e been recruiting during the last ten days every day substantially
the same number of recruits that in past years we have recruited in
every year. [Cheers.] I suppose our annual recruiting amounts to about
35,000 men for the regular army. As I pointed out a moment ago, on Sept.
3 we recruited 33,200 men. No machinery in the world which man has ever
contrived or conceived could suddenly meet in an emergency and under
great pressure the difficulty of bringing in to the colors and making
adequate provision in a day for that in which past experience we only
had to provide for in the course of a year, and that, be it observed, by
a department which during the whole of this time has been engaged in
superintending and executing an operation I believe unexampled in the
history of war--the dispatch to a foreign country of an expeditionary
force--I will not give the exact number, but roughly 150,000 men, which
has had to be, as the committee I am sure is well aware, in consequence
of the necessary and regrettable losses caused by the operations of war,
constantly repaired by reinforcements of men, guns, supplies, transport,
and every other form of warlike material. [Cheers.]

War Office's Double Task.

If our critics--I do not complain of legitimate criticism even at times
like this--but if they will try to imagine themselves equipped with the
machinery which was possessed by the War Office at the time the war
broke out, and then consider that side by side with the smooth,
frictionless, and most successful dispatch of the expeditionary force
[cheers] which left these shores and arrived at its destination--I am
speaking the literal truth--without the loss of a horse or a man,
[cheers,] the wastage day by day and week by week has had to be repaired
in men and in material, repaired often at a moment's notice, and it has
been necessary to keep constantly in reserve, and not only in reserve,
but ready for immediate use, the material to replace further wastage as
days and weeks rolled on--if you remember that that was the primary call
on the War Office, and that side by side with that they had to provide
for recruits in these few weeks of no less than 430,000 men, he will be
a very censorious, and, I venture to say, a very unpatriotic, critic who
would make much of small difficulties and friction and who would not
recognize that in a great emergency this department has played a worthy
part. [Cheers.] My tenure at the War Office was a b