The growth of "wireless," as a means of air-communication, is another astounding chapter in this incredible story. Only one of the machines which left with the original Expeditionary Force was fitted with "wireless" apparatus, and it was not used till the first Battle of the Aisne, when co-operation with the artillery first began. There are now 520 officers in the "wireless" branch and 6,200 other ranks; while there are 80 "wireless" stations in France alone and several hundred battery stations. "Wireless" telephony, too, has been made practical since 1917; and over a range of some 75 miles has been of deadly use to the artillery, especially at night, when the watcher in the skies becomes aware of lighted aerodromes, or railway stations, behind the enemy lines.

"Many wonders there be, but none more wonderful than man," said Sophocles, in the fifth century before Christ, and he gives the catalogue of man's discoveries, as the reflective Greek saw it, at that moment of the world's history. Man, "master of cunning," had made for himself ships, ploughs, and houses, had tamed the horse and the bull; had learned how to snare wild creatures for food, had developed speech, intelligence, civilisation. Marvels indeed! But had it ever occurred to such a Greek to ponder the general stimulus given to human faculty by war? Probably, for the wise Greek had thought of most things, and some reader of these pages who knows his rich literature better than I do, will very likely remember how and where. Modern history, indeed, is full of examples, from the Crusades onward. But there can never have been any such demonstration of it as this war has yielded. The business of peace is now, largely, to turn to account the discoveries of the war—in mechanics, chemistry, electricity, medical science, methods of organisation, and a score of other branches of human knowledge, and that in the interests of life, and not of death. For the human loss of the war there is no comfort, except in those spiritual hopes and convictions by which ultimately most men live. But for the huge economic waste, the waste of money and material and accumulated plant, caused by the struggle, there is some comfort, in this development of faculty, this pushing forward of human knowledge into regions hitherto unmapped, which the war has seen. This week, for instance,[[13] ] American and British airmen are competing in the first Atlantic flight, and the whole world is looking on. Again there is risk of danger and death, but the prizes sought are now the prizes of peace, the closer brotherhood of men, a truer knowledge one of another, the interchanges of science and labour; and they are sought by means taught in the furnace of war. Thus, from the sacrifices of the terrible past may spring a quickened life for the new world. Will that new world be worthy of them?—there is the question on which all depends. A certain anguish clings to it, as one measures the loss, and cannot yet measure the gain.

I have dwelt on some of the accomplished wonders—the results of the war, in the material field—guns, Tanks, and aeroplanes. But just as mechanical devices were and are, in the opinion of the Commander-in-Chief, of no avail without the fighting men who use them; so behind the whole red pageant of the war lie two omnipresent forces without which it could not have been sustained for a day—Labour at the base, Directing Intelligence at the top. In the Labour battalions of the Army there has been a growth in numbers and a development in organisation only second to that of the fighting Army itself. Labour companies were already in being in 1914, but they chiefly worked at the ports, and were recruited mainly from dock labourers. Then it was realised that to employ the trained soldier on many of the ordinary "fatigue" duties was to waste his training, and Labour began to be sent plentifully to the front. For trench-digging, for hut-building, for the making and repair of roads and railways, for the handling and unloading of supplies and ammunition, for sanitation, salvage, moving the wounded at casualty clearing stations, and a score of other needs, the demand on the Labour battalions grew and grew.

How well I remember the shivering Kaffir boys and Indians at work on the handling of stores and ammunition in the cold spring of 1917!—and the navvy battalions on the roads before the Chinese had arrived in force, and before the great rush of German prisoners began. Between the British navvy battalions, many of them elderly men past military age, or else unfit in some way for the fighting line, and their comrades in the trenches, there were generally the friendliest relations. The fighting man knew well what he owed to the "old boys." I have before me an account by a Highland officer of the relation between a navvy and a regular battalion in the Ypres salient. "Their huts stretched along the side of the road which led us towards our trenches; and every time we passed that way the sound of the pipes would bring them out of their billets in crowds to cheer us in, or to welcome us back if we were returning. They kept that road in splendid repair, despite the heavy wear and tear of the endless traffic which used it, and we blessed them many times. There was a two-miles stretch across shell-torn, muddy country just behind the fighting line. Tired men, just relieved from the trenches, and carrying heavy equipment, naturally loathed it as a Slough of Despond; but when we struck the good, honest surface of the navvy battalion's road, though there were many miles still between us and rest, we felt the journey was as good as over, so easy, by comparison, had marching become. A close friendship grew up between our battalions. Our officers invited their officers to dinner. Our men saluted their officers, and if one of our officers happened to come on the scene of their operations, some old veteran, wearing perhaps the medal ribbon of campaigns dating back a generation, would call his gang to attention, and gravely give the salute after the manner of thirty years ago. And when one realised what the age of these men must be, who were wearing decorations of Egyptian and Indian frontier campaigns, with not a few Zulu ribbons among them, one marvelled at the skill and strength with which the old fellows wielded pick and shovel. They could not march any great distance, and we helped them along in motor buses; but once set them down by their tracks, though the road might be chaos and the shell-holes innumerable, obstacles were cleared away, holes filled up, and the new surface well and truly laid with a magical rapidity.... The idea of taking shelter never seemed to occur to them; they openly rejoiced at being under fire.... Perhaps though they mended our roads and gave us easy walking, they helped us most by the quiet steadfastness of their example. One never saw them toiling away in the deathtrap of the Ypres salient without realising that they were the fathers of our generation, men who had already spent themselves in Britain's cause when we were children, and had now come out to serve her again, at her call, and to watch how we young ones played up."

