CURRENT HISTORY

COMMANDER THIERICHENS—Commander of the German commerce-raider Prinz Eitel Friedrich, which sank the American sailing ship William P. Frye.

THE GRAND DUCHESS OF LUXEMBURG—
Whose little State was first occupied by the German forces.—
(Photo from George Grantham Bain.)

The New York Times Current History

A Monthly Magazine

General Sir John French's Own Story

The Costly Victory of Neuve Chapelle

LONDON, April 14.—Field Marshal Sir John French, commander of the British expeditionary forces on the Continent, reports the British losses in the three days' fighting at Neuve Chapelle last month, as follows: Killed, 190 officers, 2,337 men; wounded, 359 officers, 8,174 other ranks; missing, 23 officers, 1,728 men; total casualties, 12,811. The report continues:

The enemy left several thousand dead on the field, and we have positive information that upward of 12,000 wounded were removed by trains. Thirty officers and 1,657 of other ranks were captured.

The British commander's dispatch concerning the battle is long, and says, among other things:

Considerable delay occurred after the capture of Neuve Chapelle, and the infantry was greatly disorganized. I am of the opinion that this delay would not have occurred had the clearly expressed order of the general officer commanding the First Army been more carefully observed.

Field Marshal Sir John French's report, which covers the battles of Neuve Chapelle and St. Eloi under date of April 5, was published in the official Gazette today. The Commander in Chief writes:

The event of chief interest and importance which has taken place is the victory achieved over the enemy in the battle of Neuve Chapelle, which was fought on March 10, 11, and 12.

The main attack was delivered by the troops of the First Army under command of General Sir Douglas Haig, supported by a large force of heavy artillery, a division of cavalry, and some infantry of the General Reserve. Secondary and holding attacks and demonstrations were made along the front of the Second Army, under direction of its commander, Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien.

While the success attained was due to the magnificent bearing and indomitable courage displayed by the troops of the Fourth and Indian Corps, I consider that the able and skillful dispositions which were made by the general officer commanding the First Army contributed largely to the defeat of the enemy and to the capture of his position. The energy and vigor with which General Sir Douglas Haig handled his command show him to be a leader of great ability and power.

Another action of considerable importance was brought about by a surprise attack made by the Germans on March 14 against the Twenty-seventh Division holding the trenches east of St. Eloi. A large force of artillery was concentrated in this area under the cover of a mist and a heavy volume of fire was suddenly brought to bear on the trenches.

At 5 o'clock in the afternoon this artillery attack was accompanied by two mine explosions, and in the confusion caused by these and by the suddenness of the attack the position of St. Eloi was captured and held for some hours by the enemy.

Well-directed and vigorous counter-attacks, in which the troops of the Fifth Army Corps showed great bravery and determination, restored the situation by the evening of the 15th.

The dispatch describes further operations, saying:

On Feb. 6 a brilliant action by the troops of the First Corps materially improved our position in the area south of La Bassée Canal. During the previous night parties of the Irish Guards and the Third Battalion of the Coldstream Guards had succeeded in gaining ground from which a converging fire could be directed on the flanks and rear of certain brick stacks occupied by the Germans, which had been for some time a source of considerable annoyance. At 2 P.M. the affair commenced with a severe bombardment of the brick stacks and the enemy's trenches.

A brisk attack by the Third Battalion of the Coldstream Guards and Irish Guards from our trenches west of the brick stacks followed and was supported by the fire from the flanking position which had been seized the previous night by the same regiments.

The attack succeeded, the brick stacks were occupied without difficulty, and a line was established north and south through a point about forty yards east of the brick stacks.

The casualties suffered by the Fifth Corps throughout the period under review, and particularly during the month of February, have been heavier than those on other parts of the line. I regret this, but do not think, taking all circumstances into consideration, that they were unduly numerous. The position then occupied by the Fifth Corps had always been a very vulnerable part of our line. The ground was marshy, and trenches were most difficult to construct and maintain. The Twenty-seventh and Twenty-eighth Divisions of the Fifth Corps had no previous experience in European warfare, and a number of the units composing the corps had only recently returned from service in tropical climates. In consequence, the hardships of a rigorous Winter campaign fell with greater weight upon these divisions than upon any other in the command.

Chiefly owing to these causes the Fifth Corps, up to the beginning of March, was constantly engaged in counter-attacks to retake trenches and ground which had been lost. In their difficult and arduous task, however, the troops displayed the utmost gallantry and devotion, and it is most creditable to the skill and energy of their leaders that I am able to report how well they have surmounted all their difficulties and that the ground first taken over by them is still intact and held with little greater loss than is incurred by the troops in all other parts of the line.

Describing an attack on the German trenches near St. Eloi on Feb. 28 by Princess Patricia's Regiment, of the Canadian contingent, under command of Lieut. C.E. Crabbe, the Commander in Chief says:

The services performed by this distinguished corps have continued to be very valuable since I had occasion to refer to them in my last dispatch. They have been most ably organized and trained and were commanded by Lieut. Colonel F.D. Farquhar, D.S.O., who I deeply regret to say was killed while superintending some trench work on March 20. His loss will be deeply felt.

Emphasizing the co-operation of the British and French forces and the new rôle in warfare assumed by the cavalry, the Commander in Chief writes:

During the month of February I arranged with General Foch to render the Ninth French Corps, holding the trenches to my left, some much-needed rest by sending the three divisions of the British Cavalry Corps to hold a portion of the French trenches, each division for a period of ten days alternately.

Map showing the field of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle and its position in the Allied line.

It was very gratifying to me to note once again in this campaign the eager readiness which the cavalry displayed to undertake a rôle which does not properly belong to them in order to support and assist their French comrades. In carrying out this work the leader, officers, and men displayed the same skill and energy which I have had reason to comment upon in former dispatches.

Referring to Neuve Chapelle and the considerations leading up to this, the Field Marshal says:

About the end of February many vital considerations induced me to believe that a vigorous offensive movement by the troops under my command should be planned and carried out at the earliest possible moment. Among the more important reasons which convinced me of this necessity were the general aspect of the allied situation throughout Europe, and particularly the marked success of the Russian Army in repelling the violent onslaughts of Marshal von Hindenburg; the apparent weakening of the enemy on my front, and the necessity for assisting our Russian allies to the utmost by holding as many hostile troops as possible in the western theatre; the efforts to this end which were being made by the French forces at Arras and in Champagne, and—perhaps the most weighty consideration of all—the need of fostering the offensive spirit in the troops under my command after the trying and possibly enervating experiences which they had gone through of a severe Winter in the trenches.

In a former dispatch I commented upon the difficulties and drawbacks which the Winter weather in this climate imposes upon a vigorous offensive. Early in March these difficulties became greatly lessened by the drying up of the country and by spells of brighter weather.

I do not propose in this dispatch to enter at length into the considerations which actuated me in deciding upon the plan, time, and place of my attack. As mentioned above, the main attack was carried out by units of the First Army, supported by troops of the Second Army and the general reserve. The object of the main attack was to be the capture of the village of Neuve Chapelle and the enemy's position at that point, and the establishment of our line as far forward as possible to the east of that place.

The object, nature, and scope of the attack and the instructions for the conduct of the operations were communicated by me to Sir Douglas Haig in a secret memorandum, dated Feb. 19.

After describing the main topographical features of the battlefield and showing how the Germans had established a strong post with numerous machine guns among the big houses, behind walls and in orchards which flanked the approaches to the village, Sir John proceeds:

The battle opened at 7:30 o'clock the morning of the 10th of March by a powerful bombardment of the enemy's position in Neuve Chapelle. The artillery bombardment had been well prepared and was most effective, except on the extreme northern portion of the front of attack.

At 8:05 o'clock the Twenty-third and Twenty-fifth Brigades of the Eighth Division assaulted the German trenches on the northwest of the village. At the same hour the Garhwal Brigade of the Meerut (British India) Division, which occupied a position to the south of Neuve Chapelle, assaulted the German trenches in its front. The Garhwal Brigade and the Twenty-fifth Brigade carried the enemy's lines of intrenchment, where the wire entanglements had been almost entirely swept away by our shrapnel fire.

The Twenty-third Brigade, however, on the northeast, was held up by wire entanglements which were not sufficiently cut. At 8:05 o'clock the artillery was turned on Neuve Chapelle, and at 8:35 o'clock the advance of the infantry was continued. The Twenty-fifth and the Garhwal Brigades pushed on eastward and northeastward, respectively, and succeeded in getting a foothold in the village. The Twenty-third Brigade was still held up in front of the enemy's wire entanglements, and could not progress. Heavy losses were suffered, especially in the Middlesex Regiment and the Scottish Rifles.

The progress, however, of the Twenty-fifth Brigade into Neuve Chapelle immediately to the south of the Twenty-third Brigade had the effect of turning the southern flank of the enemy's defenses in front of the Twenty-third Brigade. This fact, combined with powerful artillery support, enabled the Twenty-third Brigade to get forward between 10 and 11 A.M., and by 11 o'clock the whole of the village of Neuve Chapelle and the roads leading northward and southwestward from the eastern end of that village were in our hands.

During this time our artillery completely cut off the village and surrounding country from any German reinforcements which could be thrown into the fight to restore the situation, by means of a curtain of shrapnel fire. Prisoners subsequently reported that all attempts at reinforcing the front line were checked. Steps were at once taken to consolidate the positions won.

Considerable delay occurred after the capture of the Neuve Chapelle position. The infantry was greatly disorganized by the violent nature of the attack and by its passage through the enemy's trenches and the buildings of the village. It was necessary to get the units to some extent together before pushing on. The telephonic communication being cut by the enemy's fire rendered communication between the front and the rear most difficult. The fact of the left of the Twenty-third Brigade having been held up had kept back the Eighth Division and had involved a portion of the Twenty-fifth Brigade in fighting to the north, out of its proper direction of advance. All this required adjustment. An orchard held by the enemy north of Neuve Chapelle also threatened the flank of an advance toward the Aubers Bridge.

I am of the opinion that this delay would not have occurred had the clearly expressed order of the general officer commanding the First Army been carefully observed.

The difficulties above enumerated might have been overcome earlier in the day if the general officer commanding the Fourth Corps had been able to bring his reserve brigades more speedily into action. As it was, a further advance did not commence before 3:30 o'clock. The Twenty-first Brigade was able to form up in the open on the left without a shot being fired at it, thus showing that, at the time, the enemy's resistance had been paralyzed.

The brigade pushed forward in the direction of Moulin-du-Pietre. At first it made good progress, but was subsequently held up by machine gun fire from houses and from a defended work in the line of the German intrenchments opposite the right of the Twenty-second Brigade.

Further to the south the Twenty-fourth Brigade, which had been directed on Pietre, was similarly held up by machine guns in houses and trenches. At the road junction, 600 yards to the northwest of Pietre, the Twenty-fifth Brigade, on the right of the Twenty-fourth, was also held up by machine guns from a bridge held by the Germans over the River Les Layes, which is situated to the northwest of the Bois du Biez.

While two brigades of the Meerut Division were establishing themselves on a new line the Dehra Dun Brigade, supported by the Jullunder Brigade of the Lahore Division, moved to the attack of the Bois du Biez, but were held up on the line of the River Les Layes by a German post at the bridge, which enfiladed them and brought them to a standstill.

The defended bridge over the Les Layes and its neighborhood immediately assumed considerable importance. While the artillery fire was brought to bear, as far as circumstances would permit, on this point, General Sir Douglas Haig directed the First Corps to dispatch one or more battalions of the First Brigade in support of the troops attacking the bridge. Three battalions were thus sent to Richebourg St. Vaast.

Darkness coming on and the enemy having brought up reinforcements, no further progress could be made, and the Indian Corps and the Fourth Corps proceeded to consolidate the position they had gained.

While the operations, which I have thus briefly reported, were going on, the First Corps, in accordance with orders, delivered an attack in the morning from Givenchy simultaneously with that against Neuve Chapelle, but as the enemy's wire was insufficiently cut very little progress could be made, and the troops at this point did little more than hold fast to the Germans in front of them.

On the following day, March 11, the attack was renewed by the Fourth and Indian Corps, but it was soon seen that further advance would be impossible until the artillery had dealt effectively with the various houses and defended localities which had held the troops up along the entire front.

Efforts were made to direct the artillery fire accordingly, but, owing to the weather conditions, which did not permit of aerial observations, and the fact that nearly all the telephone communications between the artillery observers and their batteries had been cut, it was impossible to do so with sufficient accuracy. When our troops, who were pressing forward, occupied a house there, it was not possible to stop our artillery fire, and the infantry had to be withdrawn.

As most of the objects for which the operations had been undertaken had been attained, and as there were reasons why I considered it inadvisable to continue the attack at that time, I directed General Sir Douglas Haig on the night of the 12th to hold and consolidate the ground which had been gained by the Fourth and Indian Corps, and suspend further offensive operations for the present.

The losses during these three days' fighting were, I regret to say, very severe, numbering 190 officers and 2,337 of other ranks killed, 359 officers and 8,174 of other ranks wounded, and 23 officers and 1,720 of other ranks missing. But the results attained were, in my opinion, wide and far-reaching.

Referring to the severity of the casualties in action, the Commander in Chief writes:

I can well understand how deeply these casualties are felt by the nation at large, but each daily report shows clearly that they are endured on at least an equal scale by all the combatants engaged throughout Europe, friends and foe alike.

In war as it is today, between civilized nations armed to the teeth with the present deadly rifle and machine gun, heavy casualties are absolutely unavoidable. For the slightest undue exposure the heaviest toll is exacted. The power of defense conferred by modern weapons is the main cause for the long duration of the battles of the present day, and it is this fact which mainly accounts for such loss and waste of life. Both one and the other can, however, be shortened and lessened if attacks can be supported by a most efficient and powerful force of artillery available; but an almost unlimited supply of ammunition is necessary, and a most liberal discretionary power as to its use must be given to artillery commanders. I am confident that this is the only means by which great results can be obtained with a minimum of loss.

Roberts Of Kandahar.

SIDNEY LOW, in The London Times.

The Surrender of Przemysl

How Galicia's Strong Fortress Yielded to the Russian Siege

[By the Correspondent of The London Times.]

PETROGRAD, March 22.

The Minister of War has informed me that he has just received a telegram from the Grand Duke Nicholas announcing the fall of Przemysl.

The fall of Przemysl marks the most important event of the Russian campaign this year. It finally and irrevocably consolidates the position of the Russians in Galicia. The Austro-German armies are deprived of the incentive hitherto held out to them of relieving the isolated remnant of their former dominion. The besieging army will be freed for other purposes. From information previously published the garrison aggregated about 25,000 men, hence the investing forces, which must always be at least four times as great as the garrison, represent not less than 100,000 men. From all the information lately received from both Russian and neutral sources, the position of the Austro-German armies in the Carpathians has become distinctly critical. The reinforcements for the gallant troops of General Brusiloff, General Radko Dmitrieff, and other commanders are bound to exercise an enormous influence on the future course of the campaign in the Carpathians.

All honor and credit are given by the Russians to the garrison of Przemysl and General Kusmanek. Russian officers ever had the highest opinion of the personality of the commandant. I heard from those who fought under General Radko Dmitrieff in the early stages of the Galician campaign that when our troops, after sweeping away the resistance at Lwow and Jaroslau, loudly knocked at the doors of the fortress of Przemysl, they met with a stern rebuff. In reply to the summons of the Russians to surrender the keys the commandant wrote a curt and dignified note remarking that he considered it beyond his own dignity or the dignity of the Russian General to discuss the surrender of the fortress before it had exhausted all its powers of resistance. During the second invasion of Poland by the Austro-German armies the enemy's lines swept up to and just beyond Przemysl, interrupting the investment of the fortress. The wave of the Austrian invasion began to subside at the end of the first week in November. Only then could we begin the siege of the mighty fortress, which proved successful after the lapse of four months.

The first Russian attempt to storm Przemysl without previous bombardment, which followed immediately upon the commandant's refusal to surrender, resulted in very great loss of life to no purpose. Thereafter it was decided to abstain from further attempts to take the fortress until our siege guns could be placed and a preliminary bombardment could sufficiently facilitate the task of the besiegers. Meanwhile, although the fortress and town were duly invested, our lines were somewhat remote from the outlying forts, and the peasants of adjacent villages were, it is said, able to pass freely to and from the town of Przemysl—a fact which would enable the inhabitants to obtain supplies. From all accounts neither the garrison nor the inhabitants were reduced to very great straits for food. The announcement made at the time of the first investment of the fortress that provisions and supplies would easily last till May was, however, obviously exaggerated.

I understand that heavy siege guns were ready to be conveyed to Przemysl at the end of January, but that the Russian military authorities decided to postpone their departure in view of the determined attempts made by the Austro-German forces to pierce the Russian lines in the Carpathians in order to relieve the fortress, which, if successful, might have endangered the safety of the siege material. Owing to this fact the bombardment of Przemysl began only about a fortnight ago, when the Austro-German offensive had so far weakened as to satisfy the Russian authorities that there was no further danger from this quarter.

The concluding stages of the siege have been related in the dispatches from the Field Headquarters during the past week. The capture of the dominating heights in the eastern sector followed close upon the first bombardment. The final desperate sortie led by General Kusmanek at the head of the Twenty-third Division of the Honved precipitated the end. The remnants of the garrison were unable to man the works extending to a thirty-mile periphery.

The loss of the western approaches left General Kusmanek no alternative but to surrender. He had exhausted his ammunition and used up his effectives. His messages for help were either intercepted or unanswered. The assailants broke down the last resistance. The most important strategical point in the whole of Galicia is now in Russian hands.

The Jesters.

By MARION COUTHOUY SMITH.

Lord Kitchener Advertises for Recruits

This map shows the comparative distances from London of Ostend and of some English towns. London is in the exact center of the map.

If the German Army were in Manchester.

If the German Army were in Manchester, every fit man in the country would enlist without a moment's delay.

Do you realise that the German Army is now at Ostend, only 125 miles away—or 40 miles nearer to London than is Manchester?

How much nearer must the Germans come before you do something to stop them?

The German Army must be beaten in Belgium. The time to do it is now.

Will you help? Yes? Then enlist TODAY.

God Save the King.

[Facsimile of an advertisement that appeared in The London Times, March 17, 1915.]

Battle of the Dardanelles

The Disaster That Befell the Allies' Fleet

Official Story of Two Sea Fights

[From The London Times, March 3, 1915.]

Admiralty, March 3, 1915.

The following dispatch has been received from Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty, K.C.B., M.V.O., D.S.O., commanding the First Battle Cruiser Squadron, reporting the action in the North Sea on Sunday, the 24th of January, 1915:

H.M.S. Princess Royal,

Feb. 2, 1915.

Sir: I have the honor to report that at daybreak on Jan. 24, 1915, the following vessels were patrolling in company:

The battle cruisers Lion, Capt. Alfred E.M. Chatfield, C.V.O., flying my flag; Princess Royal, Capt. Osmond de B. Brock, Aide de Camp; Tiger, Capt. Henry B. Pelly, M.V.O.; New Zealand, Capt. Lionel Halsey, C.M.G., Aide de Camp, flying the flag of Rear Admiral Sir Archibald Moore, K.C.B., C.V.O., and Indomitable, Capt. Francis W. Kennedy.

The light cruisers Southampton, flying the broad pennant of Commodore William E. Goodenough, M.V.O.; Nottingham, Capt. Charles B. Miller; Birmingham, Capt. Arthur A.M. Duff, and Lowestoft, Capt. Theobald W.B. Kennedy, were disposed on my port beam.

Commodore (T) Reginald Y. Tyrwhitt, C.B., in Arethusa, Aurora, Capt. Wilmot S. Nicholson; Undaunted, Capt. Francis G. St. John, M.V.O.; Arethusa and the destroyer flotillas were ahead.

At 7:25 A.M. the flash of guns was observed south-southeast. Shortly afterward a report reached me from Aurora that she was engaged with enemy's ships. I immediately altered course to south-southeast, increased to 22 knots, and ordered the light cruisers and flotillas to chase south-southeast to get in touch and report movements of enemy.

This order was acted upon with great promptitude, indeed my wishes had already been forestalled by the respective senior officers, and reports almost immediately followed from Southampton, Arethusa, and Aurora as to the position and composition of the enemy, which consisted of three battle cruisers and Blücher, six light cruisers, and a number of destroyers, steering northwest. The enemy had altered course to southeast. From now onward the light cruisers maintained touch with the enemy, and kept me fully informed as to their movements.

The battle cruisers worked up to full speed, steering to the southward. The wind at the time was northeast, light, with extreme visibility. At 7:30 A.M. the enemy were sighted on the port bow steaming fast, steering approximately southeast, distant 14 miles.

Owing to the prompt reports received we had attained our position on the quarter of the enemy, and so altered course to southeast parallel to them, and settled down to a long stern chase, gradually increasing our speed until we reached 28.5 knots. Great credit is due to the engineer staffs of New Zealand and Indomitable—these ships greatly exceeded their normal speed.

At 8:52 A.M., as we had closed to within 20,000 yards of the rear ship, the battle cruisers manoeuvred to keep on a line of bearing so that guns would bear, and Lion fired a single shot, which fell short. The enemy at this time were in single line ahead, with light cruisers ahead and a large number of destroyers on their starboard beam.

Single shots were fired at intervals to test the range, and at 9:09 A.M. Lion made her first hit on the Blücher, No. 4 in the line. The Tiger opened fire at 9:20 A.M. on the rear ship, the Lion shifted to No. 3 in the line, at 18,000 yards, this ship being hit by several salvos. The enemy returned our fire at 9:14 A.M. Princess Royal, on coming into range, opened fire on Blücher, the range of the leading ship being 17,500 yards, at 9:35 A.M. New Zealand was within range of Blücher, which had dropped somewhat astern, and opened fire on her. Princess Royal shifted to the third ship in the line, inflicting considerable damage on her.

Our flotilla cruisers and destroyers had gradually dropped from a position broad on our beam to our port quarter, so as not to foul our range with their smoke; but the enemy's destroyers threatening attack, the Meteor and M Division passed ahead of us, Capt. the Hon. H. Meade, D.S.O., handling this division with conspicuous ability.

About 9:45 A.M. the situation was as follows: Blücher, the fourth in their line, already showed signs of having suffered severely from gun fire; their leading ship and No. 3 were also on fire, Lion was engaging No. 1, Princess Royal No. 3, New Zealand No. 4, while the Tiger, which was second in our line, fired first at their No. 1, and when interfered with by smoke, at their No. 4.

