ragic responsibility for the prolongation of the war, and the
prodigal loss of life it involved, must always rest. Lord Haldane,
indeed during his years of office as the War Minister of the Liberal
Government, made a gallant fight for the Army. To him we owe the
Expeditionary Force, the Territorials, the organisation of the General
Staff, the Officers' Training Corps; and without his reforms our case
would have been black indeed when the storm broke. No one has repelled
more indignantly the common Tory charges against Lord Haldane than Sir
Douglas Haig himself. But, during his years at the War Office Lord
Haldane was fighting against heavy odds, attacked on the one hand by
the upholders of Lord Roberts's scheme, in which neither he nor the
General Staff believed, and under perpetual sniping on the other from
the extreme section of his own party. The marvel is that he was able
to do what he did!

Granting, however, the unpreparedness of England, what a wonderful
story it is on which Sir Douglas Haig looks back! First, the necessary
opening stage of this or any war--_i.e._, a preliminary phase of
manoeuvring for position, on both sides, which came to an end with
"the formation of continuous trench lines from the North Sea to the
Swiss frontier." Then, when British military power had developed,
followed "the period of real struggle," in which the main forces of
the two belligerent Armies were pitted against each other in close and
costly combat--_i.e._, "the wearing-down battle" which must go on in
this war, as in all wars where large and equal forces are engaged,
till one or the other combatant begins to weaken. And, finally, the
last stage, when the weakening combatant stakes "on a supreme effort
what reserves remain to him," and must abide by the issue. Germany
staked her last reserves in the "great sortie" of her beleaguered
Armies, which lasted from April to July of 1918. She lost the game,
and the end, which was inevitable, followed quickly.

For the British Commander-in-Chief insists that we must look upon the
war as a whole. In the earlier part of the wearing-down battle which
occupied its central years, we did what we could till our new armies
were ready, and without us France could not have held out. Without the
British Navy, in particular, the war must have collapsed in a month.
But the main brunt of the struggle on land had to be borne--and was
superbly borne--by France up to the summer of 1916, when we entere