r how and where. Modern
history, indeed, is full of examples, from the Crusades onward. But
there can never have been any such demonstration of it as this war has
yielded. The business of peace is now, largely, to turn to account the
discoveries of the war--in mechanics, chemistry, electricity, medical
science, methods of organisation, and a score of other branches of
human knowledge, and that in the interests of life, and not of death.
For the human loss of the war there is no comfort, except in those
spiritual hopes and convictions by which ultimately most men live. But
for the huge economic waste, the waste of money and material and
accumulated plant, caused by the struggle, there _is_ some comfort, in
this development of faculty, this pushing forward of human knowledge
into regions hitherto unmapped, which the war has seen. This week, for
instance,[13] American and British airmen are competing in the first
Atlantic flight, and the whole world is looking on. Again there is
risk of danger and death, but the prizes sought are now the prizes of
peace, the closer brotherhood of men, a truer knowledge one of
another, the interchanges of science and labour; and they are sought
by means taught in the furnace of war. Thus, from the sacrifices of
the terrible past may spring a quickened life for the new world. Will
that new world be worthy of them?--there is the question on which all
depends. A certain anguish clings to it, as one measures the loss, and
cannot yet measure the gain.

[13] May 19th.

* * * * *

I have dwelt on some of the accomplished wonders--the _results_ of the
war, in the material field--guns, Tanks, and aeroplanes. But just as
mechanical devices were and are, in the opinion of the Commander-in-Chief,
of no avail without the fighting men who use them; so behind the whole
red pageant of the war lie two omnipresent forces without which it
could not have been sustained for a day--Labour at the base, Directing
Intelligence at the top. In the Labour battalions of the Army there
has been a growth in numbers and a development in organisation only
second to that of the fighting Army itself. Labour companies were
already in being in 1914, but they chiefly worked at the ports, and
were recruited mainly from dock labourers. Then it was realised that
to employ the trained soldier on many of the ordinary "fatigue" duties
was to waste his training, and Labour began to be sent plentiful