The enemy's destroyers emitted vast columns of smoke to screen their battle cruisers, and under cover of this the latter now appeared to have altered course to the northward to increase their distance, and certainly the rear ships hauled out on the port quarter of their leader, thereby increasing their distance from our line. The battle cruisers, therefore, were ordered to form a line of bearing north-northwest, and proceed at their utmost speed.

Their destroyers then showed evident signs of an attempt to attack. Lion and Tiger opened fire on them, and caused them to retire and resume their original course.

The light cruisers maintained an excellent position on the port quarter of the enemy's line, enabling them to observe and keep touch, or attack any vessel that might fall out of the line.

At 10:48 A.M. the Blücher, which had dropped considerably astern of enemy's line, hauled out to port, steering north with a heavy list, on fire, and apparently in a defeated condition. I consequently ordered Indomitable to attack enemy breaking northward.

At 10:54 A.M. submarines were reported on the starboard bow, and I personally observed the wash of a periscope two points on our starboard bow. I immediately turned to port.

At 11:03 A.M. an injury to the Lion being reported as incapable of immediate repair, I directed Lion to shape course northwest. At 11:20 A.M. I called the Attack alongside, shifting my flag to her at about 11:35 A.M. I proceeded at utmost speed to rejoin the squadron, and met them at noon retiring north-northwest.

I boarded and hoisted my flag on Princess Royal at about 12:20 P.M., when Capt. Brock acquainted me of what had occurred since the Lion fell out of the line, namely, that Blücher had been sunk and that the enemy battle cruisers had continued their course to the eastward in a considerably damaged condition. He also informed me that a Zeppelin and a seaplane had endeavored to drop bombs on the vessels which went to the rescue of the survivors of Blücher.

The good seamanship of Lieut. Commander Cyril Callaghan, H.M.S. Attack, in placing his vessel alongside the Lion and subsequently the Princess Royal, enabled the transfer of flag to be made in the shortest possible time.

At 2 P.M. I closed Lion and received a report that the starboard engine was giving trouble owing to priming, and at 3:38 P.M. I ordered Indomitable to take her in tow, which was accomplished by 5 P.M.

The greatest credit is due to the Captains of Indomitable and Lion for the seaman-like manner in which the Lion was taken in tow under difficult circumstances.

The excellent steaming of the ships engaged in the operation was a conspicuous feature.

I attach an appendix giving the names of various officers and men who specially distinguished themselves.

Where all did well it is difficult to single out officers and men for special mention, and as Lion and Tiger were the only ships hit by the enemy, the majority of these I mention belong to those ships.

I have the honor to be, Sir,

Your obedient servant,

(Signed) DAVID BEATTY,

Vice Admiral.

BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND MORNING.

By SIR OWEN SEAMAN.

[From King Albert's Book.]

The Greatest of Campaigns

The French Official Account Concluded

LONDON, March 18, (Correspondence of The Associated Press.)—The Associated Press has received the second installment of the historical review emanating from French official sources of the operations in the Western theatre of war, from its beginning up to the end of January. It should be understood that the narrative is made purely from the French standpoint. The additional installment of the document dealing with the victory of the Marne, Sept. 6th to 15th, is as follows:

If one examines on the map the respective positions of the German and French armies on Sept. 6 as previously described, it will be seen that by his inflection toward Meaux and Coulommiers General von Kluck was exposing his right to the offensive action of our left. This is the starting point of the victory of the Marne.

On the evening of Sept. 5 our left army had reached the front Penchard-Saint-Souflet-Ver. On the 6th and 7th it continued its attacks vigorously with the Ourcq as objective. On the evening of the 7th it was some kilometers from the Ourcq, on the front Chambry-Marcilly-Lisieux-Acy-en-Multien. On the 8th, the Germans, who had in great haste reinforced their right by bringing their Second and Fourth Army Corps back to the north, obtained some successes by attacks of extreme violence. They occupied Betz, Thury-en-Valois, and Nanteuil-le-Haudouin. But in spite of this pressure our troops held their ground well. In a brilliant action they took three standards, and, being reinforced, prepared a new attack for the 10th. At the moment that this attack was about to begin the enemy was already in retreat toward the north. The attack became a pursuit, and on the 12th we established ourselves on the Aisne.

Sonnet On The Belgian Expatriation.

By THOMAS HARDY.

[From King Albert's Book.]

War Correspondence

A Month of German Submarine War

By Vice Admiral Kirchhoff of the German Navy

On March 18 a month had passed since the beginning of our sharp procedure against our worst foe. We can in every way be satisfied with the results achieved in the meantime! In spite of all "steps" taken before and thereafter, the English have everywhere had important losses to show at sea—some 200 ships lost since the beginning of the war, according to the latest statements of the Allies—so that even they themselves no longer dare to talk about the "German bluff."

On the new and greater "war zone" established by us, our submarines have known how to work bravely, and have been able, for instance, to operate successfully on a single morning on the east coast, in the Channel, and in the Irish Sea. We have heard of many losses of our opponents, and on the other hand of the subjugation of only two of our brave U-boats. Ceaselessly they are active on the coasts of Albion; shipping is paralyzed at some points; steamship companies—including also many neutral ones—have suspended their sailings; in short, our threat of a more acute condition of war "with all means at hand" has been fully fulfilled.

The "peaceful shipping," too, has taken notice of it and adjusted itself according to our instructions. The official objections of neutrals have died away without effect; throughout the world we have already been given right; the shipping circles of the neutral States are in great part holding entirely back. The empty threats that floated over to us from across the Channel, that the captured crews of German submarines will be treated differently than other prisoners—yes, as plain pirates and sea robbers—those are nothing but an insignificant ebullition of British "moral insanity." They are a part of the hypocritical cant without which, somehow, Great Britain cannot get along. If Great Britain should act in accordance with it, however, then we shall know what we, for our part, have to do!

German and probably English mines, too, have helped our submarines in clearing up among the English mercantile and war fleet. Many merchant ships warned long in advance have been compelled to believe in the warning, and with them frequently a great part of their crews—"without any warning whatever," as our opponents like to say.

All measures of defense, yes, even more significant, all measures of deception and boastful "ruses de guerre," and even all attempts to hush up the news of German accomplishments and whenever possible to suppress it completely—all these efforts have been futile. Our results surpass the expectations that had been cherished. Who knows how many accomplishments other than those which have been published may also have been achieved? Foreign newspapers report a large number of steamships overdue. From overseas likewise we receive favorable reports about the sinking of enemy ships. But the best is the news that our submarines have succeeded in sinking two English auxiliary cruisers and perhaps also one or two larger English transport ships with several thousand men on board.

The last announcement has filled us all with greatest satisfaction. This, our latest method of warfare, is "truly humane"; it leads more speedily to the goal than anything else, so that the number of victims will in the end be smaller after all. It brings peace to all of us sooner than the empty paper protests and crying to Heaven about violence and international law, law of the sea, and laws of humanity could do. In the innocent exalted island kingdom many a fellow is already striking; why should not even the recruit strike, who is also beginning to get a glimmer of the truth that there are no props in the ocean waves?

The more opponents come before the bows of our ships and are sunk, the better! Down with them to the bottom of the sea; that alone will help! Let us hope that we shall soon receive more such cheerful news.

Three Weeks of the War in Champagne

By a British Observer

The following article, issued by the British Press Bureau, London, March 18, 1915, is from a British observer with the French forces in the field who has the permission of General Joffre to send communications home from time to time, giving descriptions of the work, &c., of the French Army which will be of interest to the British reader.

I propose to give some account of the operations which have been in progress for the last three weeks in Champagne. Every day since Feb. 15 the official communiqués find something to say about a district which lies midway between Rheims and Verdun. The three places which are always mentioned, which form the points of reference, are Perthes-lez-Hurlus, Le Mesnil-lez-Hurlus, and Beauséjour Farm. The distance between the first and the last is three and one-half miles; the front on which the fighting has taken place is about five miles; and the French have been attacking at one point or another in this front every day for the last three weeks. It is, therefore, an operation of a different kind to those which we have seen during the Winter months. Those were local efforts, lasting a day or two, designed to keep the enemy busy and prevent him from withdrawing troops elsewhere; this is a sustained effort, made with the object of keeping a constant pressure on his first line of defense, of affecting his use of the railway from Bazancourt to Challerange, a few miles to the north, and of wearing down his reserves of men and ammunition. It may be said that Feb. 15 marks the opening of the 1915 campaign, and that this first phase will find an important place when the history of the war comes to be written.

We must first know something of the nature of the country, which is entirely different to that in which the British Army is fighting. It is one vast plain, undulating, the hills at most 200 feet higher than the valleys, gentle slopes everywhere. The soil is rather chalky, poor, barely worth cultivating; after heavy rain the whole plain becomes a sea of shallow mud; and it dries equally quickly. The only features are the pine woods, which have been planted by hundreds. From the point of view of profit, this would not appear to have been a success; either the soil is too poor, or else it is unsuitable to the maritime pine; for the trees are rarely more than 25 feet high. As each rise is topped, a new stretch of plain, a new set of small woods appear, just like that which has been left behind.

ELEUTHERIOS K. VENIZELOS—The great Greek statesman who
recently resigned as Prime Minister.—(Photo from Medom Photo Service.)

LORD HARDINGE OF PENSHURST—Who, as Viceroy,
rules England's Indian Empire during the critical period of the war.

The villages are few and small, most of them are in ruins after the fighting in September; and the troops live almost entirely in colonies of little huts of wood or straw, about four feet high, dotted about in the woods, in the valleys, wherever a little water and shelter is obtainable. Lack of villages means lack of roads; this has been one of the great difficulties to be faced; but, at the same time, the movement of wagons across country is possible to a far greater extent than in Flanders, although it is often necessary to use eight or ten horses to get a gun or wagon to the point desired.

From the military point of view the country is eminently suitable for troops, with its possibilities of concealment, of producing sudden surprises with cavalry, and of manoeuvre generally. It is, in fact, the training ground of the great military centre of Châlons; and French troops have doubtless been exercised over this ground in every branch of military operation, except that in which they are engaged at the present moment.

What commander, training his men over this ground, could have imagined that the area from Perthes-lez-Hurlus to Beauséjour Farm would become two fortress lines, developed and improved for four months; or that he would have to carry out an attack modeled on the same system as that employed in the last great siege undertaken by French troops, that of Sebastopol in 1855? Yet this is what is being done. Every day an attack is made on a trench, on the edge of one of the little woods or to gain ground in one of them; every day the ground gained has to be transformed so as to give protection to its new occupants and means of access to their supports; every night, and on many days, the enemy's counter-attacks have to be repulsed.

Each attack has to be prepared by a violent and accurate artillery fire; it may be said that a trench has to be morally captured by gun fire before it can be actually seized by the infantry. Once in the new trench, the men have to work with their intrenching tools, without exposing themselves, and wait for a counter-attack, doing what damage they can to the enemy with hand grenades and machine guns. Thus the amount of rifle fire is very small; it is a war of explosives and bayonets.

Looking at the battle at a distance of about 2,000 yards from the enemy's line, the stillness of what one sees is in marked contrast to the turmoil of shells passing overhead. The only movement is the cloud of smoke and earth that marks the burst of a shell. Here and there long white lines are visible, when a trench has brought the chalky subsoil up to the top, but the number of trenches seen is very small compared to the number that exist, for one cannot see into the valleys, and the top of the ground is an unhealthy place to choose for seating a trench. The woods are pointed out, with the names given them by the soldiers, but it needs fieldglasses to see the few stumps that remain in those where the artillery has done its work. And then a telephone message arrives, saying that the enemy are threatening a counter-attack at a certain point, and three minutes later there is a redoubled whistling of shells. At first one cannot see the result of this fire—the guns are searching the low ground where the enemy's reserves are preparing for the movement, but a little later the ground in front of the threatened trench becomes alive with shell bursts, for the searching has given place to the building up of a wall of fire through which it is impossible for the foe to pass without enormous loss.

The attached map may enable us to look more closely at what has been achieved. The lowest dotted line, numbered 15, is the line of the French trenches on Feb. 15. They were then close up to the front of the German line with its network of barbed wire, its machine-gun emplacements, often of concrete, and its underground chambers for sheltering men from the shells. Each successive dotted line shows the line held by the French on the evening of the date written in the dotted line. Thus the total gain of ground, that between the most southerly and the most northerly dotted lines, varies between 200 yards, where the lines are close together northeast of Perthes, and 1,400 yards, half way between Le Mesnil and Beauséjour Farm. But the whole of this space has been a series of trenches and fortified woods, each of which has had to be attacked separately.

Map of the French Operations in the Champagne

Some of the severest fighting on the western battle front took place in this little section of about four miles of trenches, lying between Rheimes and Verdun. For a whole month from Feb. 15, the attacks were kept up by the French forces almost continuously, and the sketch gives the graphic result of changes for three weeks of that time. Ostensibly the purpose of the French was to pierce the German line and cut the railway a few miles to the rear. Incidentally, the French aimed to keep their opponents busy, and thus prevent any reinforcements being sent to von Hindenburg in the east.

The total gain of ground—that between the most southerly and most northerly dotted lines—varies from 200 yards northeast of Perthes to 1,400 yards, half way between Le Mesnil and Beauséjour Farm. But the whole of this space has been a series of trenches and fortified woods, each of which had to be attacked separately.

The letters (A to G) in the sketch indicate the points of the severest fighting. A (the "little fort") was taken and lost three times before the French finally held it. B saw some of the stiffest encounters, the Germans attacking the hill nearly every day after the French captured it, and even the Prussian Guard being put in. The woods at C, D, and E were centres of terrific combats, in which trenching and mining were continuous tasks. The redoubt at F was captured only after large losses on both sides. At the extreme west is still another wood, (G.) which the French attacked three times before they were successful in getting a foothold there.]

Some of the points where the fighting has been heaviest are shown in letters on the map. A is the "little fort," a redoubt on an open spur, holding perhaps 500 men. This was first attacked in January; it was partly taken, but the French in the end retained only the southern corner, where they remained for something like a fortnight. On Feb. 16 it was again taken in part, and lost the same day. On the 17th the same thing happened. On the 23d they once more got into the work; in the evening they repulsed five separate counter-attacks; then a sixth succeeded in turning them out. On the 27th they took all except a bit of trench in the northern face, and two days later they made that good, as well as a trench about fifty yards to the north of the work.

B is a small hill, marked 196. The capture of this, with its two lines of trenches, was one of the most brilliant pieces of work done. Since this date, the 26th, the enemy have continued to counter-attack nearly every day. It was here that the Prussian Guard was put in; but they have failed to get it back, and their losses have been very high. The prisoners stated that one regiment had its Colonel and all the superior officers killed or wounded. C is a wood, called the "Yellow Burnt Wood." It is still in the hands of the Germans, a regular nest of machine guns, which command the ground not only to the front but also down valleys to the east and west. The French are just in the southwest corner.

At D there are two woods; the southern we will call No. 3, the northern No. 4. On the 16th our allies got a trench just south of No. 3; they got into the wood on the 18th, and fought backward and forward in the wood that day and all the 19th and 20th; by the evening of the 20th they had almost reached the northern edge. On the 21st a stronger counter-attack than usual was repulsed, and in pursuing the retiring enemy they secured the northern edge. On the 22d there was more fighting in No. 3, but in the end the French managed to make their way into No. 4 as far as a trench which runs along a crest midway through the wood. The next six days saw continuous fighting in No. 4, sometimes near the northern end, sometimes at the crest in the middle, and occasionally back near the southern end. The French now hold the northern edge, and have pushed troops into the "Square" wood just north of the line of the 25th.

At E again there are two small woods; these were both captured on the 26th, but the trenches in the northern one had been mined, and the French had no sooner seized them than they were blown up. At F there was another small redoubt; part of this was taken on the 19th from the east, but the work was not finally captured till the 27th, when 240 corpses were found in it. On the extreme west, at G, is a wood which has twice been unsuccessfully attacked. On the first occasion troops got into the wood, but a severe snowstorm prevented the artillery from continuing to assist them, and they were driven out. The second was an attempt to surprise the enemy at 2 A.M. on the 25th; this also failed. A third attack was made on March 7 and was successful; the French line now runs through the wood.

The above will serve to show the tenacity which is required for an operation of this kind. Up to the present the French have made steady and continuous progress, and their success may be best judged from the fact that they have not been forced back on any day behind the line they held in the morning, despite innumerable counter-attacks. And this is not merely a question of ground, but one of increasing moral superiority, for it is in the unsuccessful counter-attacks that losses are heavy, and these and the sense of failure affect the morale of an army sooner or later.

Will the French push through the line? Will a hole be made, or is the enemy like a badger, who digs himself in rather faster than you can dig him out? I cannot tell; it would indeed be an astonishing measure of success for a first attempt, and the enemy may require a great deal more hammering at many points before he has definitely had enough at any one point. But these operations have brought the day closer, and turn our thoughts to the time when we shall be able to move forward, and one finds the cavalrymen wondering whether perhaps they, too, will get their chance.

The Germans Concrete Trenches

By F.H. Gailor, American Rhodes Scholar of New College, Oxford

[From The London Daily Mail, March 24, 1915.]

At the kind invitation of General Longchamps, German Military Governor of the Province of Namur, I spent two days with him going along the country in and behind the firing line in Northern France from near Rheims to the small village of Monthois, near Vouziers, on the Aisne.

About five miles out of Monthois we came to the artillery positions of the Germans. We could see the flashes of the guns long before we reached the hills where they were placed, but when we came up and dismounted the position was most cleverly concealed by a higher hill in front and the heavy woods which served as a screen for the artillery. I noticed many holes where the French shells had burst, and the valley to the north looked as if some one had been experimenting with a well digger. One 21-centimeter shell had cut a swath about 100 yards long out of the woods on the hill where we dismounted. The trees were twisted from their stumps as if a small cyclone had passed, and one could realize the damage the shells could do merely by the displaced air.

We went on forward into the valley on foot and stopped about two hundred yards in front and to the left of where the German guns were firing. There, although of course we could not see the French position, we could hear and see their shells as they exploded. They were firing short, one of the officers told me, because they thought the Germans were on the forward hill. He could see one of the French aeroplanes directing their fire, but I could not make it out. We stayed there listening to the shells and watching the few movements of German batteries that were taking place. A party of officers hidden by the trees were taking observations and telephoning the results of the German fire and, no doubt, of the French fire in the German trenches. There was no excitement; but for the noise the whole scene reminded me of some kind of construction work, such as building a railroad.

After about an hour, when nothing had happened, one began to realize that even such excitement may become monotonous and be taken as a matter of course. One of the officers told me that the Germans had been there since the beginning of October and that even the trenches were in the same position as when they first came.

Certainly the trenches seem permanent enough for spending many Winters. A number of them have now been built of concrete, especially in that swampy part near the Aisne where they strike water about three feet underground. The difficulty is in draining out the water when it rains.

Some of the trenches have two stories, and at the back of many of them are subterranean rest houses built of concrete and connected with the trenches by passages. The rooms are about seven feet high and ten feet square, and above the ground all evidence of the work is concealed by green boughs and shrubbery so that they may escape the attention of the enemy's aeroplanes.

With the noise and the fatigue, the men say it is impossible to sleep naturally, but they become so used to the firing and so weary that they become oblivious of everything even when shells are falling within a dozen yards of them. They stay in the trenches five days and then get five days' rest. In talking to the men one feels the influence on them of a curious sort of fatalism—they have been lucky so far and will come through all right. One sees and feels everywhere the spirit of a great game. The strain of football a thousand times magnified. The joy of winning and boyish pleasure in getting ahead of the other fellows side by side with the stronger passions of hatred and anger and the sight of agony and death.

We talked to some of the little groups of men along the road who were going back to their five days in the trenches. Of course all large units are split up so as not to attract attention. They were all the same, all sure of winning, and all bearded, muddy, and determined. I could not help thinking of American football players at the end of the first half. These men seemed all the same. I have no recollection of a single individual. The "system" and its work has made a type not only of clothes but of face. Their answers to the usual questions were all the same, and one felt in talking to them that their opinions were machine-made. Three points stood out—Germany is right and will win; England is wrong and will knuckle under; we hate England because we are alike in religion, custom, and opinion, and it is the war of kindred races. Everywhere one met the arguments and stories of unfairness and cruelty in fighting that have appeared in the English papers, but with the names reversed. English soldiers had surrendered and then fired; had shot from beneath a Red Cross flag or had killed prisoners. The stories were simple and as hackneyed as most of those current in England.

The concrete rest houses were interesting. Most of them have furniture made from trees "to amuse us and pass the time." Both officers and men use the same type of house, though discipline forbids that the same house be used by both officers and men. The light in these houses is bad and the ventilation not all that it should be, but they are extremely careful about sanitation, and everywhere one smells disinfectants and sees evidence of scrupulous guarding against disease. Oil and candles are scarce and the "pocket electric" that all the men and officers carry does not last long enough for much reading. There are always telephone connections, but in most cases visits are impossible save by way of the underground passages and the trenches.

One officer described the life as entirely normal; another said, in speaking of a Louis XV. couch which had been borrowed from a near-by château and was the pride of a regiment, "Oh! we are cave-dwellers, but we have some of the luxuries of at least the nineteenth century."

The Major Commandant at Rethel showed me a letter from a friend demanding "some easy chairs and a piano for his trench house," and the Major said, "I hear they have music up on the Yser, but the French are too close to us here!"

All that I saw of the German Red Cross leads me to believe that it is adequate and efficient. At Rethel we saw a Red Cross train of thirty-two cars perfectly equipped. The cars are made specially with open corridors, so that stretchers or rubber-wheeled trucks may be rolled from one car to another. The berths are in two tiers, much like an American sleeping car, and each car when full holds twenty-eight men. There is an operating car fully equipped for the most delicate and dangerous cases; in fact, when we saw the train at Rethel it had stopped on its way to Germany for an operation on a man's brain.

The Spirits of Mankind

By Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States

These are days of great perplexity, when a great cloud of trouble hangs and broods over the greater part of the world. It seems as if great, blind, material forces had been released which had for long been held in leash and restraint. And yet underneath that you can see the strong impulses of great ideals.

It would be impossible for men to go through what men are going through on the battlefields of Europe and struggle through the present dark night of their terrible struggle if it were not that they saw, or thought that they saw, the broadening of light where the morning should come up and believed that they were standing each on his side of the contest for some eternal principle for right.

