haracter.

The French numbers could not grow very rapidly, because the French had
armed every available man. They could bring in a certain number of
volunteers; but neither was it useful to equip the most of the older
men, nor could they be spared from those duties behind the front line
which the much larger population of the enemy entrusted to men who,
for the most part, had received no regular training. The French did,
however, in this second period, gradually grow to some two and a half
million men, behind which, ready to come in for the final period, were
about a third of a million young recruits.

Great Britain discovered a prodigious effort. She had already,
comparatively early in the second period, put across the sea nearly
half a million men, and drafts were perpetually arriving as the second
period came to a close; while behind the army actually upon the
Continent very large bodies--probably another million in
number--hastily trained indeed, and presented with a grave problem in
the matter of officering, but of excellent material and _moral_, were
ready to appear, before the end of the second period or at its close,
the moment their equipment should be furnished. Counting the British
effort and the French together, one may say that, without regard to
wastage, the Allies in the West grew in the second period from the
original 16 to over 30, and might grow even before the second period
was over to 35 or even more.

On the enemy's side (neglecting wastage for the moment) there were the
simplest elements of growth. Each Power had docketed every untrained
man, knew his medical condition, where to find him, where and how to
train him. The German Empire had during peace taken about one-half of
its young men for soldiers. It had in pure theory five million
untrained men in the reserve, excluding the sick, and those not
physically efficient for service.

In practice, however, a very large proportion of men, even of the
efficients, must be kept behind for civilian work; and in an
industrial country such as Germany, mainly urban in population, this
proportion is particularly large. We are safe in saying that the
German army would not be reinforced during the second period by more
than two and a half million men. These were trained in batches of some
800,000 each; the equipment had long been ready for them, and they
appeared mainly as drafts for filling gaps, but partly as new
formations in groups--the first going in