ry. But this slight summary sketch of the military
events, and especially of the final "effort" of England and the
Empire, in the campaign of last year, which I set myself to do, is
accomplished, however inadequately. Except, indeed, for one huge
omission which every reader of these few pages will at once suggest. I
have made only a few references here and there to the British Navy.
Yet on the British Navy, as we all know, everything hung. If the Navy
could not have protected our shores, and broken the submarine peril;
if the British Admiralty had not been able to hold the Channel against
the enemy and ward him off from the coasts and ports of France; if the
British ships and British destroyers had not been there to bring over
70 per cent of the American Armies, and food both for ourselves and
the Allies; if the sea-routes between us and our Colonies, between us
and the East, could not have been maintained, Germany at this moment
would have been ruling triumphant over a prostrate world. The
existence and power of the Navy have been as vital to us as the air we
breathed and the sun which kept us alive, and the pressure of the
British blockade was, perhaps, the dominating element in the victory
of the Allies. But these things are so great and so evident that it
seemed in this little book best to take them for granted. They have
been the presuppositions of all the rest. What has not yet been so
clear--or so I venture to think--to our own people or our Allies, has
been the full glory of the part played by the Armies of the British
Empire in the concluding phases of the war. The temporary success of
the German sortie of last spring--a mere episode in the great
whole--made so deep an impression on the mind of this nation, that the
real facts of an _annus mirabilis_, in their true order and
proportion, are only now, perhaps, becoming plain to us. It was in
order to help ever so little in this process that I have tried to
tell, as it appears to me, the end of that marvellous story of which I
sketched the beginnings in _England's Effort_.

These main facts, it seems to me, can hardly be challenged by any
future pressure from that vast critical process which the next
generation, and generations after, will bring to bear upon the war.
The mistakes made, the blunders here, or shortcomings there, of
England's mighty effort, will be all canvassed and exposed soon
enough. The process indeed has already begun. And when the first mood