As for our Allies the French, we have fought side by side for a year and a half, and each of us knows by now of what mettle the other is made. They started the war with two fixed ideas about us—that we were not a military nation (which, if you compare the relative size of our two armies at the beginning, was, from their point of view, perfectly true), and that, conscious of the might of our fleet and lulled to a state of careless repose by the sense of our island security, it would take us a long time to wake up to the real seriousness of the war. Looking back on what has passed, it is not easy to say that they were wrong. Some of us—millions of us—realized it from the first. But very many did not. Long after the war had begun there were people in England who held that we were doing more than our share and more than enough, because, as was true, we were doing far more than we had promised. There were even some so foolish and so selfish as to say that our soldiers in Flanders were fighting the battles of France, and not the battles of England, since England had not been and never could be attacked. The French were more generous than these narrow-minded myoptics (who, after all, were only a small minority), and at the same time more clear-sighted. Frankly and with deep gratitude they owned that but for the help of England France must have been crushed. But they also believed that when that had happened our turn would inevitably have come next, and that the only hope for England and the world was that France and England should face the foe together with every ounce of their united strength. Small blame to them, then, if they were seriously concerned when they saw that in England alone of all the combatant nations—Germany excepted—the enervating evil of strikes and labour threats could still exist. Small blame to them if they sometimes wondered how long it would be before, for our own security, we overcame our timid objections to the principle of national service. But they always felt sure, I think, that the time would come—as it has come, in the last days of 1915—when England would face the necessity of putting her whole strength into the field in order to bring the war to a triumphant conclusion, and to complete what a friend of mine, a high official of France, spoke of in a letter which he wrote to me last May, as “le grand œuvre de la guerre, c’est à dire la Rédemption.”