sent the conditions of the American effort in the terms of former campaigns and make it seem other and easier than it is. One may say that a nation living across the sea has promised to raise and send troops in aid of its Allies upon the further side, and that things of this sort have been done times out of number from the beginning of history.

The novelty of the situation certainly does not consist in that. It consists apart from the question of the blockade and of belligerent action by sea - in three great factors never before present.

The first of these factors is the creation of a highly trained and what may be called a technical force upon a very large scale out of a very small nucleus or germ within a very narrow limit of time.

The second factor is the reconstruction of transport necessitated under these particular conditions.

The third is the necessity of special intensive training of the units created after they have been transported oversea and put down upon Allied soil.

None of these three factors ever appeared before in any transmarine expedition, and the combination of them it is which gives the enemy his hope that the difficulties created will be in practice insurmountable; that is, will not be surmountable within the useful limits of time assigned to the effort. The surmounting of those difficulties, on the other hand, if it is accomplished, will make the issue of the war absolutely certain, in spite of the disappearance of the state that used to be called the Russian Empire and the consequent present preponderance of the Central Powers. If those difficulties are successfully surmounted within the limits of time that bound useful action we shall owe that success mainly to the energy of the

Americans themselves, and they may well boast that this energy has decided the victory of civilization.

Let us examine these three novel points in their order.

The creation of a large trained body, of a body so highly trained that it may properly be called expert or technical, compared with the levies of the older wars, has a parallel effort in the amazingly successful corresponding effort of this country. Great Britain in the first two years of the war expanded a small professional army into a force of many millions of men. I have often quoted one of the test points of this achievement, the creation of the heavy artillery. It had hitherto been taken for granted. that the heavy gunner could not be properly trained under three years, while his officer required a far longer training, and the multiplicity of types developed in the present war as it became a war of positions enhanced the magnitude of the task. Nevertheless, we know that the task was accomplished with extraordinary success, and that by the late summer of 1916 the new force was in full being, and had reached a very high point of efficiency. Further, this force thus suddenly expanded had to cross the

sea.

But the American task differs in certain degrees so much from ours that it is a novel proposition, just as ours was a proposition completely novel compared with anything that had gone before.

In the first place, the nucleus from which the expansion must take place is in proportion far smaller. In the second place, there was in existence hardly any machinery for such expansion. It had not been imagined possible or necessary at all. For, in the third place, all the history and traditions of the country involved

The new American army must depend for its instruction upon a body of men less in proportion to its numbers than what we could call upon in this country between three and four years ago. We had, in proportion to our population, a larger professional army than the Americans by far. We had particularly a larger number of officers, a very considerable proportion of whom had seen active service in the numerous Colonial and Indian wars of the British, and we had thus beginnings of cadres on what it is true was a small but what proved happily a sufficient scale. Further, thanks principally to the foresight and industry of Lord Haldane, machinery for expansion had long existed. A considerable Expeditionary Force was in being, so that the plan, though upon a small model, was already present; one had but to enlarge its scale. A system for the elementary training of lads who might have to be given commissions was in full swing, and had already covered a considerable amount of ground; and the territorial army, though, as we know, its use was restricted, and even delayed, had also provided a considerable mass of elementary training before the war broke out.

The third element, though it is not a precise one, is also of importance: The tradition and habit of transmarine expedition was not established in the United States as it is here. The whole of English history is full of such expeditions; the numerous British

wars of the last 170 years consist of nothing else. The Seven Years' War, so far as England was concerned; the American War of Secession, the Peninsular War, the Waterloo campaign, the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny, the South African War, and innumerable intervening smaller operations, all of them of necessity meant the transport of a force oversea, usually to very great distances, and its maintenance and supply under those conditions. This form of warfare was the form normal to British tradition and experience. With all other nations it was rare, abnormal, and, as a rule, unsuccessful.

It is true that the United States had quite recently engaged in two such affairs- the Cuban War and the occupation of the Philippines. But the former was close at home, and neither were conducted against an equal enemy. There could be no serious threat of interference with communications; there was no serious fear of an equal struggle upon landing being established; and if we omit those two recent experiments, the whole military and political tradition of our present Allies was purely continental and, indeed, domestic.

But it is the limitation of time, as I have said, which is the most serious condition of all which affect this sudden creation of a vast new force out of such insufficient origins. It is as evident to the enemy as to ourselves that, while no exact limit can be laid down, the interval between the opening of the present fighting season and the moment when considerable American forces can first appear in the field must be the crisis of the whole campaign. In other words, there is applied here a spur of haste, with its consequent threat of insufficiency and confusion, and it is applied after a fashion far more severe than was the

case between 1914 and 1916, when the vast Russian armies were still in being, and when the siege of the Central Powers was still fully maintained.

This, then, the mere creation of so great a force within such menacing limits of time, is the prime difficulty overshadowing all others. It is the one upon which the enemy most counts, and with reason. But it is also a problem the solution of which the enemy should most dread, for if it is solved his doom is certain. By so much as his latest opponent is distant, and by so much as that latest opponent is numerous, by so much must the enemy forgo any hope of a political diversion. If the new great armies are created in time, their effect will never be modified in favor of the enemy by any political action of his to divert them from their aim. They will come fresh from a nation fully determined; unexhausted by previous effort; quite secure at home, and with as clean an objective before it as that .of the French themselves.

The second and novel difficultythe mechanical one of communication

may be said to differ only in degree from similar difficulties in the past. But the degree is so great that it involves a clear difference in quality.

