It may

be that in the multitudes who dimly trail through the battles and the marches, the mud and blood, of the campaigns of the past, there were soldiers as brave, as loyal, as generous as those who have been sent forth these three years past from the cottages and mean streets of Europe. be so; for they do not figure in the annals. The Historic Muse, gathering her skirts about her as she trips daintily over their plebeian bodies, treats them only as an entry in her catalogue. So many thousands of their corpses, she notes coldly, left to fester on the field: so many dragged off to prison or to slavery: so many, it may be, butchered in the market square or built up alive into the walls of the fortress. Non raggionam di lor. We pass on to objects of more interest. Clio sharpens her pencil to set down in suitable detail the acts and words of kings, sultans, commanding generals, valiant knights, and other persons of dignity. Their heroism is on the record, and we know all about it; but save in a few rare instances the others are a gray mass, twanging away steadily at their bowstrings,

hacking and prodding victoriously with sabre and bayonet, or perhaps driven into rout and confused slaughter but in any case as individuals indistinguishable.

So most of the great stories of valor and sacrifice in war, that used to thrill us like the sound of a trumpet, relate to the selected, the socially superior, warriors. The hero has usually been "an officer and a gentleman," with one of the qualifications, if not both. Do the Homeric poems pause to tell us about anybody but the chiefs, the princes, and the kings, like Agamemnon and Menelaus and Odysseus and Hector, and the illhumored but most nobly-born Achilles? Are the medieval chroniclers and singers-Froissart, William of Tyre, Mallory, and the rest-concerned with the multitude in leather jerkins? It is the knights and barons that interest them, as they push about, encased in steel, among the half-armed, halfnaked serfs of the feudal levy; and if these poor fellows were often brave, as I have no doubt they were, their valor is not worth recording. We have all been brought up to regard heroism in battle as a special attribute of patrician birth, or of high rank, civil or military. That is one of the reasons why we have found war ornamental, spectacular, romantic.

But this war has changed our orientation. Heroism has become so common that it has long ceased to be picturesque and theatrical, though it tugs at our heartstrings none the less on that account. We have discovered that the quite average, ordinary man can do deeds which would have seemed notable enough to fill half a canto of sounding verse, or half a chapter of reverberant prose, in the days of the effigy-hero. For him-it may be he will get a line in a bald telegram or a bit of ribbon and a metal cross. It is much more likely he will get nothing,

and nobody but a comrade or two will know how he lived and died. He goes about all this work with an amazing modesty, calmness, and selfeffacement, as though to suffer appalling torture, to be mangled, ripped open, maimed, blinded, killed, were just an incident in the day's doings.

In the years before the war we used to write solemn pages showing how the world was losing the manlier virtues; how civilization, and particularly urban civilization, had slackened our fibre; how our young men no longer possessed the robust fortitude of their forefathers. And it is these same young men who have stepped from behind their counters, or out of little black workshops, to do deeds any hour of almost any day that once would have given them an immortality of fame. Arnold von Winkelried, you remember: gathering a sheaf of enemy spear-points into his own breast to make a way for his friends into the hostile square. A fine thing to do! But no whit finer than that of the soldier who throws himself upon a live bomb and so deliberately risks being blown to shreds in order to save his comrades. * It has been done again and again in the trenches: this and other things which need a tougher nerve, and a better allowance of sheer physical resolution than they had "any use for" at the battle of Sempach.

They do it all so quietly, with so complete an absence of pose! In all the armies I think that is so, but most in our own. I cannot imagine any but a British regiment rushing into the hell of the machine-gun fire with the cry of "Early doors sixpence extra"; or with the men kicking a

*"Lauder, V. C.-Pte. D. R. Lauder, Royal Scottish Fusiliers, decorated with the V. C. by the King on Saturday. A bomb failing to clear the trench, Lauder covered it with his foot, which was blown off, thereby saving injuries to all except himself. He is now a munition worker."-Extract from daily newspaper.

football before them through the zone of sputtering bullets. The established hero gives one the impression of being conscious that the eyes of the world are upon him. "For God and the King," he cries, or "For the lilies of France," or something of that kind, as he charges gloriously, with white plume waving, and a magnificent flutter of laced cloak or flying hussarjacket. One suspects that even in dying he faces his audience, feeling that he owes it to himself and his order to make his exit with a sense of style.

