the machine of civilization performed its functions smoothly and securely.
We can best grasp the immensity of the struggle by attempting to grasp the immensity of the battleground. Such a task is for the imagination only, for the soldier saw only his little area, and no man's first-hand experience could cover all the many fields. An observer on some altitude in the north, like the Hill of Cassel, on some evening in September 1918, could look east and note the great arc from the dunes at Nieuport to the coalfields about Lens lit with the flashes of guns and the glare of star-shells, and loud with the mutter of battle. That was a line of 50 miles—far greater than any battlefield in the old wars. Had he moved south to the ridge of Vimy he would have looked on another 50 miles of an intenser strife. South, again, to Bapaume, he would have marked the wicked glow from Cambrai to the Oise. Still journeying, from some little height between the Oise and the Aisne he would have scanned the long front which was now creeping round the shattered woods of St. Gobain to where Laon sat on its hill. From the mounts about Rheims he might have seen Gouraud's battle-line among the bleak Champagne downs, and from a point in the Argonne the trenches of the Americans on both sides of the Meuse, running into the dim wooded country where the Moselle flowed towards Metz. Past the Gap of Nancy, and southward along the scarp of the Vosges, went the flicker of fire and the murmur of combat, till the French lines stretched into the plain of Alsace, and exchanged greetings with the sentinels on the Swiss frontier. Such a battle-ground might well have seemed beyond the dream of mortals, and yet it was but part of the whole.
A celestial intelligence, with sight unlimited by distance, would have looked eastward, and, beyond the tangle of the Alps, witnessed a strange sight. From the Stelvio Pass in the Alps to the Adriatic ran another front, continuous through glacier-camps and rock-eyries and trenches on the edge of the eternal snows, to the foothills of the Lombard plain, and thence, by the gravel beds of the Piave, to the lagoons of Venice. Beyond the Adriatic it ran, through the sombre hills of Albania, past the great lakes, where the wild-fowl wheeled at the unfamiliar sound of guns, beyond the Tcherna and Vardar and Struma valleys to the Ægean shores. It began again, when the Anatolian peninsula was left behind, and curved from the Palestine coast in a great loop north of Jerusalem across Jordan to the hills of Moab. Gazing over the deserts, he would have marked the flicker which told of mortal war passing beyond the ancient valleys of Euphrates and Tigris, up into the wild Persian ranges. And scattered flickers to the north would have led him to the Caspian shores, and beyond them to that tableland running to the Hindu Kush which was the cradle of all the warring races. Still farther north, his eyes would have seen the lights of the Allies from the Pacific coast westward to the Urals and the Volga, and little clusters far away on the shore of the Arctic Sea.
Had the vision of our celestial spectator been unhindered by time as well as by space, it would have embraced still stranger sights. It would have beheld the old Allied Eastern front, from the Baltic to the Danube, pressing westward, checking, and falling east; breaking in parts, gathering strength, and again advancing; and at last dying like a lingering sunset into darkness. Behind would have appeared a murderous glow, which was the flame of revolution. Turning to Africa, it would have noted the slow movement of little armies in west, and east, and south—handfuls of men creeping in wide circles among the Cameroons forests till the land was theirs; converging lines of mounted troopers among the barrens of the German South-West territory, closing in upon the tin shanties of Windhoek; troops of all races advancing through the mountain glens and dark green forests of German East Africa, till, after months and years, the enemy strength had become a batch of exiles beyond the southern frontier. And farther off still, among the isles of the Pacific and on the Chinese coast, it would have seen men toiling under the same lash of war.
Had the spectator looked seaward, the sight would have been not less marvellous. On every ocean of the world he would have observed the merchantmen of the Allies bringing supplies for battle. But in the North Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, and in the English Channel and the North Sea he would have seen uncanny things. Vessels would disappear as if by magic, and little warships would hurry about like some fishing fleet when shoals are moving. The merchantmen would huddle into packs, with destroyers like lean dogs at their sides. He would have seen in the Scottish firths and among the isles of the Orkneys a mighty navy waiting, and ships from it scouring the waters of the North Sea, while inside the fences of Heligoland lay the decaying monsters of the German fleet. And in the air, over land and sea would have been a perpetual coming and going of aircraft like flies above the pool of war.
The observer, wherever on the globe his eyes were turned, would have found no area immune from the effects of the contest. Every factory in Europe and America was humming by night and day to prepare the material of strife. The economic problems of five continents had been transformed. The life of the remotest villages had suffered a strange transformation. Far-away English hamlets were darkened because of air raids; little farms in Touraine, in the Scottish Highlands, in the Apennines, were untilled because there were no men; Armenia had lost half her people; the folk of North Syria were dying of famine; Indian villages and African tribes had been blotted out by plague; whole countries had ceased for the moment to exist, except as geographical names. Such were but a few of the consequences of the kindling of war in a world grown too expert in destruction, a world where all nations were part one of another.
The war was an Allied victory, but let us be very clear what that means. It delivered the world's freedom from a deadly danger, and, though the price was colossal, the cause was worthy. But its positive fruits must be sought elsewhere—in that impulse to international brotherhood caused by the revulsion from the horrors of international strife, and the war's vindication of the essential greatness of our common humanity. Its hero was the ordinary man. Victory was won less by genius in the few than by faithfulness in the many.
The horrors of the four years sickened the world of war, and made thinking men realize that some other way than this monstrous folly must be found of settling disputes between peoples. A League of Nations was one of the first articles of peace, and the League then founded has already, in spite of hindrances and setbacks, and the opposition of an all too narrow patriotism, made itself a power in the world. If civilization is to endure the League must prosper, for the world cannot stand another such carnival of destruction. The League means the enforcement of law throughout the globe, so that the nations as regards each other shall live in that state of orderly liberty which a civilized power ensures for its citizens. That purpose, as we have learned from bitter experience, is not a dream of idealism, but the first mandate of common-sense.
No honest sacrifice can be made in vain. In war sacrifice is mainly of the innocent and the young. This was true of every side. Most men who fell died for honourable things. They were inspired by the eternal sanctities—love of country and home, comradeship, loyalty to manly virtues, the indomitable questing of youth. Against such a spirit the gates of death cannot prevail. We may dare to hope that the seed sown in sacrifice and pain will yet quicken and bear fruit to the purifying of the world, and in this confidence await the decrees of that Omnipotence to whom a thousand years are as one day.
THE END.
THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND
PRELIMINARIES.
From the opening of the war the British Navy had been sustained by the hope that some day and somewhere they would meet the German High Sea Fleet in a battle in the open sea. It had been their hope since the hot August day when the great battleships
