Owing in all probability to the happy fact in History that England has not been invaded and over-run by a foreign army since the time of William the Conqueror--an episode which had in the end an excellent influence on the national life--she has never taken the military art seriously. She alone, thanks to the protection of Providence, has never been compelled to fight on her own fields for her existence as a nation; she alone knows nothing even by tradition handed down from distant generations of the appearance of an alien soldier on her shores.[10] Some of her wars, as for example the successful struggle by which the Napoleonic domination was broken up, have been fought for the purpose of safe-guarding her independence, but they were not popular with the people at large, whose short sight did not permit them to see that a defensive war may have to be fought beyond the seas; and they had little or no effect in evoking a patriotic military spirit. Napoleon's gibe that the English were a nation of shopkeepers was not unasked for, and is still seasonable. On the other hand there are hundreds of thousands of persons on the Continent of Europe who have seen, or who are the near descendants of those who have seen, their fatherland ravaged; their homes destroyed; their relations, friends, and neighbours slaughtered in the defence; the tree of the national life maimed; and the full cup of the horrors of war drained to its dregs. To them the prospect of an invasion is not a remote contingency to be considered and provided for at leisure after academical discussion, but a real and instant danger from which only universal service, to which fortunately for themselves they submit without much demur, as it could not be enforced upon a reluctant community, can preserve them. The possibility of invasion is the dominant anxiety of the land-frontier nations.[11] Across the frontier they can see the conscripts drilling who almost at a moment's notice may be marching in to attack them. Their armies are not sent on interesting little expeditions to restrain a too-militant tribe of hill-men or to patrol the distant marches of a magnificent Empire, but must stand at attention generation after generation, year after year, maintaining the featureless routine of military life. None of the Romance of War that falls to the lot of the British soldier--the service among strange Easterns in Asia, the building up of a new imperial province in South Africa, the constant change of scene along the posts which form a girdle round the world from Hongkong to Jamaica--falls also to the lot of the continental conscript, for whom there is only the dull waiting for the critical moment.