I remember that when I was a boy the story of Sir Philip Sidney at the battle of Zutphen bit deep into my imagination. I derived it from a large, popular History of England, in which the incident was made the subject of a full-page engraving over which I used to linger with delight. For years afterwards the picture, with additions and embellishments, would come back at intervals to my mind. The scene, as I envisaged it, was replete with an ornate dignity. The battle raged decorously in the background; men, in correct attitudes, with corselets and bright lances, stood about; in the center lay the dying hero, an arresting figure, with his curled and, I suppose, perfumed ringlets, his elegant sword-hilt, his white and spotless ruff, his slashed jerkin, his Elizabethan hose and stockings. One saw the draught of water offered (in a silver goblet); the knight, about to raise it to his lips, turning to the wounded soldier at his side, with his "Friend, thy necessity is greater than mine." A grand thing done in the grand manner!

In the earlier days of the war I came upon a paragraph in a newspaper correspondent's letter about the fighting near Festubert. A British soldier was lying wounded on the ground, fevered with thirst, close by a German

even more desperately hurt. Stretcherbearers arrived and offered the Briton a tin of water. The man was reaching for it eagerly, when his glance fell on his tormented enemy. "After 'im," he said, and handed back the vessel for the German to drain. So now, when I seek to recall my old vision of Sidney at Zutphen, it is blotted out by another: a vision of a man in drabbled khaki, lying in the horrible crimsoned filth of No Man's Land; of another man in a torn gray tunic, drenched with blood, staring with wolfish eyes at the water; of the former shutting his own parched lips tight over his teeth and putting the precious draught by with a short, ill-said word of refusal. Surely a greater hero, that nameless cockney, than the sworded and scented courtier! "After 'im!" It is better than the nobly mellifluous phrase that made Philip Sidney immortal.

But all the blazoned deeds of the past are outshone daily. There was Sir Richard Grenville, of the Revenge and here is Captain Loftus Jones, of H. M. Destroyer Shark. In the battle of Jutland ten German ships were pouring their fire into the Shark at short range. Steering gear, funnels, superstructure were blown away. Half the crew were dead, the commander himself was severely wounded. Another destroyer, the Acasta, pushed in front of the helpless ship to shield her and brave destruction herself. Loftus Jones, who was the Commodore of the division, refused any aid, and signaled the Acasta to keep out of the way. Then a splinter of shell came which took off the captain's leg above the knee; still he sat on the shattered deck and gave his orders and fought on. He noticed that the flag had been shot down, and ordered that another should be run up; and this was done, so that the Shark went under with colors flying. When they

were all in the water the few survivors pulled their dying chief on board a raft. "Let's have a song, boys," he said; and they sang "Nearer, my God, to Thee" till that indomitable soul passed away.

It would be easy to multiply the examples. Courage, self-sacrifice, magnanimity are no longer the prerogative of the honored Few. They are the common heritage of the common man -and, let us hasten to add, the common woman. The war has raised the standard all round; it has shown that if our civilization is not prolific of geniuses, it has produced a race of ordinary men and women who are braver and more generous than the dominating aristocracies and high chivalric groups of the Past. It is the answer to the scientific sentimentalists, like Nietzsche and his followers, who talk about slave morality and crowd instincts.

Mr. Wells suggests that this glorification of the Effigy, this passionate research for the Superman, with its implied worship of mere brutal fighting force, is a by-product and misunderstanding of Darwinism. "Nature," said the hasty student of the evolution theory, "is 'one with rapine.' " Progress is an unending struggle; the stronger species prevails by crushing, killing, or starving out the weaker. Hence, also, you can breed up to the survival of the higher type by the enslavement, if not the extinction, of the lower; hence nothing really matters but the successful self-assertion of the favored individuals and classes. To that everything must be sacrificed, especially the masses of mankind. This misreading of the evolutionary process helped the preachers of the Will-to-Power gospel; but it was being spread abroad before they went to the pulpit with pseudoscientific texts.

Before Nietzsche there was that

ingenious French pessimist Gobineau, with his Inequality of Human Races, insisting that our civilization was doomed to decay because the godlike aristocratic castes were being absorbed by the inferior races, the mean-spirited multitude, autochthones, creatures of the soil. And before Gobineau there was Carlyle, with his passionate hero-worship, and that angry revolt against the shams and futilities of weakness which led him to admire even such a savage old ruffian as the father of Frederick the Great. Before Carlyle, again, there was Machiavelli, who taught that men in the mass being for the most part "a sorry breed," were only fit to be bullied, driven, and deceived by the stronger and more subtle spirits, like that of the amiable Cæsar Borgia. And long before them all was Aristotle, who settled the whole question by dividing the human kind into those who were free and destined to mastery, and those who were "slavish by nature," and in consequence were justly enthralled and exploited by the others. The doctrine is as ancient as history, and there were ingenious sages justifying it on moral and religious grounds a few thousand years before Darwin had told us about natural selection and the survival of the fittest, and before Nietzsche and Treitschke had assisted Prussian generals and ministers to discover that "the State is Power," and that war is a "biological necessity," especially when you think you can wage it with

success.

