g the British Army was performed by 1911.

What we had by that time attained was the power to send an army of, not
100,000 men, which was all that had originally been suggested, but of
160,000, to a place of concentration opposite the Belgian frontier, and
to have it concentrated there within a time which was fifteen days in
1911, but was a little later reduced to twelve. No German army could
mobilize and concentrate at such a distance more rapidly. So far as I
know none of the necessary details were overlooked, and the timetables
and arrangements for the concentration worked out, when the moment for
their use came, without a hitch. What had been done was to take the
old-fashioned British Army and to rid it of superfluous fat, to develop
muscle in place of mere flesh, and to put the whole force into proper
training. If the warrior looked slender he was at least as well prepared
for the ring as science could make him.

It is said that this army ought to have been provided from the first
with more heavy artillery. But the reason why its artillery, and that of
the French armies also, were of a comparatively light pattern was not
due to any notion of economy or to civilian interference. We had enough
money, even in those difficult days, for every necessary purpose.

The real reason was that the General Staffs of both the French and the
British Armies had advised that the campaign would probably be one in
which swiftness in moving troops would prove the determining factor.
Heavy artillery, and even any large number of the ponderous machine-guns
of that period (the Lewis gun had not yet appeared), would have been a
serious impediment to such mobility. What was anticipated was a series
of great battles. "It was supposed by certain soldiers," says a
well-informed military critic (Colonel A'Court Repington, at page 276 of
his "Vestigia"), "that the war against Germany would be decided by the
fighting of some seven great battles _en rase campagne_, where heavies
would be a positive encumbrance."

So far the staffs proved to be right, for in the early period of the war
mobility did count for a very great deal, and it was not until later
that trench warfare became the dominant factor, a stage for which even
the Germans themselves, as we now know, from the memoirs of Admiral
Tirpitz and other books, were not adequately prepared in point of guns,
or of shells and powder, either.

It is said that we in Great Britain ought, before