lf to forms of life quite new to it, and far removed from
all its ordinary habits; giving up the freedom to do as it likes;
accepting the extremities of discomfort, hardship, and pain--death
itself--rather than abandon the idea; and so putting itself to school,
resolutely and of its own free will, that when its piece of self-imposed
education is done, it can no more be the same as it was before than the
youth who has yielded himself loyally to the pounding and stretching of
any strenuous discipline, intellectual or physical.

Training--"askesis"--with either death, or the loss of all that makes
honourable life, as the ultimate sanction behind the process, that is
the present preoccupation of this nation in arms. Even the football
games I saw going on in the course of our drive to Albert were all part
of this training. They are no mere amusement, though they are amusement.
They are part of the system by which men are persuaded--not driven--to
submit themselves to a scheme of careful physical training, even in
their times of rest; by which they find themselves so invigorated that
they end by demanding it.

As for the elaboration of everything else in this frightful art of war,
the ever-multiplying staff courses, the bombing and bayonet schools, the
special musketry and gas schools, the daily and weekly development of
aviation, the technical industry and skill, both among the gunners
abroad and the factory workers at home, which has now made our artillery
the terror of the German army: a woman can only realise it with a
shudder, and find comfort in two beliefs. First, that the whole horrible
process of war has _not_ brutalised the British soldier--you remember
the Army Commander whom I quoted in an earlier letter!--that he still
remains human and warm-hearted through it all, protected morally by the
ideal he willingly serves. Secondly, in the conviction that this
relentless struggle is the only means that remains to us of so chaining
up the wild beast of war, as the Germans have let it loose upon the
world, that our children and grandchildren at least shall live in peace,
and have time given them to work out a more reasonable scheme of things.

But, at any rate; we have gone a long way from the time when Matthew
Arnold, talking with "the manager of the Claycross works in Derbyshire"
during the Crimean War, "when our want of soldiers was much felt and
some people were talking of conscription," was told by his companion
th