This then was the cost, "the loss of many thousands of brave men," this the price in blood, the sacrifice upon the altar of unpreparedness. "Can the lesson," despairingly asks the writer of a leading article in the _Times_ of April 11, 1919, "of this great soldier's remarks be missed by the most reckless of politicians, or the most fanatical of 'pacifists'?" Can it be missed either, it may be asked, by those congregations of the faithful, who, repeating as of yore the old, old cry "Give peace," resemble rather the ostrich that buries its head in the sand, making no active endeavour to combat the approaching storm? Incredible that the lesson should be missed by any, and having marked the undying tribute which Sir Douglas Haig has paid to those thousands of brave men who for us paid the price, we may turn to that other tribute which this same great soldier unhesitatingly pays to those who supplied the means by which, miraculously enough, recovery was assured, and ultimate victory achieved. "The Army owes a great debt to science and to the distinguished scientific men who placed their learning and their skill at the disposal of their country." Such is the praise bestowed upon the distinguished heads of industry and of science as representing the vast mass of workers at the back, the backbone of the country, and undoubtedly, as the great Field-Marshal goes on to explain, "a remarkable feature of the present war has been the number and variety of mechanical contrivances to which it has given birth, or has brought to a higher state of perfection." But perhaps the most remarkable of all these remarkable features was that particular one evinced by that particular body of distinguished scientific men, to wit, the chief mechanical engineers of the great railway companies, in that, by their ingenuity and versatile ability, they succeeded in producing not the quantities only, but the varieties also, of all those mechanical contrivances which, as we know, added to the horrors of, as well as to the interest in, modern warfare.