CONCLUSION.
This book has been written in spare hours off duty while the air throbbed all round me. The crackling rifle fire at the butts, the uproar of the batteries at practice and frequent bursts of bombs, the buzzing aeroplanes as they pass overhead, rumble of transport trains, and tramp of marching troops, bands on a Sunday, and choirs of trumpets sounding the evening calls are echoes, all of them, from the great thunders of the Armageddon.
The sounds will die away into the distance to a last muttering beyond the skyline. Then those who are left of us will put away our weapons and our saddles, and go back to civil life. But we shall all be changed.
No man returning from a journey, has ever come back with the same self into his former life. From this travail we shall come changed into a different world. A new and realized manhood will meet a tried and bettered womanhood. We shall not any more be able to live content in the old world of selfishness and slackness. We shall demand for men a training of their manhood, for women a training of their womanhood.
The makings of manhood
We shall value manliness more than scholarship, ease or wealth, or even the freedom we fought so hard to save. Food has no flavour until we have been hungry, rest has no value unless we have been weary, life has no zest save that from fierce endeavour, it is the work we do which builds our strength. The manhood of our fathers came by use of arms, and of horses, by going down to the sea in ships, by hard, rough living, taking risks and enduring pain, by generous giving and honest loving.
The manhood of our sons will not be made by indoor life, by ease, by softness, by selfishness or vice. The body as well as the mind and the spirit must have daily training, renewal and growth, if we would avert disease, corruption and decay. The future has nothing to add to the past save in the hazards of the air, the fierce delight of handling aircraft, and the hardening of all our fibres in the conquest of the skies. It will be long, however, before the aeroplane can alight in forests, on mountains, rough ground or stormy water, or venture very far from the bases of supply. Till then our industry and our wars will still need horses, and even afterwards we shall hardly be able to spare them from our pleasures.
In the past, the horses carried our ancestors out of savagery through barbarism into civilization. They saved us from the barren labour of Chinese, Egyptian and Indian cultivators, and gave us the large opportunities of our country life. Horses and shipping added all the continents to our estate, the conquest of the world to our arms, the glamour of adventure to our history. If only we can learn to understand horses with a quicker sympathy, a bolder reasoning, the training which our fathers had as horsemen, will be bettered in the training of our sons.