The stakes are high, and if on the one hand the game calls forth an
immense amount of resource, skill, alertness, self-control, endurance,
courage, and even tenderness, helpfulness, and fidelity; on the other
hand, it is liable to let loose pretty bad passions of vindictiveness
and cruelty, as well as to lead to an awful accumulation of mental and
physical suffering and of actual material loss. To call war "The Great
Game" may have been all very well in the more rudimentary wars of the
past; but to-day, when every horrible invention of science is conjured
up and utilized for the express purpose of blowing human bodies to bits
and strewing battlefields with human remains, and the human spirit
itself can hardly hold up against such a process of mechanical
slaughter, the term has ceased to be applicable. The affections and the
conscience of mankind are too violently outraged by the spectacle; and a
great mass of feeling is forming which one may fairly hope will ere long
make this form of strife impossible among the more modern peoples.

Still, even now, as Mr. Jerome himself contends, the term is partly
justified by a certain fine feeling of which it is descriptive and which
is indeed very noticeable in all ranks. Whether in the Army or Navy,
among bluejackets or private soldiers or officers, the feeling is
certainly very much that of a big game--with its own rules of honour and
decency which must be adhered to, and carried on with extraordinary
fortitude, patience, and good-humour. Whether it arises from the
mechanical nature of the slaughter, or from any other cause, the fact
remains that among our fighting people to-day--at any rate in the
West--there is very little feeling of _hatred_ towards the "enemy." It
is difficult, indeed, to hate a foe whom you do not even see. Chivalry
is not dead, and at the least cessation of the stress of conflict the
tendency to honour opponents, to fraternize with them, to succour the
wounded, and so forth, asserts itself again. And chivalry demands that