ion of
an expeditionary force of Regulars. The Militia, which was not under
obligation to serve abroad, was abolished, and its substance was
converted into third regular battalions, organized for the purpose of
training and providing drafts to meet the wastage of war in the first
and second regular battalions of their regiments. Some of those third
battalions are said to have trained and sent out as many as twelve
thousand men apiece in the course of the war.

All these things were done under the direction of such young and
modern soldiers as Sir Douglas Haig on the General Staff side, and as
Sir John Cowans on the administrative side. Both of these officers
were brought home from India for the purpose. Sir Herbert Miles, as
Quartermaster-General, and Sir Stanley von Donop, as Master-General of
the Ordnance also rendered much help. The newly organized General Staff
thought the plans out under the direction, first of Sir Neville
Lyttelton, and then of Sir William Nicholson, its successive chiefs. The
latter and Sir Douglas Haig in addition worked out, in consultation with
the representatives of the Dominions, the organization of their troops
in units and with staffs and weapons corresponding as nearly as was
practicable to our own. Systematic conferences between the British and
Dominion War and other Ministers prepared the ground for this. Sir
Wilfrid Laurier and General Botha and others of the Dominion Ministers
came to London and co-operated.

It is sometimes said that all these things were very well, but that we
should have at once raised a much larger army, as in the course of the
war we ultimately had to do. The answer is that in a time of peace we
could not possibly have raised a large army on the Continental scale. If
we had tried to we should have made a miserable and possibly disastrous
failure. The utmost we could do toward it was to provide the
organization in which the comparatively small force which was all we
could create might be expanded after a war broke out.

How this nucleus organization, on the basis of which the later
expansions took place, was fashioned so as to afford a general pattern,
anyone may see who chooses to expend a shilling on the purchase of the
little volume called "Field Service Regulations, Part II." This piece of
work took nearly three years to prepare. With the organization of which
I have spoken, which was made in accordance with its principles, the
whole of the task of recastin