“Like a rickety, clumsy machine, with a pin loose here, and a tooth broken there, and a makeshift somewhere else, in which the force of Hercules may be exhausted in a needless friction, and obscure hitches before the hands are got to move, so is our Executive, with the Treasury, the Horse Guards, the War Department, the Medical Department, all out of gear, but all required to move together before a result can be obtained. He will be stronger than Hercules who can get out of it the movement we require”—Colonel Lefroy’s letter to Miss Florence Nightingale, Sir Edward Cook’s _Life of Miss Florence Nightingale_, vol. i. pp. 322-3. FROM the early days of the war Mr. Lloyd George had perceived that there were two great difficulties ahead of us—men and the arming of men—and that perhaps the greater of the two was the arming.[79] For the first year, at any rate, the question of men seemed to present little difficulty. England’s manhood came flocking to the banner of Lord Kitchener. The great multitudes of free citizens who freely poured into the recruiting offices after the retreat from Mons, will always be one of the most splendid episodes in our history. The patience and valour—the good-humour and endurance—of those first armies of “Kitcheners” will always add an imperishable glory to the name of him who summoned them. So far, indeed, “nought shall make us rue.” England rested true to herself and her great cause. But it was not enough to gather the legions. It was necessary also to arm them. Here it soon became clear that we were up against a new portent. The stupendous war equipment of the German armies, both in guns and in munitions, has since become a commonplace; at that time it was a wonder and a surprise. The War Office went into the war still thinking in terms of the Boer War, when machine-guns were a new miracle and shrapnel was the last word in shells. They found themselves faced with an army in which machine-guns had become a multitudinous commonplace and shrapnel was already the humble servant of the high-explosive shell. This was clearly, from the first, a struggle of machinery. It was not an old-fashioned war. It was a war monstrously new—a fight against a people immensely modern and scientific, as high in skill as they were low in ruth, armed cap-à-pie with every device of destruction, sharpened to the finest edge on the whetstone of prepared war. All this has since become a commonplace; it is Mr. Lloyd George’s distinction that he perceived it clearly in the autumn of 1914. Then in the Cabinet he already insisted on the need for increased armaments. He preached in season and out of season the need for guns; and in the autumn of 1914 the Cabinet Committee, of which he was a member, forced the War Office to order 4,000 guns instead of 600 for the following year (1915).