284 ENGLISH SAGA

something mightier than England: there was Hayward and
Hobbs going in to bat, the Oddfellows' dinner and the Old
Kent Road.

It was a people subject to such influences who created in the
next few years, as though by a miracle, a military machine as
vast and as efficient as Germany's. In the first eighteen months
of the war Great Britain without compulsion raised two and
three-quarter million men for the Services, and the self-governing
Dominions close on another million. The miracle was achieved
merely by asking for volunteers. They were told that- their
King and Country needed them, and it was enough. . It was in
the nature of things that the best went first and were the first
killed. In the democracy of Britain there was no equality of
sacrifice. The war graves of Gallipoli and the Somme are the
memorials of a national aristocracy nobler than any Herald's
College could have conceived. That spontaneous and inspired
loss—of her very finest—was the price Britain paid both for her
voluntary system and her past neglect. It won her the war but
it cost her the peace. For by their elected sacrifice she lost the
leaders she was to need when the war was over.

A nation of amateur patriots was absorbed into the little
professional peace-time army, which itself suffered virtual
annihilation while England buckled on her long-neglected
armour. The traditions of that army were perfectly adapted to
the subconscious nature of Englishmen. Men who a few weeks
before had never seen a rifle handled or thought of soldiering
with Anything but contempt found themselves swelling with
pride at regimental annals and titles won by remote forerunners,
and boasted to their womenfolk that they were "Pontius Pilate's
Bodyguard," or the "Devil's Own" or the "Diehards" or the
"Fighting Fifth." For every unit in the army had its own pride
and its own privileges, won for it on the battlefield. To many
Englishmen, long robbed by factory life of status and privilege,
that return to the army—for all its harshness—was like a
recall home.

There was little of ease or comfort about it, much of hardship;
and men came to realise that the certain end of the road they
trod was death and wounds. But nobody who lived in England
in that first winter of the first Great War will ever forget the
training battalions of "Kitchener's Army," marching in their
ill-fitting blue tunics down muddy country lanes and singing
as they marched: