By living at home I had gained perspective about the war and by living
with the war I have gained perspective about my own country. At the
front I was concerned day after day with the winning of trenches and the
storming of villages whose names meant as little in the Middle West as a
bitter fight for good government in a Western city meant to the men at
the front. After some months of peace upon my return to England I
resented passport regulations which had previously been a commonplace;
but soon I was back in the old groove, the groove of war, with war
seeming as normal in England as peace seemed in the United States.

In London, recruiting posters with their hectic urgings to the manhood
of England to volunteer no longer blanketed the hoardings and the walls
of private buildings. Conscription had come. Every able-bodied man must
now serve at the command of the government. England seemed to have
greater dignity. The war was wholly master of her proud individualism,
which had stubbornly held to its faith that the man who fought best was
he who chose to fight rather than he who was ordered to fight.

There was a new Chief of Staff at the War Office, Sir William
Robertson, who had served for seven years as a private before he
received his commission as an officer, singularly expressing in his
career the character of the British system, which leaves open to merit
the door at the head of a long stairway which calls for hard climbing.
England believes in men and he had earned his way to the direction of
the most enormous plant with the largest personnel which the British
Empire had ever created.

It was somewhat difficult for the caller to comprehend the full extent
of the power and responsibility of this self-made leader at his desk in
a great room overlooking Whitehall Place, for he had so simplified an