tish soldiers were in billets in place of the French in the
villages at the rear and British guns moved into French gun-emplacements
with the orderly precision which army training with its discipline alone
secures; while the French Army was on board railway trains moving at
given intervals of headway over rails restricted to their use on their
way to Verdun where, under that simple French staff system which is the
product of inheritance and previous training and this war's experience,
they fell into place as a part of the wall of men and cannon.

Outside criticism, which drew from this arrangement the conclusion that
it left the British to the methodical occupation of quiet trenches while
their allies were sent to the sacrifice, had its effect for a time on
the outside public and even on the French, but did not disturb the
equanimity of the British staff in the course of its preparations or of
the French staff, which knew well enough that when the time came the
British Army would not be fastidious about paying the red cost of
victory. Four months later when British battalions were throwing
themselves against frontal positions with an abandon that their staff
had to restrain, the same sources of outside criticism, including
superficial gossip in Paris, were complaining that the British were too
brave in their waste of life. It has been fashionable with some people
to criticize the British, evidently under the impression that the
British New Army would be better than a continental army instantly its
battalions were landed in France.

Every army's methods, every staff's way of thinking, are characteristic
in the long run of the people who supply it with soldiers. The German
Army is what it is not through the application of any academic theory of
military perfection, but through the application of organization to
German character. Naturally phlegmatic, naturally disinclined to
initiative, the Germans before the era of modern Germany had far less of
the martial instinct than the French. German army makers, including the
master one of all, von Moltke, set out to use German docility and
obedience in the creation of a machine of singular industry and rigidity
and ruthless discipline. Similar methods would mean revolt in democratic
France and individualistic England where every man carries Magna Charta,
talisman of his own "rights," in his waistcoat pocket.

The French peasant, tilling his fields within range of the guns, the