The next of the flashes as of lightning that revealed the drama of the
past 365 days came to us at Christmas. The war had then been going on
five months, showing us many strange and terrible sights, but nothing
stranger and more terrible than the changed aspect of warfare itself.
A battlefield had ceased to be a scene of pomp and of personal prowess,
with the charging of galloping cavalry, the clash of glittering arms,
and the advancing and retiring of vast numbers of soldiery. It was now a
broad and desolate waste, in which no human figure was anywhere visible
as far as the eye could reach--a monstrous scar on the face of the
globe, such as we see in volcanic countries, only differing in the
evidence of design that came of long, parallel lines of turned-up soil,
which were the trenches wherein hundreds of thousands of men lived
under the surface of the ground. Over this barren waste there was almost
perpetual smoke, and through the smoke a deafening cannonading, which
came of the hurling through the air of scythes of steel, called shells.
Sometimes the shells were burying themselves unbroken in the empty
earth, but too often they were scouring the trenches, where they were
bursting into jagged parts and sending up showers of horrible fragments
which had once been the limbs of living men.
Such was warfare by machinery as the world caught its first, full,
horrified sight of it between the beginning of August and the end of
December 1914. But even out of that maelstrom of horror there had been
glimpses of great things--great heroisms, great victories, and great
proofs of the power to endure. A rigid censorship, rightly designed to
keep back from the enemy the information that would endanger the lives
of our soldiers, was also keeping us in ignorance of many glorious
incidents of the war such as would have thrilled us up to our throbbing
throat. But some of them could not possibly be concealed, so we heard of
the gallant stand of the dauntless sons of our daughter Canada, and we
saw our great old warrior, Lord Roberts, going out to the front in his
eighty-third year to visit his beloved Indian troops, dying as was
most fit on the battlefield, within sound of the guns in the war he had
foretold, and then being brought home, borne through the crowded streets
of London and buried under the dome of St. Paul’s, amid the homage of
his Bang and people.