st of national energy.
You will remember how the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee came into
being, that first autumn?--how the Prime Minister took the lead, and the
two great political parties of the country agreed to bring all their
organisation, central or local, to bear on the supreme question of
getting men for the Army. Tory and Radical toured the country together.
The hottest opponents stood on the same platform. _L'union sacree_--to
use the French phrase, so vivid and so true, by which our great Ally has
charmed her own discords to rest in defence of the country--became a
reality here too, in spite of strikes, in spite of Ireland.

By July 1915--the end of the first year of war--more than 2,000,000 men
had voluntarily enlisted. But the military chiefs knew well that it was
but a half-way house. They knew, too, that it was not enough to get men
and rush them out to the trenches as soon as any kind of training could
be given them. The available men must be sorted out. Some, indeed, must
be brought back from the fighting line for work as vital as the
fighting itself.

_So Registration came_--the first real step towards organising the
nation. 150,000 voluntary workers helped to register all men and women
in the country, from eighteen to sixty-five, and on the results Lord
Derby built his group system, which _almost_ enabled us to do without
compulsion. Between October and December 1915, another two million and a
quarter men had "attested"--that is, had pledged themselves to come up
for training when called on.

But, as every observer of this new England knows, we have here less than
half the story. From a nation not invaded, protected, on the contrary,
by its sea ramparts from the personal cruelties and ravages of war, to
gather in between four and five million voluntary recruits was a great
achievement. But to turn these recruits at the shortest possible notice,
under the hammer-blows of a war, in which our enemies had every initial
advantage, into armies equipped and trained according to modern
standards, might well have seemed to those who undertook it an
impossible task. And the task had to be accomplished, the riddle solved,
before, in the face of the enemy, the incredible difficulties of it
could possibly be admitted. The creators of the new armies worked, as
far as they could, behind a screen. But now the screen is down, and we
are allowed to see their difficulties in their true perspective--as they
exist