Then all about them, all about us, there sits the silent, waiting tribunal which is going to utter the ultimate judgment upon this struggle, the great tribunal of the opinion of the world; and I fancy I see, I hope that I see, I pray that it may be that I do truly see, great spiritual forces lying waiting for the outcome of this thing to assert themselves, and are asserting themselves even now to enlighten our judgment and steady our spirits.

No man is wise enough to pronounce judgment, but we can all hold our spirits in readiness to accept the truth when it dawns on us and is revealed to us in the outcome of this titanic struggle.

It is of infinite benefit that in assemblages like this and in every sort of assemblage we should constantly go back to the sources of our moral inspiration and question ourselves as to what principle it is that we are acting on. Whither are we bound? What do we wish to see triumph? And if we wish to see certain things triumph, why do we wish to see them triumph? What is there in them that is for the lasting benefit of mankind?

For we are not in this world to amuse ourselves with its affairs. We are here to push the whole sluggish mass forward in some particular direction, and unless you know the direction in which you want to go your force is of no avail. Do you love righteousness? is what each one of us ought to ask himself. And if you love righteousness are you ready to translate righteousness into action and be ashamed and afraid before no man?

It seems to me, therefore, that it is worth suggesting to you that you are not sitting here merely to transact the business and express the ideals of a great church as represented in the State of Maryland, but you are here also as part of the assize of humanity, to remind yourselves of the things that are permanent and eternal, which if we do not translate into action we have failed in the fundamental things of our lives.

You will see that it is only in such general terms that one can speak in the midst of a confused world, because, as I have already said, no man has the key to this confusion. No man can see the outcome, but every man can keep his own spirit prepared to contribute to the net result when the outcome displays itself.

"What the Germans Say About Their Own Methods of Warfare"

By Joseph Bedier, Professor in the College de France

[From an article in the Revue de Paris for January, 1915.]

I purpose to show that the German armies cannot altogether escape the reproach of violating on occasion the law of nations. I shall establish this by French methods, through the use of documents of sound value.

My texts are genuine, well vouched for, and I have taken pains to subject them to a critical examination, as scrupulous and minute as heretofore in times of peace I expended in weighing the authority of some ancient chronicle, or in scrutinizing the authenticity of some charter. Perhaps this care was born of professional habit, or due to a natural craving for exactness, but in either case it is a voucher for the work, which is meant for all comers—for the passer-by, for the indifferent, and even for my country's foes. My wish is that the veriest looker-on, idly turning these pages, may be confronted only with documents whose authenticity will be self-evident, if he is willing to see, and whose ignominious tale will reach his heart, if ye have a heart.

I have, moreover, sought for documents not only incontestably genuine but of unquestioned authority. Accusation is easy, while proof is difficult. No belligerent has ever been troubled to find mountains of testimony, true or false, against his enemy; but were this evidence gathered by the most exalted magistrates, under the most solemn judicial sanction, it must unfortunately long remain useless; until the accused has full opportunity to controvert it, every one is free to treat it as false or, at the best, as controvertible. For this reason I shall avoid resting the case upon Belgian or French statements, though I know them to be true. My purpose has been to bring forward such testimony that no man living, be he even a German, should be privileged to cast a doubt upon it. German crimes will be established by German documents.

These will be taken mainly from the "War Diaries," which Article 75 of the German Army Regulations for Field Service enjoins upon soldiers to keep during their marches, and which were seized by the French upon the persons of their prisoners, as military papers, as authorized by Article 4 of The Hague Convention of 1907. The number of these is daily increasing, and I trust that some day, for the edification of all, the complete collection may be lodged in the Germanic section of manuscripts in the National Library. Meantime, the Marquis de Dampierre, paleographer and archivist, graduate of the Ecole des Chartes, is preparing, and will shortly publish, a volume in which the greater part of these notebooks will be minutely described, transcribed, and clarified. Personally, I have only examined about forty of them, but they will answer my purpose, by presenting relevant extracts, furnishing the name, rank, and regiment of the author, with indications of time and place. Classification is difficult, mainly because ten lines of a single text not infrequently furnish evidence of a variety of offenses. I must take them almost at random, grouping them under such analogies or association of ideas or images as they may offer.

The Recruit.

By HORTENSE FLEXNER.

American Reply to Britain's Blockade Order

By William J. Bryan, American Secretary of State

With the publication on April 6, 1915, of its note in reply to the British Government's Order in Council, proclaiming a virtual blockade against commerce to and from Germany—printed in the April, 1915, number of THE NEW YORK TIMES CURRENT HISTORY—the American Government rested its case. The text of the note to Great Britain follows:

WASHINGTON, March 30, 1915.

The Secretary of State to the American Ambassador at London:

You are instructed to deliver the following to his Majesty's Government in reply to your Nos. 1,795 and 1,798 of March 15: The Government of the United States has given careful consideration to the subjects treated in the British notes of March 13 and March 15, and to the British Order in Council of the latter date.

These communications contain matters of grave importance to neutral nations. They appear to menace their rights of trade and intercourse, not only with belligerents but also with one another. They call for frank comment in order that misunderstandings may be avoided. The Government of the United States deems it its duty, therefore, speaking in the sincerest spirit of friendship, to make its own view and position with regard to them unmistakably clear.

The Order in Council of the 15th of March would constitute, were its provisions to be actually carried into effect as they stand, a practical assertion of unlimited belligerent rights over neutral commerce within the whole European area and an almost unqualified denial of the sovereign rights of the nations now at peace.

This Government takes it for granted that there can be no question what those rights are. A nation's sovereignty over its own ships and citizens under its own flag on the high seas in time of peace is, of course, unlimited, and that sovereignty suffers no diminution in time of war, except in so far as the practice and consent of civilized nations has limited it by the recognition of certain now clearly determined rights which it is conceded may be exercised by nations which are at war.

A belligerent nation has been conceded the right of visit and search, and the right of capture and condemnation, if upon examination a neutral vessel is found to be engaged in unneutral service or to be carrying contraband of war intended for the enemy's Government or armed forces.

It has been conceded the right to establish and maintain a blockade of an enemy's ports and coasts and to capture and condemn any vessel taken in trying to break the blockade. It is even conceded the right to detain and take to its own ports for judicial examination all vessels which it suspects for substantial reasons to be engaged in unneutral or contraband service and to condemn them if the suspicion is sustained. But such rights, long clearly defined both in doctrine and practice, have hitherto been held to be the only permissible exceptions to the principle of universal equality of sovereignty on the high seas as between belligerents and nations not engaged in war.

It is confidently assumed that his Majesty's Government will not deny that it is a rule sanctioned by general practice that, even though a blockade should exist and the doctrine of contraband as to unblockaded territory be rigidly enforced, innocent shipments may be freely transported to and from the United States through neutral countries to belligerent territory, without being subject to the penalties of contraband traffic or breach of blockade, much less to detention, requisition, or confiscation.

Moreover, the rules of the Declaration of Paris of 1856—among them that free ships make free goods—will hardly at this day be disputed by the signatories of that solemn agreement.

His Majesty's Government, like the Government of the United States, have often and explicitly held that these rights represent the best usage of warfare in the dealings of belligerents with neutrals at sea. In this connection I desire to direct attention to the opinion of the Chief Justice of the United States in the case of the Peterhof, which arose out of the civil war, and to the fact that that opinion was unanimously sustained in the award of the Arbitration Commission of 1871, to which the case was presented at the request of Great Britain. From that time to the Declaration of London of 1909, adopted with modifications by the Order in Council of the 23d of October last, these rights have not been seriously questioned by the British Government. And no claim on the part of Great Britain of any justification for interfering with the clear rights of the United States and its citizens as neutrals could be admitted. To admit it would be to assume an attitude of unneutrality toward the present enemies of Great Britain, which would be obviously inconsistent with the solemn obligations of this Government in the present circumstances. And for Great Britain to make such a claim would be for her to abandon and set at nought the principles for which she has consistently and earnestly contended in other times and circumstances.

The note of his Majesty's principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, which accompanies the Order in Council, and which bears the same date, notifies the Government of the United States of the establishment of a blockade which is, if defined by the terms of the Order in Council, to include all the coasts and ports of Germany and every port of possible access to enemy territory. But the novel and quite unprecedented feature of that blockade, if we are to assume it to be properly so defined, is that it embraces many neutral ports and coasts, bars access to them, and subjects all neutral ships seeking to approach them to the same suspicion that would attach to them were they bound for the ports of the enemies of Great Britain, and to unusual risks and penalties.

It is manifest that such limitations, risks, and liabilities placed upon the ships of a neutral power on the seas, beyond the right of visit and search and the right to prevent the shipment of contraband already referred to, are a distinct invasion of the sovereign rights of the nation whose ships, trade, or commerce is interfered with.

The Government of the United States is, of course, not oblivious to the great changes which have occurred in the conditions and means of naval warfare since the rules hitherto governing legal blockade were formulated. It might be ready to admit that the old form of "close" blockade, with its cordon of ships in the immediate offing of the blockaded ports, is no longer practicable in the face of an enemy possessing the means and opportunity to make an effective defense by the use of submarines, mines, and air craft; but it can hardly be maintained that, whatever form of effective blockade may be made use of, it is impossible to conform at least to the spirit and principles of the established rules of war.

If the necessities of the case should seem to render it imperative that the cordon of blockading vessels be extended across the approaches to any neighboring neutral port or country, it would seem clear that it would still be easily practicable to comply with the well-recognized and reasonable prohibition of international law against the blockading of neutral ports, by according free admission and exit to all lawful traffic with neutral ports through the blockading cordon.

This traffic would, of course, include all outward-bound traffic from the neutral country and all inward-bound traffic to the neutral country, except contraband in transit to the enemy. Such procedure need not conflict in any respect with the rights of the belligerent maintaining the blockade, since the right would remain with the blockading vessels to visit and search all ships either entering or leaving the neutral territory which they were in fact, but not of right, investing.

The Government of the United States notes that in the Order in Council his Majesty's Government give as their reason for entering upon a course of action, which they are aware is without precedent in modern warfare, the necessity they conceive themselves to have been placed under to retaliate upon their enemies for measures of a similar nature, which the latter have announced it their intention to adopt, and which they have to some extent adopted, but the Government of the United States, recalling the principles upon which his Majesty's Government have hitherto been scrupulous to act, interprets this as merely a reason for certain extraordinary activities on the part of his Majesty's naval forces and not as an excuse for or prelude to any unlawful action.

If the course pursued by the present enemies of Great Britain should prove to be in fact tainted by illegality and disregard of the principles of war sanctioned by enlightened nations, it cannot be supposed, and this Government does not for a moment suppose, that his Majesty's Government would wish the same taint to attach to their own actions or would cite such illegal acts as in any sense or degree a justification for similar practices on their part in so far as they affect neutral rights.

It is thus that the Government of the United States interprets the language of the note of his Majesty's principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, which accompanies the copy of the Order in Council, which was handed to the Ambassador of the United States by the Government in London and by him transmitted to Washington.

This Government notes with gratification that "wide discretion is afforded to the prize court in dealing with the trade of neutrals in such a manner as may in the circumstances be deemed just, and that full provision is made to facilitate claims by persons interested in any goods placed in the custody of the Marshal of the prize court under the order." That "the effect of the Order in Council is to confer certain powers upon the executive officers of his Majesty's Government," and that "the extent to which these powers will be actually exercised and the degree of severity with which the measure of blockade authorized will be put into operation are matters which will depend on the administrative orders issued by the Government and the decisions of the authorities especially charged with the duty of dealing with individual ships and cargoes, according to the merits of each case."

This Government further notes with equal satisfaction the declaration of the British Government that "the instructions to be issued by his Majesty's Government to the fleet and to the customs officials and executive committees concerned will impress upon them the duty of acting with the utmost dispatch consistent with the object in view, and of showing in every case such consideration for neutrals as may be compatible with that object, which is succinctly stated, to establish a blockade to prevent vessels from carrying goods for or coming from Germany."

In view of these assurances formally given to this Government, it is confidently expected that the extensive powers conferred by the Order in Council on the executive officers of the Crown will be restricted by orders issued by the Government, directing the exercise of their discretionary powers in such a manner as to modify in practical application those provisions of the Order in Council, which, if strictly enforced, would violate neutral rights and interrupt legitimate trade. Relying on the faithful performance of these voluntary assurances by his Majesty's Government, the United States takes it for granted that the approach of American merchantmen to neutral ports situated upon the long line of coast affected by the Order in Council will not be interfered with when it is known that they do not carry goods which are contraband of war or goods destined to or proceeding from ports within the belligerent territory affected.

The Government of the United States assumes with the greater confidence that his Majesty's Government will thus adjust their practice to the recognized rules of international law because it is manifest that the British Government have adopted an extraordinary method of "stopping cargoes destined for or coming from the enemy's territory," which, owing to the existence of unusual conditions in modern warfare at sea, it will be difficult to restrict to the limits which have been heretofore required by the law of nations. Though the area of operations is confined to "European waters, including the Mediterranean," so great an area of the high seas is covered and the cordon of ships is so distant from the territory affected that neutral vessels must necessarily pass through the blockading force in order to reach important neutral ports which Great Britain as a belligerent has not the legal right to blockade and which, therefore, it is presumed she has no intention of claiming to blockade.

The Scandinavian and Danish ports, for example, are open to American trade. They are also free, so far as the actual enforcement of the Order in Council is concerned, to carry on trade with German Baltic ports, although it is an essential element of blockade that it bear with equal severity upon all neutrals.

This Government, therefore, infers that the commanders of his Majesty's ships of war, engaged in maintaining the so-called blockade, will be instructed to avoid an enforcement of the proposed measures of non-intercourse in such a way as to impose restrictions upon neutral trade more burdensome than those which have been regarded as inevitable, when the ports of a belligerent are actually blockaded by the ships of its enemy.

The possibilities of serious interruption of American trade under the Order in Council are so many, and the methods proposed are so unusual, and seem liable to constitute so great an impediment and embarrassment to neutral commerce, that the Government of the United States, if the Order in Council is strictly enforced, apprehends many interferences with its legitimate trade which will impose upon his Majesty's Government heavy responsibilities for acts of the British authorities clearly subversive of the rights of neutral nations on the high seas. It is, therefore, expected that the Majesty's Government, having considered these possibilities, will take the steps necessary to avoid them, and, in the event that they should unhappily occur, will be prepared to make full reparation for every act which, under the rules of international law, constitutes a violation of neutral rights.

As stated in its communication of Oct. 22, 1914, "this Government will insist that the rights and duties of the United States and its citizens in the present war be defined by the existing rules of international law and the treaties of the United States irrespective of the provisions of the Declaration of London, and that this Government reserves to itself the right to enter a protest or demand in each case, in which those rights and duties so defined are violated or their free exercise interfered with by the authorities of the British Government."

In conclusion you will reiterate to his Majesty's Government that this statement of the view of the Government of the United States is made in the most friendly spirit, and in accordance with the uniform candor which has characterized the relations of the two Governments in the past, and which has been in large measure the foundation of the peace and amity existing between the two nationals without interruption for a century.

BRYAN.

Germany's Conditions of Peace

The First Authoritative German Presentation of the Idea

By Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, Late German Colonial Secretary of State

That Germany would be willing to make peace on the basis of a free neutral sea, guaranteed by the powers, was indicated in a letter written by Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, ex-Colonial Secretary of Germany, and read at a pro-German mass meeting held in Portland, Me., on April 17, 1915. After an explanatory note Dr. Dernburg divided into numbered clauses his letter, as follows:

(1) Whatever peace is concluded should be of a permanent nature; no perfunctory patching up should be permitted. The horror of all the civilized nations of the Old World slaughtering one another, every one convinced of the perfect righteousness of their own cause—a recurrence, if it could not be avoided absolutely, should be made most remote, so as to take the weight from our minds that all this young blood of the best manhood of Europe might be spilled in vain.

(2) For this purpose it must be borne in mind that the world has changed considerably since the last big conflagration, and that all the countries striving for humanity and civilization are now one big family, with interests, spiritual as well as commercial, interlocking to a degree that no disturbance of any part of the civilized globe can exist without seriously affecting the rest. A disturbance in one quarter must make quite innocent bystanders involuntary victims, to the serious detriment of spiritual peace and commercial pursuits.

The great highway on which thoughts and things travel are the high seas. I can with full authority disclaim any ambition by my country as to world dominion. She is much too modest, on the one hand, and too experienced, on the other hand, not to know that such a state will never be tolerated by the rest. Events have shown that world dominion can only be practiced by dominion of the high seas. The aim of Germany is to have the seas, as well as the narrows, kept permanently open for the free use of all nations in times of war as well as in times of peace. The sea is nobody's property and must be free to everybody. The seas are the lungs from which humanity draws a fresh breath of enterprise, and they must not be stopped up.

I, personally, would go so far as to neutralize all the seas and narrows permanently by a common and effective agreement guaranteed by all the powers, so that any infringement on that score would meet with the most severe punishment that can be meted out to any transgressor.

(3) A free sea is useless except combined with the freedom of cable and mail communications with all countries, whether belligerent or not. I should like to see all the cables jointly owned by the interested nations and a world mail system over sea established by common consent. But, more than this, an open sea demands an open policy. This means that, while every nation must have the right, for commercial and fiscal purposes, to impose whatever duties it thinks fit, these duties must be equal for all exports and imports for whatever destination and from whatever source. It would be tantamount to world empire, in fact, if a country owning a large part of the globe could make discriminating duties between the motherland and dominions or colonies as against other nations.

This has been of late the British practice. German colonies have always been open to every comer, including the motherland, on equal terms. Such equality of treatment should be the established practice for all the future. The only alternative to an open sea and free intercourse policy would be a Chinese wall around each country. If there is no free intercourse every country must become self-sufficient. Germany has proved that it can be done. But this policy would mean very high customs barriers, discrimination, unbounded egotism, and a world bristling in arms. While the free sea policy stands for the true aims of international relations, namely, in exchange of goods, which must benefit either party, to be mutually satisfactory, it will engender friendly feeling among all the peoples, advance civilization, and thereby have a sure tendency toward disarmament.

(4) Germany has been taxed with disregarding treaty obligations, tearing up a scrap of paper—a solemn engagement of international character regarding Belgium. I have the less reason to enter into this matter since—if it was a breach of international law at all—it has been followed up by all other belligerents by destroying other parts of that code so essential to the welfare of the community of nations. Two German men-of-war have been destroyed in neutral waters. The protests that the Government of this country had to make against Great Britain's treatment of international sea law and the rights of the neutrals are too numerous to be recounted. Chinese neutrality has been violated in the grossest way.

In disregard of all conventions, China is now being subjected to demands incompatible with the rights of self-respecting nations. Egypt and Cyprus have been annexed by Great Britain, disregarding all treaties. Germany's diplomatic representatives have been driven from China, Morocco, and Egypt—all countries sovereign at the time. The Declaration of London, which had been set up by the Government of the United States as the governing document, had to be dropped as such. There is practically no part of international law that could stand the test. Justice toward neutrals compels that international law should be re-established in a codified form, with sufficient guarantees so as to save, as far as possible, all the neutrals from possible implication in a war in which they do not take part.

(5) Germany does not strive for territorial aggrandizement in Europe; she does not believe in conquering and subjugating unwilling nations—this on account of a spirit of justice and her knowledge of history. No such attempts have ever been permanently successful.

Belgium commands the main outlet of Western German trade, is the natural foreland of the empire, and has been conquered with untold sacrifice of blood and treasure. It offers to German trade the only outlet to an open sea and it has been politically established, maintained, and defended by England in order to keep these natural advantages from Germany.

The love for small peoples that England heralds now will never stand investigation, as shown by the destruction of the small Boer republics. So Belgium cannot be given up. However, these considerations could be disregarded if all the other German demands, especially a guaranteed free sea, were fully complied with and the natural commercial relationship of Belgium to Germany was considered in a just and workable form. In this case Germany will not fail when the times come to help in rebuilding the country; in fact, she is doing so now.

(6) Germany is a country smaller in size than California, but populated thirty-five times as thickly as that State. She loves and fosters family life, and sees her future in the raising of large families of healthy children under the home roof and under the national flag. German parents have no desire to expatriate every year a considerable number of their children. This implies that her industrial development, which would alone give occupation to the yearly increase of pretty nearly a million people, should go on unhampered.

The activity of her people should have an outlet in the development of such foreign parts as need or wish for development. Great Britain has shown very little foresight in constantly opposing such efforts, playing Morocco into the hands of France, a nation that remained stationary for forty-four years, with little more than half of the population of Germany, and with a system equally undermining religion and morality in keeping families small for the sake of worldly comforts.

England, furthermore, constantly obstructed the German endeavor to reclaim for the benefit of all of the world the granary in Mesopotamia. A permanent peace will mean that this German activity must get a wide scope without infringement upon the rights of others. Germany should be encouraged to continue her activities in Africa and Asia Minor, which can only result in permanent benefit to all the world. Americans have a saying "that it will never do good to sit on a safety valve."

There is nothing in the program of my country which would not be beneficial to the rest of the world, especially the United States. That this is so the events of the last months have conclusively shown, and a better appreciation of what Germany really stands for has recently taken place. So, if I plead the cause of my country, I am not pleading as a German alone, but as a citizen of a country who wishes to be a useful and true member of the universality of nations, contributing by humanitarian aims and by the enhancement of personal freedom to the happiness of even the lowliest members of the great world community.

I am proud to say that I cannot only give this assurance, but produce facts, and I beg to refer to the modern system of social reforms which Germany inaugurated and carries through at an expense which is every year larger by half than the expense of the military system.

The brunt of this war has not been borne by the men who fight, but by the women who suffer, and it will be one of the proudest and most coveted achievements that Germany will gain in rewarding in a dignified and permanently beneficial way the enormous sacrifices of womanhood, to alleviate to the extent of the possible the hardships and sorrows that this war has brought upon them.

