* * * * *

The evening at the Chateau passed only too quickly, and we were sad to
say good-bye, though it left me still the prospect of further
conversation with some members of the Intelligence Staff on my return
journey from Paris and those points of the French line for which, thanks
to the courtesy of the French Headquarters, I was now bound.

The last night under the little schoolmistress's quiet roof amid the
deep stillness of the village was a wakeful one for me. The presence of
the New Armies, as of some vast, impersonal, and yet intensely living
thing, seemed to be all around me. First, as an organisation, as the
amazing product of English patriotic intelligence devoted to one sole
end--the defence of civilisation against the immoral attack of the
strongest military machine in the world. And then, so to speak, as a
moral entity, for my mind was full of the sights and sounds of the
preceding days, and the Army appeared to me, not only as the mighty
instrument for war which it already is, but as a training school for the
Empire, likely to have incalculable effect upon the future.

How much I have heard of _training_ since my arrival in France! It is
not a word that has been so far representative of our English temper.
Far from it. The central idea of English life and politics, said Mr.
Bright, "is the assertion of personal liberty." It was, I suppose, this
assertion of personal liberty which drove our extreme Liberal wing
before the war into that determined fighting of the Naval and Military
Estimates year after year, that determined hatred of anything that
looked like "militarism," and that constant belittlement of the soldier
and his profession which so nearly handed us over, for lack of a
reasonable "militarism," to the tender mercies of the German variety.

But, years ago, Matthew Arnold dared to say, in face of the general
British approval of Mr. Bright, that there is, after all, something
greater than the "assertion of personal liberty," than the freedom to
"do as you like"; and he put forward against it the notion of "the
nation in its collected and corporate character" controlling the
individual will in the name of an interest wider than that of
individuals.

What he had in view was surely just what we are witnessing in Great
Britain to-day--what we are about to witness in your own country--a
nation becoming the voluntary servant of an idea, and for that idea
submitting itse