When the events of the Great War, and perhaps the chief actors in it themselves, have passed away, some British historian will almost certainly arise to tell the world the story--the "inside story"--of how Mr. Asquith's cabinet, through three days and nights of doubts, uncertainties, trials and tribulations, crossed the Rubicon to the shore of unanimity on the subject of British participation. There were moments, beyond all question, when that issue hung perilously in the balance. The French Government's frantic eleventh-hour appeals for a decision in Downing Street are mute evidence of the vacillation which prevailed--a species of tentativeness which has never been missing from the British conduct of the purely diplomatic affairs of the war. The ministerial debates during which the die was cast in favor of war will make immortal reading, even if only a digest of them is all that is vouchsafed posterity. The "strong men" of the Government, if report is reliable, were called upon to fight valiantly and ceaselessly to avoid England's "running away from the obligations of honor and interest." The tense interval which ensued while they were battering down the trenches of skepticism, chicken-heartedness and nonchalance among their Cabinet colleagues caused a delay which might easily have proved of fatal import; for the decision to throw the strength of the British army, as well as the navy, into the scales was under discussion, and it is conceivable that the Expeditionary Force, which it was eventually determined to send, might have been kept back for weeks, or even altogether, instead of the mere days its dispatch was actually retarded. Disaster incalculable would almost inevitably have resulted in that event.

The indispensable and all-governing preliminary measures for war in respect of domestic politics, the Government and the naval and military administration having thus been taken, equally radical precautions were invoked to put the nation's economic house in order. The Stock Exchange, following the lead of New York, Paris and Berlin, had shut down as early as July 31, in order that mere insensate panic on the part of the speculative and investing world might not degenerate into irretrievable rout. War having descended with irresistible suddenness during the "week-end" preceding the traditional August Bank Holiday (Monday, the 3rd), a meeting of great financiers in the Bank of England on the holiday itself decided to prolong it, as far as banks and bankers were concerned, for three days, i.e., until Friday, the 7th, in what turned out to be the well-grounded hope that public excitement would meantime subside and prevent "runs" ruinous alike to banks and depositors. A moratorium was established. The Bank discount-rate, which had already vaulted from four to eight per cent., was now raised to ten, an unheard-of figure, which effectually curbed the lust of persons anxious to profit from war abnormalities or otherwise indulge in operations not consistent with the gravity of the hour.

Germans Anxious to Fly from England. Remarkable scenes were witnessed outside the American Consulate, thousands of Germans clamoring for passage back to Germany.

It was mainly these things--wholesome, substantial proofs that their rulers had grappled with the situation with bold initiative that inspired the people of London with reassurance, which, diluted with the stoicism of the British character, became calm confidence Gibraltar-like in its inflexibility. She had "the men," England was saying; she had "the ships," and, Parliament having voted an initial war fund of one hundred million pounds as unconcernedly as if it were a thousand-pounds grant for a new switch-track at Woolwich arsenal, she unmistakably had "the money," too.

But even more self-comforting, if possible, than this iron trust in her own inexhaustible resources was England's conviction in the invincibility of her Allies. Was not even little Belgium holding back the flower of the German army before Liége? Even in the unlikely event of Liége's fall, would not the impregnable fortress of Namur provide Krupp guns with a still tougher nut to crack? Those were, alas! the hours in which the existence of the forty-two-centimeter siege gun was not even mooted in ostrich England. France? The Germans would find a vastly different antagonist awaiting them this time in the Ardennes, the Vosges passes and along the Meuse and the Sambre. There was a "New France," a France of élan and iron. It was the virile Republic of Poincaré, Delcassé, Joffre, Bleriot, Pegoud and Carpentier, with which the Prussian hosts must this time measure lances, not the degenerate Empire of the third Napoleon, which crumbled at Sedan and Metz and surrendered Paris. Russia? "Can't you just hear the steam-roller rumbling across East Prussia and thundering at the gates of Berlin?" a great English peer asked me, in all seriousness, during my first week in London. "Isn't the tread of the Czar's countless millions, pounding remorselessly toward the west, almost audible?" he persisted. Millions of Englishmen were thinking and saying the same thing. As for the German army, almost as many of them were convinced that that "over-organized, peace-stale" military establishment, which was a magnificent spectacle on parade, but lacked leaders experienced in modern campaigning, would crash to pieces not only against "superior numbers" but against Allied troops and commanders who had been fighting great wars this past quarter of a century in Africa and Asia. London's feelings toward Germany seemed, indeed, almost compassionate. Many people, otherwise sane, talked about the war being over by Christmas. The Kaiser's navy would come out and be smashed, they calculated, and such work as had not already been accomplished by the Allied armies within the Fatherland's eastern and western frontiers would soon be completed by "internal collapse," industrial stagnation, national impoverishment and universal starvation. Poor Germany! She had brought it on herself. Her end, after a peace soon to be dictated in Berlin, would manifestly be speedy and annihilating. The Social Democrats, it was true, were bamboozled into support of the war by fictitious assurances that the sword had been "forced" into Germany's unwilling and blameless hand, but the scales would presently fall from their eyes, and then woe betide whatever remained of the Hohenzollerns' ravished, defenseless realm! Street-hawkers in the Strand were selling blatant copies--a penny each--of The Kaiser's Last Will and Testament. Would William II be sent to St. Helena, like the other Napoleon, or be interned in some more accessible point in the British Empire, to pass the remaining days of his humiliation and remorse? And the "Crown Prince" with him, of course. These were the reveries of Britain in the early days of August, 1914. Nothing disturbed them except the creaking and the rumbling of the Russian steam-roller. Those being dulcet reverberations, John Bull paused eagerly in the midst of his musings to let them lull him into a still deeper siesta of optimism....

