he greater State, national or imperial, of which it now
forms a constituent and organic part. And looming already on the
horizon, the wars of races rise portentous, which will touch to
purposes yet higher and more mystic the wars of empires--as these have
greatened the wars of nationalities, these again the wars of feudal
kings, of principalities, of cities, of tribes or clans.

Secondly, this ideal of Imperial Britain will greaten and exalt the
action of the soldier, hallowing the death on the battlefield with the
attributes at once of the hero and the martyr. Thus, when M. Bloch and
similar writers delineate war as robbed by modern inventions of its
pomp and circumstance, when they expatiate upon the isolation resulting
from a battle-line extended across leagues, and upon the "zone of
death" separating the opposing hosts, one asks in perplexity, to what
end does M. Bloch consider that war was waged in the past? For the
sake of such emotional excitement or parade as are now by smokeless
powder, maxims, long-range rifles, and machine guns abolished? These
are but the trappings, the outward vesture of war; the cause, the
sacred cause, is by this transformation in the methods of war all
untouched. Was there then no "zone of death" between the armies at
Eyiau or at Gravelotte? Let but the cause be high, and men will find
means to cross that zone, now as then--by the sapper's art if by no
other! And as the pride and ostentation of battle are effaced, its
inner glory and dread sanctity are the more evinced. The battlefield
is an altar; the sacrifice the most awful that the human eye can
contemplate or the imagination with all its efforts invent. "The
drum," says a French moralist, "is the music of battle, because it
deadens thought." But in modern warfare the faculties are awake.
Solitude is the touchstone of valour, and the modern soldier cast in
upon himself, undazzled, unblinded, faces death singly. Fighting for
ideal ends, he dies for men and things that are not yet; he dies,
knowing in his heart that they may never be at all. Courage and
self-renunciation have attained their height.

Nor have strategy and the mechanical appliances of modern warfare
turned the soldier into a machine, an automaton, devoid of will and
self-directing energy. Contemporary history makes it daily clearer
that in modern battles brain and nerve count as heavily as they ever
did in the combats by the Scamander or the Simois. Anothe