of the Manchurian plains, of other tens of thousands of maimed
bodies groaning in ditches, crawling on the frozen ground, filling

the field hospitals; of the hundreds of thousands of survivors no
less pathetic and even more tragic in being left alive by fate to

the wretchedexhaustion of their pitiful toil.
An early Victorian, or perhaps a pre-Victorian, sentimentalist,

looking out of an upstairs window, I believe, at a street--perhaps
Fleet Street itself--full of people, is reported, by an admiring

friend, to have wept for joy at seeing so much life. These
arcadian tears, this facile emotionworthy of the golden age, comes

to us from the past, with solemnapproval, after the close of the
Napoleonic wars and before the series of sanguinary surprises held

in reserve by the nineteenth century for our hopeful grandfathers.
We may well envy them their optimism of which this anecdote of an

amiable wit and sentimentalist presents an extremeinstance, but
still, a true instance, and worthy of regard in the spontaneous

testimony to that trust in the life of the earth, triumphant at
last in the felicity of her children. Moreover, the psychology of

individuals, even in the most extremeinstances, reflects the
general effect of the fears and hopes of its time. Wept for joy!

I should think that now, after eighty years, the emotion would be
of a sterner sort. One could not imagine anybody shedding tears of

joy at the sight of much life in a street, unless, perhaps, he were
an enthusiastic officer of a general staff or a popular politician,

with a career yet to make. And hardly even that. In the case of
the first tears would be unprofessional, and a stern repression of

all signs of joy at the provision of so much food for powder more
in accord with the rules of prudence; the joy of the second would

be checked before it found issue in weeping by anxious doubts as to
the soundness of these electors' views upon the question of the

hour, and the fear of missing the consensus of their votes.
No! It seems that such a tender joy would be misplaced now as much

as ever during the last hundred years, to go no further back. The
end of the eighteenth century was, too, a time of optimism and of

dismal mediocrity in which the French Revolution exploded like a
bomb-shell. In its lurid blaze the insufficiency of Europe, the

inferiority of minds, of military and administrative systems, stood
exposed with pitiless vividness. And there is but little courage

in saying at this time of the day that the glorified French
Revolution itself, except for its destructive force, was in

essentials a mediocre phenomenon. The parentage of that great
social and political upheaval was intellectual, the idea was

elevated; but it is the bitter fate of any idea to lose its royal
form and power, to lose its "virtue" the moment it descends from

its solitarythrone to work its will among the people. It is a
king whose destiny is never to know the obedience of his subjects

except at the cost of degradation. The degradation of the ideas of
freedom and justice at the root of the French Revolution is made

manifest in the person of its heir; a personality without law or
faith, whom it has been the fashion to represent as an eagle, but

who was, in truth, more like a sort of vulture preying upon the
body of a Europe which did, indeed, for some dozen of years, very

much resemble a corpse. The subtle and manifold influence for evil
of the Napoleonic episode as a school of violence, as a sower of

national hatreds, as the direct provocator of obscurantism and
reaction, of political tyranny and injustice, cannot well be

exaggerated.
The nineteenth century began with wars which were the issue of a

corrupted revolution. It may be said that the twentieth begins
with a war which is like the explosiveferment of a moral grave,

whence may yet emerge a new political organism to take the place of
a gigantic and dreaded phantom. For a hundred years the ghost of

Russian might, overshadowing with its fantastic bulk the councils
of Central and Western Europe, sat upon the gravestone of

autocracy, cutting off from air, from light, from all knowledge of
themselves and of the world, the buried millions of Russian people.

Not the most determined cockney sentimentalist could have had the
heart to weep for joy at the thought of its teeming numbers! And

yet they were living, they are alive yet, since, through the mist
of print, we have seen their blood freezing crimson upon the snow

of the squares and streets of St. Petersburg; since their
generations born in the grave are yet alive enough to fill the

ditches and cover the fields of Manchuria with their torn limbs; to
send up from the frozen ground of battlefields a chorus of groans

calling for vengeance from Heaven; to kill and retreat, or kill and
advance, without intermission or rest for twenty hours, for fifty

hours, for whole weeks of fatigue, hunger, cold, and murder--till
their ghastly labour, worthy of a place amongst the punishments of

Dante's Inferno, passing through the stages of courage, of fury, of
hopelessness, sinks into the night of crazy despair.

