The Spectator at war: Kitchener’s conception

From ‘Lord Kitchener’, The Spectator, 6 March 1915:

We are grateful to Lord Kitchener because at the very beginning of the war he formed what Mr. Bonar Law calls “a gigantic conception,” not only of the military needs of the nation, but of our ability to meet those needs. Other men and lesser men, even though they might have bad enough imagination to see what might and ought to be done, would in the emergency have been daunted by the task before them. They would have argued that it was too late to try any now system, that we were committed to great naval but only to small military action, and that therefore all we could be expected to do, and all we could do, since we were unprepared from the military point of view, was to send abroad a comparatively small but efficient Expeditionary Force, and to keep that force thoroughly equipped and thoroughly well supplied with men.