Earnest appeals had already been issued for recruits; the response was immediate; and on August 9 Earl Kitchener, as War Minister, issued a circular to Lord-Lieutenants of Counties and Chairmen of County Territorial Associations, asking for 100,000 men to form a new Army. Recruits came in for it at the rate, at first, of 3,000 daily; most of the members of the Universities' Officers' Training Corps applied for commissions in the Territorials or Special Reserve; those who asked to be appointed to the latter were offered commissions in this "New Army," and sent (if they accepted) to officers' training camps, whence they were despatched by instalments to join their units elsewhere. Retired officers and non-commissioned officers largely returned to the colours and were used in these units, which formed additional "Service Battalions" of the existing infantry regiments, their numbers following those of the Territorial Battalions. This Army was formed into six (territorial) divisions each of three brigades. By the end of the year there were also a second and a third new Army formed, or in process of formation, on the same lines. The officers' training camps, however, had been given up.
The Navy, meanwhile, was active. Cruisers were guarding the great trade routes and patrolling the North Sea; a German submarine attack on the First Cruiser Squadron was repulsed, and it was announced on August 10 that the German submarine U 15 had been sunk by H.M. cruiser Birmingham. The German cruiser Karlsruhe had been surprised (Aug. 7) by H.M.S. Bristol 200 miles south of Bermuda while coaling from the Hamburg-American liner Kronprinz Wilhelm and had escaped after a 200 miles' chase; the German battle cruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau, after the latter had shelled Tunis, escaped from a pursuing Allied Fleet through the Straits of Messina, and proceeded to Constantinople, where they were bought by the Porte. (Rear-Admiral Berkeley Milne, commanding the Mediterranean squadron and Rear-Admiral Troubridge, commanding the pursuing fleet, were exonerated from responsibility for their escape.)
Further events were reassuring for the British public. The German wireless station at Dar-es-Salaam, the only good harbour in German East Africa, was destroyed (Aug. 9) by a British force; another British force occupied Togoland in West Africa (Aug. 7); and Japan (Aug. 5) and Portugal (Aug. 10) formally announced that they recognised the obligations imposed by their respective alliances with Great Britain.
Help was tendered lavishly from the Dominions and Crown Colonies; at home private houses and other buildings were freely offered for hospital purposes, yachts were converted by their owners into hospital ships, and the great London hospitals allotted beds for the wounded. Great activity—sometimes marked by zeal rather than knowledge—was shown in preparing for Red Cross work, and in making clothes for soldiers and others. The Queen issued an appeal to all needlework guilds throughout the British Isles (Aug. 10) to send in underclothing for soldiers and sailors, and ordinary garments for their wives and children and such of the civil population as might suffer through unemployment; steps were taken locally to consider how distress might be mitigated, and the newspapers were full of suggestions for help. But, after the first shock, the great mass of British citizens kept their heads, responded as far as possible to the call for "business as usual," and prepared to face bravely the prospect of lessened income—already visible in the withholding of many interim dividends—and the huge sacrifices demanded by the contest.
In two respects only there had been at the outset a tendency to panic. Before the Bank Holiday there had been some attempt by private persons to lay in large stores of food, and to draw gold from the banks; when the shops reopened on August 4, there was a rush to buy provisions in many great provincial cities; next day the alarm spread to London; the great stores were besieged; one of them had to close its provision department, another refused to supply customers with more than ordinary quantities; many of the small shops were speedily sold out; in the East End certain wholesale dealers, to encourage a rise in prices, actually provided purchasers with money; and, in the West End and some southern residential towns on that day and for some days afterwards, well-to-do people personally loaded hundredweights of stores into their own motor-cars, and packed their houses to the roof. But there was no real lack of foodstuffs; steps were taken at once by the Government to keep open the foreign sources of supply by a scheme of insurance against war risks; it took over the flour mills; and a Consultative Committee on Food Supplies met the representatives of certain great distributive companies and of the Grocers' Federation, representing some 17,000 shops, and lists of maximum retail prices were issued, as given below. The interruption was mainly in the supply of sugar from the Continent, and in that of butter, bacon, and eggs from Denmark. The following list (given in The Times, Aug. 7) shows the first effect of the war on wholesale prices.
| July 28. | August 6. | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| s. | d. | s. | d. | |
| Flour | 1¼ | 1½ | ||
| Sugar, Cubes | 1 ¾ | 4 | ||
| Beef, English | 6½ | 7½ | ||
| " Chilled | 6 | 7½ | ||
| " Frozen | 4½ | 6½ | ||
| Mutton, English | 8 | 8¼ | ||
| Bacon, Danish | 8¼ | 10½ | ||
| Cheese, Colonial | 6¾ | 8½ | ||
| Butter | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
The following lists of maximum retail prices were agreed on by the Advisory Committee:—
| August 7. | August 11. | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| s. | d. | s. | d. | |
| Granulated sugar per lb. | 0 | 4½ | 0 | 3¾ |
| Lump sugar | 0 | 5 | 0 | 4½ |
| Butter(imported) | 1 | 6 | 1 | 6 |
| Cheese, Colonial | 0 | 9½ | 0 | 9½ |
| Lard, American | 0 | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| Margarine | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Bacon, Continental (by the side) | 1 | 4 | 1 | 2 |
| " British " | 1 | 6 | 1 | 3 |
The prices of sugar were conditional on supplies being obtainable at the prices submitted by wholesale merchants. Sugar had jumped up from 15s. to 38s. per cwt. owing to the war. Of flour and imported meat there was no shortage. A Special Committee, with Sir Ailwyn Fellowes as chairman, was appointed by the Board of Agriculture and Foodstuffs and held its first meeting on August 10. But there proved to be little for it to do. The harvest, too, was promising, and the weather, except for one short spell of cold and some rain early in August, exceptionally fine.