The German newspapers, for the comfort of the German' people, have been assuring their readers that the British recruiting is all a bluff. The Times" military correspondent gives some interesting facts and figures on the subject, for, as he points out, there is no particular reason why we should allow the rest of the world to har-hour these silly illusions.
We have in organized form in the British Isles at the present moment, not 600,000 men (as the German' newspapers say) but exactly double this number, namely 1,200,000 men, and the number grows almost faster than we can cope with it.
At the same time the stream of men from the British Dominions and Dependencies begins to flow in. Two first 100,000 are already with us, and from all corners of the Empire there has begun, and there will continue to come in 50 long as the war lasts, a steady stream of drafts to maintain the strength of units in the field, and of fresh units to increase the numbers of the divisions at the skirmish with the enemy. In the spring the rest of the advanced guard will follow, and somewhere towards the close of 1915 the main body will begin to come within view.
We are not in any hurry, Wo are gorry, of course, for our Allies that we are even slower than Russia in making our habe art felt, but they can at least happy that at the moment, a or two hence, when they will expect a rest, we shall be in a position to make good war on our own account.
If the enemy wins successes in the interval s0 much the better for him, but nothing can arrest the steadily ascending figures of our armies, and their cost is of little account since will ultimately have to pay—in territory as well as in money, because the cost of the war to the Allies cannot be met in cash by a Germany beaten to her knees.
Let us take the thing at its worst, and imagine the penultimate Cossack on the Urals and the last French doorkeeper evicted from Bordeaux. Then we begin a maritime war against Germany, and are no worse off than when we began it against Napoleon, when he had nearly all Europe under his heel.
But we are not there yet, and un-Jess Germany can do much better than she has done hitherto, our Allies will keep the field and will continue to exercise the same oonstant and increasing pressure on land that we already exercise at sea. front.
But this is only a beginning. Tt is our way, as well as America's, to begin to raise our armies after war has broken out, and to go on raising them until our ultimate ends are achieved.
That is what we are doing now, and the 1,200,000 men at home, the Army in the field, and the hundreds of thousands of men who are formed or forming in India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere are merely the nucleus upon which other armies will eventually be built up.
It is not a question of practienbility, but only of time, It stands to reason that an Empire of 400 millions of people can never Inck men, and it also stands to reason that the first man who realized the vast resources of the British Empire and knew how to convert them into terms of war-power was likely to make a name for himself and incidentally to create an Army which would, in the end, confirm our Imperial position, and bring confusion upon the King's enemies This war, for us, has hardly begun. We have sent the point of our advanced guard into France to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.