For the British Commander-in-Chief insists that we must look upon the war as a whole.  In the earlier part of the wearing-down battle which occupied its central years, we did what we could till our new armies were ready, and without us France could not have held out.  Without the British Navy, in particular, the war must have collapsed in a month.  But the main brunt of the struggle on land had to be borne—­and was superbly borne—­by France up to the summer of 1916, when we entered on our full strength.  Thenceforward the chief strain lay on the constantly developing Armies of Great Britain.  From July, 1916, to the Armistice, Sir Douglas Haig bids us conceive the long succession of battles fought by the Allies in France as “one great and continuous engagement.”  “Violent crises of fighting” within such a conflict may appear individually as “indecisive battles.”  But the issue is all the time being slowly and inexorably decided.  And as soon as the climax is reached, and the weakening of one side or the other begins, nothing but the entry of some new and unexpected factor can avert the inevitable end.  When Russia broke down in 1917, it looked for a time as though such a new factor had appeared.  It prolonged the war, and gave Germany a fresh lease of fighting strength, but it was not sufficient to secure victory.  She did her utmost with it in 1918, and when she failed, the older factors that had been at work, through all the deadly progress of the preceding years of the war, were seen at last for the avengers, irresistible and final, that they truly were.  “The end of the war,” says the Commander-in-Chief, “was neither sudden, nor should it have been unexpected.”  The rapid collapse of Germany’s military powers in the latter half of 1918 was the logical outcome of the fighting of the previous two years. Attrition and blockade are the two words that explain the final victory.  As to the cost of that victory, the incredible heart-rending cost, Sir Douglas Haig maintains that, given the vast range of the struggle, and the vital issues on which it turned—­given also the unpreparedness of England, and the breakdown of Russia, the casualties of the war could not have been less.  The British casualties in all theatres of war are given as 3,000,000—­2,500,000 on the Western front; the French at 4,800,000; the Italians, including killed and wounded only, 1,400,000; a total of nine million, two hundred thousand.  On the enemy side, the Field Marshal gives the German and Austro-Hungarian losses at approximately eleven millions.  And to these have to be added the Russian casualties before 1917, a figure running into millions; the Serbian, Roumanian, and Turkish losses, and, lastly, the American.

Some seven million young men at least have perished from this pleasant earth, which is now again renewing its spring life in beauty and joy, and millions of others will bear the physical marks of the struggle to their graves.  Is there anything to console us for such a spectacle?  The reply of the British Commander-in-Chief is that “the issues involved in this stupendous struggle were far greater than those concerned in any other war in recent history.  Our existence as an Empire, and civilisation itself as it is understood by the free Western nations was at stake.  Men fought as they had never fought before.”