Had the spectator looked seaward, the sight would have been not less marvellous. On every ocean of the world he would have observed the merchantmen of the Allies bringing supplies for battle. But in the North Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, and in the English Channel and the North Sea he would have seen uncanny things. Vessels would disappear as if by magic, and little warships would hurry about like some fishing fleet when shoals are moving. The merchantmen would huddle into packs, with destroyers like lean dogs at their sides. He would have seen in the Scottish firths and among the isles of the Orkneys a mighty navy waiting, and ships from it scouring the waters of the North Sea, while inside the fences of Heligoland lay the decaying monsters of the German fleet. And in the air, over land and sea would have been a perpetual coming and going of aircraft like flies above the pool of war. The observer, wherever on the globe his eyes were turned, would have found no area immune from the effects of the contest. Every factory in Europe and America was humming by night and day to prepare the material of strife. The economic problems of five continents had been transformed. The life of the remotest villages had suffered a strange transformation. Far-away English hamlets were darkened because of air raids; little farms in Touraine, in the Scottish Highlands, in the Apennines, were untilled because there were no men; Armenia had lost half her people; the folk of North Syria were dying of famine; Indian villages and African tribes had been blotted out by plague; whole countries had ceased for the moment to exist, except as geographical names. Such were but a few of the consequences of the kindling of war in a world grown too expert in destruction, a world where all nations were part one of another. The war was an Allied victory, but let us be very clear what that means. It delivered the world’s freedom from a deadly danger, and, though the price was colossal, the cause was worthy. But its positive fruits must be sought elsewhere—in that impulse to international brotherhood caused by the revulsion from the horrors of international strife, and the war’s vindication of the essential greatness of our common humanity. Its hero was the ordinary man. Victory was won less by genius in the few than by faithfulness in the many.