anything
like that."

"What good did it do them? We got them back," laughed the Colonel.

"Yes, and did you notice the price we paid. Everything we got from
them we pay the utmost for; they extract the last ounce from us; and
so it will go on to the end. If they work twenty-four hours in the day
we will have to do the same. You can't help taking your hat off to the
brutes."

"Just about once a day," agreed the Cap.

"Or oftener," said the Colonel.

"Well, what is the end going to be?" asked the Cap.

"Personally, I don't think there is any doubt about us winning out
finally, but the end is not yet in sight. We have not used all our
resources yet because as an Empire we have not felt that we were up
against it hard. But the British are coming to it and if the war lasts
long enough Great Britain will be rejuvenated. She was getting pretty
rotten before the war. Suffering is chastening her; I have great faith
in that for there is no doubt that trials and suffering strengthen a
nation just as they strengthen individuals. I believe a newer and
greater Britain will arise out of the ashes of the old. There will be
many problems between capital and labor to work out; there must be a
redistribution of land; people will have to work much harder than they
have ever had to before. But to five millions of men in the army of
the British Empire a man has become a man once more. When men stand
side by side in the trenches, while the German shells play upon them,
the men of wealth, or education, or title realize that a shell does
not discriminate between him and the workman by his side. The soldier
knows that the only thing that counts is whether a man is really a
man; when he has stood before his maker for weeks at a time in the
front line, not knowing when his hour would strike, he realizes that
there are few things in life that really count. He is going to take
that point of view back with him into civilian life and he is going to
put it into practice. He will have no fear of anybody. He will want to
make a comfortable living but he will not, at least for years to come,
adopt the old ideas that money or so-called position really count.
Because he knows what really does count; he has had the greatest
experiences and has felt the most tremendous excitement that can come
to a man in life and a great deal of what would have appealed to him
before the war no longer moves him."

"Therefore I believe that there will be a new unders