The conclusion of this first period would come, of course, gradually in the case of every combatant, and would come more rapidly in the case of some than in the case of others. But we are fairly safe if we take the general turning-point from the first period to the second to be the month of October 1914. The second period had begun for some--notably for Germany--with the first days of that month; it had already appeared for all, especially for England, before the beginning of November. The second period is marked for all the combatants by the bringing into play of such forces as, for various reasons, the Government of each had once hoped would not be required. The German Empire might have marked them as not required, in the reasonable hope that victory would be quickly assured. The British Government might, from a very different standpoint, have believed them not to be required, because it regarded the work of its continental Allies as sufficient to gain the common object, etc. But in the case of all, however various the motives, the particular mark of this second period is the straining to put into the field newly trained and equipped bodies which in the first period were, it was imagined, neither needed nor perhaps available. This second period merges very gradually into the third, or final, period, which is that of the last effort possible to the belligerents. There comes a moment before the end of the first year when, in the case of most of the belligerents, every man who is available at all has been equipped, trained, and put forward, and after which there is nothing left but the successive batches of yearly recruits growing up from boyhood to manhood. Although Britain is in a peculiar position, and Russia, through her tardiness in equipment, in a peculiar position of another kind, yet one may fairly say that the vague margin between the second period of growth and the third period of finality appears roughly somewhere round the month of June. It will fall earlier with Germany, a good deal earlier with France; but from the middle of May at earliest to the end of June at latest may be said to mark the entry of the numerical factor into its third and final phase. Let us take these three periods one by one. The first period is by far the most important to our judgment of the campaign; a misapprehension of it has warped most political statements made in this country, and most contemporary judgments of the war as a whole. It is impossible to get our view of the great European struggle--of its nature in the bulk--other than fantastically wrong, if we misapprehend the opening numbers with which it was waged. There are three ways of getting at those numbers. The first and worst way is the consulting of general statistics published before the war broke out. Thus we may see in almanacs the French army put down as a little over four million, the German at the same amount, the Russian at about five million, and so forth.