The Way to Win

by William Le Queux

Those who wish to form an adequate realisation of what Britain has really done in the cause of civilisation should try to take a longer view, and try also to throw their minds backward to the condition of affairs which existed when the declaration of war came eighteen months ago. They should try, in fact, to learn something of the lessons taught by our past history.

We can start with the indisputable and undisputed fact that so far as the war on land was concerned this country was entirely unprepared to take up the rôle it has since assumed. That is a proposition which not even the Germans, who are so ready to accuse England of having caused the War, can very well dispute. Throughout our history we have been a naval and not a military Power, though it is of course true that, judged by the standards of other days, we have now and again put forward very considerable military efforts.

But it was many a long year since British troops had fought on the Continent of Europe, and it is safe to assume that the great majority of people in this country, had they been asked, would have replied without hesitation that we should never again take part in the land fighting in a continental war.

Now it must be obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to give the matter a moment’s thought that, for the purposes of war as it is understood by the great military nations of Europe, the British Army as it existed in August, 1914, was hopelessly inadequate. Our real strength lay on the sea, where it has always lain. It is true that, for its size, the British force which was thrown into Flanders in the early days of the struggle was perhaps the most perfectly trained and equipped army that ever took the field.

But no one will contend that it was adequate in size, and we know that the Germans regarded it as a “contemptible little army” that was to be brushed aside with hardly an effort by the German hordes. It consisted of perhaps 120,000 men, and undoubtedly, as our French friends have generously admitted, it played a part worthy of “the best and highest traditions” of our race. But it was not an army on the continental scale.

What has been done since? How have we taken up the task of creating forces which might be regarded as commensurate to meet the menace by which civilisation found itself faced?

Our “contemptible little army,” thanks to the genius of Lord Kitchener, has grown until to-day it numbers something in the neighbourhood of four million men. That is a fact which the world knows and recognises, and in itself alone it is sufficient to refute the contention of those who are to be found preaching in and out of season that Britain’s efforts have been lamentably inadequate. Great armies are not to be made in a day or a year, they do not spring fully armed from the earth, and the fact that we, a naval rather than a military Power, have in the course of eighteen months raised and equipped forces on such a scale ought to be sufficient to confound those shallow critics who are eternally bewailing our supposed “slackness,” which, as a matter of fact, has no existence outside their own disordered imaginations. I do not believe there is to be found to-day a military writer whose opinion is of any value who would not agree that the effort which Britain has made is one of the most stupendous in all military history.

In France, in Russia, and in Italy everyone whose authority is regarded as having any substantial basis is agreed on the point, and the Germans themselves, however they may affect to sneer at our army of “hirelings,” know a great deal too much about military matters not to recognise that one of the very gravest of their perils is the growing military power of England. That power will be exercised to the full when the time comes, and it will assuredly be found to be of the very greatest importance in bringing about the overthrow of German hopes and ambitions.

We all know—the whole world knows—why the military power of England has not yet reached its full majesty. We all know that in the War of to-day a superabundance of munitions is demanded which none could have expected from the history of the past. Every form of military stores—guns, rifles, shell, ammunition—all must be provided on a scale of colossal magnitude.

It is the fact that Germany alone of all the warring nations partly realised this, and in her careful preparations for a war of her own seeking, for which she chose her own time, accumulated in the days of peace such enormous reserves of munitions as she hoped would render her to a large extent independent of manufacture during the actual period of fighting. It is certain that Germany hoped to overthrow Russia and France in a series of swift, brief attacks without trenching dangerously upon her reserve stocks. We know now that she was wrong; but we know, too, that she came within an ace of success.