After the noble tributes paid to him by Lord Haig and Lord French I need not trouble the reader by dealing with the accusations brought against the greatest of our War Ministers by the gutter-press or by the baser kind of politicians. It is now acknowledged in all circles outside of Bedlam that Lord Haldane prepared a perfect instrument of war which, shot like an arrow from its bow, saved the world from a German victory, and among the intellectual soldiers it is generally held that if France and Russia had been as well prepared to fulfil their engagements as we were to fulfil ours the war would have ended in an almost immediate victory for the Allies.[2] It will be more instructive to ask how a man who never made an enemy in his life, and for whom many of our greatest men have a deep affection, came of a sudden to be the target of such general and overwhelming abuse. I think I can do something to clear up this mystery. When he saw that the great conflict was inevitable, Lord Haldane suggested to Mr. Asquith, then acting as War Secretary, that he should go down to the War Office, where he was still well known and very popular with the intellectual generals, and mobilize his own machine for war. The harassed and overburdened Mr. Asquith gratefully accepted this suggestion. Accordingly Lord Haldane went down to the War Office, and knowing that speed was the one thing to save us from a German avalanche, began to mobilize the Expeditionary Force. Some of the generals were alarmed. War was not yet declared. The cost of mobilization ran into millions. Suppose war did not come after all, how were those millions to be met? Lord Haldane brushed aside every consideration of this kind. Mobilization was to be pushed on, cost what it might. He had not studied his Moltke to no profit. On leaving the War Office that same day, after having mobilized the British Army, he went across to the Foreign Office and was there stopped by a certain soldier who asked him how many divisions he was sending to France. Lord Haldane very naturally rebuked this person for asking such a question, telling him that war was not yet declared and that therefore perhaps no divisions at all would go to France. Never was a just reproof more fatal to him who administered it. I believe this soldier went straight off to an important Civil Servant with the sensational news that Lord Haldane was holding back the Expeditionary Force, and afterwards carried the same false news to one of the most violent anti-German publicists in London, a frenzied person who enjoys nevertheless a certain power in Unionist circles. In a few hours it was all over London that the Liberals were going to desert France, that Lord Haldane, a friend of the German Kaiser, had got back to the War Office, and that he was preventing mobilization.