“Many wonders there be, but none more wonderful than man,” said Sophocles, in the fifth century before Christ, and he gives the catalogue of man’s discoveries, as the reflective Greek saw it, at that moment of the world’s history.  Man, “master of cunning,” had made for himself ships, ploughs, and houses, had tamed the horse and the bull; had learned how to snare wild creatures for food, had developed speech, intelligence, civilisation.  Marvels indeed!  But had it ever occurred to such a Greek to ponder the general stimulus given to human faculty by war?  Probably, for the wise Greek had thought of most things, and some reader of these pages who knows his rich literature better than I do, will very likely remember how and where.  Modern history, indeed, is full of examples, from the Crusades onward.  But there can never have been any such demonstration of it as this war has yielded.  The business of peace is now, largely, to turn to account the discoveries of the war—­in mechanics, chemistry, electricity, medical science, methods of organisation, and a score of other branches of human knowledge, and that in the interests of life, and not of death.  For the human loss of the war there is no comfort, except in those spiritual hopes and convictions by which ultimately most men live.  But for the huge economic waste, the waste of money and material and accumulated plant, caused by the struggle, there is some comfort, in this development of faculty, this pushing forward of human knowledge into regions hitherto unmapped, which the war has seen.  This week, for instance,[13] American and British airmen are competing in the first Atlantic flight, and the whole world is looking on.  Again there is risk of danger and death, but the prizes sought are now the prizes of peace, the closer brotherhood of men, a truer knowledge one of another, the interchanges of science and labour; and they are sought by means taught in the furnace of war.  Thus, from the sacrifices of the terrible past may spring a quickened life for the new world.  Will that new world be worthy of them?—­there is the question on which all depends.  A certain anguish clings to it, as one measures the loss, and cannot yet measure the gain.

  [13] May 19th.

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I have dwelt on some of the accomplished wonders—­the results of the war, in the material field—­guns, Tanks, and aeroplanes.  But just as mechanical devices were and are, in the opinion of the Commander-in-Chief, of no avail without the fighting men who use them; so behind the whole red pageant of the war lie two omnipresent forces without which it could not have been sustained for a day—­Labour at the base, Directing Intelligence at the top.  In the Labour battalions of the Army there has been a growth in numbers and a development in organisation only second to that of the fighting Army itself.  Labour companies were already in being in 1914, but they chiefly worked