The possibility of invasion is the dominant anxiety of the land-frontier
nations.[11] Across the frontier they can see the conscripts drilling
who almost at a moment's notice may be marching in to attack them. Their
armies are not sent on interesting little expeditions to restrain a
too-militant tribe of hill-men or to patrol the distant marches of a
magnificent Empire, but must stand at attention generation after
generation, year after year, maintaining the featureless routine of
military life. None of the Romance of War that falls to the lot of the
British soldier--the service among strange Easterns in Asia, the
building up of a new imperial province in South Africa, the constant
change of scene along the posts which form a girdle round the world from
Hongkong to Jamaica--falls also to the lot of the continental conscript,
for whom there is only the dull waiting for the critical moment.

The land-frontier nations alone are aware of the reality of the Terror
of War; it is a Thing overshadowing and, apart from every other thing in
their world, which must not, cannot be expelled from their thoughts. The
objects that meet the eye on all sides speak of War; the railway
vehicles marked with the number of men and horses conveyable, the noble
war memorials, the officers constantly in uniform, the crowds of
soldiers in the streets, the military bearing and precision of even the
civilian servants of the State; while upon the ears falls the sound,
which is in most cases a lingering echo of the roar of war, of alien
tongues spoken within the frontier, or of the tongue of the Fatherland
spoken in exile without it.

On the other hand, Peace is believed to be permanently settled upon the
shore of the silver streak which encloses the British Isles. The war
monuments are scanty and not a few of them are grotesque; the soldier
and his work are thrust into the background, and his uniform is so often