Never, in the history of the world, has the courage of the individual soldier and the skill of the individual officer been so superbly witnessed as in the Great War. Still less has it ever been that a general dealt with such mighty forces or was confronted with such appalling problems of organization. The brain would reel with its immensity were it not for the fact that the brain grows accustomed to prodigies, to prodigies of valor, of skill, and of self-sacrifice.

Two great questions stand out paramount in the Great War. It is a conflict of principles, it is also a conflict of strategies. These two are interlocked. The strategy that dooms hundreds of thousands to death recklessly is the result of one principle; the strategy that makes every soldier a hero and a patriot is based on an opposing principle. These are hereinafter set forth and tell their own hideous and their own glorious tale.

War, such as the Great War, has never been before. The changed conditions did not come suddenly, they came gradually, and each new death-dealing[Pg viii] device was brought about as the result of some disaster that had gone before. The Siege-Gun explains the fall of Liége, the weakness of fortifications explains trench warfare, the defense at Ypres explains the poison gas, and the trench deadlock foreshadows the tank.

The United States is in the war. It is our war. We must know all that can be known. We must do all that can be done. We have entered the war on a high and noble plane, and we must know what are the fundamental principles at stake. War is neither a gathering of heroes nor a shambles. It is holy and it is dreadful. It is sublime and it is sordid. It is so terrible a thing that it can only be pardoned when its causes are just, even as they are just, noble, and sublime in this war. To give the boys of the United States a fair viewpoint on this war, to reveal the great issues involved, to build up a swift-blooded admiration for the men who have taken their lives in their hands to defend these great ideals and to prepare our lads for a manhood in which they shall be worthy of their fathers and of their elder brothers, to give a deeper pulse to the pride of being an American, is the aim and purpose of