_Nous avons changé tout ça!_ The last shall be first and the first last in this citizen army of ours. I know of a peer of the realm, an Earl who is the head of one of the oldest families in the British Isles, who is serving as orderly in a clearing hospital at the front. When last seen he was whitewashing and whistling a little tune as he worked, the bearer of one of our greatest names at the beck and call of the humblest medical student with a commission in the R.A.M.C., but, like the latter, filling his niche in the service of the State. Could one imagine a more difficult task, amongst all the manifold problems which have confronted us in this war, than the expansion of the framework of our little Expeditionary Force to embrace these hundreds of thousands of men, from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, from India and Canada, from South Africa and Australia, from Fiji and the West Indies, with their varying ideas of personal liberty and discipline? That this task has been successfully accomplished is due, for one thing, to the fact that every man in our army is an apostle, bearing within him a message of liberty to the world, ready to subordinate every personal feeling to the end of victory; for another, to the astonishing adaptability of our race, which has enabled Lord Kitchener to stamp an army from the earth, and Sir John French and his Generals to breathe into it the spirit of our great military past. If you took a small haberdasher in a London suburb and suddenly increased his modest establishment until it reached the dimensions of William Whiteley’s or of Harrod’s, would you blame the man if, even with unlimited resources, he showed himself incapable of achieving the same relative measure of success as he had attained with his little shop? You know that you would not. You would rather blame the lack of organization that had suddenly thrust enormously increased responsibilities on a man who, had the process been gradual, might have adapted himself to the growing dimensions of his business. Yet this is what the country has thrust upon Sir John French. He, a General, like all save the Balkan and Turkish Generals, without any experience of modern European war, has been called upon to meet in unequal combat the finest military brains that the application of forty years can produce, with a sword that has constantly changed its weight and balance and length and sharpness.