Page:Great Speeches of the War.djvu/99

 DR. CLIFFORD

year nineteen hundred and fourteen will be remembered by us, and by our children—and for many generations to come—as the year of the Great War, in the same way that our fathers thought, and we think, of 1815 as the year of Waterloo, and 1666 as the year of the Great Fire of London.

It is a great war, and great in this, that it differs in toto from all the wars of the past. There has been nothing like it. "It is," says The Times, "the biggest thing that has ever happened in the way of wars in the whole world since the dawn of history. It transcends all limits of thought, imagination, and history. We little creeping creatures cannot see more than a fraction of it."

It is true; but we see more than enough to appal and overwhelm us. The ghastly tragedy oppresses us night and day. More than half of the great human family is directly involved in the awful strife, and the whole future of the remaining portions, for weal or woe, hangs on its issues. Between sixteen and seventeen millions of soldiers are either already on the fields of battle, or preparing to go there; and over a thousand millions of men, women and children have their individual and social interests at stake in it. In width of range, in cost, in destruction of property, and in waste of human life, it is absolutely without parallel in all the campaigns and battles of the long past.

Mr. Lloyd George says that Britain alone is spending forty-five millions a month, and it is notorious that the other belligerents are spending very much more. Two millions of our own men are under arms as soldiers and sailors, and before the New Year has travelled far there will be half a million more. And who are they? The very pick of the nation! The flower of all classes of society: the poor and the rich; workmen and students, the élite of the trade unions and of the churches, brilliant scholars of the Universities of Oxford and 75