In some sort of figurative conception as this did his brain realize the psychological meaning of the forces against which the civilized world was struggling. But there was the other side of the world’s embattled hosts, whose tremendous energies baffled his mental grasp. England’s Navy—yes. He had been born and bred in the belief of its invincibility. But the British Army? A glorious army, of course; a blaze of honour from Cressy upwards; a sure shield and buckler in the far-flung posts of Empire; but a thing necessarily apart from the vast military systems of the Continent of Europe. And now he learned, to his stupefaction, that the British Empire, calling up all her sons from within those same far-flung posts, had made itself, within two years, one of the three greatest military powers in
