We shall win the war for freedom, but at what, a cost! If the British, who have already perished, were to march twenty abreast from sunrise to sunset, it would take them ten days to pass a given point. It would take the French eleven days, the Russians five weeks, the whole of the Allied dead two and a half months, and the skeletons of the fallen enemy six weeks more. If all the armies of men of whatever nations who have died fighting since August, 1914, were to march in review, twenty abreast, before the grand-stand of the living, it would take them four months to pass. This would not include the old men, women and children who have perished from disease and privation, from military brutalities, from the sinking of ships and the haphazard cruelties of shell-fire and bombs. Yet despite the tremendous thought of such a procession, the actual pathos of one man smashed in battle is more appalling. Comparatively few people have seen that sight. If they had, the war would end tomorrow. The generals who plan our battles rarely see it; they are too far back. The war-correspondents who describe our battles do not see it; they collect their information second-hand at canteens, dressing-stations and Army Headquarters. Our civilians only read the correspondents’ descriptions. So it goes—the mere hands through which the news passes and the further back it travels, the more the vileness of the happening becomes misted over with lies and transmuted into something magnificent. Each informant, in the proportion that he is removed from the terror, is the more anxious to pose as an heroic eye-witness. The only eye-witnesses are the men who do the dying, and they do not feel themselves to be heroes. They are under fire on account of the accidents of medical fitness, youth and a properly developed sense of duty. They are people of inferior rank and of no social or military consequence. They are not literary, oratorical, articulate. Because they die, the world never learns what war is like. Even though they bear charmed lives and survive, they are muzzled by Army orders and the vigilance of the censor. Not a whimper of the truth escapes. In hospital or on leave they are eager to forget; moreover, they quickly learn that the Sir Galahad misconceptions of civilians make their facts sound like the whimperings of cowards. So they strike the attitude which is required of them, pretending that there’s a sporting fascination about blowing and being blown into atoms.