an to talk like that
after the war--as many of them are now talking--and the revolt of the
spirit, vague but passionate, against the evil that had produced this
devil's trap of war, and the German challenge, was subconscious as they
sat in their dugouts and crowded in their ditches in the battles of the
Somme.

PART SEVEN. THE FIELDS OF ARMAGEDDON

I

During the two years that followed the battles of the Somme I recorded
in my daily despatches, republished in book form ("The Struggle in
Flanders" and "The Way to Victory"), the narrative of that continuous
conflict in which the British forces on the western front were at
death-grips with the German monster where now one side and then the
other heaved themselves upon their adversary and struggled for the
knock-out blow, until at last, after staggering losses on both sides,
the enemy was broken to bits in the last combined attack by British,
Belgian, French, and American armies. There is no need for me to retell
all that history in detail, and I am glad to know that there is nothing
I need alter in the record of events which I wrote as they happened,
because they have not been falsified by any new evidence; and those
detailed descriptions of mine stand true in fact and in the emotion
of the hours that passed, while masses of men were slaughtered in the
fields of Armageddon.

But now, looking back upon those last two years of the war as an
eye-witness of many tragic and heroic things, I see the frightful drama
of them as a whole and as one act was related to another, and as the
plot which seemed so tangled and confused, led by inevitable stages, not
under the control of any field-marshal or chief of staff, to the climax
in which empires crashed and exhausted nations looked round upon the
ruin which followed defeat and victory. I see also, as in one picture,
the colossal scale of that human struggle in that Armageddon of our
civilization, which at the time one reckoned only by each day's success
or failure, each day's slaughter on that side or the other. One may add
up the whole sum according to the bookkeeping of Fate, by double-entry,
credit and debit, profit and loss. One may set our attacks in the
battles of Flanders against the strength of the German defense, and say
our losses of three to one (as Ludendorff reckons them, and as many of
us guessed) were in our favor, because we could afford the difference
of exchange and the enemy could not put so man