ciple of this was to complete the Cardwell
system by shaping the home battalions into six great divisions, and so
providing them with transport, munitions, stores, and medical and other
equipment, as to make them instantly ready for war. The characteristic
of the old British Army, as it was up to 1907, was, as I have already
observed, that it lived in peace formations only, in small and detached
units which would have to be refashioned into quite different formations
before they could be ready to be sent to fight.

This state of things involved much delay in mobilization. A careful
inquiry made in 1906 disclosed that in order to put even 80,000 men on
the Continent, a period which might be well over two months was the
minimum required. Besides this great difficulty, the other items to
which I have referred as required for the six divisions were not there
in any shape even approaching sufficiency. The artillery too was
deficient.

There is no more amusing myth than the one according to which the horse
and field artillery were reduced. The batteries which could be made
instantly effective for war were, in fact, raised from forty-two to
eighty-one. The personnel of this artillery was increased by a third for
mobilization. For the first time the horse and field artillery was given
the modern organization which Cardwell had not been able to give it. The
establishments had been merely peace establishments. There were
ninety-nine batteries which could parade about on ceremonial occasions,
but if war had broken out they would have had to be rolled up, and the
personnel of fifty-seven of them taken to produce the mobilized
forty-two which were all that could be put into the field. The
difficulty was got over by the organization of eighteen of the
ninety-nine into training brigades, and the additional men needed for
the mobilization of eighty-one fighting batteries were thus obtained. No
doubt some of the artillery officers did not like being set to training
work, and complained that they were being reduced. But it was a
reduction from unreal work of parade in order to double fighting
efficiency. Not a man or a gun of the regular horse and field artillery
was ever reduced in any shape or form, and not only were the effective
batteries largely increased, but over 150 serviceable batteries were
created and made part of the Second Line, or Territorial, Army. This was
a force which could be used either for home defense or for expans