[1] Churchill resigned from the Cabinet in November, 1915, declaring that he was a soldier--"and my regiment is in France." To it he said he preferred to go rather than continue in a position of "well-paid inactivity" at home. In a dramatic speech in the House of Commons, he took political farewell of the country and, having pleaded "Not Guilty" to the capital charges of responsibility for Antwerp and the Dardanelles, left England unostentatiously for the trenches, as a major of cavalry. Lord Kitchener has always boasted that he scorned popularity. He has need for his philosophical temperament to-day, for there is no manner of doubt that his hold on the imaginations of his countrymen is less firm than it was when the war began. "K.’s" dramatic appointment to the War Office, in the earliest hours of the conflict, heartened the nation to an extraordinary degree. Britain had no army, Englishmen said, but it had Kitchener, who was a host in himself. His name alone was an asset which bred indescribable confidence. Men recalled his dominant traits--iron determination, strenuous application to duty, imperious disregard of hide-bound methods and red tape, and, above all, his genius for organization. They rejoiced to hear that he had accepted the War Office, long cob-webbed with circumlocutory traditions and petticoat influence, on the strict understanding that he was to be monarch of all he surveyed--that he would not tolerate such party interference as intrudes itself on departmental affairs in general. Immensely to the popular taste, because it confirmed the masses’ conception of "K.," was the story that when he arrived at the War Office for the first time and was told there was "no bed here, Sir," he commanded the affrighted and astonished caretaker, then, "to put one in, as I am going to sleep here." Britain said to herself that she indubitably possessed a match for German Efficiency in her new Secretary for War, and all thought of "losing" with such a man as the supreme chief of the military establishment vanished from her mind. [Illustration: Kitchener.] Kitchener was never one of the war-will-be-over-by-Christmas crew. His maiden speech as War Minister in the House of Lords informed the country, bluntly, that he expected a three years’ struggle. During the winter an anecdote ascribed to the taciturn War Secretary’s loquacious sister gained currency, and passed from mouth to mouth. "When is the war going to end?" she asked him. "I don’t know when it’s going to end," he was said to have replied, "but it is going to begin in May." It was in May, by the pitiless irony of Fate, that the War Office’s muddle of the ammunition supply was exposed.