the victor
of Blenheim or even the Black Prince, but a faint figure out of far-off
martyrologies--St. George. One soldier is asserted to have claimed to
identify the saint because he was "on every quid." On the coins, St.
George is a Roman soldier.

But these fancies, if they were fancies, might well seem the last sickly
flickerings of an old-world order now finally wounded to the death. That
which was coming on, with the whole weight of a new world, was something
that had never been numbered among the Seven Champions of Christendom.
Now, in more doubtful and more hopeful days, it is almost impossible to
repicture what was, for those who understood, the gigantic finality of
the first German strides. It seemed as if the forces of the ancient
valour fell away to right and left; and there opened a grand, smooth
granite road right to the gate of Paris, down which the great Germania
moved like a tall, unanswerable sphinx, whose pride could destroy all
things and survive them. In her train moved, like moving mountains,
Cyclopean guns that had never been seen among men, before which walled
cities melted like wax, their mouths set insolently upwards as if
threatening to besiege the sun. Nor is it fantastic to speak so of the
new and abnormal armaments; for the soul of Germany was really expressed
in colossal wheels and cylinders; and her guns were more symbolic than
her flags. Then and now, and in every place and time, it is to be noted
that the German superiority has been in a certain thing and of a certain
kind. It is _not_ unity; it is not, in the moral sense, discipline.
Nothing can be more united in a moral sense than a French, British, or
Russian regiment. Nothing, for that matter, could be more united than a
Highland clan at Killiecrankie or a rush of religious fanatics in the
Soudan. What such engines, in such size and multiplicity, really meant
was this: they meant a type of life naturally intolerable to happier and
more healthy-minded men, conducted on a larger scale and consuming
larger populations than had ever been known before. They meant cities
growing larger than provinces, factories growing larger than cities;
they meant the empire of the slum. They meant a degree of detailed
repetition and dehumanised division of labour, to which no man born
would surrender his brief span in the sunshine, if he could hope to beat
his ploughshare into a sword. The nations of the earth were not to
surrender to the Kaiser; they w