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