To return to our Superman as Hero. He had its uses under the older conditions, though now his functions have become largely atrophied. Individual leadership in civil, and particularly in military, matters was much more important than it is at present. A campaign was to a considerable extent a game of skill, in

which almost everything depended on the cleverness of the principal player on either side. The issue might be decided by a single battle, and the battle itself by some sudden welldirected movement of a small body of men, the choice of a good position, the adroit seizure of some useful bit of ground, the ability to grasp the psychological moment for advance or retirement. It was a stroke of that sort, a stroke of genius if it were not perhaps sheer luck, which made for victory or staved off defeat. With small, mobile armies, fighting at close quarters, leadership was everything, and the leadership was necessarily that of an individual.

Macaulay says that an army has sometimes been successfully directed by a fool or a coward, but never by a debating society. In the present war all the armies are directed, more or less, by debating societies. They are much too large and much too complex in their organization to be controlled by an individual, however comprehensive his talent. For the War Lord we have had to substitute the War Board, for the towering commanding personality, the Committee. Strategy, supply, equipment, transport, military economics, are now beyond the grasp of any single mind, though it were the mind of a Napoleon, a Carnot, and a Julius Cæsar rolled into one.

In war, as in industrial transactions, what is wanted is the harmonious co-operation of a number of managing persons, none of them necessarily gifted with genius, but all well-trained, well-informed, and clear-thinking. The excessively forceful, self-assertive intelligence may be a hindrance rather than a help on a committee. You do not want the Superman there; he would be likely to make trouble. The Board will do best when its members are on about a general high level of character and capacity, and have sufficient

confidence in one another to work together in comfort. With a directing council of this kind a great business concern a railway, for instance, or a steamship company-will be well managed; so likewise will be an army or a nation, both of which are also aggregates of human beings organized for industry. The Hero is here a luxury— sometimes a dangerous superfluity. Sir Walter Raleigh has recently told* a story of a Winchester boy who was "swanking" about his school, and was told that it had at any rate produced few men of genius. "I should think not," responded the Wintonian, "we would soon knock anything of that sort out of them." It was a very English reply: English in its distrust of intellectual superiority; English also in its instinctive belief that it is safer to rely upon a good average of efficiency than on the occasional revelation of brilliant, and perhaps abnormal, ability.

The Hero had other uses. He was a great instrument of suggestion, and man is a suggestible animal. Schooled as he has been by centuries of autocratic rule and anthropomorphic religion, he finds it easier to receive the suggestion when it comes to him through a personal agency. He makes a Person of his country, a Person of his god. He may, it is true, fight and die for an abstract idea: men have suffered martyrdom and tortured one another over the placing of a diphthong or the date of a church festival. The combative and the self-sacrificing appetites can thrive on a slender diet. But they grow more robust when they can feed on something that is made in their own image. The Great Man or the Superman, human or semi-divine, focuses the imagination and kindles the flame of enthusiasm. Loyalty to a Throne came more naturally to people

*See the report of his lecture at the Royal Colonial Institute in United Empire for January, 1917.

in the mass than loyalty to a Cause: they were happiest when they saw the cause, or thought they saw it, personified in the king.

Even nations that had outgrown the habit of despotism had that feeling, so that the noblest souls in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were content to give up everything, including their lives, for an elderly flirt like Queen Elizabeth, or an obstinate and confused intriguer like Charles I. Men have shown as much devotion to the city, the state, or the republic, to Athens, to Sparta, to the United Provinces; but this was mostly in the case of small communities, where it was clearly present to the minds of all the citizens that their own personal safety, their lives, and wives, and property depended on the success of the corporate effort. When the entire population of a town was liable to be murdered in cold blood, or sold into slavery, if the hostile army were victorious, no artificial stimulus to patriotism was needed. The people of Carthage were unwarlike and softened by luxury and wealth; but they worked and fought with frantic energy in the final siege, for they knew what desperate doom lay before them when Scipio's forces got possession of the city.

The Personality may be dispensed with when the Cause comes clearly home to everybody, and is intelligently apprehended by all. Perhaps our Committees and Joint Commissions and Advisory Councils will appeal to that kind of corporate consciousness in the future. There is more sense of it in this war than in almost any great war of the past. The armies know what they are fighting for: they have an ethical and political creed, indefinite but substantial, and require no "magnetic" leadership to stimulate their imagination.

But here we are dealing with armed hosts of men who read, and even, in