These apprehensions were particularly apt to arise if you had spent an hour that day in seeing herds of the English "common people" ushered down narrowing corridors of barbed wire into some gap that had all the German machine guns raking its exit, the nature of Regular officers' pre-war education in England precluding the prompt evolution of any effectual means on our side to derange the working of this ingenious abattoir. We had asked for it all. We had made the directing brains of our armies the poor things that they were. Small blame to them if in this season of liquidation they failed to produce assets which we had never equipped them to earn--mental nimbleness, powers of individual observation, quickness to cap with counter-strokes of invention each new device of the fertile specialists opposite. Being as we had moulded them, they had probably done pretty well in doing no worse. What's _done_ we partly may compute, But know not what's _resisted_. Who shall say what efforts it may have cost some of those poor custom-ridden souls not to veto, for good and all, an engine of war so far from "smart" as the tank, or to accept any help at all from such folk as the new-fangled, untraditional airmen, some of whom took no shame to go forth to the fray in pyjamas. Not they alone, but all of ourselves, with our boastful chatter about the "public school spirit," our gallant, robust contempt for "swats" and "smugs" and all who invented new means to new ends and who trained and used their brains with a will--we had arranged for these easy battues of thousands of Englishmen, who, for their part, did not fail. To-morrow you would see it all again--a few hundred square yards of ground gained by the deaths, perhaps, of twenty thousand men who would Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot Which is not tomb enough and continent To hide the slain. So it would go on, week after week, sitting after sitting of the dismal court that liquidated in the Flanders mud our ruling classes' wasted decades, until we either lost the war outright or were saved from utter disaster by clutching at aid from French brains and American numbers. Like Lucifer when he was confronted with the sky at night, you "looked and sank." Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law. What had we done, when we could, that the stars in their courses should fight for us now? Or left undone, of all that could provoke this methodical universe of swinging and returning forces to shake off such dust from its constant wheels? V