lled War. But the machine won. Hughes went down. He went
down as he had come up--alone. His going down seemed more swift than
his rising. And yet he began to go down when he stood on the rope
ladder down the Gulf and watched the troopships drift out. If in that
moment he had not dreamed that General Sam Hughes was above government,
he might have continued his great work long enough to become Lord
Valcartier. He might have helped in a second Capture of Quebec, made
conscription less difficult when it came, and put the Fifth Division
into the field. And in that case Canada's part in the war would have
been even more magnificent than it now is.

The latter days of the General were characteristic of a man who never
knew he was beaten. Musical geniuses have written tremendous scores to
depict a man's struggle with death. None of them could have
transcended the long battle which Sam Hughes put up to stay here. For
months we had intermittent bulletins from his bedside when any morning
we expected to read that he was gone. He was a hard man to conquer.
And only his intimate friends are likely ever to know whether or not it
was his own ultimate biting failure, after his almost super-human
success, that turned this man of the shadow into a phantom before he
let go.

And before he went the hard, bluff soldier, who has as much iron in his
composition as any man of his time sprang one of those human surprises
that even war fails to emulate--when he listened time after time to the
record that he loved better than most music, "I know that my Redeemer
liveth", from Handel's "Messiah".

THE STEREOPTICON AND THE SLIDE

LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CURRIE

The war was a great cosmic artist of infinite satire, making of
humanity little stereopticon slides which he slipped in front of his
calcium and flashed upon the clouds for a screen. When the war was
done the stereopticon was smashed. The slides remain. What shall we
do with them?

One of the most world-interesting characters in the magic lantern of
war was Lieut.-General Sir Arthur Currie, who in 1914 locked his real
estate desk in Victoria, B.C., and in 1919 came back to Canada
admittedly one of the ablest commanders in a war which made the
exploits of Wellington seem like comic opera in simplicity.

Whatever partial, prejudiced or private opinions some Canadians may
have about Sir Arthur Currie, it must be generally admitted that he was
perhaps the most