cheers the winner. She trusts in her strength for another day. She
insists on playing fair. She considers it bad manners to lose one's
temper. She despises to hate back. She has carried this spirit so far
that if you enter the college chapels of Oxford to-day, you will find
inscribed on memorial tablets to the fallen not only the names of
Britishers, but also the names of German Rhodes Scholars, who died
fighting for their country against the men who were once their
friends. Generosity, justice, disdain of animosity-these virtues were
learnt on the playing-fields and race-courses. England knows their
value; she treats war as a sport because so she will fight better. For
her that approach to adversity is normal.

With us war is a sport. With the French it is a martyrdom. But with
the Americans it is a job. "We've got four years to do this job. We've
got four years to do this job," as the American soldiers chant. I
think in these three attitudes towards war as a martyrdom, as sport
and as a job, you get reflected the three gradations of distance
by which each nation is divided from the trenches. France had her
tribulation thrust upon her. She was attacked; she had no option.
England, separated by the Channel, could have restrained the weight
of her strength, biding her time. She had her moment of choice, but
rushed to the rescue the moment the first Hun bayonet gleamed across
the Belgian threshold. America, fortified by the Atlantic, could not
believe that her peace was in any way assailed. The idea seemed
too madly far-fetched. At first she refused to realise that this
apportioning of a continent three thousand miles distant from Germany
was anything but a pipe-dream of diplomats in their dotage. It was
inconceivable that it could be the practical and achievable cunning of
military bullies and strategists. The truth dawned too slowly for her
to display any vivid burst of anger. "It isn't true," she said. And