Peace of Amiens remained unbroken Europe would have been spared many sorrows and France her martyrdom.

After three and a half years of war the German soldiers, German statesmen, and the German nation have realized the ideal originated by German philosophers. They can, if they choose, exult in their political sagacity. Although the Great General Staff was forced to change its plans owing to the military resistance of France and England in the West, its political aims have never changed, and as the war stands to-day they have been achieved. But the end is not yet. The most powerful force that any conqueror has ever had to encounter in the history of mankind remains unbroken-the stubborn resistance and bitter antagonism of the Anglo-Saxon race.

A writer, whom I have already quoted, once said that to make England break with her history is a thing more easily said than done, as it has ever been in all her ages. Is it likely that after three and a half years of war, after stupendous losses in human life, after consumption of national resources so great that years of German toil will be required to restore them, the German remnant, however great the territorial expansion of its authority, can make England break with her past? Can the waning German remnant hold its conquests against the waxing unity and strength of the Anglo-Saxon races? In spite of her three treaties of peace, there is not a "profane or idle gentleman" in Europe who would lay three to one on Germany obtaining the ratification of any one of them by a Peace congress. History and war are differently read and interpreted. I myself have never doubted of the result of the war since the fruits of the victories on the Somme were gathered.

I was taught, when young, that Nelson won the Napoleonic war on October 21, 1805, although ten years elapsed, full of victories and defeats-Austerlitz, Jena, Leipzig, and countless others before Napoleon's final reverse. Be it remembered that in the interim Mr. Pitt rolled up the map of Europe at least on one occasion. Children should be taught now that Sir Douglas Haig and General Foch won the Great German War in the summer of 1916 on the Somme, although possibly the final reverse of the enemy may be prolonged until 1926! Nelson's strategy is said to have "noiselessly foiled Napoleon's plans." Eliminate that epithet as not characteristic of the Somme Battle and a similar

honour may be claimed for our Army's heroic struggle for it foiled the plans of the German General Staff.

Trafalgar proved to Napoleon and to Europe that England was unconquerable. It was the most decisive defensive battle ever fought. The Somme Battle proved directly and indirectly that the lines of the Western battle-front are unbreakable by any force that the enemy can muster against them. It was the greatest offensive-defensive battle ever fought, and its lessons, if they are correctly read, should convince every citizen of the British Empire that the British Army is invulnerable and that the island home, which that Army covers, is secure.

But to win the war is not necessarily to end it. Although the Allies won the war in 1916, the war may well drag on for years if certain fundamental maxims are not observed. Of these the first and last is Unity. We must be united in spirit and in action, united amongst ourselves and against the enemy. I have pleaded for a positive concentration of the keenest minds on the problems of the war rather than upon Mr. Lloyd George's minor errors. He himself should help. Like Cromwell, he must not allow himself to be "blottered." In the Lambeth manuscript of the Brut there is a story of Henry of Monmouth's management of two lords who continually fought each other instead of fighting the King's enemies. Henry summoned them to Windsor, where they arrived as he was going to dinner. "By the faith that I owe to God and St. George," said he, "if they have not agreed and accorded by the time I have eaten my oysters they shall both be hanged ere I have supped." Henry V was, like Mr. Lloyd George, a Welshman.

If we can achieve unity at home, then " by the faith we owe to God" let us have unity of design, of purpose, of aims, and of plans.

It is in reality so simple. If England, America, and France hold together, if their leaders agree that the war is won-come the end soon or late, this year or in 1926-then we possess unity of design, purpose, and aims. On these points no more need be

said.

As to unity of military plans, if the soldiers disagree, the question resolves itself into the time it should take Mr. Lloyd George, President Wilson, and M. Clemenceau to finish their oyster supper. But the soldiers agree.

ESHER

A MEMORY OF BOURLON WOOD

IN the grey first light of a mid-November morning, a certain battalion of a famous regiment set out upon its march along one of those roads which, having traversed the Somme battlefield, strikes across the waste ex-German tract of country south-east of Bapaume. There was not much cheer to the heart. For a damp, wind-riven mist partially veiled the landscape, while from a fitful quarter blew a breeze that threatened to cut one in two. The kits were late, the quartermaster was annoyed; the breakfast had to be eaten by candle-light under circumstances of chilly confusion which, if possible, enhanced its nastiness; most of the cups, plates, knives, and forks had been already packed up. These misfortunes are, apparently, inseparable from an early move. Everybody" strafes," muttering oaths and curses. Nevertheless the men were in great form and tramped along right sturdily, fit after a week of hard marching, and reinforced by the belief that the British Army had "broken through" (blessed phrase!) at last, that the Boches were on the run, that the Tanks were driving all before them, and that the cavalry had entered Cambrai several hours previously.

Of these stirring events not a word had reached England in advance, nor had any reliable information leaked out in the hotbeds of gossip and "back chat" prior to November 20. Nearer the Front little was known, and, as generally happens, the wildest canards obtained credence. Certain it was that on the 22nd, artillery and transport were pouring along the eastward roads, while the unceasing thunderous and often swelling chorus of the guns bespoke a tremendous battle.

