ion set themselves to work to calculate how soon Boche
man-power would be exhausted. Lord Haldane hurled himself into the
breach with a zest that could hardly have been exceeded had he been
contriving a totally new Territorial Army organization. Professor Oman
abandoned Wellington somewhere amidst the declivities of the sierras
without one qualm, and immersed himself in computations warranted to
make the plain man's hair stand on end. The enthusiasts who
voluntarily undertook this onerous task arrived at results of the most
encouraging kind, for one learnt that the Hun as a warrior would
within quite a short space of time be a phantom of the past, that
adult males within the Kaiser's dominions would speedily comprise only
the very aged, the mentally afflicted or the maimed wreckage from the
battlefields of France and Poland, and that if this attractive
Sovereign proposed to continue hostilities he must ere long, as
Lincoln said of Jefferson Davis, "rob the cradle and the grave." Even
Lord Kitchener displayed some interest in these mathematical
exercises, and was not wholly unimpressed when figures established the
gratifying fact that the German legions were a vanishing proposition.
I was always in this matter graded in the "doubting Thomas" class.

The question seemed to base itself upon what premises you thought fit
to start from. You could no doubt calculate with some certainty upon
the total number of Teuton males of fighting age being somewhere about
fifteen millions in August 1914, upon 700,000, or so, youths annually
reaching the age of eighteen, and upon Germany being obliged to have
under arms continually some five million soldiers. After that you were
handling rather indeterminate factors. You might put down
indispensables in civil life at half a million or at four millions
just as you liked; but it made the difference of three and a half
millions in your pool to start with, according to which estimate you
preferred. After that you had to cut out the unfit--another
problematical figure. Finally came the question of casualties based on
suspicious enemy statistics, and the perplexities involved in the
number of wounded who would, and who would not, be able to return to
the ranks. The only conclusion that one seemed to be justified in
arriving at was that the wastage was in excess of the intake of
youngsters, that the outflow was greater than the inflow, and that if
the war went on long enough German man-power wou