rtunity
overseas drain away a large proportion of just those able and educated
men who would in other countries gravitate towards the army. Such small
wealth of officers as we have--and I am quite prepared to believe that
the officers we have are among the very best in the world--are scarcely
enough to go round our present supply of private soldiers. And the best
and most brilliant among this scanty supply are being drawn upon more
and more for aerial work, and for all that increasing quantity of highly
specialised services which are manifestly destined to be the real
fighting forces of the future. We cannot spare the best of our officers
for training conscripts; we shall get the dismallest results from the
worst of them; and so even if it were a vital necessity for our country
to have an army of all its manhood now, we could not have it, and it
would be a mere last convulsion to attempt to make it with the means at
our disposal.

But that brings me to my second contention, which is that we do not want
such an army. I believe that the vast masses of men in uniform
maintained by the Continental Powers at the present time are enormously
overrated as fighting machines. I see Germany in the likeness of a boxer
with a mailed fist as big as and rather heavier than its body, and I am
convinced that when the moment comes for that mailed fist to be lifted,
the whole disproportionate system will topple over. The military
ascendancy of the future lies with the country that dares to experiment
most, that experiments best, and meanwhile keeps its actual fighting
force fit and admirable and small and flexible. The experience of war
during the last fifteen years has been to show repeatedly the enormous
defensive power of small, scientifically handled bodies of men. These
huge conscript armies are made up not of masses of military muscle, but
of a huge proportion of military fat. Their one way of fighting will be
to fall upon an antagonist with all their available weight, and if he is
mobile and dexterous enough to decline that issue of adiposity they will
become a mere embarrassment to their own people. Modern weapons and
modern contrivance are continually decreasing the number of men who can
be employed efficiently upon a length of front. I doubt if there is any
use for more than 400,000 men upon the whole Franco-Belgian frontier at
the present time. Such an army, properly supplied, could--so far as
terrestrial forces are concerned--