I was specially interested during our talk to find that it was not only in the older, and, as it might be thought, more effete civilisations of Western Europe, that a consciousness of the incongruity of war with twentieth century ideas, is becoming current. This officer, representative of the best traditions of Eastern European soldierhood, described how he had formerly been an enthusiastic lover of war, a believer in its glories, and had once even sacrificed a good position on the Staff, in order to be in the thick of the fighting line. And now, though he suffered, as his personal record testified, from no lack of courage or virility, war, in his eyes, was murder, and its glories tinsel. I compared this Serbian major with our German devil-major at Tongres. Which of the two was the more truly civilised? I realised that Kipling's "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet" does not apply to the east and west of Europe. The west of Europe must, and will, unite with the Slav portion of the east, as a safeguard against the Central Powers of darkness. This war is bringing clearly before human consciousness in the east, as well as in the west of Europe, the fact that it is logically impossible for civilised mankind to preserve simultaneously two opposed standards of conduct: for individuals, a high form of morality, in which life, honour, and justice are revered; and for nations, a cynical non-morality, in which murder, dishonour, and injustice are inculcated as the highest virtues. We must raise the international standard or we shall inevitably debase the individual standard of human right and wrong. The fate of humankind, whilst this war lasts, is in the balance. The fight between the Allies and the Central Powers is not merely a struggle between one form of civilisation and another; between a society which believes in full-blown militarism, and a society which believes in a milder form of militarism. There is more than that at stake. The struggle is between militarism and human evolution. Europe is in travail--the travail preceding the birth of a new race. We prayed God that the birth might not be still-born. For fear of this, and for this reason alone, deliverance must not be prematurely forced. The Central Powers, the arch exponents of militarism, must be vanquished. My friend and I were agreed, that in the future, militarism must be exterminated, root and branch, if mankind is not to regress towards a monstrous sub-humanity. There was no one and nothing to contradict us, and we felt that if we lived a thousand years, our thoughts would never be more appropriately leaded to plumb the depths of the sea of Truth.