The presence of
the New Armies, as of some vast, impersonal, and yet intensely living
thing, seemed to be all around me. First, as an organisation, as the
amazing product of English patriotic intelligence devoted to one sole
end--the defence of civilisation against the immoral attack of the
strongest military machine in the world. And then, so to speak, as a
moral entity, for my mind was full of the sights and sounds of the
preceding days, and the Army appeared to me, not only as the mighty
instrument for war which it already is, but as a training school for the
Empire, likely to have incalculable effect upon the future.
How much I have heard of _training_ since my arrival in France! It is
not a word that has been so far representative of our English temper.
Far from it. The central idea of English life and politics, said Mr.
Bright, "is the assertion of personal liberty." It was, I suppose, this
assertion of personal liberty which drove our extreme Liberal wing
before the war into that determined fighting of the Naval and Military
Estimates year after year, that determined hatred of anything that
looked like "militarism," and that constant belittlement of the soldier
and his profession which so nearly handed us over, for lack of a
reasonable "militarism," to the tender mercies of the German variety.
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