ce as an astronomer studies the faint markings upon the
surface of Mars. But to all intents and purposes that country is as much
cut off from you as is the farthest star.

For the war in which we are engaged means this--that you may travel from
any part of the world with the freedom of this twentieth century and all
its conveniences, until you come to the place where we are to-day. But,
when you come thus far, there is a line in front of you which no power
that has yet been produced in this world, from its creation to the
present day--not all the money nor all the invention--not all the
parliamentarians nor the philosophers--not all the socialism nor the
autocracy, the capital, nor the labour, the brain, nor the physical
power in the whole world has yet been able to pass. The German nation,
for reasons of its own, has put this line across another people's
country and made a fool of all the progress and civilisation on which we
relied so confidently up to a couple of years ago. I suppose it will all
grow unbelievable again some day--two hundred years hence they will
smile at such talk just as we did two years ago. But it will be as true
then as it is to-day--that a nation of officials and philosophers gone
mad has been able to place across the world a line which no man can at
present move.

I have seen that line at a fair number of places--since writing these
words, many miles away in my billet, working in the brick-floored
cottage bedroom by the light of an oil lamp, I have stepped to the door,
and there I can see it now, always flickering and flashing like faint
summer lightning under the clouds on the horizon. When you come to the
very limit--to the farthest point which you or any man on earth can
possibly reach by yourself--it is just a strip of green grass from
twenty to four hundred yards wide, straggling across France and Belgium
from the sea to the Swiss border. I suppose that French and English men
have sanctified every part of that narrow ribbon by dying there. But the
grass of those old paddocks grows unkempt like a shock head of hair. And
it has covered with a kindly mantle most of the terrible relics of the
past. A tuft, perhaps thicker than the rest, is all that marks where
last year lay a British soldier whose death represented the latest
effort of the world to cross the line the Germans laid.

You cannot even know what is going on in the country beyond that line.
You have to build up a science for deduc