As for the elaboration of everything else in this frightful art of war, the ever-multiplying staff courses, the bombing and bayonet schools, the special musketry and gas schools, the daily and weekly development of aviation, the technical industry and skill, both among the gunners abroad and the factory workers at home, which has now made our artillery the terror of the German army: a woman can only realise it with a shudder, and find comfort in two beliefs. First, that the whole horrible process of war has _not_ brutalised the British soldier--you remember the Army Commander whom I quoted in an earlier letter!--that he still remains human and warm-hearted through it all, protected morally by the ideal he willingly serves. Secondly, in the conviction that this relentless struggle is the only means that remains to us of so chaining up the wild beast of war, as the Germans have let it loose upon the world, that our children and grandchildren at least shall live in peace, and have time given them to work out a more reasonable scheme of things. But, at any rate; we have gone a long way from the time when Matthew Arnold, talking with "the manager of the Claycross works in Derbyshire" during the Crimean War, "when our want of soldiers was much felt and some people were talking of conscription," was told by his companion that "sooner than submit to conscription the population of that district would flee to the mines, and lead a sort of Robin Hood life underground." An illuminating passage, in more ways than one, by the way, as contrasted with the present state of things!--since it both shows the stubbornness of the British temper in defence of "doing as it likes," when no spark of an ideal motive fires it; and also brings out its equal stubbornness to-day in support of a cause which it feels to be supreme over the individual interest and will. But the stubbornness, the discipline, the sacrifice of the armies in the field are not all we want. The stubbornness of the nation _at home_, of the men and the women, is no less necessary to the great end. In these early days of March every week's news was bringing home to England the growing peril of the submarine attack. Would the married women, the elder women of the nation, rise to the demand for personal thought and saving, for _training_--in the matter of food--with the same eager goodwill as thousands of the younger women had shown in meeting the armies' demand for munitions? For the women heads of households have it largely in their hands. The answer at the beginning of March was matter for anxiety. It is still matter for anxiety now--at the beginning of May.