The present war is the biggest event in secular history—so big indeed that its scale evades the imagination. Its cause cannot be condensed into a formula or its story told in a volume. But every war, sooner or later, finds literary expression; and the present gigantic struggle needs, and will create, a new literature of its own, beside which all the rest of secular literature will seem petty. A hundred years hence professional soldiers will be spelling out its strategy; toiling historians will be collating and recording its events; philosophers will be analysing its causes, moralists in spectacles will be assessing its spiritual elements. What a literature—strategic, scientific, political, financial, geographical, legal, medical, personal—it will be! And when all such questions are dealt with there will yet remain that aspect of the war which has nothing to do with strategy, or politics, or finance. It deals with the purely human interests and emotions of the struggle; its picturesqueness; its dramatic incidents; the strophe and antistrophe of moral forces it reveals; its literary aspects, in a word; things in it which would have arrested the imagination of Shakespeare, and supplied the text for mightier dramas than ‘Macbeth’ or ‘Hamlet’; incidents that Scott would have woven into romance; follies which might have given Swift the text for keener satire than even his ‘Tale of a Tub’; heroisms that a greater Byron may set to more resounding music than even those famous lines which tell of Waterloo. And, it may be added, it is possible already to see in this amazing war some aspects which will do more than merely challenge the literary imagination, the sense of the wonderful. To begin with what is nearest: the new scale of the war, the strange temper, the terrific weapons with which it is being fought, will certainly prove, for centuries to come, an irresistible challenge to the literary imagination. When the first shot in this war was fired, the whole familiar and accepted arithmetic of battle went suddenly to wreck. It was a war, not of armies, but of nations. As a result we have to think of the contending forces in terms of millions.