nd attention he was the one man
who stood most enthusiastically, one might say stubbornly, for the
supreme importance of munitioning the magnificent Russian defence. He
mystified all the English pessimists, in what seemed to them the
blackest hour of pessimism, by announcing that Germany had "shot her
bolt"; that she had already lost her chance, not by any of the Allied
attacks, but by the stupendous skill and valour of that Russian
retreat, which was more triumphant than any attack. It is this
discovery that marks an epoch; for that great deliverance was not only
the victory of Russia, but very specially the victory of the Russians.
Never before was there such a war of men against guns--as awful and
inspiring to watch as a war of men against demons. Perhaps the duel of
a man with a modern gun is more like that between a man and an
enormous dragon; nor is there anything on the weaker side save the
ultimate and almost metaphysical truth, that a man can make a gun and
a gun cannot make a man. It is the man--the Russian soldier and
peasant himself--who has emerged like the hero of an epic, and who is
now secure for ever from the sophisticated scandal-mongering and the
cultured ignorance of the West.

And it is this that lends an epic and almost primeval symbolism to the
tragedy of Kitchener's end. Somehow the very fact that it was
incomplete as an action makes it more complete as an allegory. English
in his very limitations, English in his late emancipation from them,
he was setting forth on an eastward journey different indeed from the
many eastward journeys of his life. There are many such noble
tragedies of travel in the records of his country; it was so, silently
without a trace, that the track of Franklin faded in the polar snows
or the track of Gordon in the desert sands. But this was an adventure
new for such adventurous men--the finding not of strange foes but of
friends yet stranger. Many men of his blood and type--simple,
strenuous, somewhat prosaic--had threaded their way through some dark
continent to add some treasure or territory to the English name. He
was seeking what for us his countrymen has long been a dark
continent--but which contains a much more noble treasure. The glory of
a great people, long hidden from the English by accidents and by lies,
lay before him at his journey's end. That journey was never ended. It
remains like a mighty bridge, the mightier for being broken, pointing
across a chasm, and