Towards that sound a whole brigade marched through the dim hours after dawn till the hard cold steel of a winter's day tempered somewhat the hard cold steel of a wintry land. By villages extremely and utterly wrecked; past orchards whose every tree had been neatly sliced in half; across a grey prairie of waving ashen grass, interspersed with bleak, young oak woods and stretches of cultivated land long since run to seed. Ridge succeeded ridge with troughs and hollows in between, rolling away into distance like a Canadian prairie. And always on either side

the road for miles ahead those silent companions, the poplars, those mute watchers which speed the marching companies along the roads of France. Of human life there was no sign; of war there was every sign. Endless strings of artillery, transport and horses, motor-cyclists, and mounted orderlies, motor-lorries, white tents gleaming from distant ridges and strips of naked woodland, aeroplanes that droned backwards and forwards overhead, batteries that banged away to right and left. Down in a hollow on the hither side of a battered village we came about the middle of the morning upon a bare piece of ground and a pile of unpitched tents. There was just nothing. But in a twinkling thirty or forty tents appeared, fires were got going, food was cooking, an extreme briskness succeeded the emptiness, and-lo! a camp. The keen wind blew, the grass waved, the cold grey clouds went sailing overhead, and every now and then a gleam of pale sunshine lit up the countryside.

A great spurt of flame, followed at an interval by a sullen boom that hit one like a shock, indicated the presence of a 12-inch howitzer in a small wood near by. And every two or three minutes a German shell would burst on the Bapaume-Cambrai road, whose course along the crest of the ridge was marked by the inevitable line of trees. The thunder of the battle was continuous, now rising, now falling, so tantalizing that one felt impelled to mount a neighbouring hill-whence, however, nothing could be seen but ridge and hollow, ridge and hollow that suggested the everlasting sea.

It was an afternoon of preparation-of that bustling preparation which necessarily precedes a battle. The camouflage kits were produced, the water-bottles filled, haversacks loaded, revolvers cleaned, extra ammunition and bombs issued, and so forth.

Thus the hours slipped by. Night came early, and it was a night splashed and spangled with the gleam of innumerable campfires. Around these fires and braziers could be seen groups of men, warming their hands, and boiling water in their mess-tins, their faces richly lit up, softened or grave, or made merry by the dancing flames. Loud was the laughter and the singing of songs, uproarious at times the exchange of compliments from one fireside to another. A stranger might imagine that of all these noisy fellows none had a care in the world.

Presently some of the more sober mounted a little ridge that formed one side of the hollow in which camp had been pitched. Thence a familiar but magnificent spectacle presented itself. Along the dark horizon flickered the flashes of countless guns; here and there rose coloured Very-lights, red and green, yellow and whitelonely they looked and far away-and golden-shower rockets,

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and other powerful rockets that seemed to cast their glimmer even back here. There may have been greater night spectacles in the war, but seldom a horizon so far-flung, so panoramic. It was like a vast open amphitheatre enclosing within its walls of sky all the storm and passion, the mystery and obscurity of human life. Watching from that high spot was like a man at his birth, whose unseeing eye looks out into the future with its glimmerings of hope and fate, and its little lonely lights and its vast unknown shadows. Only in this scene there was found a sombre note, something wild and melancholy, something closer akin to the end of life than to its beginning.

It was pleasanter to look up and find the serenely twinkling starlight that never changed, that was on the whole kind.

At ten o'clock the battalion moved, and all that night we marched and marched. Often the narrow road, whose surface was pitted and rough, became alive with transport. Progress, therefore, was slow. Dug-outs-many of them snug-looking and warm-honeycombed the banks on either side, and as we approached the old British line and the Hindenburg line beyond, communication trenches and disused trench systems began to appear on either hand. We passed into the area of field-batteries, and from pools of miry blackness would burst forth suddenly a vivid sheet of flame, followed by the piercing reports of field-guns -one, two, three, four. Then came the flotsam and jetsam of the battlefield with white-bandaged fingers, arms, and hands, walking and extremely cheerful. "What'll you give for mine? says one; and to each in turn the men shout, " Is it a Blighty?" So they stroll back and we go forward again.

Then one by one, and afterwards in twos and threes, came the stretcher-parties-bearing, as it were stealthily, each its burden, a perfectly still figure shrouded in a dark blanket. "Make way for the stretcher would be passed down the column every few minutes. We must have crossed the Hindenburg line, scarcely knowing, about the middle of the night. So dark was it you could only discern occasional belts of barbed wire or German stakes, and opening from the roadside banks great deep trenches that appeared to face westward. Presently we were on the broad open highway. On one side squatted an abandoned Tank. A little farther on three dead horses lay in the roadway, but there was nothing to show that we were in country which had been German five days before. No shells came near. Once the column halted to let a battery fire immediately across its front; once in a big village that in its silence and shattered solitude was a little uncanny. Then out in the open country with the Verylights marking a wide semicircle, and the keen wind singing