we have lived so long, and those detailed and scientific histories which every Army, and probably every corps and division, is now either writing, or preparing to write, about its own doings in the war.  Meanwhile the official reports drawn up by each Army under the British Command are “secret documents.”  The artillery dispositions of the great battles which brought the war to an end cannot yet be disclosed.  There can, therefore, be no proper maps of these battles for some time to come, while some of the latest developments in offensive warfare which were 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 the British war-consciousness means.