The profound, the instructive nature of this war is resumed by the
memorable difference in the spiritual state of the two armies; the one
forlorn and dazed on being driven out from an abyss of mental darkness
into the red light of a conflagration, the other with a full knowledge of
its past and its future, "finding itself" as it were at every step of the
trying war before the eyes of an astonished world. The greatness of the
lesson has been dwarfed for most of us by an often half-conscious
prejudice of race-difference. The West having managed to lodge its hasty
foot on the neck of the East, is prone to forget that it is from the East
that the wonders of patience and wisdom have come to a world of men who
set the value of life in the power to act rather than in the faculty of
meditation. It has been dwarfed by this, and it has been obscured by a
cloud of considerations with whose shaping wisdom and meditation had
little or nothing to do; by the weary platitudes on the military
situation which (apart from geographical conditions) is the same
everlasting situation that has prevailed since the times of Hannibal and
Scipio, and further back yet, since the beginning of historical
record--since prehistoric times, for that matter; by the conventional
expressions of horror at the tale of maiming and killing; by the rumours
of peace with guesses more or less plausible as to its conditions. All
this is made legitimate by the consecrated custom of writers in such time
as this--the time of a great war. More legitimate in view of the
situation created in Europe are the speculations as to the course of
events after the war. More legitimate, but hardly more wise than the
irresponsible talk of strategy that never changes, and of terms of peace
that do not matter.

And above it all--unaccountably persistent--the decrepit, old, hundred
years old, spectre of Russia's might still faces Europe from across the
teeming graves of Russian people. This dreaded and strange apparition,