ere to have been launched upon the enemy had the war continued,
are naturally not for the public for a good while ahead. And
considering that, year by year, we are still discussing and
investigating the battles of a hundred years ago--(look for instance
at the lists of recent books on the Napoleonic campaigns in the
Cambridge Moddern History!)--we may guess at the time mankind will
take hereafter in writing about and elucidating a war, where in many
of the great actions, as a Staff Officer remarked to me, a Waterloo
might have been lost without being missed, or won without being more
than a favourable incident in an otherwise perhaps unfavourable whole.

At the same time, this generation has got somehow--as an ingredient in
its daily life--to form as clear a mental picture as it can of the war
as a whole, and especially just now of its closing months in France. For
the history of those last months is at the present moment an _active
agent in the European situation_. What one may call the war-consciousness
of France, with the first battle of the Marne, glorious Verdun, the
Champagne battle-field, the victorious leadership of Marshal Foch, on
the one hand--her hideous losses in men, her incalculable loss in
material and stored-up wealth, and her stern claim for adequate
protection in future, on the other, as its main elements; the
war-consciousness of Great Britain and the Empire, turning essentially
on the immortal defence of the Ypres salient and the Channel ports,
the huge sacrifices of the Somme, the successes and disappointments of
1917, the great defensive battle of last March, and the immediate and
brilliant reaction, leading in less than five months to the beginning
of that series of great actions on the British front which finished
the war--all interpenetrated with the sense of perpetual growth in
efficiency and power; and finally, the American war-consciousness, as
it emerged from the war, with its crusading impulse intact, its sense
of boundless resources, and its ever-fresh astonishment at the
irrevocable part America was now called on to play in European
affairs:--amid these three great and sometimes clashing currents, the
visitor to France lived and moved in the early weeks of the year. And
then, of course, there was the Belgian war-consciousness--a new thing
for Belgium and for Europe. But with that I was not concerned.

Let me try to show by an illustration or two drawn from my own recent
experience what