It seems that in both armies many men are driven beyond the bounds
of sanity by the stress of moral and physicalmisery. Great

numbers of soldiers and regimental officers go mad as if by way of
protest against the peculiar sanity of a state of war: mostly

among the Russians, of course. The Japanese have in their favour
the tonic effect of success; and the innate gentleness of their

character stands them in good stead. But the Japanese grand army
has yet another advantage in this nerve-destroying contest, which

for endless, arduous toil of killing surpasses all the wars of
history. It has a base for its operations; a base of a nature

beyond the concern of the many books written upon the so-called art
of war, which, considered by itself, purely as an exercise of human

ingenuity, is at best only a thing of well-worn, simple artifices.
The Japanese army has for its base a reasoned conviction; it has

behind it the profoundbelief in the right of a logical necessity
to be appeased at the cost of so much blood and treasure. And in

that belief, whether well or ill founded, that army stands on the
high ground of consciousassent, shouldering deliberately the

burden of a long-tried faithfulness. The other people (since each
people is an army nowadays), torn out from a miserable quietude

resembling death itself, hurled across space, amazed, without
starting-point of its own or knowledge of the aim, can feel nothing

but a horror-stricken consciousness of having mysteriously become
the plaything of a black and merciless fate.

The profound, the instructive nature of this war is resumed by the
memorable difference in the spiritual state of the two armies; the

one forlorn and dazed on being driven out from an abyss of mental
darkness into the red light of a conflagration, the other with a

full knowledge of its past and its future, "finding itself" as it
were at every step of the trying war before the eyes of an

astonished world. The greatness of the lesson has been dwarfed for
most of us by an often half-consciousprejudice of race-difference.

The West having managed to lodge its hasty foot on the neck of the
East, is prone to forget that it is from the East that the wonders

of patience and wisdom have come to a world of men who set the
value of life in the power to act rather than in the faculty of

meditation. It has been dwarfed by this, and it has been obscured
by a cloud of considerations with whose shaping wisdom and

meditation had little or nothing to do; by the weary platitudes on
the military situation which (apart from geographical conditions)

is the same everlasting situation that has prevailed since the
times of Hannibal and Scipio, and further back yet, since the

beginning of historical record--since prehistoric times, for that
matter; by the conventional expressions of horror at the tale of

maiming and killing; by the rumours of peace with guesses more or
less plausible as to its conditions. All this is made legitimate

by the consecrated custom of writers in such time as this--the time
of a great war. More legitimate in view of the situation created

in Europe are the speculations as to the course of events after the
war. More legitimate, but hardly more wise than the irresponsible

talk of strategy that never changes, and of terms of peace that do
not matter.

And above it all--unaccountably persistent--the decrepit, old,
hundred years old, spectre of Russia's might still faces Europe

from across the teeming graves of Russian people. This dreaded and
strange apparition, bristling with bayonets, armed with chains,

hung over with holy images; that something not of this world,
partaking of a ravenous ghoul, of a blind Djinn grown up from a

cloud, and of the Old Man of the Sea, still faces us with its old
stupidity, with its strange mystical arrogance, stamping its

shadowy feet upon the gravestone of autocracy already cracked
beyond repair by the torpedoes of Togo and the guns of Oyama,

already heaving in the blood-soaked ground with the first stirrings
of a resurrection.

Never before had the Western world the opportunity to look so deep
into the black abyss which separates a soulless autocracy posing

as, and even believing itself to be, the arbiter of Europe, from
the benighted, starved souls of its people. This is the real

object-lesson of this war, its unforgettable information. And this
war's true mission, disengaged from the economic origins of that