What he had in view was surely just what we are witnessing in Great Britain to-day—­what we are about to witness in your own country—­a nation becoming the voluntary servant of an idea, and for that idea submitting itself to forms of life quite new to it, and far removed from all its ordinary habits; giving up the freedom to do as it likes; accepting the extremities of discomfort, hardship, and pain—­death itself—­rather than abandon the idea; and so putting itself to school, resolutely and of its own free will, that when its piece of self-imposed education is done, it can no more be the same as it was before than the youth who has yielded himself loyally to the pounding and stretching of any strenuous discipline, intellectual or physical.

Training—­“askesis”—­with either death, or the loss of all that makes honourable life, as the ultimate sanction behind the process, that is the present preoccupation of this nation in arms.  Even the football games I saw going on in the course of our drive to Albert were all part of this training.  They are no mere amusement, though they are amusement.  They are part of the system by which men are persuaded—­not driven—­to submit themselves to a scheme of careful physical training, even in their times of rest; by which they find themselves so invigorated that they end by demanding it.

As for the elaboration of everything else in this frightful art of war, the ever-multiplying staff courses, the bombing and bayonet schools, the special musketry and gas schools, the daily and weekly development of aviation, the technical industry and skill, both among the gunners abroad and the factory workers at home, which has now made our artillery the terror of the German army:  a woman can only realise it with a shudder, and find comfort in two beliefs.  First, that the whole horrible process of war has not brutalised the British soldier—­you remember the Army Commander whom I quoted in an earlier letter!—­that he still remains human and warm-hearted through it all, protected morally by the ideal he willingly serves.  Secondly, in the conviction that this relentless struggle is the only means that remains to us of so chaining up the wild beast of war, as the Germans have let it loose upon the world, that our children and grandchildren at least shall live in peace, and have time given them to work out a more reasonable scheme of things.

But, at any rate; we have gone a long way from the time when Matthew Arnold, talking with “the manager of the Claycross works in Derbyshire” during the Crimean War, “when our want of soldiers was much felt and some people were talking of conscription,” was told by his companion that “sooner than submit to conscription the population of that district would flee to the mines, and lead a sort of Robin Hood life underground.”  An illuminating passage, in more ways than one, by the way, as contrasted with the present state of things!—­since it both shows the stubbornness of the British temper in defence of “doing as it likes,” when no spark of an ideal motive fires it; and also brings out its equal stubbornness to-day in support of a cause which it feels to be supreme over the individual interest and will.