Then the Leviathan steams to leeward of the burning ship, and picks up her boats. She takes the rescued passengers aboard, and returns to windward; then drops the boats again, and repeats the previous operations, until every man, woman, and child is saved.
As the last boat swings up at the end of the great derricks aboard the Cornucopia there is a final volcano of flame from the burning ship, lighting up the black belly of the sky into billowing clouds of redness. There falls the eternal blackness of the night.... The Vanderfield has gone.
The Leviathan swings round through the night, with her six hundred saved; and begins to sing again in her deep heart, laying the miles and the storm astern once more, in a deep low thunder.
THE WAR IN PERSPECTIVE.
BY DR. W. H. FITCHETT.
The present war is the biggest event in secular history—so big indeed that its scale evades the imagination. Its cause cannot be condensed into a formula or its story told in a volume. But every war, sooner or later, finds literary expression; and the present gigantic struggle needs, and will create, a new literature of its own, beside which all the rest of secular literature will seem petty. A hundred years hence professional soldiers will be spelling out its strategy; toiling historians will be collating and recording its events; philosophers will be analysing its causes, moralists in spectacles will be assessing its spiritual elements. What a literature—strategic, scientific, political, financial, geographical, legal, medical, personal—it will be!
And when all such questions are dealt with there will yet remain that aspect of the war which has nothing to do with strategy, or politics, or finance. It deals with the purely human interests and emotions of the struggle; its picturesqueness; its dramatic incidents; the strophe and antistrophe of moral forces it reveals; its literary aspects, in a word; things in it which would have arrested the imagination of Shakespeare, and supplied the text for mightier dramas than ‘Macbeth’ or ‘Hamlet’; incidents that Scott would have woven into romance; follies which might have given Swift the text for keener satire than even his ‘Tale of a Tub’; heroisms that a greater Byron may set to more resounding music than even those famous lines which tell of Waterloo. And, it may be added, it is possible already to see in this amazing war some aspects which will do more than merely challenge the literary imagination, the sense of the wonderful.
To begin with what is nearest: the new scale of the war, the strange temper, the terrific weapons with which it is being fought, will certainly prove, for centuries to come, an irresistible challenge to the literary imagination. When the first shot in this war was fired, the whole familiar and accepted arithmetic of battle went suddenly to wreck. It was a war, not of armies, but of nations. As a result we have to think of the contending forces in terms of millions.
Australia, for example, supplies a proof of the enormously expanded scale of this war. The standing army of Imperial Rome consisted of 260,000 men. Australia is a community of only five million people; war to it is a totally new experience. Yet it has raised, equipped, and sent to a battlefield 12,000 miles distant an army equal in number to the standing army of the Caesars, at the time the Caesars were the masters of the civilised world. Great Britain affords another example of the amazingly expanded realm of the war. She hates standing armies, hates them so much that she will only pass the Mutiny Act, which makes an army of any sort possible, for a year at a time. The British formula is a big fleet and a little army. When this war broke out the regular forces of Great Britain consisted of only 186,000 men. When the war was not yet two years old, the British fleet had taken a scale without precedent in history; in addition Great Britain had raised an army which approached 5,000,000 and in which every man was a volunteer. If the average Liberal member of Parliament had been told, say, three years ago, that Great Britain, in addition to having a fleet in scale so tremendous, would have a land force of 5,000,000, he probably would have assaulted his interlocutor. But Great Britain, having raised by voluntary effort those 5,000,000, has actually passed a Conscription Bill for the remainder of its population.