The continued existence of war is precarious. More than the League of Nations menaces its future. For it depends, at the last, on the infrequency of "proper lawyers." Armies can now be made, and moved about when made, only because the plain man who keeps the world going round does not stick up for the last ounce of his rights, or stick out for the joys of having the last word, so dourly as these. Even to keep up a game with so modest an element of voluntaryism about it as penal justice you have to have some little effort of co-operation all round. If your convicts will not even eat the whole thing begins crumbling. The "suffragettes" showed us that. A pioneer still earlier, an Indian coolie, proved it in a Fijian gaol. Were every soldier like this diarist war would have to be dropped, not because men were too good, but because they were too prickly. II And yet the book told something which no other book has yet succeeded in telling you. Wordy, cantankerous, dull, repeating itself like a decimal, padded with cheap political "thoughts" gathered from old "stunts" in bad papers--still, it came nearer than any other to showing you the way trench warfare struck a mind and soul quite commonplace in everything except a double dose of native sourness. Here was nothing of M. Barbusse's doctrinaire fire to make the author pervert or exaggerate. No thrill of drastic passion, not even the passionate self-pity of Dickens describing his childhood as Copperfield's, stirred the plodding and crabbed narrative. The writer seemed too peevish to be at the pains to beautify or exalt. And so his account of the bungled attack in which he took part is extraordinarily true to all that the commonplace man found to be left in almost any attack when once all the picturesque fluff filling the current literary pictures of it were found not to be there--the touch of bathos; the supposed heroic moment only seeming a bit of a "dud," a miscarriage; the hugger-mugger element of confusion; the baffling way that the real thing did not so often give men obvious gallant things to do as irritating puzzles to solve, muddles to liquidate at short notice; the queer flashes of revelation, in contact with individual enemies, of the bottomless falsity of the cheaper kind of current war psychology.