But through four long years scarcely a family in Great Britain and the Dominions that possessed men on the fighting fronts--and none were finally exempt except on medical or industrial grounds--but was either in mourning for, or in constant fear of death for one or more of its male members, whether by bullet, shell-fire or bomb, or must witness the return to them of husbands, brothers, and sons, more or less injured for life. The total American casualties are 264,000. The total British casualties--among them from 700,000 to 800,000 dead--are 2,228,000 out of a total white population for the Empire of not much more than two-thirds of the population of the United States. There is small room for "belittling" here. A silent clasp of the hands between our two nations would seem to be the natural gesture in face of such facts as these. II. Such thoughts, however, belong to the emotional or tragic elements in the British war-consciousness. Let me turn to others of a different kind--the intellectual and reflective elements--and the changing estimates which they bring about. Take for instance what we have been accustomed to call the "March retreat" of last year. The dispatch of Sir Douglas Haig describing the actions of March and April last year was so headed in the _Times_, though nothing of the kind appears in the official publication. And we can all remember in England the gnawing anxiety of every day and every hour from March 21st up to the end of April, when the German offensive had beaten itself out, on the British front at least, and the rushing over of the British reinforcements, together with the rapid incoming of the Americans, had given the British Army the breathing space of which three months later it made the use we know. "But why," asks one of the men best qualified to speak in our Army--"why use the words 'retreat' and 'disaster' at all?" They were indeed commonly used at the time both in England and abroad, and have been often used since about the fighting of the British Army last March and April. Strictly speaking, my interlocutor suggests, neither word is applicable. The British Army indeed fell back some thirty-five miles on its southern front, till the German attack was finally stayed before Amiens. The British centre stood firm from Arras to Béthune. But in the north we had to yield almost all the ground gained in the Salient the year before, and some that had never yet been in German hands. We lost heavily in men and guns, and a shudder of alarm ran through all the Allied countries.