DITION

There has been added to this edition an epilogue in the shape of a seventh
letter, bringing the story up to August 16, including munitions, finance,
the battle of Jutland, and the Somme offensive.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Spring-time in the North Sea--Snow on a British
Battleship _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

Marines drilling on the quarterdeck of a British Battleship 24

Fifteen-inch guns on a British Battleship 25

A forest of shells in a corner of one of England's
great shell filling factories 86

A light railway bringing up ammunition 87

One of the wards of a base hospital, visited by the King 132

A Howitzer in the act of firing 133

ENGLAND'S EFFORT

I

Dear H.

Your letter has found me in the midst of work quite unconnected with this
hideous war in which for the last eighteen months we in England have lived
and moved and had our being. My literary profession, indeed, has been to
me, as to others, since August 4th, 1914, something to be interposed for a
short time, day by day, between a mind tormented and obsessed by the
spectacle of war and the terrible reality it could not otherwise forget.
To take up one's pen and lose oneself for a while in memories of life as
it was long, long before the war--there was refreshment and renewal in
that! Once--last spring--I tried to base a novel on a striking war
incident which had come my way. Impossible! The zest and pleasure which
for any story-teller goes with the first shaping of a story died away at
the very beginning. For the day's respite had gone. The little "wind-warm"
space had disappeared. Life and thought were all given up, without mercy
or relief, to the fever and nightmare of the war. I fell back upon my
early recollections of Oxford thirty, forty years ago--and it was like
rain in the desert. So that, in the course of months it had become a habit
with me never to _write_ about the war; and outside the hours of writing
to think and talk of nothing else.

But your letter suddenly roused in me a desire to write about the war. It
was partly I think because what you wrote summed up and drove home other
criticisms and appeals of the same kind. I had been putting them
mechanically aside as not having any special refer