By midsummer of 1915 Britain was faced by an emergency not a whit less urgent than shells. She had effectively organized her facilities for turning out a maximum of high-explosives. She had now to confront and solve the insistent problem of manning her decimated armies. Kitchener and the voluntary system had worked wonders. The actual figures, for some unaccountably censorious reason, were never disclosed, except in the case of Ireland, which up to October 1 had furnished 81,000 recruits; but the authorities allowed to pass uncontradicted the statement that the United Kingdom and the Colonies between them had raised a volunteer army of approximately 3,000,000 men. Had it turned out to be anything except a War of Miscalculations, this gigantic contribution of British military force might have sufficed, but with 500,000 British casualties after fourteen months of fighting--roundly, 400,000 in France and Flanders and 100,000 in the Dardanelles--and with the Germans not only not yet expelled from Belgium or France, but in undisputed possession of Poland and about to pound through Serbia on "the road to Constantinople, Egypt and India," it was apparent that probably twice 3,000,000 British soldiers would be required. Two spectacular attempts to "break through" the wall of concrete and iron Germany had erected in the West had been made. Both failed, however gloriously. Neuve Chapelle and Artois inscribed fresh and imperishable deeds of valor on the scroll of the British army, but each was strategically valueless. Results attained were frightfully out of proportion to the price they cost in blood and treasure. Succeeding events of the war of stalemate in the West and fiasco in the Dardanelles--dreary and weary months of fighting accounted "victorious" if it took three hundred yards of trenches, or a hill, or a cemetery, or a sugar-factory, or a strip of beach, or if it advanced the British line a mile and a half over a front of twelve miles--every "gain" entailing a terrible toll in killed and maimed and fabulous expenditure of shells--all demonstrated one outstanding, immutable fact: that nothing but sheer preponderance of man-power weight would or could "cleave the way to victory." If it cost 25,000 or 30,000 young British lives to win Neuve Chapelle, probably twice that many to carry out the trial push of the great offensive at the end of September, and 100,000 casualties to fail in Gallipoli, what rivers of blood would not have to be spilled along that once-vaunted "march to Berlin"?