most of us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the dimensions of a
railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce any
effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments of
Scarborough and Ramsgate were colossal tragedies, and the battle
of Jutland a mere ballad. The words "after thorough artillery
preparation" in the news from the front meant nothing to us; but
when our seaside trippers learned that an elderly gentleman at
breakfast in a week-end marine hotel had been interrupted by a
bomb dropping into his egg-cup, their wrath and horror knew no
bounds. They declared that this would put a new spirit into the
army; and had no suspicion that the soldiers in the trenches
roared with laughter over it for days, and told each other that
it would do the blighters at home good to have a taste of what
the army was up against. Sometimes the smallness of view was
pathetic. A man would work at home regardless of the call "to
make the world safe for democracy." His brother would be killed
at the front. Immediately he would throw up his work and take up
the war as a family blood feud against the Germans. Sometimes it
was comic. A wounded man, entitled to his discharge, would return
to the trenches with a grim determination to find the Hun who had
wounded him and pay him out for it.

It is impossible to estimate what proportion of us, in khaki or
out of it, grasped the war and its political antecedents as a
whole in the light of any philosophy of history or knowledge of
what war is. I doubt whether it was as high as our proportion of
higher mathematicians. But there can be no doubt that it was
prodigiously outnumbered by the comparatively ignorant and
childish. Remember that these people had to be stimulated to make
the sacrifices demanded by the war, and that this could not be