The Allies' Conditions of Peace

By Sir Edward Grey

The occasion of our meeting this afternoon is to hear a lecture from my friend Mr. Buchan on the strategy of the war, and he is sure to make it informing and interesting. His friends know him as a man of fine public spirit and patriotism, in whom a crisis such as this in his country's history arouses the noblest feelings. I am sorry that an engagement makes it necessary for me to return soon to the Foreign Office, and therefore it will be a great disappointment to me not to hear the whole of the lecture. I take the opportunity to make my apology now, and also to make one or two remarks on the origin and issues of the war. While we are engaged in considering the particular methods by which the war may be prosecuted to a successful conclusion do not let us lose sight even for a moment of the character and origin of this war and of the main issues for which we are fighting. Hundreds of millions of money have been spent, hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, and millions have been maimed and wounded in Europe during the last few months. And all this might have been avoided by the simple method of a conference or a joint discussion between the powers concerned which might have been held in London, at The Hague, or wherever and in whatever form Germany would have consented to have it. It would have been far easier to have settled by conference the dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, which Germany made the occasion for this war, than it was to get successfully through the Balkan crisis of two years ago. Germany knew from her experience of the conference in London which settled the Balkan crisis that she could count upon our good will for peace in any conference of the powers. We had sought no diplomatic triumph in the Balkan Conference; we did not give ourselves to any intrigue; we pursued impartially and honorably the end of peace, and we were ready last July to do the same again.

In recent years we have given Germany every assurance that no aggression upon her would receive any support from us. We withheld from her one thing—we would not give an unconditional promise to stand aside, however aggressive Germany herself might be to her neighbors. Last July, before the outbreak of the war, France was ready to accept a conference; Italy was ready to accept a conference; Russia was ready to accept a conference; and we know now that after the British proposal for a conference was made, the Emperor of Russia himself proposed to the German Emperor that the dispute should be referred to The Hague. Germany refused every suggestion made to her for settling the dispute in this way. On her rests now, and must rest for all time, the appalling responsibility for having plunged Europe into this war and for having involved herself and the greater part of the Continent in the consequences of it.

We know now that the German Government had prepared for war as only people who plan can prepare. This is the fourth time within living memory that Prussia had made war in Europe. In the Schleswig-Holstein war, in the war against Austria in 1866, in the war against France in 1870, as we now know from all the documents that have been revealed, it was Prussia who planned and prepared these wars. The same thing has occurred again, and we are determined that it shall be the last time that war shall be made in this way.

We had assured Belgium that never would we violate her neutrality so long as it was respected by others. I had given this pledge to Belgium long before the war. On the eve of the war we asked France and Germany to give the same pledge. France at once did so. Germany declined to give it. When, after that, Germany invaded Belgium we were bound to oppose Germany with all our strength, and if we had not done so at the first moment, is there any one who now believes that when Germany attacked the Belgians, when she shot down combatants and non-combatants in a way that violated all the rules of war of recent times and the laws of humanity of all time—is there any one who thinks it possible now that we could have sat still and looked on without eternal disgrace?

Now what is the issue for which we are fighting? In due time the terms of peace will be put forward by our Allies in concert with us—in accordance with the alliance that exists between us—and published to the world. One essential condition must be the restoration to Belgium of her independence, national life, and free possession of her territory, and reparation to her as far as reparation is possible for the cruel wrong done to her. That is part of the great issue for which we, with our allies, are contending, and the great part of the issue is this—We wish the nations of Europe to be free to live their independent lives, working out their own form of government for themselves, and their own national developments, whether they be great nations or small States, in full liberty. This is our ideal. The German ideal—we have had it poured out by German professors and publicists since the war began—is that of the Germans as a superior people, to whom all things are lawful in the securing of their own power, against whom resistance of any sort is unlawful—a people establishing a domination over the nations of the Continent, imposing a peace which is not to be liberty for every nation, but subservience to Germany. I would rather perish or leave the Continent altogether than live on it under such conditions.

After this war we and the other nations of Europe must be free to live, not menaced continually by talk of "supreme war lords," and "shining armor," and the sword continually "rattled in the scabbard," and heaven continually invoked as the accomplice of Germany, and not having our policy dictated and our national destinies and activities controlled by the military caste of Prussia. We claim for ourselves and our allies claim for themselves, and together we will secure for Europe, the right of independent sovereignty for the different nations, the right to pursue a national existence, not in the shadow of Prussian hegemony and supremacy, but in the light of equal liberty.

All honor for ever be given from us whom age and circumstances have kept at home to those who have voluntarily come forward to risk their lives, and give their lives on the field of battle on land and on sea. They have their reward in enduring fame and honor. And all honor be from us to the brave armies and navies of our Allies, who have exhibited such splendid courage and noble patriotism. The admiration they have aroused, and their comradeship in arms, will be an ennobling and enduring memory between us, cementing friendships and perpetuating national good will. For all of us who are serving the State at home or in whatever capacity, whether officials, or employers, or wage earners, doing our utmost to carry on the national life in this time of stress, there is the knowledge that there can be no nobler opportunity than that of serving one's country when its existence is at stake, and when the cause is just and right; and never was there a time in our national history when the crisis was so great and so imperative, or the cause more just and right.

South Africa's Romantic Blue Paper

Recording the Vision of "Oom Niklaas," the Boer Seer of Lichtenburg

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April 18, 1915.]

The South African "Blue Paper" is out. It is unique. However widely and however eagerly the official documents of the other countries involved in the present war may have been read, they could not be called romantic in any sense of the word.

The "Blue Paper" issued by the Union of South Africa presents a distinct contrast. In the third paragraph of the very first page of this weighty document, which deals with the recent rebellion, is the following unusual sentence:

And this is followed by a still stranger passage:

The seer is Niklaas van Rensburg, and he runs through this Government report like a scarlet thread through gray homespun. It is around his influence that the uprising of Sept. 15 is built. It is under his roof that all manner of lurid conspiracies are hatched. Not only do his words carry with the crowds that gather before his house to hear his prophecy, but his warnings shape the actions of some of the Transvaal Generals. The Government report will not go so far as to brand "Oom Niklaas" as a hoax. Says the preface:

Evidently, to denounce visions of gray bulls as hocus-pocus would be to describe a puzzling situation much too subjectively, since the Government has apparently no evidence that these are not genuine prophecy. The best the Government can do is to call them "extraordinary and apparently quite authentic."

But the extraordinary part of it is that an illiterate old soothsayer should be considered important enough to be included in an official report.

His most famous and most influential prophecy, the one that will go down in the history of South Africa, was that which concerned General de la Rey and the fatal number 15.

The prophecy which came back to the minds of van Rensburg's followers when war broke out was one concerning General de la Rey, the intrepid soldier who had commanded the Lichtenburg burghers in the Boer war and since become President of the Western Transvaal Farmers' Association. Van Rensburg had always admired General de la Rey. He had frequently hinted to his circle that great things were in store for him. One of his visions had been well known to General de la Rey and his friends for some years. The report says:

H.M. CONSTANTINE I.—King of Greece.—
(Photo from P.S. Rogers.)

JOHN REDMOND—The great Irish leader,
who says that Ireland has now taken her proper place
in the British Empire.—(Photo from P.S. Rogers.)

This was several years ago. But the people did not forget the prophecy, and when war broke out in Europe the Western Transvaal—in the Lichtenburg-Wolmaransstad area, where van Rensburg's influence was strongest—was immediately aflame. The Government does not seek to minimize the importance of this influence:

The outbreak of the war in Europe suddenly brought the Lichtenburger's prophecy down to earth and crystallized the dream. The commandants were evidently as convinced that independence was at hand as the crowd.

None doubted the truth of the seer's prophecy now. The Western Transvaal took it for its guide with implicit confidence.

Of course, General de la Rey was the storm centre. He had been mentioned in the same vision with the number 15 and it was taken for granted that he would play the chief rôle in the Treurfontein meeting. De la Rey was the unquestioned ruler of the Western Transvaal. The report states:

Accordingly, General Louis Botha, Premier of the South African Union, summoned General de la Rey to Pretoria some days before the meeting, and persuaded him to use his best efforts to allay excitement.

On the 15th the meeting was held. The situation was a tense one. Not one of the burghers present doubted the outcome. Yet General de la Rey exhorted them to remain cool and calm. He urged them to await the turn of events in Europe. After his address a "strange and unusual silence" was observed, says the "Blue Paper."

All danger of a rebellious movement had apparently been averted.

The only difficulty was that the prophecy of "Oom Niklaas" was still standing. The fact that the uprising had failed did not seem in the least to invalidate the vision. If the mysterious number did not mean Aug. 15, then perhaps it did mean Sept. 15.

Accordingly, preparations were laid for a rebellion for the latter date. The plot was engineered by Lieut. Colonel Solomon G. Maritz and General Christian Frederick Beyers. Maritz is a brilliant though unlettered Colonel who won distinction in the Boer war, while Beyers was the Commandant General of the South African Union forces. Beyers is dead now; Maritz and some of the prominent men associated in the conspiracy are in prison awaiting trial.

Beyers and Maritz did not trust entirely to the prophecy of the seer of Lichtenburg. Maritz had already obtained a guarantee from the authorities in German West Africa, with whom he had been in communication for some time, that in the event of Germany's victory the Free State and the Transvaal would be given their freedom. He had organized the back-veldt Boers into readiness to go over into German West Africa at a moment's notice. In the Free State, General de Wet was ready to aid the rebellion, and the Western Transvaal, already excited, could easily be swung into line.

The regiments of the west were to concentrate at Potchefstroom early in September for their annual training. At that time the members of the Government, among them General de la Rey, who is a member of the Legislative Assembly, would be in Cape Town for the session of the Parliament.

Everything made the 15th of September look like an auspicious date for the conspirators and those who believed in van Rensburg. But General de la Rey still remained the storm centre. He was the factor which upset all plans. He was the most difficult obstacle. A large personality, his influence could never be discounted. If he could be induced to join the conspiracy the cause was as good as won. Should he oppose the movement it was lost, for neither Beyers nor Major Kemp, a leader in his district in West Transvaal, could hope to do anything against General de la Rey in the west.

General de la Rey believed in the Lichtenburg prophet. A strong man, of extraordinary force and intelligence, the whole course of his plans might be altered by a new vision from van Rensburg. Beyers knew this, says the report, and saw the way by which he should win the General to the conspiracy.

Just how Beyers accomplished this has not yet been revealed, but there was material enough to his hand. The news from Europe was disquieting. The German drive to Paris seemed irresistible. It looked as if in a week or two Germany would have the Allies at her mercy.

The prophet saw visions in which 40,000 German soldiers were marching up and down the streets of London. He predicted significantly that the new South African State would have at its head "a man who feared God." The Government of Premier Botha and General Smuts, the Minister of Finance and Defense, was "finished." He had seen the English leaving the Transvaal and moving down toward Natal. When they had gone far away, a vulture flew from among them and returned to the Boers and settled down among them. That was Botha. As for Smuts, he would flee desperately to England and would never be seen in South Africa again. Through it all ran the strange number 15.

This was excellent material for the conspirators. But the problem was to get General de la Rey away from the Parliament session at Cape Town and into the Potchefstroom camp at the psychological moment. Beyers sent a series of urgent telegrams to Cape Town hinting at important business. He emphasized the need for General de la Rey's immediate presence in Potchefstroom. He had evidently not yet broached the conspiracy to the General, but hoped only to get him to the camp at the critical moment when his presence would prove the deciding factor.

[map of South Africa]

Everything in Potchefstroom was in readiness. The Active Citizen Force concentrated here—about 1,600 men—was to start the uprising. The movement was to be promptly seconded throughout the Western Transvaal. The "Vierkleur" was to be hoisted, and a march made on Pretoria, men and horses being commandeered on the way. This was to take place on Tuesday, the 15th. There was an attempt to line up the prophet to add to the theatric effect, says the report.

The signal for the revolt was to be the arrival of General Beyers and General de la Rey in the Potchefstroom camp. The latter was returning from Cape Town via Kimberley, and was due to arrive in Potchefstroom on the 15th. But for some reason he chose to come back through the Free State, and by the 15th was only at Johannesburg.

This upset plans. Beyers had to act quickly. He had his chauffeur overhaul his motor car, equip it with new tubes and covers, in readiness for "a long journey." In a short time the car was on its way to bring General de la Rey from Johannesburg to Pretoria, where Beyers would meet him.

There was no time to be lost. It was too late to stage the rebellion for the 15th, but Beyers arranged for it to be at 4 o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, the 16th.

General de la Rey arrived in Pretoria. General Beyers met him and asked him to go immediately with him to Potchefstroom.

The car came within sight of Johannesburg. A police cordon had been thrown around the town for the purpose of capturing three desperadoes, known as the "Foster gang," who were trying to escape in a motor car. The police were instructed to stop all motors and to examine in particular any car containing three men.

Beyers's car held three men. It was racing at high speed. It was, of course, challenged by the police and ordered to stop. But Beyers knew nothing of the "Foster gang" and the reason for the police cordon. Keyed up to the highest pitch of nervous tension, his immediate conclusion was that his plot had been discovered and that the police were after him. He believed he was trapped.

Meanwhile, Major Kemp at Potchefstroom grew more and more anxious as the hours slipped by. Midnight came, and no news of the two Generals. About 3 o'clock in the morning, says the report, an officer sharing the tent of a Lieutenant Colonel by the name of Kock, who was Kemp's confidant, was awakened by the entrance of a man. It proved to be Major Kemp. He leaned over Kock's bed and whispered something in his ear.

Kock, in a profoundly startled voice, exclaimed, "Oh, God!"

Kemp left immediately, and Kock then whispered to his friend: "General de la Rey is dood geskiet," (General de la Rey has been shot dead.)

The effect of this news on South Africa can be imagined. The whole country was aflame. This was what the number 15 meant. The General had indeed "returned home without his hat, followed by a carriage full of flowers."

Report ran through every town that General de la Rey had been deliberately assassinated by the Government. As a matter of fact, the report states that the shooting was purely accidental, done by the police under the belief that this motor car which would not halt at their command contained the "Foster gang." Beyers exhibited the motor-car everywhere, arousing sentiment to the highest pitch.

The rest was easy. The rank and file, at least, now believed firmly in the prophet. He had always said that General Botha would offer no resistance, that the revolution would be bloodless, and thousands went over to the cause led by Maritz and Beyers in this belief. But it was not until Oct. 12 that martial law was proclaimed in South Africa. The rebellion had begun.

The Bells Of Berlin

[From Punch of London.]

Warfare and British Labor

By Earl Kitchener, England's Secretary of State for War

For many weeks only trench fighting has been possible owing to the climatic conditions and waterlogged state of the ground. During this period of apparent inaction, it must not be forgotten that our troops have had to exercise the utmost individual vigilance and resource, and, owing to the proximity of the enemy's lines, a great strain has been imposed upon them. Prolonged warfare of this sort might be expected to affect the morale of an army, but the traditional qualities of patience, good temper, and determination have maintained our men, though highly tried, in a condition ready to act with all the initiative and courage required when the moment for an advance arrived. The recently published accounts of the fighting in France have enabled us to appreciate how successfully our troops have taken the offensive. The German troops, notwithstanding their carefully prepared and strongly intrenched positions, have been driven back for a considerable distance and the villages of Neuve Chapelle and L'Epinette have been captured and held by our army, with heavy losses to the enemy.

In these operations our Indian troops took a prominent part and displayed fine fighting qualities. I will in this connection read a telegram I have received from Sir John French:

I should like also to mention that the Canadian Division showed their mettle and have received the warm commendation of Sir John French for the high spirit and bravery with which they have performed their part. Our casualties during the three days' fighting, though probably severe, are not nearly so heavy as those suffered by the enemy, from whom a large number of prisoners have been taken.

Since I last spoke in this House substantial reinforcements have been sent to France. They include the Canadian Division, the North Midland Division, and the Second London Division, besides other units. These are the first complete divisions of the Territorial Force to go to France, where I am sure they will do credit to themselves and sustain the high reputation which the Territorials have already won for themselves there. The health of the troops has been remarkably good, and their freedom from enteric fever and from the usual diseases incidental to field operations is a striking testimony to the value of inoculation and to the advice and skill of the Royal Army Medical Corps and its auxiliary organizations.

The French army, except for a slight withdrawal at Soissons, owing to their reinforcements being cut off by the swollen state of the Aisne River, have made further important progress at various points on the long line they hold, especially in Champagne. Association with both our allies in the western theatre has only deepened our admiration of their resolute tenacity and fighting qualities.

In the Eastern theatre the violent German attacks on Warsaw have failed in their purpose, and a considerable concentration of German troops to attack the Russian positions in East Prussia, after causing a retirement, are now either well held or are being driven back. In the Caucasus fresh defeats have been inflicted by the Russians on the Turks, and the latter have also been repulsed by our forces in Egypt when they attempted to attack the Suez Canal. The operations now proceeding against the Dardanelles show the great power of the allied fleets, and, although at the present stage I can say no more than what is given in the public press on the subject, your Lordships may rest assured that the matter is well in hand.

The work of supplying and equipping new armies depends largely on our ability to obtain the war material required. Our demands on the industries concerned with the manufacture of munitions of war in this country have naturally been very great, and have necessitated that they and other ancillary trades should work at the highest possible pressure. The armament firms have promptly responded to our appeal, and have undertaken orders of vast magnitude. The great majority also of the employees have loyally risen to the occasion, and have worked, and are working, overtime and on night shifts in all the various workshops and factories in the country.

Notwithstanding these efforts to meet our requirements, we have unfortunately found that the output is not only not equal to our necessities, but does not fulfill our expectations, for a very large number of our orders have not been completed by the dates on which they were promised. The progress in equipping our new armies, and also in supplying the necessary war material for our forces in the field, has been seriously hampered by the failure to obtain sufficient labor, and by delays in the production of the necessary plant, largely due to the enormous demands not only of ourselves, but of our allies.

While the workmen generally, as I have said, have worked loyally and well, there have, I regret to say, been instances where absence, irregular timekeeping, and slack work have led to a marked diminution in the output of our factories. In some cases the temptations of drink account for this failure to work up to the high standard expected. It has been brought to my notice on more than one occasion that the restrictions of trade unions have undoubtedly added to our difficulties, not so much in obtaining sufficient labor, as in making the best use of that labor. I am confident, however, that the seriousness of the position as regards our supplies has only to be mentioned, and all concerned will agree to waive for the period of the war any of those restrictions which prevent in the very slightest degree our utilizing all the labor available to the fullest extent that is possible.

I cannot too earnestly point out that, unless the whole nation works with us and for us, not only in supplying the manhood of the country to serve in our ranks, but also in supplying the necessary arms, ammunition, and equipment, successful operations in the various parts of the world in which we are engaged will be very seriously hampered and delayed. I have heard rumors that the workmen in some factories have an idea that the war is going so well that there is no necessity for them to work their hardest. I can only say that the supply of war material at the present moment and for the next two or three months is causing me very serious anxiety, and I wish all those engaged in the manufacture and supply of these stores to realize that it is absolutely essential not only that the arrears in the deliveries of our munitions of war should be wiped off, but that the output of every round of ammunition is of the utmost importance, and has a large influence on our operations in the field.

The bill which my noble friend is about to place before the House as an amendment to the Defense of the Realm act is calculated to rectify this state of things as far as it is possible, and, in my opinion, it is imperatively necessary. In such a large manufacturing country as our own the enormous output of what we require to place our troops in the field thoroughly equipped and found with ammunition is undoubtedly possible, but this output can only be obtained by a careful and deliberate organization for developing the resources of the country so as to enable each competent workman to utilize in the most useful manner possible all his ability and energy in the common object which we all have in view, which is the successful prosecution and victorious termination of this war. [Cheers.] I feel sure that there is no business or manufacturing firm in this country that will object for one moment to any delay or loss caused in the product of their particular industry when they feel that they and their men are taking part with us in maintaining the soldiers in the field with those necessaries without which they cannot fight.

As I have said, the regular armament firms have taken on enormous contracts vastly in excess of their ordinary engagements in normal times of peace. We have also spread orders both in the form of direct contracts and subcontracts over a large number of subsidiary firms not accustomed in peace time to this class of manufacture. It will, I am sure, be readily understood that, when new plant is available for the production of war material, those firms that are not now so engaged should release from their own work the labor necessary to keep the machinery fully occupied on the production for which it is being laid down, as well as to supply sufficient labor to keep working at full power the whole of the machinery which we now have.

I hope that this result will be attained under the provisions of the bill now about to be placed before you. Labor may very rightly ask that their patriotic work should not be used to inflate the profits of the directors and shareholders of the various great industrial and armament firms, and we are therefore arranging a system under which the important armament firms will come under Government control, and we hope that workmen who work regularly by keeping good time shall reap some of the benefits which the war automatically confers on these great companies.

I feel strongly that the men working long hours in the shops by day and by night, week in and week out, are doing their duty for their King and country in a like manner with those who have joined the army for active service in the field. [Cheers.] They are thus taking their part in the war and displaying the patriotism that has been so manifestly shown by the nation in all ranks, and I am glad to be able to state that his Majesty has approved that where service in this great work of supplying the munitions of war has been thoroughly, loyally and continuously rendered, the award of a medal will be granted on the successful termination of the war. [Cheers.]

Saviors Of Europe

By Rene Bazin

[From King Albert's Book.]

I believe that King Albert and Belgium, in sacrificing themselves as they have done for right, have saved Europe.

I believe that in order to act with such decision it was essential to have a King, that is to say, a leader responsible to history, of an old and proved stock.

I believe that for such action a Christian nation was essential, a nation capable of understanding, of accepting, and of enduring the ordeal.

I believe that the first duty of the Allies will be to restore the Kingdom of Belgium, and that the example shown by the King and his people will be exalted in all civilized countries as long as the world reads history.

Britain's Peril of Strikes and Drink

By David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer.

I have promised for some time to address a meeting at Bangor. I have been unable to do so because Ministers of the Crown have been working time and overtime, and I am sorry to say that we are not even able to make the best of the day of rest, the urgency is so great, the pressure is so severe. I had something to say today, otherwise I should not have been here, and I had something to say that required stating at once. This is the only day I had to spare. It is no fault of mine. It is because we are entirely absorbed in the terrible task which has been cast upon our shoulders. I happened to have met on Friday morning, before I decided to come down here, one of the most eminent Scottish divines, a great and old friend of mine, Dr. Whyte of Edinburgh. We were discussing what I have got to say today. I remarked to him, "I have only one day on which to say it, and as that is Sunday afternoon I am very much afraid my constituents won't listen to me." He replied, "If they won't have you, come to Scotland, and we will give you the best Sunday afternoon meeting you ever had." But I thought I would try Wales first. [Cheers.] He told me that in the Shorter Catechism you are allowed to do works of charity and necessity, and those who tell me that this is not work of necessity do not know the need, the dire need, of their country at this hour. At this moment there are Welshmen in the trenches of France facing cannon and death; the hammering of forges today is ringing down the church bells from one end of Europe to the other. When I know these things are going on now on Sunday as well as the week days I am not the hypocrite to say, "I will save my own soul by not talking about them on Sundays." [Cheers.]

