a crater fifty feet deep and a hundred feet across. Seven months the
British sappers had toiled far below in the chalk, digging the passage
and chamber; and one summer dawn, like some tropical volcano, it had
burst directly under the German trench. Long we stood on the slippery
edge of it, gazing down at the tangled wire and litter of battle that
strewed the bottom, while the rain fell pitilessly. Just such rain, said
my officer-guide, as had drenched this country through the long winter
months of preparation. "We never got dry," he told me; and added with a
smile, in answer to my query: "Perhaps that was the reason we never
caught colds."

When we entered Albert, the starting point of the British advance, there
was just light enough to see the statue of the Virgin leaning far above
us over the street. The church-tower on which it had once stood erect
had been struck by a German shell, but its steel rod had bent and not
broken. Local superstition declares that when the Virgin of Albert falls
the war will be ended.



IV

I come home impressed with the fact that Britain has learned more from
this war than any other nation, and will probably gain more by that
knowledge. We are all wanting, of course, to know what we shall get out
of it, since it was forced upon us; and of course the only gain worth
considering--as many of those to whom its coming has brought home the
first glimmerings of social science are beginning to see--is precisely a
newly acquired vision of the art of self-government. It has been
unfortunately necessary--or perhaps fortunately necessary--for the great