ely necessary--for the
great democracies to turn their energies and resources and the inventive
ingenuity of their citizens to the organization of armies and indeed of
entire populations to the purpose of killing enough Germans to
remove democracy's exterior menace. The price we pay in human life is
appallingly unfortunate. But the necessity for national organization
socializes the nation capable of it; or, to put the matter more truly,
if the socializing process had anticipated the war--as it had in Great
Britain--the ability to complete it under stress is the test of
a democratic nation; and hence the test of democracy, since the
socializing process becomes international. Britain has stood the test,
even from the old-fashioned militarist point of view, since it is
apparent that no democracy can wage a sustained great war unless it is
socialized. After the war she will probably lead all other countries in
a sane and scientific liberalization. The encouraging fact is that not
in spite of her liberalism, but because of it, she has met military
Germany on her own ground and, to use a vigorous expression, gone her
one better. In 1914, as armies go today, the British Army was a mere
handful of men whose officers belonged to a military caste. Brave men
and brave officers, indeed! But at present it is a war organization
of an excellence which the Germans never surpassed. I have no space
to enter into a description of the amazing system, of the network of
arteries converging at the channel ports and spreading out until it
feeds and clothes every man of those millions, furnishes him with
newspapers and tobacco, and gives him the greatest contentment
compatible with the conditions under which he has to live. The number of
shells flung at the enemy is only limited by the lives of the guns that
fire them. I should like to tell with what swiftness, under the stress
of battle, the wounded are hurried back to the coast and even to England
itself. I may not state the thousands carried on leave every day across
the channel and back again--in spite of submarines. But I went one day
through Saint Omer, with its beautiful church and little blue chateau,
past the rest-camps of the big regiments of guards to a seaport on the
downs, formerly a quiet little French town, transformed now into an
ordered Babel. The term is paradoxical, but I let it stand. English,
Irish, and Scotch from the British Isles and the ends of the earth
mingle there wit