Do we understand the necessity? Do we realize it? Belgium, once comfortably well-to-do, is now waste and weeping, and her children are living on the bread of charity sent them by neighbors far and near. And France—the German Army, like a wild beast, has fastened its claws deep into her soil, and every effort to drag them out rends and tears the living flesh of that beautiful land. The beast of prey has not leaped to our shores—not a hair of Britain's head has been touched by him. Why? Because of the vigilant watchdog that patrols the deep for us; and that is my complaint against the British Navy. It does not enable us to realize that Britain at the present moment is waging the most serious war it has ever been engaged in. We do not understand it. A few weeks ago I visited France. We had a conference of the Ministers of Finance of Russia, France, Great Britain, and Belgium. Paris is a changed city. Her gayety, her vivacity, is gone. You can see in the faces of every man there, and of every woman, that they know their country is in the grip of grim tragedy. They are resolved to overcome it, confident that they will overcome it, but only through a long agony.

No visitor to our shores would realize that we are engaged in exactly the same conflict, and that on the stricken fields of the Continent and along the broads and the narrows of the seas that encircle our islands is now being determined, not merely the fate of the British Empire, but the destiny of the human race for generations to come. [Cheers.] We are conducting a war as if there was no war. I have never been doubtful about the result of the war, [cheers,] and I will give you my reasons by and by. Nor have I been doubtful, I am sorry to say, about the length of the war and its seriousness. In all wars nations are apt to minimize their dangers and the duration. Men, after all, see the power of their own country; they cannot visualize the power of the enemy. I have been accounted as a pessimist among my friends in thinking the war would not be over before Christmas. I have always been convinced that the result is inevitably a triumph for this country. I have also been convinced that that result will not be secured without a prolonged struggle. I will tell you why. I shall do so not in order to indulge in vain and idle surmises as to the duration of the war, but in order to bring home to my countrymen what they are confronted with, so as to insure that they will leave nothing which is at their command undone in order, not merely to secure a triumph, but to secure it at the speediest possible moment. It is in their power to do so. It is also in their power, by neglect, by sloth, by heedlessness, to prolong their country's agony, and maybe to endanger at least the completeness of its triumphs. This is what I have come to talk to you about this afternoon, for it is a work of urgent necessity in the cause of human freedom, and I make no apology for discussing on a Sunday the best means of insuring human liberty. [Cheers.]

I will give you first of all my reasons for coming to the conclusion that after this struggle victory must wait on our banners if we properly utilize our resources and opportunities. The natural resources of the allied countries are overwhelmingly greater than those of their enemies. In the man capable of bearing arms, in the financial and economic resources of these countries, in their accessibility to the markets of the world through the command of the sea for the purpose of obtaining material and munitions—all these are preponderatingly in favor of the allied countries. But there is a greater reason than all these. Beyond all is the moral strength of our cause, and that counts in a struggle which involves sacrifices, suffering, and privation for all those engaged in it. A nation cannot endure to the end that has on its soul the crimes of Belgium. [Loud cheers.] The allied powers have at their disposal more than twice the number of men which their enemies can command. You may ask me why are not those overwhelming forces put into the field at once and this terrible war brought to a triumphant conclusion at the earliest possible moment. In the answer to that question lies the cause of the war. The reason why Germany declared war is in the answer to that question.

In the old days when a nation's liberty was menaced by an aggressor a man took from the chimney corner his bow and arrow or his spear, or a sword which had been left to him by an ancestry of warriors, went to the gathering ground of his tribe, and the nation was fully equipped for war. That is not the case now. Now you fight with complicated, highly finished weapons, apart altogether from the huge artillery. Every rifle which a man handles is a complicated and ingenious piece of mechanism, and it takes time. The German arsenals were full of the machinery of horror and destruction. The Russian arsenals were not, and that is the reason for the war. Had Russia projected war, she also would have filled her arsenals, but she desired above everything peace. ["Hear, hear!"] I am not sure that Russia has ever been responsible for a war of aggression against any of her European neighbors. Certainly this is not one of them. She wanted peace, she needed peace, she meant peace, and she would have had peace had she been left alone. She was at the beginning of a great industrial development, and she wanted peace in order to bring it to its full fructification. She had repeatedly stood insolences at the hands of Germany up to the point of humiliation, all for peace, and anything for peace.

Whatever any one may say about her internal Government, Russia was essentially a peaceable nation. The men at the head of her affairs were imbued with the spirit of peace. The head of her army, the Grand Duke Nicholas, [cheers,] is about the best friend of peace in Europe. Never was a nation so bent on preserving peace as Russia was. It is true Germany six or seven years ago had threatened to march her legions across the Vistula and trample down Russia in the mud, and Russia, fearing a repetition of the same threat, was putting herself in a position of defense. But she was not preparing for any aggression, and Germany said, "This won't do. We don't like people who can defend themselves. We are fully prepared. Russia is not. This is the time to plant our dagger of tempered steel in her heart before her breastplates are forged." That is why we are at war. [Cheers.] Germany hurried her preparations, made ready for war. She made a quarrel with the same cool calculation as she had made a new gun. She hurled her warriors across the frontier. Why? Because she wanted to attack somebody, a country that could not defend herself. It was the purest piece of brigandage in history. [Cheers.] All the same there remains the fact that Russia was taken at a disadvantage, and is, therefore, unable to utilize beyond a fraction the enormous resources which she possesses to protect her soil against the invader. France was not expecting war, and she, therefore, was taken unawares.

What about Britain? We never contemplated any war of aggression against any of our neighbors, and therefore we never raised an army adequate to such sinister purposes. During the last thirty years the two great political parties in the State have been responsible for the policy of this country at home and abroad. For about the same period we have each been governing this country. For about fifteen years neither one party nor the other ever proposed to raise an army in this country that would enable us to confront on land a great Continental power. What does that mean? We never meant to invade any Continental country. [Cheers.] That is the proof of it. If we had we would have started our great armies years ago. We had a great navy, purely for protection, purely for the defense of our shores, and we had an army which was just enough to deal with any small raid that happened to get through the meshes of our navy, and perhaps to police the empire. That was all, no more. But now we have to assist neighbors becoming the victims of a power with millions of warriors at its command, and we have to improvise a great army, and gallantly have our men flocked to the standard. [Cheers.] We have raised the largest voluntary army that has been enrolled in any country or any century—the largest voluntary army, and it is going to be larger. [Cheers.]

I saw a very fine sample of that army this morning at Llandudno. I attended a service there, and I think it was about the most thrilling religious service I have ever been privileged to attend. There were men there of every class, every position, every calling, every condition of life. The peasant had left his plow, the workman had left his lathe and his loom, the clerk had left his desk, the trader and the business man had left their counting houses, the shepherd had left his sunlit hills, and the miner the darkness of the earth, the rich proprietor had left his palace, and the man earning his daily bread had quitted his humble cottage. There were men there of diverse and varied faiths who worshipped at different shrines—men who were in array against each other months ago in bitter conflict, and I saw them march with one step under one flag to fight for the same cause, and I saw them worship the same God. What has brought them together? The love of their native land, resentment for a cruel wrong inflicted upon the weak and defenseless. More than that, what brought them together was that instinct which comes to humanity at critical times when the moment has arrived to cross rivers of blood in order to rescue humanity from the grip of some strangling despotism. [Cheers.] They have done nobly. That is what has brought them together, but we want more, [cheers,] and I have no doubt we will get more.

If this country had produced an army which was equal in proportion to its population to the number of men under arms in France and in Germany at the present moment there would be three millions and a half in this country and 1,200,000 in the Colonies. [Cheers.] That is what I mean when I say our resources are quite adequate to the task. It is not our fight merely—it is the fight of humanity. [Cheers.] The allied countries between them could raise armies of over twenty millions of men. Our enemies can put in the field barely half that number.

Much as I should like to talk about the need for more men, that is not the point of my special appeal today. We stand more in need of equipment than we do of men. This is an engineers' war, [cheers,] and it will be won or lost owing to the efforts or shortcomings of engineers. I have something to say about that, for it involves sacrifices for all of us. Unless we are able to equip our armies our predominance in men will avail us nothing. We need men, but we need arms more than men, and delay in producing them is full of peril for this country. You may say that I am saying things that ought to be kept from the enemy. I am not a believer in giving any information which is useful to him. You may depend on it he knows, but I do not believe in withholding from our own public information which they ought to possess, because unless you tell them you cannot invite their co-operation. The nation that cannot bear the truth is not fit for war, and may our young men be volunteers, while the unflinching pride of those they have left behind them in their deed of sacrifice ought to satisfy the most apprehensive that we are not a timid race, who cannot face unpleasant facts! The last thing in the world John Bull wants is to be mollycoddled. The people must be told exactly what the position is, and then we can ask them to help. We must appeal for the co-operation of employers, workmen, and the general public; the three must act and endure together, or we delay and maybe imperil victory. We ought to requisition the aid of every man who can handle metal. It means that the needs of the community in many respects will suffer acutely vexatious, and perhaps injurious, delay; but I feel sure that the public are prepared to put up with all this discomfort, loss, and privation if thereby their country marches triumphantly out of this great struggle. [Cheers.] We have every reason for confidence; we have none for complacency. Hope is the mainspring of efficiency; complacency is its rust.

We laugh at things in Germany that ought to terrify us. We say, "Look at the way they are making their bread—out of potatoes, ha, ha!" Aye, that potato-bread spirit is something which is more to dread than to mock at. I fear that more than I do even von Hindenburg's strategy, efficient as it may be. That is the spirit in which a country should meet a great emergency, and instead of mocking at it we ought to emulate it. I believe we are just as imbued with the spirit as Germany is, but we want it evoked. [Cheers.] The average Briton is too shy to be a hero until he is asked. The British temper is one of never wasting heroism on needless display, but there is plenty of it for the need. There is nothing Britishers would not give up for the honor of their country or for the cause of freedom. Indulgences, comforts, even the necessities of life they would willingly surrender. Why, there are two millions of them at this hour who have willingly tendered their lives for their country. What more could they do? If the absorption of all our engineering resources is demanded, no British citizen will grudge his share of inconvenience.

But what about those more immediately concerned in that kind of work? Here I am approaching something which is very difficult to talk about—I mean the employers and workmen. I must speak out quite plainly; nothing else is of the slightest use. For one reason or another we are not getting all the assistance we have the right to expect from our workers. Disputes, industrial disputes, are inevitable; and when you have a good deal of stress and strain, men's nerves are not at their best. I think I can say I always preserve my temper in these days—I hope my wife won't give me away—[laughter]—and I have no doubt that the spirit of unrest creeps into the relations between employer and workmen. Some differences of opinion are quite inevitable, but we cannot afford them now; and, above all, we cannot resort to the usual method of settling them.

I suppose I have settled more labor disputes than any man in this hall, and, although those who only know me slightly may be surprised to hear me say it, the thing that you need most is patience. If I were to give a motto to a man who is going to a conference between employers and workmen I would say: "Take your time; don't hurry. It will come around with patience and tact and temper." But you know we cannot afford those leisurely methods now. Time is victory, [cheers,] and while employers and workmen on the Clyde have been spending time in disputing over a fraction, and when a week-end, ten days, and a fortnight of work which is absolutely necessary for the defense of the country has been set aside, I say here solemnly that it is intolerable that the life of Britain should be imperiled for the matter of a farthing an hour.

Who is to blame? That is not the question, but—How it is to be stopped? Employers will say, "Are we always to give way?" Workmen say, "Employers are making their fortunes out of an emergency of the country; why are not we to have a share of the plunder?" ["Hear, hear!" and laughter.] There is one gentleman here who holds that view. [Laughter.] I hope he is not an engineer. [Renewed laughter.] "We work harder than ever," say the workmen. All I can say is, if they do they are entitled to their share. But that is not the point—who is right? Who is wrong? They are both right and they are both wrong. The whole point is that these questions ought to be settled without throwing away the chances of humanity in its greatest struggle. [Cheers.] There is a good deal to be said for and there is a vast amount to be said against compulsory arbitration, but during the war the Government ought to have power to settle all these differences, and the work should go on. The workman ought to get more. Very well, let the Government find it out and give it to him. If he ought not, then he ought not to throw up his tools. The country cannot afford it. It is disaster, and I do not believe the moment this comes home to workmen and employers they will refuse to comply with the urgent demand of the Government. There must be no delay.

There is another aspect of the question which it is difficult and dangerous to tackle. There are all sorts of regulations for restricting output. I will say nothing about the merits of this question. There are reasons why they have been built up. The conditions of employment and payment are mostly to blame for those restrictions. The workmen had to fight for them for their own protection, but in a period of war there is a suspension of ordinary law. Output is everything in this war.

This war is not going to be fought mainly on the battlefields of Belgium and Poland. It is going to be fought in the workshops of France and Great Britain; and it must be fought there under war conditions. There must be plenty of safeguards and the workman must get his equivalent, but I do hope he will help us to get as much out of those workshops as he can, for the life of the nation depends on it. Our enemies realize that, and employers and workmen in Germany are straining their utmost. France, fortunately, also realizes it, and in that land of free institutions, with a Socialist Prime Minister, a Socialist Secretary of State for War, and a Socialist Minister of Marine, the employers and workmen are subordinating everything to the protection of their beautiful land.

I have something more to say about this, and it is unpleasant. I would wish that it were not I, but somebody else that should say it. Most of our workmen are putting every ounce of strength into this urgent work for their country, loyally and patriotically. But that is not true of all. There are some, I am sorry to say, who shirk their duty in this great emergency. I hear of workmen in armaments works who refuse to work a full week's work for the nation's need. What is the reason? They are a minority. The vast majority belong to a class we can depend upon. The others are a minority. But, you must remember, a small minority of workmen can throw a whole works out of gear. What is the reason? Sometimes it is one thing, sometimes it is another, but let us be perfectly candid. It is mostly the lure of the drink. They refuse to work full time, and when they return their strength and efficiency are impaired by the way in which they have spent their leisure. Drink is doing us more damage in the war than all the German submarines put together.

What has Russia done? [Cheers.] Russia, knowing her deficiency, knowing how unprepared she was, said, "I must pull myself together. I am not going to be trampled upon, unready as I am. I will use all my resources." What is the first thing she does? She stops the drink. [Cheers.] I was talking to M. Bark, the Russian Minister of Finance, a singularly able man, and I asked, "What has been the result?" He said, "The productivity of labor, the amount of work which is put out by the workmen, has gone up between 30 and 50 per cent." [Cheers.] I said, "How do they stand it without their liquor?" and he replied, "Stand it? I have lost revenue over it up to £65,000,000 a year, and we certainly cannot afford it, but if I proposed to put it back there would be a revolution in Russia." That is what the Minister of Finance told me. He told me that it is entirely attributable to the act of the Czar himself. It was a bold and courageous step—one of the most heroic things in the war. [Cheers.] One afternoon we had to postpone our conference in Paris, and the French Minister of Finance said, "I have got to go to the Chamber of Deputies, because I am proposing a bill to abolish absinthe." [Cheers.] Absinthe plays the same part in France that whisky plays in this country. It is really the worst form of drink used; not only among workmen, but among other classes as well. Its ravages are terrible, and they abolished it by a majority of something like 10 to 1 that afternoon. [Cheers.]

That is how those great countries are facing their responsibilities. We do not propose anything so drastic as that—we are essentially moderate men. [Laughter.] But we are armed with full powers for the defense of the realm. We are approaching it, I do not mind telling you, for the moment, not from the point of view of people who have been considering this as a social problem—we are approaching it purely from the point of view of these works. We have got great powers to deal with drink, and we mean to use them. [Cheers.] We shall use them in a spirit of moderation, we shall use them discreetly, we shall use them wisely, but we shall use them fearlessly, [cheers,] and I have no doubt that, as the country's needs demand it, the country will support our action and will allow no indulgence of that kind to interfere with its prospects in this terrible war which has been thrust upon us.

There are three things I want you to bear in mind. The first is—and I want to get this into the minds of every one—that we are at war; the second, that it is the greatest war that has ever been fought by this or any other country, and the other, that the destinies of your country and the future of the human race for generations to come depend upon the outcome of this war. What does it mean were Germany to win? It means world power for the worst elements in Germany, not for Germany. The Germans are an intelligent race; they are undoubtedly a cultivated race; they are a race of men who have been responsible for great ideas in this world. But this would mean the dominance of the worst elements among them. If you think I am exaggerating just you read for the moment extracts from the articles in the newspapers which are in the ascendency now in Germany about the settlement which they expect after this war. I am sorry to say I am stating nothing but the bare, brutal truth. I do not say that the Kaiser will sit on the throne of England if he should win. I do not say that he will impose his laws and his language on this country as did William the Conqueror. I do not say that you will hear the tramp, the noisy tramp of the goose step in the cities of the Empire. [Laughter.] I do not say that Death's Head Hussars will be patrolling our highways. I do not say that a visitor, let us say, to Aberdaron, will have to ask a Pomeranian policeman the best way to Hell's Mouth. [Loud laughter.] That is not what I mean. What I mean is that if Germany were triumphant in this war it would practically be the dictator of the international policy of the world. Its spirit would be in the ascendant. Its doctrines would be in the ascendant; by the sheer power of its will it would bend the minds of men in its own fashion. Germanism in its later and worst form would be the inspiriting thought and philosophy of the hour.

Do you remember what happened to France after 1870? The German armies left France, but all the same for years after that, and while France was building up her army, she stood in cowering terror of this monster. Even after her great army was built France was oppressed with a constant anxiety as to what might happen. Germany dismissed her Ministers. Had it not been for the intervention of Queen Victoria in 1874 the French Army would never have been allowed to be reconstructed, and France would simply have been the humble slave of Germany to this hour. What a condition for a country! And now France is fighting not so much to recover her lost provinces, she is fighting to recover her self-respect and her national independence; she is fighting to shake off this nightmare that has been on her soul for over a generation, [cheers,] a France with Germany constantly meddling, bullying, and interfering. And that is what would happen if Russia were trampled upon, France broken, Britain disarmed. We should be left without any means to defend ourselves. We might have a navy that would enable us, perhaps, to resent insult from Nicaragua, [laughter,] we might have just enough troops, perhaps, to confront the Mad Mullah—I mean the African specimen. [Loud laughter.]

Where would the chivalrous country be to step in to protect us as we protected France in 1874? America? If countries like Russia and France, with their huge armies, and the most powerful navy in the world could not face this terrible military machine, if it breaks that combination, how can America step in? It would be more than America can do to defend her own interests on her own continent if Germany is triumphant. They are more unready than we were. Ah! but what manner of Germany would we be subordinate to? There has been a struggle going on in Germany for over thirty years between its best and its worst elements. It is like that great struggle which is depicted, I think, in one of Wagner's great operas between the good and the evil spirit for the possession of the man's soul. That great struggle has been going on in Germany for thirty or forty years. At each successive general election the better elements seemed to be getting the upper hand, and I do not mind saying I was one of those who believed they were going to win. I thought they were going to snatch the soul of Germany—it is worth saving, it is a great, powerful soul—I thought they were going to save it. So a dead military caste said, "We will have none of this," and they plunged Europe into seas of blood. Hope was again shattered. Those worst elements will emerge triumphant out of this war if Germany wins.

What does that mean? We shall be vassals, not to the best Germany, not to the Germany of sweet songs and inspiring, noble thoughts—not to the Germany of science consecrated to the service of man, not to the Germany of a virile philosophy that helped to break the shackles of superstition in Europe—not to that Germany, but to a Germany that talked through the raucous voice of Krupp's artillery, a Germany that has harnessed science to the chariot of destruction and of death, the Germany of a philosophy of force, violence, and brutality, a Germany that would quench every spark of freedom either in its own land or in any other country in rivers of blood. I make no apology on a day consecrated to the greatest sacrifice for coming here to preach a holy war against that. [Great cheering.]

Concluding this speech in Welsh, Mr. Lloyd George said: "War is a time of sacrifice and of service. Some can render one service, some another, some here and some there. Some can render great assistance, others but little. There is not one who cannot help in some measure, whether it be only by enduring cheerfully his share of the discomfort. In the old Welsh legend there is a story of a man who was given a series of what appeared to be impossible tasks to perform ere he could reach the desires of his heart. Among other things he had to do was to recover every grain of seed that had been sown in a large field and bring it all in without one missing by sunset. He came to an anthill and won all the hearts and enlisted the sympathies of the industrious little people. They spread over the field, and before sundown the seed was all in except one, and as the sun was setting over the western skies a lame ant hobbled along with that grain also. Some of us have youth and vigor and suppleness of limb; some of us are crippled with years or infirmities, and we are at best but little ants. But we can all limp along with some share of our country's burden, and thus help her in this terrible hour to win the desire of her heart." [Loud cheers.]

Mr. Lloyd George and his party returned after the meeting to Llandudno, where today he will inspect the First Brigade of the Welsh Army Corps.

BRITAIN'S MUNITIONS COMMITTEE

LONDON, April 14.—The Times says this morning:

An important step has at last been taken by the Government toward the solution of the supreme problem of the moment—the organization of the national output of munitions of war. A strong committee has been appointed, with full power to deal with the question. It is to be representative of not merely one department but of the Treasury, Admiralty, War Office, and Board of Trade; in short, of the whole Government, with all its resources and authority.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer is to be Chairman, and the first meeting will be held today.

The work before the committee is nothing less than the organization of the whole resources of the nation for the production of materials of war. Hitherto, in spite of many warnings and some half-hearted attempts at organization, there has been no central, co-ordinated authority.

It is an open secret that it was during Lloyd George's visit to France at the beginning of the year that he first appreciated the scientific organization of labor which our Allies had already achieved. Not content with utilizing and extending the existing armament plant, the French have long since diverted several temporarily irrelevant industries to the main business of waging war.

With reference to the drink problem The Times says:

While the Government is apparently considering the expropriation of all the licensed houses in the kingdom, this far-reaching proposal has not at present gone beyond the stage of inquiry and consultation, and it is tolerably certain that it will go no farther unless it is assured of no serious opposition in the country.

The Parliamentary Opposition, the leaders of which have been consulted in a general way, are believed to stand by the principle which they followed since the war began, namely: They are not prepared to quarrel with any measure which the Government regards as necessary for the active prosecution of the war so long as no injustice is done to established interests.

