ewly trained and equipped bodies which in the
first period were, it was imagined, neither needed nor perhaps
available.

This second period merges very gradually into the third, or final,
period, which is that of the last effort possible to the belligerents.
There comes a moment before the end of the first year when, in the
case of most of the belligerents, every man who is available at all
has been equipped, trained, and put forward, and after which there is
nothing left but the successive batches of yearly recruits growing up
from boyhood to manhood.

Although Britain is in a peculiar position, and Russia, through her
tardiness in equipment, in a peculiar position of another kind, yet
one may fairly say that the vague margin between the second period of
growth and the third period of finality appears roughly somewhere
round the month of June. It will fall earlier with Germany, a good
deal earlier with France; but from the middle of May at earliest to
the end of June at latest may be said to mark the entry of the
numerical factor into its third and final phase.

Let us take these three periods one by one.

The first period is by far the most important to our judgment of the
campaign; a misapprehension of it has warped most political statements
made in this country, and most contemporary judgments of the war as a
whole. It is impossible to get our view of the great European
struggle--of its nature in the bulk--other than fantastically wrong,
if we misapprehend the opening numbers with which it was waged.

There are three ways of getting at those numbers.

The first and worst way is the consulting of general statistics
published before the war broke out. Thus we may see in almanacs the
French army put down as a little over four million, the German at the
same amount, the Russian at about five million, and so forth.

These figures have no relation to reality, because they omit a hundred
modifying considerations--such as the age of the reserves, the degree
of training of the reserves, the organization prepared for the
enrolment of untrained men, etc. The only element in them which is of
real value is the statistics--when we can obtain them--of men actually
present with the colours before mobilization, to which one may add,
perhaps--or at any rate in the case of France and Germany--the numbers
of the _active_ reserve immediately behind the conscript army in
peace.

The second method, which is better, but imperfect