halky plains stretch bare towards the east, and
the bloody Hohenzollern redoubt, with the great squat slag heap beside
it, lies silent and ominous; in Guillemont and Guinchy, where the
sunken road was stiff with German dead and no two bricks remain on top
of one another; on Vimy Ridge, in Bullecourt and Croisilles, in all
these places, in all the hundred others, the seed has been sown. What
of the harvest?

If I have made of war a hideous thing--unredeemed, repulsive--the
picture is not consciously exaggerated. As far as in me lies I have
drawn the thing as I have seen it.

But after the lean years, the fat; after the hideous sowing, the
glorious aftermath.

The more one thinks of it, the more amazing does the paradox
become--the paradox of cause and effect. To fit these civilians of
Britain for all the dirty details which go to make winning or losing,
to fit them for the business of killing in the most efficient manner,
the tuition must include the inculcation of ideals--more, the
assimilation of ideals--which are immeasurably superior to any they
learned in their civilian life. At least so it seems to one who makes
their acquaintance when they first join up. In their civilian life
self ruled; there, each individual pawn scrambled and snarled as he
pushed the next pawn to him under--or went under himself as the case
might be--in his frenzied endeavour to better himself, to win a little
brief authority! The community was composed of a mass of struggling,
fighting units, each one all out for himself and only himself.

But from the tuition which the manhood of Britain is now undergoing,
there must surely be a very different result. Self no longer rules;
self is sunk for the good of the cause--for the good of the community.
And the community, realising that fact, endeavours, by every means in
its power, to develop that self to the very maximum of which it is
capable, knowing that, in due course, it will reap the benefit. No
longer do individual pawns struggle one against the other, but
each--developing his own particular gift to the maximum--places it at
the disposal of the community who helped him in his development. And
that is the result of so-called militarism--_British_ militarism.

Surely what has been accomplished in the Army can be carried into other
matters in the fullness of time. I am no prophet; I am no social
reformer to speak of ways and means. All I can say with certainty is
that I have seen