Italy's Evolution as Reflected in Her Press

Italy has reached her present position through the development of a policy the steps of which have been brightly illuminated by the press of the Peninsula. The most important of these steps may be designated as follows:

First, the declaration of the Government to the German Ambassador at Rome on Aug. 1, 1914, that it did not regard the conflict begun by Austria-Hungary and Germany as a defensive war and hence not binding on it as a member of the Triple Alliance, and its subsequent declarations of "neutrality," of "armed neutrality," and of "a neutrality which is likely to be broken if the interests of the country demanded it."

Second, Premier Salandra's speech of Dec. 3 for "armed, alert neutrality," and the declaration in Parliament on Dec. 5 by Signor Giolitti showing that the declaration of Aug. 1 was merely a repetition of one conveyed to Austria in the Summer of 1913, when Austria had suggested that she aid Bulgaria in subduing Serbia.

Third, the arrival in Rome in December of the former German Imperial Chancellor, Prince von Bülow, as Extraordinary Ambassador to the Quirinal, for the purpose of keeping Italy neutral, and, when this seemed doubtful, to negotiate between Italy and Austria what territorial compensation the latter would render the former in order to perpetuate the neutrality of the Peninsula.

Aside from the influence of these official acts, which invited press comments, the Italian papers have paid keen attention to the conduct of the war, concerning which the Government could not, on account of its neutrality, offer an opinion. Among such incidents of conduct have been the British declaration of a protectorate over Egypt and the bombardment of the Dardanelles by the Franco-British fleet.

In order to weigh the full significance of the comments of the Italian papers on these subjects a word may be said concerning the status of the journals themselves:

The most conspicuous is the Idea Nazionale, a paper of Rome practically dedicated to intervention. Then comes the conservative and solid Corriere della Sera of Milan, whose Rome correspondent, Signor Torre, has peculiar facilities for learning the intentions of the Ministry. Both the Tribuna and the Giornale d'Italia are considered Government organs, but, while the former rarely comments with authority except on accomplished facts, the latter, although often voicing the unofficial and personal opinions of Premier Salandra, who is known to be privately in favor of intervention, also voices the sentiment of former Premier Giolitti, who is known to be for continued neutrality. The Stampa of Turin is a Giolitti organ.

The Osservatore Romano is the well-known Vatican organ, which naturally supports Austria, a Catholic country, where such support does not conflict too pointedly with the sentiments of Catholics in neutral countries. Other clerical papers with strong pro-German opinions and with German industrial backing are the Corriere d'Italia and the Popolo Romano. The Messaggero of Rome and the Secolo of Milan, influenced by important British and French interests, are for intervention at all costs. The Avanti is the Socialist organ.

Some Ruses De Guerre.

By A.M. WAKEMAN.

(Respectfully submitted to the British Government.)

The European War As Seen By Cartoonists

Facsimile of a Belgian Bread-Check

The card is in French and Flemish. The face reads: "No. 6,715. Gratis. City of Brussels, Department of Public Supplies. Committee No. 1. Street ——. Card issued to the family ——, living at ——, for the daily delivery of —— portions. To be presented at ——Street. N.B.—Victuals will be delivered only to the father or mother of a family." The reverse side bears stamps showing the dates on which rations were issued to the holder. The original is somewhat larger than this reproduction.

To A German Apologist

By BEATRICE BARRY.

America's Neutrality

By Count Albert Apponyi

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 28, 1915.]

I have been greatly interested in your account of American neutrality in the present European crisis. I must confess that I had seen it in a somewhat different light before and that some of the facts under our notice still appear to me as hardly concordant with the magnificent attitude of impartiality, nay, not even with the international duties of neutrality, which intellectual and official America professes to keep.

We cannot explain to ourselves that a neutral power should suffer the selling of arms and ammunition by its citizens to one of the belligerent parties, when no such selling to the other party is practically feasible; we cannot understand why America should meekly submit to the dictates of England, declaring all foodstuffs and manufacturing materials contraband of war, with not even a show of right and with the clear and openly proclaimed intention of starving Germany and Austria-Hungary; why, on the other hand, America should use an almost threatening language against Germany, and against Germany alone, when the latter country announces reprisals against the English trade, which, under given circumstances, can be considered only as acts of legitimate self-defense against an enemy who chooses to wage war not on our soldiers only, but on our women and children, too.

With all the respect we feel for the United States, we cannot find this attitude of their Government either fair or dignified. I offer these remarks in no spirit of uncalled-for criticism, but because I see how much the moral authority of the United States and their splendid situation as the providential peace makers of some future—alas! still far off—day has been impaired by the aforementioned proceedings. We cannot help considering them as so many acts of ill-disguised hostility against ourselves and of compliance with our foes. How can you expect, then, to have your good offices accepted with confidence by both belligerent parties when the times are ripe for them? It seems like the throwing away of a magnificent opportunity, and I think that those who, like yourself, cherish for your country the noble ambition of being some day the restorer of peace, should exert themselves to prevent practices which, if continued, would disable her to play any such part.

In your letter you strike the keynote of what I cannot help considering the partiality of Americans for the Entente powers. It is the idea that "in the western area of conflict, at least, there is an armed clash between the representatives of dynastic institutions and bureaucratic rule on the one hand with those of representative government and liberal institutions on the other." I can understand that it impresses some people that way, but I beg to enter a protest against this interpretation of the conflict.

Liberal or less liberal institutions have nothing to do with it in the west; the progress of democracy in Germany will not be stopped by her victory, it will rather be promoted by it, because the masses are conscious of bearing the burden of war and of being the main force of its vigorous prosecution, and they are enlightened and strong enough to insist on a proper reward. Rights cannot be denied to those who fulfilled duties involving self-sacrifice of the sublimest kind with unflinching devotion. No practical interest of democracy then is involved in the conflict of the western powers.

As to their representing liberal institutions in a higher or lower degree, I am perfectly willing to admit England's superior claims in that respect, but I am not at all inclined to recognize such superiority in modern France, republic though she calls herself. The omnipresence and omnipotence of an obtruding bureaucratic officialism is just what it has been under the old monarchy; religious oppression has only changed sides, but it still flourishes as before. In former times the Roman Catholic religion was considered as a State religion and in her name were dissent and Freemasonry oppressed; today atheism is the official creed, and on its behalf are Catholic believers oppressed.

Separation of Church and State, honestly planned and loyally fulfilled in America has been perverted in modern France into a network of vexations and unfair measures against the Church and her faithful servants; the same term is used and this misleads you to cover widely different meanings. In a word, it is a perfect mistake to consider modern France as the "sweet land of liberty" which America is. A German citizen, with less show of political rights, enjoys more personal freedom than is granted to a French one, if he happens to differ from the ruling mentality.

So stand things in the western area of conflict. But how about the east? You are kind enough to admit in your letter that "from this (the aforementioned) standpoint of course the appearance of Russia among the allies is an anomaly and must be explained on other grounds." Anomaly is a rather tame word to characterize the meaning of this appearance of Russia. I should hardly designate it by this term.

She does not "appear among the allies." She is the leading power among them; it is her war, as Mr. Tsvolski, the Russian Ambassador to Paris, very properly remarked: "C'est ma guerre." She planned it, she gave Austria-Hungary no chance to live on peaceful terms with her neighbors, she forced it upon us, she drew France into it by offering her a bait which that poor country could not resist, she created the situation which England considered as her best opportunity for crushing Germany. I must repeat it over and over again: it is in its origin a Russian war, with a clearly outlined Russian program of conquest.

Here, then, you have a real clash between two principles; not shades of principles as these may subsist between Germany and her western foes, but principles in all their essential features; not between different tints of gray, but between black and white, between affirmation and negation; affirmation of the principle of human dignity, liberty, safety, and negation of the same; western evolution and eastern reaction.

I wonder why those prominent Americans who are so deeply impressed by the comparatively slight shades of liberalism differentiating Germany from England and France are not struck by the absolute contrast existing between Muscovitism and western civilized rule as represented by Austria-Hungary and Germany; that they overlook the outstanding fact that while in the western area the conflict has nothing whatever to do with the principles embodied in the home policy of the belligerents, in the east, on the other hand, these principles will in truth be affected by the results of war, since a Russian victory, followed by a Russian conquest, would mean the retrogression of western institutions and the corresponding expansion of eastern ones over a large area and large numbers of men.

It is the consciousness of fighting in this war which has been forced upon us, against the direst calamity threatening our kind and on behalf of the most precious conquests of progress and civilization, which enhances our moral force so as to make it unconquerable. The hope which I expressed in my first letter, that Serbia's doom would soon be fulfilled, has been prostrated by the mistakes of an over-confident Commander in Chief; but that means postponement only and does not alter the prospects of war in their essentials.

Good progress is achieved in the campaign against Russia; a chapter of it may be brought to a happy close before long. The spirit of the country shows no symptom of weakening; it is really wonderful what a firm resolve pervades our whole people, though every man between twenty and forty-two stands in the field, and though the losses are frightful. Economically we hold out easily; the expenses of war are defrayed by inner loans, which give unexpected results; every bit of arable land is tilled as in time of peace, the old, the women and the half-grown youths doing the work of their absent supporters, neighbors assisting each other in a spirit of brotherhood truly admirable. In cases of urgent need we have the prisoners of war, whose number increased to nearly 300,000 (in Austria-Hungary alone) and to whom it is a real boon to find employment in the sort of work they are accustomed to.

The manufacturing interest, of course, suffers severe losses; but the number of the unemployed is rather less than usual, since a greater part of the "hands" is absorbed by the army. In a word, though the sufferings of war are keenly felt, they are less severe than had been expected, and there is not the smallest indication of a break-down. The area of Germany, Austria, and Hungary taken as a whole is self-supporting with regard to foodstuffs. The English scheme of starving us is quite as silly as it is abominable. England can, of course, inflict severe losses on our manufacturers by closing the seas against their imports and exports; but this is not a matter of life and death, such as the first reprisals of Germany, if successful, may prove to England.

Generally speaking, it seems likely that England will be caught in the net of her own intrigue. She did not scruple to enlist the services of Japan against her white enemies, but this act of treachery will be revenged upon herself. The latest proceedings of Japan against China can have one meaning only—the wholesale expulsion of the white man from Eastern Asia. The Japs do not care one straw who wins in Europe; they seized upon their own opportunity for their own purposes. England only gets her deserts; but how do Americans feel about it? Can America be absolved from a certain amount of responsibility for what may soon prove imminent danger to herself? Has not her partiality for England given encouragement to methods of warfare unprecedented in the history of civilized nations and fruitful of evil consequences to neutral nations?

To us, in our continental position, all this means much less than it means to you. It does not endanger our prospects. We feel comparatively stronger every day. Our losses, though enormous, are only one-half of those of the Entente armies, according to the Geneva Red Cross Bureau's calculation. The astounding number of unwounded prisoners of war which Russia loses at every encounter, and even in spaces of time between two encounters, shows that the moral force of her army is slowly giving way, while the vigor of our troops is constantly increasing. After six months of severe fighting our military position is certainly stronger than the position of the Entente powers, though the latter represent a population of 250,000,000, (English colonies and Japan not included,) against the 140,000,000 of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. Who can doubt on which side superior moral power fights? Who can doubt, therefore, what the ultimate result promises to be?

If it takes more time to bring matters to a decision—and a decision must be obtained at any price, if there is to follow a period of permanent peace—part, at least, of the responsibility for the horrors of the protracted war, for the slaughter of many hundred thousands more of human beings, rests on America. But for the American transports of guns and ammunition, the power of Russia would give way in a shorter time, considering her enormous losses in that respect and her inability to supplement them from her own workshops.

It is very edifying that American pacifists are exerting themselves against the current of militarism which appears to spread in their country; but wouldn't it be better still, more to the purpose and certainly practically more urgent, to insist upon a truly neutral attitude of the great republic, to protest against her feeding the war by providing one belligerent side with its implements? Do American pacifists really fail to see that their country by such proceedings disables herself from being the peacemaker of the future? Do they think it immaterial from the standpoint of her moral power, as well as of her material interests, how central Europe, a mass of 120,000,000, think of her, feel about her?

I hope my readers will not find fault with me for using such plain language. My well-known enthusiastic regard for the great American commonwealth makes it unnecessary that I should protest against the charge of meaning disrespect or anything else whatever but a sincere desire to state with absolute sincerity how we feel about these matters, in what light they appear to us. I think America must know this, because it is part of the general situation she has to reckon with when shaping her policies. I fervently hope these policies will remain in concordance with the great principles on which the commonwealth is built and with the teaching embodied in that farewell address which is read once a year in Congress and in which the greatest American emphatically warns his countrymen from becoming entangled in the conflicts of European nations.

A few words more about the future of Europe may be said on this occasion. I have read with the keenest interest your own and Mr. Carnegie's statements concerning a future organization of Europe on the pattern of the United States. My personal views concerning this magnificent idea have been expressed in anticipation in my America lectures of the year 1911. Allow me to quote my own words:

Let me add to this the following remarks:

1. Any sort of union among the nations of Europe appears impossible if it is meant to include Russia. Russia represents eastern mentality, which implies an unadmissible spirit of aggression and of conquest. It seems to be a law of nature on the old Continent that eastern nations should wish to expand to the west as long as they are powerful. Not to mention the great migration of nations which gave birth to mediaeval organizations, you may follow this law in the history of the Tartars, of the Turks, and of Russia herself. The spirit of aggressiveness vanishes only when decay sets in, which is still far from being the case of Russia, or when a nation is gradually converted to Occidental mentality, which, I hope, will some day be her happy lot. But till then, and that may mean a century or two, any sort of union including Russia would mean a herd of sheep including a wolf.

2. What I hope then, for the present, as the most desirable result of the war, is a thorough understanding between the nations of the Western European Continent, construction of a powerful political block, corresponding to the area of western mentality, in close connection with America; such a block would discourage aggression from the east; it would urge Russia on the path of reform and home improvement. England would be welcome to join it, on condition of renouncing those pretensions to monopolizing the seas which are as constant a menace to peace as Russian aggressiveness is. So we should have, if not "the United States of Europe," which at present lies beyond the boundary lines of possibilities, a strong peace union of the homogeneous western nations. Alas! this result can be reached only by destroying the present unnatural connections, which mean the continuance of war till a crushing decision is obtained.

3. The American colonies of England did not think of union as of a peace scheme; they had been compelled into it by war, by the necessity of self-defense. It is only such an overpowering motive which has force enough to blot out petty rivalries and minor antagonisms. If union between States belonging to the same race and not divided either by history or by serious conflicting interests could be effected only under the pressure of a common peril, we must infer "a minori ad majus" that such a powerful incentive will be more necessary still to persuade into union nations of different races, each cherishing memories of mutual collisions and actually aware of not unimportant clashing interests.

The menace of aggression from the east has been brought home to us by the present war; gradually it will be understood even by those Occidentals who at present unhappily lend their support to that aggression. On this perception of the higher common interests of self-defense do I build the possibilities of a western coalition. But a time may come when Russia will be compelled to join it and to complete thereby the union of the whole of Europe; it may come sooner than the conversion of Russia to western ideas could be effected by natural evolution; it may come through the yellow peril, the menace of which has been brought nearer to us by the accursed policy of England.

Let Japan organize the dormant forces of China, as it seems bent upon doing, and the same law of eastern aggressiveness which is at the bottom of the present war will push the yellow mass toward Europe. Russia, as comparatively western, will have to bear their first onset; for this she will require Occidental assistance, and in the turmoil of that direful conflict—or, let us hope, in order to avoid it—she will readily give up all designs against her western neighbors, and she may become really western by the necessities which impel her to lean on the west.

But this may or may not happen. What I see before me as a tangible possibility is the great western block. It is the only principle of reconstruction after war that contains a guarantee of a permanent peace; it is the one, therefore, which the pacifists of all nations should strive for, once they get rid of the passing mentality of conflict that now obscures the judgment of the best among us.

Neutral Spirit of the Swiss

An Interview With President Motta of the Swiss Confederation

[From The London Times, Jan. 30, 1915.]

BERNE, Jan. 20.

The President of the Swiss Confederation is the symbol of a democracy so perfect that the man in the street is not quite sure who the President is. He knows that he is one of a council of seven, and that he is elected for one year, and that is all. In the Federal Palace, the Berne Westminster and Downing Street, the anonymity is almost as complete. Officers pass and repass in the corridors—one of the signs, like the waiting military motor cars at the door, of mobilization—but this does not change the spirit, simple and civilian, of the interior.

M. Motta, Chief of State for this year, is a man of early middle life. He is the best type of Swiss, a lawyer by profession, whose limpid French seems to express culture as well as candor. Nor could one doubt for a moment the sincerity of his speech. Speaking on the Swiss position in the war, M. Motta was anxious to remove the impression that it was colored, dominated by the existence of the German-speaking cantons, more numerous than the French. "Of course," he said, "we have our private sympathies, which incline us one way or the other, and there is the language tie—though here we are greatly attached to our Bernese patois—but I would have you believe the Swiss are essentially just and impartial, they look at the war objectively.

"We have good-will toward all the nations. Need I say that we respect and esteem England? Have you not found that you are well received? There is no antagonistic feeling against any one. Our neutrality is imposed upon us by our position, a neutrality that is threefold in its effects, for it is political, financial, and economic. Italy, France, Germany, Austria, are our neighbors; we send them goods, and we receive supplies from them in return."

We then talked of the army, of that wonderful little army which, at this moment, is watching the snowy passes of the Alps. Two years ago it is said to have impressed the Kaiser on manoeuvres; perhaps for that reason he has refrained to pass that way. Outside, in the slippery streets, over which the red-capped children passed with shouts of glee, I had seen something of the preparations; the men, steel-like and stolid, marching by, the officers, stiff and martial-looking, saluting right and left under the quaint arcades of this charming city. Colored photographs of corps commanders adorned the windows and seemed to find a ready sale. These things pointed in the same direction. Switzerland, posted on her crests, was watching the issue of the terrific struggle in the plains.

"We must defend our neutrality," the President said, "our 600 years of freedom. There is not a single man in the country who thinks differently. I am an Italian-Swiss, one of the least numerous of our nationalities, but there is only one voice here as elsewhere—only one voice from Ticino to Geneva. That we shall defend our neutrality is proved by the great expenditure on our army; otherwise, it would be the height of folly."

The President spoke of army expenditure, of the simple army system, of the reorganization which had been carried out some years before. Switzerland was spending £20,000 a day, a large sum for a small country. Since the day when the general mobilization had been decreed—some classes have now been liberated—Switzerland had spent £4,500,000. It was a lot of money.

The army, of course, was a militia; some few officers were professional soldiers, others were drawn from a civil career and were doctors, lawyers, engineers, and merchants. In 1907 the country had consented to lengthen the periods of training in what are quaintly called the "recruits' schools" and "rehearsal schools." In the former category the men do sixty-five days' training a year, in the latter forty-five.

"I assure you," continued M. Motta, "whatever sympathy the German-Swiss may feel toward Germany, the French-Swiss toward France, or the Italian toward Italy, it is nothing like as warm and as intimate as that which each Swiss feels toward his fellow-Swiss."

This was the national note which dominated everything. At first there was a little difficulty in the councils of the nation. Some showed a tendency to lose their balance, but that phase had passed, and each day, I gathered, purely Swiss interests were coming uppermost.

"And the press, M. le President?"

M. Motta admitted that some writers had been excessive in their language and had been lacking in good taste; but, on the whole, he thought the newspapers had impartially printed news from both sides, and he cited a list of leading organs—Switzerland is amazingly full of papers—which had been conspicuous for their moderation.

And then there was the question of contraband. Orders were very precise on the subject; the Cabinet had limitless power since the opening of the war; if there was any smuggling it was infinitesimal, and, as to foodstuffs, Switzerland regretted she could not import more for her own needs. The Government had established a monopoly and forbidden re-exportation, but supplies were not up to the normal. The route by the Rhine was closed.

Finally came the phrase, concluding the conversation: "Whoever violates our neutrality will force us to become the allies of his enemy." There could be nothing more categorical.

To King And People.

By WALTER SICHEL.

[From King Albert's Book.]

A Swiss View of Germany

By Maurice Millioud

Humanitarians the most deeply buried in dreams yield with stupefaction to the evidence of fact. European war was possible, since here it is, and even a world war, for all continents are represented in the mêlée. Millions of men on the one side or the other are ranged along battle fronts of from 500 to 1,000 kilometers. We are witnessing a displacement of human masses to which there is nothing comparable except the formidable convulsions of geologic ages.

The world then was in formation. Will a new Europe, a new society, a new humanity, take form from the prodigious shock by which our imagination is confounded?

We can at least seek to understand what we cannot hinder.

This war was not a matter of blind fate, but had been foreseen for a long time. What are the forces that have set the nations in movement? I do not seek to establish responsibility. Whosoever it may be, those who have let loose the conflict have behind them peoples of one mind. That, perhaps, is the most surprising feature in an epoch when economic, social, and moral interests are so interwoven from one end of the earth to the other that the conqueror himself must suffer cruelly from the ruin of the conquered.

The Governments have determined the day and the hour. They could not have done it in opposition to the manifest will of the nations. Public sentiment has seconded them. What is it then which rouses man from his repose, impels him to desert his gains, his home, the security of a regular life, and sends him in eager search for bloody adventures?

This problem involves different solutions because it embraces a number of cases. Between the Russians, the French, the English, the Germans there is a similarity of will, but not, it seems, an analogy of sentiment. I shall undertake to analyze the case of Germany. It has peculiar interest on account of its importance, of its definiteness, of the comparisons to which it leads, and the reflections which it suggests. Numerous facts easy to verify and in part recent permit us to throw some light upon it and offer us a guarantee against hazardous conjectures.

Defining a caste as "a group of men bound to each other by solidarity of functions in society," such as the Brahmins of India and the feudal nobility, Prof. Millioud says that he will use the terms as equivalent or nearly equivalent to a "directing class." Quoting the article from Vorwaerts which led to the suspension of that Socialist organ and which "admits by implication that responsibility for the war falls on Germany," he proceeds to examine the origins of the influence of the war party and the interests it served.

