"progressive" or "backward" nations, mirrors in any
way the realities of the great business. This war was in some almost
final fashion, and upon a scale quite unprecedented, the returning
once again of those conflicting spirits which had been seen over the
multitudes in the dust of the Rhone valley when Marius came up from
Italy and met the chaos in the North. They had met again in the damp
forests of the Ardennes and the vague lands beyond the Rhine, when the
Roman auxiliaries of the decline pushed out into the Germanies to set
back the frontiers of barbarism. It was the clash between strong
continuity, multiple energies, a lucid possession of the real world, a
creative proportion in all things--all that we call the ancient
civilization of Europe--and the unstable, quickly growing, quickly
dissolving outer mass which continually learns its lesson from the
civilized man, and yet can never perfectly learn that lesson; which
sees itself in visions and has dreams of itself: which now servilely
accepts the profound religion of its superior; now, the brain fatigued
by mysteries, shakes off that burden which it cannot comprehend.

By an accident comparatively recent, the protagonist of chaos in these
things happened to be that rigid but curiously amorphous power which
Prussia has wielded for many years to no defined end. The protagonist
upon the other side of the arena was that same Romanized Gaul which
had ever since the fall of the Empire least lost the continuity with
the past whereby we live.

But the defender of ancient things was (again by an accident in what
is but a moment for universal history) the weaker power. In the
tremendous issue it looked as though numbers and values had fallen
apart, and as though the forces of barbarism, though they could never
make, would now at last permanently destroy.

In what mood, I say, did the defenders of the European story enter the
last and most perilous of their debates? We must be able to answer
that question if we are to understand even during the course of the
war its tendency and its probable end.

By the same road, the valley of the Oise, which had seen twenty times
before lesser challenges of the kind, the North had rushed down. It
was a gauge of its power that all the West was gathered there in
common, with contingents from Britain in the heart of the press.

The enemy had come on in a flood of numbers: the defence, and half as
much as the defence, and more again. Th