CHAPTER XXV 'WHY IS VICTORY DELAYED? 'The war still drags on, Luscombe.' 'Yes, it still drags on,' and I looked up from the copy of _The Times_ which I had been reading. 'They seem to have had bad weather at the front. From what I can judge, the Somme push is practically at an end for this winter, unless better weather sets in.' The train by which we travelled had just left Bristol, and would not stop until we arrived in London. 'Of course,' I went on, 'it will be Haig's policy to keep the Germans busy all the winter, but I don't imagine that much more advance will be made before spring comes.' 'That will mean another winter in the trenches, with its ghastly toll of suffering and sacrifice of human life.' 'I am afraid so,' I said, 'but then we are at war.' 'How long is this going to last?' and there was a note of impatience in his voice. 'Until the Germans are brought to their knees,' I replied, 'and that will be no easy matter. When a nation like Germany has spent forty years in preparation for war, it isn't easily beaten. You see they were piling up mountains of munitions, while the Krupp's factories were turning out thousands of big guns all the time we were asleep. Now we are paying the price for it.' 'The same old tale,' he laughed, 'big guns, explosives, millions of men.' 'It must be the same old tale,' I replied. 'This is a war of exhaustion, and the nations which can hold out longest will win.' 'Then where does God come in?' he asked. I was silent. For one thing, I did not wish to enter into a religious argument, and for another I scarcely knew what to say. 'You know those words in the Bible, Luscombe,--"Some trust in horsemen, some in chariots, but we will trust in the strength of the Lord our God." How much are we trusting in God?' 'It seems to me,' I replied, 'that God gives the victory to the biggest and best equipped armies.' 'That's blank materialism, blank atheism!' he cried almost passionately. 'We don't give God a chance, that is why we haven't won the war before now.' I laughed good-humouredly, for even yet the mental attitude he had taken up seemed to me almost absurd. 'I see what you are thinking, but I tell you what,--the materialism of the country is adding to this frightful welter of blood, to this ghastly holocaust. The destinies of men and nations are not decided primarily by big guns, or mighty armies, and until we, as a nation, get back to a realization of the necessity of God, the war will drag on. As I told you before, when I was up at Ypres, I was convinced that if big armies, and big guns, and poison gas shells, could have won the war, Germany would have won long ago. But she was fighting the devil's battle, she was trusting in "reeking tube and iron shard,"--as Rudyard Kipling puts it. That is why she failed. With such a cause as ours, and with such heroism as our men have displayed, we should, if we had claimed the help of Almighty God, have won long since.'