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A silent clasp of the hands between our two nations would seem to be the natural gesture in face of such facts as these. Such thoughts, however, belong to the emotional or tragic elements in the British war-consciousness. Let me turn to others of a different kind the intellectual and reflective elements and the changing estimates which they bring about.
And then, of course, there was the Belgian war-consciousness a new thing for Belgium and for Europe. But with that I was not concerned. Let me try to show by an illustration or two drawn from my own recent experience what the British war-consciousness means. It was a beautiful January day when we started from the little inn at Cassel for Ypres, Menin, Lille, Lens, and Vimy.
Bonar Law has stated in the House of Commons since these lines were written that the losses in the third battle of Ypres, from Messines to Passchendaele, July October, 1917, were 228,000. How deeply this Ypres salient enters into the war-consciousness of Britain and the Empire!
What one may call the war-consciousness of France, with the first battle of the Marne, glorious Verdun, the Champagne battle-field, the victorious leadership of Marshal Foch, on the one hand her hideous losses in men, her incalculable loss in material and stored-up wealth, and her stern claim for adequate protection in future, on the other, as its main elements; the war-consciousness of Great Britain and the Empire, turning essentially on the immortal defence of the Ypres salient and the Channel ports, the huge sacrifices of the Somme, the successes and disappointments of 1917, the great defensive battle of last March, and the immediate and brilliant reaction, leading in less than five months to the beginning of that series of great actions on the British front which finished the war all interpenetrated with the sense of perpetual growth in efficiency and power; and finally, the American war-consciousness, as it emerged from the war, with its crusading impulse intact, its sense of boundless resources, and its ever-fresh astonishment at the irrevocable part America was now called on to play in European affairs: amid these three great and sometimes clashing currents, the visitor to France lived and moved in the early weeks of the year.
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