But now, looking back upon those last two years of the war as an eye-
witness of many tragic and heroic things, I see the frightful drama of
them as a whole and as one act was related to another, and as the plot
which seemed so tangled and confused, led by inevitable stages, not
under the control of any field-marshal or chief of staff, to the
climax in which empires crashed and exhausted nations looked round
upon the ruin which followed defeat and victory. I see also, as in one
picture, the colossal scale of that human struggle in that Armageddon
of our civilization, which at the time one reckoned only by each day's
success or failure, each day's slaughter on that side or the other.
One may add up the whole sum according to the bookkeeping of Fate, by
double-entry, credit and debit, profit and loss. One may set our
attacks in the battles of Flanders against the strength of the German
defense, and say our losses of three to one (as Ludendorff reckons
them, and as many of us guessed) were in our favor, because we could
afford the difference of exchange and the enemy could not put so many
human counters into the pool for the final "kitty" in this gamble with
life and death.
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