Here we must have recourse to history. In Germany the dominant class is composed in part of an aristocracy by birth and of bourgeois capitalists, more or less of them ennobled. The interior policy of Germany since 1871 and even since 1866 is explained by the relations, sometimes kindly, sometimes hostile, of these two categories of persons, by the opposition or the conjunction of these two influences, and not by a struggle of the dominant class against the socialistic mass. That struggle, which is in France and is becoming in England a fact of essential gravity, has been in Germany only a phenomenon of secondary importance. It has determined neither the profound evolution of the national life nor the chief decisions of the Government.

In Germany, as is known, the abolition of the ancien régime did not take place brusquely as in France. After the revolution and the French occupation, the noble caste recovered all its privileges. It has lost them little by little, but not yet entirely. Even the liquidation of the property of the feudal régime was not completed until toward 1850. Napoleon made some sad cuts in the little sovereignties, but from 1813 to 1815 the princely families did their utmost to recover their independence. The greater part were mediatized, but their tenacity offered a serious obstacle up to 1871 to the establishment of German unity.

That unity was accomplished in despite of them, by sword and fire, as Bismarck said, that is to say, by the wars of 1866 and 1870. Care was taken, however, not to abase them more than was strictly necessary, for it was intended to maintain the hierarchy. What was wanted was a monarchical unity, made from above down, and not a democratic unity brought about by popular impulsion.

On the other hand, the smaller nobles formed, after 1820, a vast association for the defense of their rights, the Adelskette. Moreover, they could not be sacrificed, in the first place, because they had rendered invaluable services in the wars of independence, they had arisen as one man, and they had ruined themselves in sacrifices for the national cause, they had organized the people and led it to victory, finally because they served to restrain the high nobility whose domination was feared. They sustained the throne against the princes, the higher nobility against the democracy, the lesser nobility against the higher, the two forming an intermediary class between the monarch and the nation. That was the social conception which prevailed with those who were working to realize the unity of Germany, so that the nobility, lesser or higher, in default of its privileges retained its functions.

Treitschke, in his last lessons, about 1890, called it "a political class." For the bourgeois, he said, wealth, instruction, letters, arts. Their part is fine enough. The nobility is apt at governing. That is its special distinction. For a long time, in fact, the nobility has filled alone or almost alone the great administrative, governmental, and military posts.

Bismarck was the finished type, the representative par excellence of this class of men. He had their intellectual and moral qualities carried to the highest degree of superiority. But he underwent evolution after 1871, and his caste with him, under the pressure of general circumstances.

Bismarck was a Junker, a Prussian rustic, monarchist, particularist, agrarian and militarist. Each of his qualities is an attribute of a mentality of caste, a very curious one, not lacking in grandeur, but very narrow and not always adequate to the conduct of affairs.

Monarchist means anti-Parliamentarian. The fine scorn of rhetoric and even of public discussion, a conviction that democracy will not lead to anything beyond a display of mediocrity, that is one of the salient features of his mind. Patriotism conceived as an attachment to personal relations, as the service of one man, the subject, to another man, the King, and not the service of an anonymous person, the functionary, to an abstraction, the State, the republic, this was formerly designated by the word faithful, (féal,) which has disappeared from our vocabulary because it is without meaning in our present moral state.

The Junker is particularist, at least he was. The political and administrative centralization which the Jacobins achieved in France inspires him with horror. For him it is disorder. He sees in it nothing but a dust heap of individuals crushed beneath a formula. Even today, when the German accuses France of anarchy, that is what he means. He figures to himself the nation as a vast hierarchy of liberties, an autonomy of States within the empire, of provinces within the State, of communes within the province, of proprietors within the commune. Equality is equality of rank, of worth, of wealth, of force, but impersonal equality before the law is for him an unnatural thing, an invention of the professors which at heart he despises.

He is agrarian and militarist, that is to say, conservative and enamored of force. In 1830 four-fifths of the population lived by agriculture and the landlord governed his peasants patriarchally. He kept the conservatist spirit of a rustic, a very lively sense of authority and the military instinct. He had scant liking for distant enterprises or adventures. He was at once religious, warlike, and realist, knowing how to nurse his ambitions and to confine his view to what was within reach.

Bismarck for a long time was the decided opponent of naval armaments and colonial policy, in short, of imperialism. Even his projects for social reform—insurance against sickness, against old age—which have been accepted as concessions to modern ideas, were due entirely to his monarchical and patriarchal conception of the State. He copied the ancient decrees of Colbert as to naval personnel. He would have gone as far as assurance against non-employment. In the dominion of the King, he said, no one should die of hunger.

The Junker made a force of Prussia; he made Prussia itself. It was due to him that she passed after 1815 from the form of a Polizeistaat to the form of Kulturstaat, the latter only an expansion of the former. In place of a watchful, regulating, and vexatious State she became an organized State, the instructor of youth, the protector of religion, the source of inspiration for agricultural reforms, and all great commercial and industrial enterprises. This State was not an emanation from the national will, but the creator of a nation, the living and moving self-incarnation of the Hegelian "idea," that is to say, the Divine thought.

Of all the German aristocracy the noble of Pomerania or Brandenburg, the Prussian Junker, represented this social type most definitely. In the south the liberal tendencies—to be exact, the memories of the French Revolution—persisted far into the nineteenth century. But it is well known that German unity was accomplished by military force and against liberalism.

After 1871, and even after Sadowa, the problem of interior policy which presented itself was that of the "Prussianization" of Germany. At one time it seemed that Bismarck was on the point of succeeding in it. What was that national liberal party upon which he depended for so long? It was the old liberal party, with advanced tendencies tainted with democratic liberalism and even with cosmopolitanism, keeping up its relations with the intellectuals, the university men, who made so much noise with pen and voice about 1848 and later. They dreamed of the unity of Germany in the democratic liberty and moral hegemony of their nation, having become in Europe the sobered heir of the French Revolution.

Under the influence of Bismarck they sacrificed to their dream of unity, to their national dream, their liberal dream, and they secured for the Chancellor the support of the upper bourgeoisie.

It was indeed the Prussianization of Germany, but in that spirit and in that system contemporary German militarism would never have fructified. It was contrary to the characteristic tendencies of a monarchical State supported by a conservative caste, which was also particularist, military, and agricultural. A State of this kind tends to become a closed State.

What then happened? An event of capital importance which everybody knows, but of which we only now begin to see the consequences. It was the radical transformation of Germany from an agricultural to an industrial nation. In its origin this phenomenon dates from before the nineteenth century. By 1848 it had become perceptible. Since 1866, and especially since 1871, it has dominated the entire social evolution of the empire. Here, in fact, is the revolution. It partakes of the character of a tragedy, it has overturned the conditions of life throughout the entire German territory.

At the close of the War of Independence, four out of five Germans lived on the land, two out of three were engaged in agriculture. By 1895 the agricultural population was only 35.7 per cent. That, supported by industry and commerce, kept continually increasing. In 1895 it was 50.6 per cent.

This progress of industry and trade indicates the rise of a new class of the population, that of the capitalists. It seemed at first that their arrival would result in a dispossession of the nobility. For example, under the ancien régime the bourgeois could not acquire the property of the nobles. Toward 1880, for Eastern Prussia only, 7,086 estates of 11,065 belonged to non-nobles. They could have been acquired only with money. Capital was supplanting birth. Today even, in Prussia, five members of the Ministry, a little more than one-third, are bourgeois not enjoying the particle von.

The new dominant class encroached upon the ancient in two ways, by depriving it of its clientele and by acquiring a considerable weight in the State. "The weight of a social class" is the totality of its means of action, which it possesses on account of its numbers, its personal influence, its wealth, and the importance of the interests which it represents. The clientele of the agrarian nobility was essentially the peasants, who have continually diminished in number, the attraction of industrial and commercial employments having caused a great migration to the interior, to the factories, and the cities.

For many years this phenomenon has been disclosed by statistics and pointed out by economists and sociologists, but no remedy has been found. Today, although emigration abroad has much moderated, Germany has not labor for its tillage. It is obliged to import farm hands and even cereals. It no longer produces foodstuffs sufficient for its own support.

Moreover, the peasant who remains upon the soil is freed from the landlord, and agricultural production has become specialized—industrialized. There is the case, for instance, of that peasant woman who declared that she had not the time to wash her linen and who sent it to the steam laundry at Karlsruhe. Here is not merely an economic transformation, but a moral evolution. The agriculturist who no longer produces in order to consume but in order to sell, and who must live from the product of his sales, tries to produce as much as possible. He hires foreign labor to get from it all that he can. The impersonal relations of employer and employed replace the patriarchal traditions. Thus the land owner finds himself caught in the mechanism of the capitalistic system.

As to the "weight" of the new class, it increased prodigiously during the years following the war of 1870, thanks to the millions which the empire could invest in its industries and which allowed it to endow its commerce and its merchant marine, to complete the network of its roads, canals, and railways.

The law of concentration of capital was verified on this occasion in a striking manner. In the famous years 1871 to 1874, which the Germans call the Gründejahre, the foundation years, gigantic industrial and commercial enterprises took a spring which seemed irresistible. A Director of the Deutsche Bank, of the Dresdener Bank, the President of a company for transatlantic commerce, such as the Hamburg-American Line, or of the committee of great electric establishments, enjoyed an influence in the councils of the State far greater than that of a Baron, a Count, or a little mediatized Prince.

What was the aristocracy of birth going to do about it? Struggle desperately? It took that tack at first. Bismarck ranged himself in its support for some time. He was himself an agrarian. But he was not long in installing paper mills on his estates at Varzin. It is said that the Emperor himself possesses porcelain factories. A part of the nobility for a long time tried to adapt itself to the new method of production. It took to it awkwardly and often ended in ruin.

Freytag has described this phenomenon at its beginnings in a romance which is a chef d'oeuvre. A part of the nobility yielded, fell into the hands of the financiers, the money lenders, the managers of agricultural enterprises, sold their lands, and took refuge in the great civil, administrative and military posts. The remainder resisted as well as they could. There was antagonism between their interests and those of the capitalists, between the religious and particularist tendencies on one hand and free thought and cosmopolitanism on the other. The agrarians demanded tariff duties on agricultural products to raise the price of their foodstuffs. The industrials wanted a low cost of living in order to avoid the rise of wages and to compete with better advantage for foreign markets.

Bismarck was the target for vehement opposition when he inclined toward the party of the traders and the industrials in his colonial and tariff policy. This evolution came about 1879. For a while the great Chancellor was looked upon almost as a traitor.

Nevertheless, his view was just. Balancing the forces on the one hand by those on the other, ceding protective duties first to one side and then to the other, offsetting the advantages which he offered to one side by the prerogatives which he accorded to the other, he finally succeeded in reconciling them.

From this reconciliation of the two dominant classes has resulted the extraordinary power of Germany. The bourgeois parties have from time to time grumbled over the military appropriations, but they have always voted them. And militarism, which is the support of the aristocracy, has been placed at the service of capitalistic ambition. By the prestige of force, awakening hopes here and inspiring fears there, more than once by the help of manoeuvres of intimidation, it has become an instrument of economic conquest.

Other combinations, other reciprocal interlacings, have taken place which have given an exceptional and unique character to contemporary Germany. It is a case of social psychology of extreme interest. To describe it would require long detail. The combination of the aristocratic and military tendency with the industrial and plutocratic tendency, the tendency of the police spirit, the regularizing spirit of the Kulturstaat with the individual initiative of the capitalist entrepreneur, methodical habits of administration with the love of risk characteristic of the speculator, all this constitutes imperialism, German imperialism, distinct from every other, because to a definite object, economic conquest, it adds another, less precise, in which the moral satisfaction dear to aristocracy, the pleasure of dominating, the love of displaying force, the tendency to prove one's own superiority to one's self, play a large part.

Economic conquest has become a necessity for Germany. Transformed into an industrial State, it no longer produces its own food. Since 1885 its imports have exceeded its exports by 1,353,000,000 marks. Whence did Germany derive these 1,300,000,000 marks which were needed, good year and bad, to meet its balance of trade? It owes them to its maritime commerce and the revenue of its capital invested abroad. Its maritime commerce then must augment and must triumph over all competition. At every cost it must open for itself outlets for its industrial products in order to buy foodstuffs which it does not produce sufficiently. If not, famine.

Let us see now how the complicated play of all these social forces and the effect of this economic situation have been embodied in formulas, what has been its intellectual expression.

This is no idle question, for men have always claimed to be guided by ideas, and generally they are, but they rarely know where their ideas come from or in what they consist. Without intellectual expression imperialism would not have extended to all the classes of society. The passion of economic conquest did not prevail throughout the whole of Germany. The bourgeois in the Liberal provinces, the corps of officers, the corps of teachers, the clergy were refractory to it. This direct form of imperialism does not seduce them. Not everybody can see his country and the universe through the eyes of an oligarch of high finance. A doctrine works with power when it appeals to instincts, when it awakens collective emotions, diverse enough in themselves, and joins them to each other with an appearance of logical deduction. It is not indispensable, but it is useful that it should borrow the language of the day. In the mediaeval epoch this language was religious. Beginning with the seventeenth century it was metaphysical. In our own time it is a scientific language set off by Greek words.

If the German philosophies of the second half of the nineteenth century are considered, there are not many of them that pass beyond the limit of the school. They are honest, scholarly productions elaborated by men who have read much, of whom some, like Wundt, are eminent specialists, but who have not conquered either their subjects or their readers. One feels that they are not of their century.

It is not from them, it is not from Eucken, the pleasant popularizer, it is not from Windelbund or Ostwald that the cultivated public sought the direction for its thought. To satisfy the need of general ideas which was everywhere felt, associations were formed, churches with or without God, of which a very important one was the "Monistenbund," in which Haeckel exploited his materialism transformed into a sort of biological pantheism.

But it was outside of the associations and outside of the school that the flame of creative genius burned brightly. The man of the last generation was Nietzsche. That his thought has been perverted by his interpreters there is no doubt. They have taken this eagle who gazed unblinded at the sun and exhibited him to the young people in all sorts of philosophic rôles for the benefit of the industrial and military coalition. Nietzsche depicted in lines of fire the resurrection of heroism, his vision of the superman was that of an ardent soul, steeled by sufferings, meditating a tragic conception of life with serenity, and in his solitary individualism surmounting the infirmity of man and his own by the insistent will to eternal ascension.

He was made the apostle of brute force, a sort of Messiah of the "struggle for life." Moreover, he was soon put one side and Gobineau was revived. He also, who if he did not have genius had wit, would have been surprised and hardly flattered perhaps by the rôle which they made him play. The dolichocephalic (long-skulled) blonde whom he celebrated was not exactly the one whom we are now judging by his works, but at least he proclaimed the superiority of the German race.

His doctrine was the centre around which were gathered a complete ensemble of dogmas and of very diverse theories, whose connected thread it is not easy to discover when it is searched for logically, but appears quite distinctly when not reason, but reasons, are demanded. The reasons are found in the need of justifying in theory the economic and military imperialism, born as we have seen from conditions of fact and from very practical motives.

I do not pretend that it was calculated, nor that the optimates made express requisition of the naturalists, economists, and historians and sociologists and moralists to provide an imperialistic philosophy for the use of adult and normal dolichocephalous blondes. But there certainly was a coincidence. It may have been due to the influence of what is called a milieu ambiant, that of the commercial and military party. The authors of the doctrine lived in a special atmosphere. Their intellect was there formed—or deformed—their work consisted in gathering facts, inventing reasonings, elaborating formulas, so as to subject natural science, history and morality to the service of that keen will for hegemony which was in Germany the common characteristic and was the connecting link between the ancient and the new directing class.

To convince one that this is so, it is enough to arrange the works of the pan-Germanists in a series passing from the simplest to the most complicated. The dates are of no importance. We might put at one of the extremes the works of the Prussian General, von Bernhardi, and at the other the gigantic lucubration of a famous pan-German zealot, a neophite, a convert, almost a deserter, Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

Prof. Millioud examines at some length and acutely the tendencies and teachings of von Bernhardi, now familiar to American readers, sums up the work of the philosophers of minor rank and turns to Mr. Chamberlain.

With Mr. Chamberlain the thesis of vital competition, the morality of force, the judgment of history against little nations, the civilizing mission imposed upon greater Germany by its very greatness, by its economic, scientific and artistic superiority, everything tends to the glorification of the German, to his duty to govern the whole world which he feels so imperatively and which he accepts with such a noble simplicity. His work is not easily summarized, not only because it counts 1,379 pages and two appendices, but because all is in everything, and everything in the universe is also in Mr. Chamberlain's book. And the German has made everything. Not indeed the world; that he has only remade and is about to remake. But he has a way of remaking so creative that one might say that without him the Creator Himself would be a bit embarrassed. He has gathered to himself alone the heritage of Greece and Rome as far as it was worth anything. From the year 1200 to the year 1800 he founded, ripened, and saved a new civilization several times over. The mother of our sciences and our arts, Italy, is Germanic; the great architecture of the Middle Ages is Germanic; the true interpretation of Christianity, the true conception of art, the true social economy, the love of nature, the sense of individuality, the exploration of the world and of the soul, the great reawakenings of conscience, all the great flashes of thought are Germanic; everything is Germanic, except you and me, perhaps; so much the worse for me and so much the worse for you. After this book, the success of which has been prodigious, it would truly seem that there is nothing more to say. Germanic thought has appropriated the universe to itself. It only remained for the German sword to complete the work. It is drawn!

I have tried to describe the modifications, or rather the successive additions, by which the elementary themes disclosing economic, political, and military appetites in the directing class have been disguised as theories of biology, history, political economy, sociology, and morality. It would take another study or another article to show how science was perverted to such ends. The severity of methods, rigor in the determination of facts, precision in reasoning, prudence in generalization, serene impartiality and objectivity in verification, in a word the scientific spirit, cannot be bent to so many pleasant compromises without sacrificing a great part of its dignity and its title to respect.

This has been a singular and melancholy event for those of us who have been raised in respect for German science and in admiration for its methods, as well as for its discoveries. Certainly, from Liebig to Roentgen and to Behring, from Kant to Wundt, Germany has counted many distinguished pioneers. In the matter of fecund originality, however, and creative inspiration, Italy and France have always equaled, if not surpassed, her. She has had no Marconi, no Pasteur or Poincaré, no Carrel.

What we have received from her so long that it has become almost a matter of instinct is less dazzling flashes than an equal and constant light. And the savants, the university men who bring to us anthropological romances, history stuffed with legends and personal prejudices, sociology constructed in contempt of the facts!

In these later days we have seen all these joining under the guidance of their most illustrious members to address the civilized nations in an appeal in which by virtue of their quality as savants they undertook to pronounce upon facts which they don't understand, to deny those which they cannot help understanding, and solemnly to declare that it is not true that Germany has violated the neutrality of the territory of Belgium. For proof of this, nothing but their word of honor. Do they take us for those young gentlemen who said to Monge, "Professor, give us your word of honor that this theorem is true and we will excuse you from the demonstration of it"?

Fully to explain the rôle of the intellectual savants and university men in the formation of the ideology of caste which prevails among the Germans it would be necessary to recite the history of instruction in Germany, not such as Davis and Paulson have written it, but such as it actually is under the influence of institutions and programmes—I mean the moral history of instruction.

The great Frederick was wont to cry, "I commence by taking; afterward I shall always have pedants enough to establish my rights." Pedants or not, the members of the teaching corps of every grade in Germany are a wheel of the State, their mission is to form not men, but Germans, to inculcate the national idea. Their views have penetrated even to the common people.

Germany receives a double education—that of the school and that of the barracks. The spirit of these two institutions is the same, and their influence, which has been exercised since 1848 in opposition to humanitarian and internationalist ideas, has encountered no serious obstacles, for it went readily with certain old instincts which it was not difficult to reawaken and which general circumstances favored.

"Latrocinia nullam habent infamiam," said Caesar, speaking of the Germans. Pillage brings no shame. This desire of gain, this positive and realistic tendency is one of the motives which the brusque and prodigious economic expansion of Germany has promoted in the most efficient manner.

This total assimilation of a people of 70,000,000 of souls by an aristocratic, almost a feudal, directing class, a combination of plutocrats and militarists, is in reality a most curious phenomenon, more than curious, in a sense grandiose, and in any case full of suggestions and menaces.

Surrender of body and soul, confidence almost religious, enthusiastic faith, the directing class has conquered everything within in order to conquer everything without. Now it stakes everything upon the cast of the dice. I have not undertaken to decide whether it is just or not. The event will determine whether it is genius or madness.

The Land Of Maeterlinck

By Alfred Sutro

[From King Albert's Book.]

I have translated many books of Maeterlinck's; I have wandered with him among the canals of Bruges and the fragrant gardens of Ghent; I have seen the places where he dreamed of Pelléas and Mélisande, and the hives of the bees he loved. Through him I learned to know Belgium, today all the world knows. Her cities are laid waste now and her people scattered, but her people will return and rebuild the cities, and the enemy will be dust. The day will come when the war will be far distant, a thing of the past, remote, forgotten, but never, while men endure or heroism counts, will it be forgotten what the Belgians did for Liberty's sake and for the sake of Albert, their King.

America and Prohibition Russia

Two Mustard Seeds of Reform Carried From This Land to the Steppes

By Isabel F. Hapgood

When Russia recently abolished the sale of liquor, first in the shops run as a Government monopoly, and, after a brief experience of the beneficent results, in the restaurants and clubs as well, an astonished and admiring world recognized the measure as one of the greatest events in the moral history of a nation. It takes rank with the reforms of Peter the Great. It almost casts into the shade the emancipation of the serfs.

There has always existed in Russia a strong party which severely disapproved of Peter precisely because he forced "Western" ideas upon them. Their idea has always been that Russia would have developed a far higher degree of genuine culture and far more precious spiritual qualities had she been left to the promptings of her own genius and its "healthy, natural" development. And there are, indubitably, persons scattered through the vast Russian Empire who entertain parallel opinions with regard to the total prohibition of liquor just effected, and with regard to the projected change in the calendar now assumed to be imminent. I trust that I shall not increase their numbers to dangerous proportions if I call attention to the fact that these reforms have also, like Peter the Great's ideas, been imported from the West—from the Far West, the United States. I am sure my fellow-countrymen will be gratified to learn the truth, and I cheerfully accept the risk, and assume that Russia will, in all probability, remain ignorant of my interference!

It is true that we do not have actual, effective prohibition anywhere here in America, and that we do not seem to be within measurable distance of such an achievement; that Russia has distanced us again in this, just as she distanced us by emancipating her serfs, without a war, before we emancipated our slaves, with the aid of a war. But we have supplied the scriptural mustard seed in the case of prohibition in Russia, and have either furnished the seed for the change in the calendar, or, at any rate, have provided elements that have hastened its growth to a very remarkable degree.

