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.

It was a beautiful January day when we started from the little inn at
Cassel for Ypres, Menin, Lille, Lens, and Vimy. From the wonderful
window at the back of the inn, high perched as Cassel is above a wide
plain, one looked back upon the roads to St. Omer and the south, and
thought of the days last April, when squadron after squadron of French
cavalry came riding hot and fast along them to the relief of our
hard-pressed troops, after the break of the Portuguese sector of the
line at Richebourg St. Vaast. But our way lay north, not south,
through a district that seemed strangely familiar to me, though in
fact I had only passed forty-eight hours in it, in 1916. Forty-eight
hours, however, in the war-zone, at a time of active fighting, and
that long before any other person of my sex had been allowed to