Serene and imperturbable as the vast majority of Englishmen were, the responsible leaders of the nation were under no delusions as to the magnitude of the task now confronting them. To the country's intense astonishment, though Lord Roberts had been dinning it in their ears incessantly for at least five years previous, England found itself in a state of practical impotence as far as effective participation in modern large-scale military operations was concerned. In the same five minutes during which Parliament voted one hundred million pounds as a first war credit, it also sanctioned an increase of the British army by five hundred thousand men. At that moment the Home military establishment, which was immediately mobilized as "The British Army Expeditionary Force" when England decided to enter the war with her soldiers as well as her sailors, consisted of eight divisions of all arms--roundly, one hundred fifty thousand men. An organization of another half-million troops, officered and equipped for a great Continental campaign, could not be stamped out of the ground. Its production, even in a country with the glorious military traditions of England, was manifestly fraught with stupendous difficulties. There was no mistrust of British patriotism; but when men recalled the futility of Lord Roberts' efforts to implant in England's conscience the necessity of some form of National Service--how he not only failed, but was ridiculed and vilified for pursuing his sagacious crusade in the face of merciless rebuff--and when inherent British repugnance to "soldiering" and even to wearing uniforms was remembered, there were widespread misgivings.

Prussian militarism long filled me with abhorrence. I had learned to detest it not as an institution, but for its numerous disgusting manifestations, principally the arrogance of its gilded popinjays and the brutal and overweening contempt in which their traditions and training taught them to hold mere civilian microbes. Yet in those frantic hours when hopelessly unready military England was compelled to patch up an army for battle against the world's most scientific war-machine, I pondered what a blessing a little "militarism" would have been for the British democracy. I had seen Germany trooping off to war, singing, cheering and flower-garnished; and I knew that her debonair demeanor was due less to lust for the fray--the great mass of the nation was animated by no such sentiment as that--than to the realization, which sprang from immutable facts and numbers, that her citizen army was equal to almost any emergencies it would be called upon to meet. Germany was a nation in arms. England was a nation in difficulties. How grotesquely unprepared to play a commensurate part in a military war, compared to her Continental allies and foes, this table showing the size of the various armies indicates:

Peace footing War footing Guns
Great Britain ............... 234,000 380,000 1,000
Austria-Hungary ............. 500,000 2,200,000 2,500
France (including Algeria) .. 790,000 4,000,000 4,200
Germany ..................... 850,000 6,000,000 5,500
Russia ...................... 1,700,000 7,000,000 6,000

Lord Kitchener was obviously the man of the hour. An organizer primarily, rather than a strategist, tactician or field-marshal, his appointment to the War Secretaryship demonstrated that whoever was responsible for it--men say it was Lord Northcliffe--recognized instantly the all-overshadowing requirement: a recruiting sergeant. Joffre, the French Commander-in-Chief, would necessarily retain the supreme direction of the Allied forces operating against the German front in France and Belgium. England's part was to send him men. And the one to find, drill and equip them was unmistakably Kitchener of Khartum, South Africa, India and Egypt, the "organizer" of victory against the fuzzy-wuzzies and the Boers, the disciplinarian who had galvanized the Indian army into new life, and the administrator who was licking Egypt into Imperial shape. There would be time enough for the war itself to produce another Wellington or Roberts. What was needed now was men, rifles and guns, cartridges, shells and uniforms, war-planes, motor-lorries and hospital-trains and all the other innumerable impedimenta of modern man-killing. The summoning to the task of the big bluff soldier who first saw the light in County Kerry, who was looked upon as the incarnation of initiative and relentless efficiency, and who had proved his right so to be considered, was elementary and inevitable. It was work for a "sergeant-major" and a "drill-sergeant" rather than for a Napoleonic genius; and when England learned that "K.," as he is affectionately known in the army, was on the prodigious job, England took heart. She responded with a will to his first appeal for men. The hoardings of the Kingdom were plastered with it on the morning of August 8. It read as follows: