Something in it too, perhaps--at least some centuries ago. When a great nation's army was only a few thousands strong the freak and the fluke had their chance. An Achilles or two, at the top of their form on the day, might upset the odds. But when armies are millions of men, and machinery counts for more than the men, the few divine accidents of exceptional valour cannot go far. With eleven a-side a Grace or an Armstrong may win a game off his own bat. He will hardly do that in a game where the sides are eleven thousand apiece. More and more, as the armies increase, must the law of averages have it its own dreary way; glorious uncertainties wither; statistical "curves" of relative national fitness to win, and to stand the strain of winning or losing, overbear everything else. What are the two armies' and the two nations' relative numbers? What is the mean physique on each side? And the mean intelligence? How far has each nation's history--social, political, religious, industrial--tended to make its men rich in just pride, self-reliance, high spirit, devotion, and hardihood? How many per cent on each side have been sapped by venereal disease? How much of their work have its officers troubled to learn? These are the questions. The more men you have in a war, and the longer it lasts, the more completely has it to lose the romance of a glorious gamble and sink--or, as some would say, rise--to the plane of a circumstantial, matter-of-fact liquidation of whatever relative messes the nations engaged have made of the whole of their previous lives. II