All the older wars normally permitted of an easy landing wherever that landing was unopposed; that is, of an easy transition from the maritime to the terrestrial communications of a transmarine force. There were many reasons for this: The proportion. of the armies to the civilian population was such that civilian harbors were usually ample for maritime. needs. In many cases, landing could be effected when it was possible to choose one's weather, from open roadsteads. The material to be transhipped from vessels to the shore was not in very heavy units. Once the

transhipment had been effected, the ordinary means of communication by land were, as a rule, ample and available to the advancing force.

What has changed all this to-day is the magnitude of the forces compared with the civilian population; the greater draughts of ships and the weight of the units of material that have to be handled. The accommodation of civilian harbors is unsuited to the transhipment of a large force save in very rare cases. The railway terminals, the wharfage accommodation, the amount of rolling stock present, and the nature of the track leading from the harbors inland are, save in those rare cases of exceptionally large and deep marine depots, insufficient for their work. A great deal has to be remade.

In the particular case of this Expeditionary Force there is a further handicap. Most of the best French harbors in the north are already earmarked for British supply. Those nearest to the American ports, and providing the shortest communications by the sea, are, with few exceptions, of moderate depth; nor were they engaged in any great volume of trade such as would have developed their resources. Many of those most famous in history did their work under the old conditions of small vessels and import upon a far smaller scale than that of the great commercial nations to-day.

The French western and northwestern coasts have nothing corresponding to Antwerp or Plymouth or New York. There lies behind them a broad belt of purely agricultural territory; the happier and the more civilized, indeed, from what is called 'industrialism,' but none the less consequently ill-provided with rapid communication, and neither needing nor creating large facilities for import

at its few points of access by sea. The result of all this is that the harbors, the terminals, the railway tracks beyond, and their rolling stock, all have to be transformed with the utmost rapidity if the American force is to come into play at all in useful time; and such a condition has never arisen in the history of war beforeor, at any rate, upon nothing like this scale.

The last of the principal difficulties we are noting is the most novel of all. It is unique and particular to this war. The developments of the campaign since the autumn of 1914 have been such that a completely new tactical art has arisen, most of which can only be learned upon the spot. The old armies, if they left your home ports as trained soldiers, landed upon a distant soil as ready for combat as ever they would be. The weapons they had to handle and their way of handling them were as familiar to them at home as abroad.

The trench warfare of the last three years, the elements of poisonous gas introduced by the enemy; the enormous expansion of aerial observation, experience not only of cover, but of leaving cover, of concealment, of a vast development of new missile weapons, and on the top of all this the unprecedented strain of the thing –

Land and Water

all have to be learned, or, at least, the learning of them completed within the zone of action, and most of them upon the front of that zone. You can teach a man at home to dig a trench and to put up wire, to handle trench weapons, and (with no feeling of reality) to adjust a gas mask. You can teach them somewhat imperfectly the rudiments of observation from the air; but the difference between this preliminary instruction and its completion upon the front is like the difference between learning the grammar of a foreign language at school and having to talk it abroad. It is a new chapter altogether, and an absolutely necessary one.

The consequence of this is that to the difficulties of merely raising and training a vast new force out of a very small nucleus and to the special difficulties of transhipment you have added the bottle neck' of intensive training upon the European side. The great bodies of men, even though long under discipline and of good training poured over from the reservoir beyond the sea, must pass through the gate of special instruction before they can spread out upon the far side of it as troops in line equal to the present emergency. And that again is a condition which the past never knew.

THE last time I ever saw Keary was in the spring of 1917, the year of his death. He gave me the manuscript of Religious Hours to read, but was too ill, and I dare say also too proud, to say much about them. One thing, I remember, he did say: 'If I were asked what I really thought about my verse, I should say that I believed it had dignity.' It would have been very unlike its author if it had not that, and a great deal more beside. I was fully prepared for dignity, for gravity and measured utterance; but I found in the little book, not only a profound religious emotion, and that of a very unusual sort, but also an intensity, almost a passion, of belief which made the book seem to me a self-revelation. I think now that I was always prepared for something of the kind from him, but that must have been by intuition; for he had never led me to expect it by anything said or written. There is little of it in such earlier verse of his as is known to me. The Beggars, published in the English Review in 1909, is not at all like Religious Hours. Dramatic in form, and written in vers libre, it is a not very successful interlude of drolls: black spirits and gray, goblins, an abbé, a company of beggarmen, and other such minions of the moon. It is obscure and hard to follow. Mr. Hardy might have made a success of it. But in July 1911 the same Review published four more poems of his which mark an approach to the solemnity, though not to the leashed VOL. XI-NO. 536

fervor, of Religious Hours. The Wanderer and The High Road might perhaps have been included in that beautiful book. The best of the four is The Market, which is in a different key.

Religious Hours makes me regret keenly the opportunities I must have lost or mishandled of knowing Keary better. A more noble expression of austere belief I have never met with. He discerns the God on all sides of him; nothing is too common or mean for divine immanence. Real awe, genuine worship is in every line. Apart from the comparatively few poets who write under the impulsion of genius, it is certain that most men write verse because it is the greatest fun in the world so to handle the universe, and so to mould it nearer to the heart's desire. But Keary wrote it as a devotional exercise, to the glory of God- that is, of the Gods, for he acknowledged many- and as a solace to his own overcharged spirit. His Pantheon is that of old Greece; the Olympians are his high Gods; and among his lesser divinities are the spirits resident in natural objects, in woods and hills, in streams, on heaths, and in the sea. He dedicates his book to Artemis, 'huntress dought and dear'; to her and to Apollo the most serious of his odes are addressed. I have seen nothing of the much larger body of verse' of which he speaks in a prefatory note, unless the pieces in the English Review be of them; but it seems clear that, at some time or

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