Australia, for example, supplies a proof of the enormously expanded scale of this war. The standing army of Imperial Rome consisted of 260,000 men. Australia is a community of only five million people; war to it is a totally new experience. Yet it has raised, equipped, and sent to a battlefield 12,000 miles distant an army equal in number to the standing army of the Caesars, at the time the Caesars were the masters of the civilised world. Great Britain affords another example of the amazingly expanded realm of the war. She hates standing armies, hates them so much that she will only pass the Mutiny Act, which makes an army of any sort possible, for a year at a time. The British formula is a big fleet and a little army. When this war broke out the regular forces of Great Britain consisted of only 186,000 men. When the war was not yet two years old, the British fleet had taken a scale without precedent in history; in addition Great Britain had raised an army which approached 5,000,000 and in which every man was a volunteer. If the average Liberal member of Parliament had been told, say, three years ago, that Great Britain, in addition to having a fleet in scale so tremendous, would have a land force of 5,000,000, he probably would have assaulted his interlocutor. But Great Britain, having raised by voluntary effort those 5,000,000, has actually passed a Conscription Bill for the remainder of its population. The battles of to-day take such a scale, last so long, and are fought under such strange conditions, that we have to invent new names for them. They are neither ‘sieges’ nor ‘battles,’ but a combination of both; and so we call them siege-battles. That ‘first and last of fights, king-making Waterloo,’ when set against the arithmetic of the present war, dwindles into a skirmish. The little shallow valley outside Brussels, where Napoleon and Wellington measured swords with each other, and one of the greatest soldiers in history ended his career, is in area three miles by two, and lies open to a single glance. Waterloo itself began at 11 o’clock in the morning, and ended before 9 o’clock at night; it might have been fought under the Factories Act.