Some more recent notes from G.H.Q. dwell warmly on the invaluable services rendered by the Labour Corps in the Battle of Cambrai, November, 1917, in the defensive battle of last spring, and in the autumn attacks which ended the war. In the Cambrai attack the Labour men were concentrated 1,000 yards behind the line, so as to be ready for immediate advance. A light railway was run into Marcoing within twenty-four hours of its capture, and another into Moeuvres under heavy fire, while the approaches to the bridges over the Canal du Nord were carried out by men working only 1,000 yards from the enemy machine guns posted on one of the locks of the Canal. In the withdrawals of last March and April, throughout the heavy defensive fighting of those dangerous weeks, no men were steadier. Theirs was the heavy work of digging new defence lines—at night—with long marches to and from their billets. Casualties and wastage were heavy, but could not be helped, as fighting men could not be spared. Yet the units concerned behaved "with the greatest gallantry." "One company," says a report from G.H.Q., "worked day and night in a forward ammunition dump for three days, and then marched seventy miles in six days, working a day and night in another ammunition dump on the way, with no transport but one G.S. wagon to help them; in their retirements, effected as they were with almost no transport, they lost practically all their equipment, and yet without getting time to rest and re-equip, they had to be moved at once to work on defence lines."

The total number of Labour men employed in stemming the German rush on Amiens, by the construction of new lines of defence, was no less than 62,000—two-thirds, nearly, of the whole British Army at Waterloo!

Then, when our counter-attack began, the task of the Labour men was reversed. Now it was for them to go forward, well ahead of the reserves, and some 1,000 yards ahead of the skilled transport troops and the construction trains that were laying the line for which the Labour men prepared the way. Death or wounds were always in the day's risks, but the Labour men "held on." By this time there were 350,000 men under the Labour Directorate—a force about equal to our whole Territorial and Regular Army before the war. They were a strange and motley host!—95,000 British, 84,000 Chinese, 138,000 Prisoners of War, 1,500 Cape Coloured, 4,000 West Indians, 11,000 South African natives, 100 Fijians, 7,500 Egyptians, 1,500 Indians—so run the principal items. The catalogue given of their labours covers all the rough work of the war household. They were the handy men everywhere, adding on occasion forestry and agriculture to their war-work, and the British Labour battalions were, of course, the stiffening and superintending element for the rest.

In the handling of the Coloured Labour Units there were naturally many new and occasionally surprising things to be learnt by the British soldiers directing them. A party of Nagas, for instance, were among the Indian Labour Units. "They were savages from a country which has only recently been brought thoroughly under British rule," writes an officer of the A.G.'s department. "Their pastime is head-hunting, and their 'uniform' when at home is that bestowed on them by Nature. They were extraordinarily cheerful, willing workers, and gave no trouble at all. The trouble of providing the special kind of food which in general the natives of India require, was entirely absent in the case of the Nagas. They have a strong liking for rats, and the only food they object to is monkeys. A company of Nagas, about May, 1917, after the advance at Arras in April, were sent up to somewhere near Boisleux to bury dead horses. The dead horses were disposed of—but not by burial. And in addition an Infantry Brigade in the neighbourhood had soon to mourn the loss of all their dogs."

The Chinese were a constant source of amusement and interest to the British. All that neatness and delicacy of finger which is shown in Chinese art and hand-work, the infinite pains, the careful finish which the Chinaman inherits from his age-long, patient past, were to be seen even in the digging of trenches. Their defence lines were a marvel of finish, in spite of the fact that in hard manual labour they were ahead of any other unit—shifting, often, 240 cubic feet of soil per day, per man. As porters, too, they were beyond rivalry; and their contempt for the German prisoners' capacity in this direction was amusing. A Chinese coolie, watching two prisoners handle a stack of cased goods, could not at last contain himself. He walked up to them, saying: "Hun no damn good," and proceeded to show them how it should be done. The stolidity of the Chinaman is generally proof against surprise, but some of those coming from the backwoods of Northern China were occasionally bewildered and overwhelmed when set down amid the amazing and to them terrifying wonders of the "back" of a European Army. One company of such men arrived at their appointed camp, and the next day there was a fight with enemy aeroplanes overhead. One of the poor coolies was so terrified that he went and hanged himself, and the rest could only be pacified with great difficulty. On the other hand, a flying officer once offered a ride to a Chinese ganger who, with his men, had been doing some work on an aerodrome for the R.A.F. "The ganger went up with glee; and the pilot's feelings may be imagined when, at a good height, he looked round and saw the ganger standing up, as happy as could be, looking over the edge and pointing down to the camp where his company lived, and other landmarks he was able to recognise."