Mustard seed No. 1 was carried over from the United States in the Autumn of 1887 and sown on the good ground of the late Count Tolstoy, and other noble men, whence—as results show—it spread abroad with a swiftness suggestive rather of the proverbial weed than of the fair flower its blossoming has shown it to be.

In the Autumn of 1886 Dr. Peter Semyonovitch Alexyeeff of Moscow, accompanied by his wife, sailed for Canada and the United States for the purpose of inspecting the hospitals, prisons, and elementary schools; and they came for the Winter because some parts of Canada during that season possess a climate similar to that of Central Russia, while in other parts the climates are identical. In fact, Canada is the only country in the world where the climatic conditions are at all analogous. The construction of new hospitals, the adaptation of already existing buildings for hospital use, the internal arrangement, and the perfection of their internal machinery had long been matters of deep interest to Dr. Alexyeeff.

Germany and France, with climates so different from that of Russia, could not furnish him with the information available in North America, where, in his opinion, the habits and conditions of existence—such important factors in matters connected with hospitals and invalids—also differ less from those of Russia than do the general surroundings in the countries of the Continent. After visiting the principal cities of Canada and the United States from Quebec to Vancouver, and from Boston to Washington, (some of them more than once,) Dr. Alexyeeff arrived at the conclusion that the hospitals of the United States were better built and much better administered than those of London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.

Naturally, no one could spend nine months in investigating hospitals and prisons in this country without coming in contact with the liquor problem. Moreover, Dr. Alexyeeff was a wideawake man, who took an interest not only in all matters connected with his profession, but in very many outside of it. He was, also, a man of very lofty character. His wife once wrote me concerning him somewhat as follows: "He walks, habitually, on such moral heights, in such a rarefied spiritual atmosphere, that I, the daughter of an English clergyman, reared accordingly, and myself (as you know) deeply in sympathy with it, find difficulty in following him." Obviously, he was precisely the man to appreciate the temperance movement, and to carry it to its logical conclusion. In the preface to a volume, "About America," which he published in Moscow in 1888, he writes:

He did not confine himself to this brief, general statement. He wrote in praise of temperance, of prohibition, for learned Russian societies. Then he wrote a book entitled "Concerning Drunkenness." The Censor's permit to publish is dated March 29, (April 10,) 1887. It was published by the management of the magazine, Russkaya Mysl, (Russian Thought,) which may indicate that it had first appeared in that monthly as a series of articles, though I have not been able to verify the fact. The book may have been published promptly, or at least the article from the medical magazine may have been published in the cheap form (costing two or three cents) used by the semi-commercial, semi-philanthropic firm "Posrednik," which may be rendered "Middleman" or "Mediator," designed for the dissemination of good and useful reading among the masses.

At any rate, "Concerning Drunkenness" appeared at the price of one ruble (about fifty cents) in 1891, prefaced by a dissertation by Count Tolstoy, "Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?" specially written for this occasion, as Dr. Alexyeeff told me. (It has been translated under the title of "Alcohol and Tobacco," London, and published without any indication that Dr. Alexyeeff inspired it.)

In 1896 a second edition, revised and enlarged, was published, also in Moscow; and to this the author added a list of helpful publications and a summary bibliography, which included books issued in various foreign countries, ranging in number from 705 for Great Britain and Colonies, 142 for the United States, 247 for Germany, 124 for ten other countries combined, (up to 1885 in all these cases,) to ten for Russia. Of these ten, four are in Latin, four in German, one is in Swedish and one in Russian—the latter, evidently, an article republished from The Medical News. On the whole, a list practically non-existent, so far as Russia was concerned!

Dr. Alexyeeff had discovered a field of endeavor as virgin as the unplowed steppe. Only scientists desperately hard up for an unusual topic for a strictly academic discussion and recklessly willing to risk incurring universal unpopularity would have dreamed of unearthing those volumes. He promptly aroused Count Tolstoy's interest in the subject of temperance, which in this case signified prohibition, since the Count in his preface to Dr. Alexyeeff's book (dated July 10-22, 1890,) treated liquor on the same basis as tobacco, which he had totally abjured at least two years previously. With Tolstoy, to become convinced that a reform was desirable was, as all the world knows, to become an ardent propagandist of that reform. Thanks to the efforts of Dr. Alexyeeff, seconded by those of Tolstoy, temperance began to attract attention in Russia, temperance societies were formed, and have been steadily increasing ever since in numbers and activity.

Eventually Mr. Tchelisheff arrived on the scene with his splendid vital force and practical solutions of the financial and other problems (or suggestions for them) that arise from prohibition, (especially when a Government monopoly and revenue are concerned,) which he most strenuously advocated when Mayor of Samara, as representative in the Duma—everywhere, in fact, where he could obtain a hearing, willing or unwilling, up to the Emperor Nicholas himself. And the Emperor showed that he was equal to the magnificent opportunity, and joined hands with the former peasant in aiding his country.

In an interview published by THE TIMES a while ago Mr. Tchelisheff mentions that his attention was first drawn to the subject of the evils of drunkenness by a book which he saw a muzhik reading. Judging from the point at which he inserts that mention into his outline sketch of his career (previous to the great famine which he—erroneously—assigns to the "end of the '80s," but which came in 1891) his interest was aroused precisely at the time when Dr. Alexyeeff's first utterances may be assumed to have seen the light of print. At any rate, it is an admitted fact that Dr. Alexyeeff carried to Russia and to Tolstoy from the United States the idea and inspiration which has borne such wonderful fruit in the abolition of the liquor traffic "forever," as the Imperial ukase runs.

Mr. Tchelisheff is a noteworthy figure in history accordingly, but Dr. Alexyeeff should not be forgotten. When I made his acquaintance at Count Tolstoy's, in Moscow, he had just requested (and obtained) a detail of service in Tchita, Trans-Baikal Province, Siberia, as physician to the political exiles there, thinking the region would repay study from many points of view, in his leisure hours. The preface to the first edition of his book "Concerning Drunkenness" is dated "July, 1899, Tchita," and from Tchita I received my copy from him. In that preface he states the scope of his book in a way which confirms my conviction that Mr. Tchelisheff was first stirred to interest, and in the end aroused to action, by the United States, via Dr. Alexyeeff. He writes:

Therefore, he omits the legal aspects of the matter in his book and confines himself to an attempt at popularizing the information scattered in divers individual books, "borrowing everything which can lead to the ultimate goal—the extermination of the evil caused by the use of spirituous drinks." He continues:

The second edition of this book, with the surprising list of Russian treatises on drunkenness to which I have already alluded, is dated "June, 1895, Riga," where he lived after his return from Siberia, as an official of the Government medical service, until his death in August, 1913. During the stay in Tchita of the Alexyeeffs, the present Emperor (then the heir,) passed through it, on his way home (from the trip to India and Japan which came so near terminating fatally in the latter country) after having officially opened work upon the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. A formal reception and ceremonies were organized in Tchita; and I allude to the matter because of a curious detail mentioned in a letter to me by Mrs. Alexyeeff. Foreigners have very queer ideas, she said, as to the position and treatment of the political exiles in Siberia; some of the Tchita exiles served as heads of the committees for welcoming the heir, and he shook hands with them and treated them exactly as he treated the Governor General of the Province.

Whether it was his admiration for the American temperance movement which influenced Dr. Alexyeeff's views on everything American, I cannot say. But, assuredly, not many foreign visitors have pronounced upon our country such a panegyric as is contained in the preface to his "Across America." He writes:

Until he died, in Siberia, in Russia, everywhere, Dr. Alexyeeff worked for temperance. He was enthusiastic about it when I saw him and his wife in England, in 1907.

Mr. Tchelisheff having been aroused to interest, theoretically, by America, via Dr. Alexyeeff, as is fairly proven, it was only natural that he should proceed to make the personal observations on the practical, social side of drunkenness which he mentions in his Times interview. He noticed, during the great famine of 1891, that it was the drunkards who had squandered their grain and pawned their possessions to the keepers of the dramshops who robbed other men's granaries and houses, burned, rioted, and murdered; while the men who did not drink had plenty of food and grain to hold out. We are informed from Russia that even during its still brief reign prohibition has resulted in remarkable improvement in health, living conditions, and bank accounts.

Mr. Tchelisheff is, as I have said, a noteworthy figure in history. He would be a remarkable figure in any land; but for those who are not acquainted with Russia, the rise of a man born a peasant, educated solely by his own efforts on stray newspapers and books which fell in his way in his schoolless village, and absolutely lacking in money or influence, ("svyazi"—connections, is the Russian version of "pull,") to the position of multi-millionaire and co-worker with the Emperor, is amazing almost beyond belief. In reality, it is as simple as the rise of an American newsboy, of an Edison or a Carnegie to a position of power in the United States. Fate, circumstances, as well as their own personality are the factors in all these cases; and in every similar case.

Moreover, there is in Russia no eternally impassable barrier of caste, but there is a genuine democracy which is not easy to define, but is very easily felt. For instance, the title of "Prince," (to which, unlike that of "Count" or "Baron"—conferrable—one must be born, runs the rule, with exceptions for such national heroes as Suvaroff,) counts for nothing or approximately that, unless its owner possesses, in addition, the wealth, character, learning or other characteristics which would render him a man of mark without it.

There are other interesting instances of peasants who have risen high in Russia, and Mr. Tchelisheff is their worthy successor. The founder of the great silversmiths' firm of Ovtchinnikoff was a serf. His successors have made it their rule, "out of gratitude to God," to maintain and educate a certain number of poor boys, who, when their intellectual and technical training is completed, are free to remain with the firm as valued artists or to go forth independently. When the Emperor Alexander II. celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession to the throne, all the Sovereigns of Europe sent him magnificent presents. These are assembled in his library, at the Winter Palace, Petrograd; and in the centre—accorded that place by the Russians with equal good feeling, good taste, and justice—is a large group in solid silver, representing a huge mass of rock upon whose pinnacles stand figures representing the different parts of the empire—Little Russia, Siberia, and so forth. The inscription reads: "To the Tzar-Liberator from the Liberated Serf." It was made by the Ovtchinnikoffs and presented by another ex-serf, who had become a millionaire railway magnate.

Mustard Seed No. 2 from America to Russia falls into a somewhat different category. It more nearly resembles one of those grains of antique wheat found in a tomb and sprouting vigorously when finally planted in congenial, helpful soil. I trust that my comparison may not be regarded as disrespectful. One could not, willingly, be disrespectful to the calendar, any more than to the thermometer!

Russia, by adhering to the Julian Calendar and refusing to adopt the Gregorian, has now fallen thirteen days behind the rest of the world. It falls behind about a day for every century. There are several reasons why Russia has not, up to now, remedied the serious inconvenience caused by this conflict of dates. One is—the Gregorian Calendar is Roman Catholic, and named after a Pope. It is, also, inaccurate. Worst of all, the rectification might—almost infallibly would, under ordinary circumstances—cause trouble at the outset, especially in one incalculably important direction.

Russian scientists long ago worked out a new calendar far more accurate than the Gregorian for thousands of years, and when the change is made that calendar will be adopted. The fundamental difficulty lies in the fact that all the people whose saints' days must inevitably be skipped for the first year in the process of rectification will inevitably feel that they are being robbed of their guardian angels, that they are "orphans"—a mournful word greatly beloved of the Russian masses under multiform circumstances, both material and spiritual—and orphaned in a peculiarly distressing and irrevocable way. They might even feel when their saints' days came around quite correctly the next year that some spurious adventurer—Angel of Darkness—was being foisted upon them.

Fanatics and professional mischief-makers would certainly seize with avidity upon such a godsend of a chance, unparalleled since the days of Peter the Great's father, when the Patriarch Nikon had the errors of the copyists in the Scriptures and church service books corrected. But the present war has fused all parties, united all hearts in patriotism, loyalty to, and confidence in their Emperor and created a fervid inclination amounting to enthusiasm to accept even the most drastic reforms he may make cheerfully, unquestionably, as for the good of the fatherland.

On the matter of the calendar reform America has for many years past been exerting a steadily increasing influence. During the past twenty years the steady flow of immigrants from Russia and other countries belonging to the Orthodox Catholic Church of the East, (Greco-Russian,) has increased to a great volume, and it seems destined to attain still greater proportions when the war is over. These people are obliged to work and keep holiday by the Gregorian calendar and to worship by the Julian. This entails hardships.

For example, a devout Russian who has been forced to remain idle on our Christmas and New Year's Days must sacrifice his pay—sometimes risk or lose his job—if he wishes to observe the feasts of his own church. A reform of the calendar would be hailed with joy by innumerable such immigrants, who have been over here long enough to consider calmly the practical aspects of a temporary dislocation of saints' days. The ecclesiastical authorities in this country have frequently protested, in print, both here and in Russia, and I have been informed that the Holy Synod has been appealed to, more than once, to induce it to cast its influence into the balance with that of the scientists and the governmental authorities, who have been discussing the matter for years past, and hesitating over the probable consequences of action—a case of peasant joining hands with the rulers of Russia, once more like Mr. Tchelisheff and the Emperor Nicholas—or the people of the United States and the President—to secure a needed reform!

And these same peasant-immigrants in America have, without the shadow of a doubt, already written back to their relatives and friends in the old country—and very frequently—about the difficulties of the antiquated Julian calendar, and these, in turn, can disseminate common sense about the change in a way which the Government, aided by the Holy Synod and the explanations of home-staying parish priests, unaided, could never effect. When the fitting time arrives, perhaps the Russian Government will avail itself of just this argument, among others—the welfare of friends in distant America. There has never been a propitious time in Russia to make that calendar reform since the reign of Peter the Great until now. And America may fairly be said to have brought from its dark hiding place the mustard seed which has been trying so long to germinate, and imparted to it a vivifying impulse.

The Mother's Song.

By CECILIA REYNOLDS ROBERTSON.

Pan-American Relations As Affected by the War

Consequences of the European Conflict on Future Commerce Between the United States and Latin America

By Huntington Wilson,

Formerly Assistant Secretary of State.

An Easter Message

By BEATRICE BARRY.

An Interview on the War With Henry James

By Preston Lockwood

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 21, 1915.]

One of the compensations of the war, which we ought to take advantage of, is the chance given the general public to approach on the personal side some of the distinguished men who have not hitherto lived much in the glare of the footlights. Henry James has probably done this as little as any one; he has enjoyed for upward of forty years a reputation not confined to his own country, has published a long succession of novels, tales, and critical papers, and yet has apparently so delighted in reticence as well as in expression that he has passed his seventieth year without having responsibly "talked" for publication or figured for it otherwise than pen in hand.

Shortly after the outbreak of the war Mr. James found himself, to his professed great surprise, Chairman of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps, now at work in France, and today, at the end of three months of bringing himself to the point, has granted me, as a representative of THE NEW YORK TIMES, an interview. What this departure from the habit of a lifetime means to him he expressed at the outset:

"I can't put," Mr. James said, speaking with much consideration and asking that his punctuation as well as his words should be noted, "my devotion and sympathy for the cause of our corps more strongly than in permitting it thus to overcome my dread of the assault of the interviewer, whom I have deprecated, all these years, with all the force of my preference for saying myself and without superfluous aid, without interference in the guise of encouragement and cheer, anything I may think worth my saying. Nothing is worth my saying that I cannot help myself out with better, I hold, than even the most suggestive young gentleman with a notebook can help me. It may be fatuous of me, but, believing myself possessed of some means of expression, I feel as if I were sadly giving it away when, with the use of it urgent, I don't gratefully employ it, but appeal instead to the art of somebody else."

It was impossible to be that "somebody else," or, in other words, the person privileged to talk with Mr. James, to sit in presence of his fine courtesy and earnestness, without understanding the sacrifice he was making, and making only because he had finally consented to believe that it would help the noble work of relief which a group of young Americans, mostly graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, are carrying on along their stretch of the fighting line in Northern France.

Mr. James frankly desired his remarks to bear only on the merits of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. It enjoys today the fullest measure of his appreciation and attention; it appeals deeply to his benevolent instincts, and he gives it sympathy and support as one who has long believed, and believes more than ever, in spite of everything, at this international crisis, in the possible development of "closer communities and finer intimacies" between America and Great Britain, between the country of his birth and the country, as he puts it, of his "shameless frequentation."

There are many people who are eloquent about the war, who are authorities on the part played in it by the motor ambulance and who take an interest in the good relations of Great Britain and the United States; but there is nobody who can tell us, as Mr. James can, about style and the structure of sentences, and all that appertains to the aspect and value of words. Now and then in what here follows he speaks familiarly of these things for the first time in his life, not by any means because he jumped at the chance, but because his native kindness, whether consciously or unconsciously, seemed so ready to humor the insisting inquirer.

"It is very difficult," he said, seeking to diminish the tension so often felt by a journalist, even at the moment of a highly appreciated occasion, "to break into graceful license after so long a life of decorum; therefore you must excuse me if my egotism doesn't run very free or my complacency find quite the right turns."

He had received me in the offices of the corps, businesslike rooms, modern for London, low-ceiled and sparely furnished. It was not by any means the sort of setting in which as a reader of Henry James I had expected to run to earth the author of "The Golden Bowl," but the place is, nevertheless, today, in the tension of war time, one of the few approaches to a social resort outside his Chelsea home where he can be counted on. Even that delightful Old World retreat, Lamb House, Rye, now claims little of his time.

The interviewer spoke of the waterside Chelsea and Mr. James's long knowledge of it, but, sitting not overmuch at his ease and laying a friendly hand on the shoulder of his tormentor, he spoke, instead, of motor ambulances, making the point, in the interest of clearness, that the American Ambulance Corps of Neuilly, though an organization with which Richard Norton's corps is in the fullest sympathy, does not come within the scope of his remarks.

"I find myself Chairman of our Corps Committee for no great reason that I can discover save my being the oldest American resident here interested in its work; at the same time that if I render a scrap of help by putting on record my joy even in the rather ineffectual connection so far as 'doing' anything is concerned, I needn't say how welcome you are to my testimony. What I mainly seem to grasp, I should say, is that in regard to testifying at all unlimitedly by the aid of the newspapers, I have to reckon with a certain awkwardness in our position. Here comes up, you see, the question of our reconciling a rather indispensable degree of reserve as to the detail of our activity with the general American demand for publicity at any price. There are ways in which the close presence of war challenges the whole claim for publicity; and I need hardly say that this general claim has been challenged, practically, by the present horrific complexity of things at the front, as neither the Allies themselves nor watching neutrals have ever seen it challenged before. The American public is, of course, little used to not being able to hear, and hear as an absolute right, about anything that the press may suggest that it ought to hear about; so that nothing may be said ever to happen anywhere that it doesn't count on having reported to it, hot and hot, as the phrase is, several times a day. We were the first American ambulance corps in the field, and we have a record of more than four months' continuous service with one of the French armies, but the rigor of the objection to our taking the world into our intimate confidence is not only shown by our still unbroken inability to report in lively installments, but receives also a sidelight from the fact that numerous like private corps maintained by donations on this side of the sea are working at the front without the least commemoration of their deeds—that is, without a word of journalistic notice.

"I hope that by the time these possibly too futile remarks of mine come to such light as may await them Mr. Norton's report of our general case may have been published, and nothing would give the committee greater pleasure than that some such controlled statement on our behalf, best proceeding from the scene of action itself, should occasionally appear. The ideal would, of course, be that exactly the right man, at exactly the right moment, should report exactly the right facts, in exactly the right manner, and when that happy consummation becomes possible we shall doubtless revel in funds."

Mr. James had expressed himself with such deliberation and hesitation that I was reminded of what I had heard of all the verbal alterations made by him in novels and tales long since published; to the point, we are perhaps incorrectly told of replacing a "she answered" by a "she indefinitely responded."

I should, indeed, mention that on my venturing to put to Mr. James a question or two about his theory of such changes he replied that no theory could be stated, at any rate in the off-hand manner that I seemed to invite, without childish injustice to the various considerations by which a writer is moved. These determinant reasons differ with the context and the relations of parts to parts and to the total sense in a way of which no a priori account can be given.

"I dare say I strike you," he went on, "as rather bewilderedly weighing my words; but I may perhaps explain my so doing very much as I the other day heard a more interesting fact explained. A distinguished English naval expert happened to say to me that the comparative non-production of airships in this country indicated, in addition to other causes, a possible limitation of the British genius in that direction, and then on my asking him why that class of craft shouldn't be within the compass of the greatest makers of sea-ships, replied, after brief reflection: 'Because the airship is essentially a bad ship, and we English can't make a bad ship well enough.' Can you pardon," Mr. James asked, "my making an application of this to the question of one's amenability or plasticity to the interview? The airship of the interview is for me a bad ship, and I can't make a bad ship well enough."

Catching Mr. James's words as they came was not very difficult; but there was that in the manner of his speech that cannot be put on paper, the delicate difference between the word recalled and the word allowed to stand, the earnestness of the massive face and alert eye, tempered by the genial "comment of the body," as R.L. Stevenson has it.

Henry James does not look his seventy years. He has a finely shaped head, and a face, at once strong and serene, which the painter and the sculptor may well have liked to interpret. Indeed, in fine appreciation they have so wrought. Derwent Wood's admirable bust, purchased from last year's Royal Academy, shown by the Chantrey Fund, will be permanently placed in the Tate Gallery, and those who fortunately know Sargent's fine portrait, to be exhibited in the Sargent Room at the San Francisco Exhibition, will recall its having been slashed into last year by the militant suffragettes, though now happily restored to such effect that no trace of the outrage remains.

Mr. James has a mobile mouth, a straight nose, a forehead which has thrust back the hair from the top of his commanding head, although it is thick at the sides over the ears, and repeats in its soft gray the color of his kindly eyes. Before taking in these physical facts one receives an impression of benignity and amenity not often conveyed, even by the most distinguished. And, taking advantage of this amiability, I asked if certain words just used should be followed by a dash, and even boldly added: "Are you not famous, Mr. James, for the use of dashes?"

"Dash my fame!" he impatiently replied. "And remember, please, that dogmatizing about punctuation is exactly as foolish as dogmatizing about any other form of communication with the reader. All such forms depend on the kind of thing one is doing and the kind of effect one intends to produce. Dashes, it seems almost platitudinous to say, have their particular representative virtue, their quickening force, and, to put it roughly, strike both the familiar and the emphatic note, when those are the notes required, with a felicity beyond either the comma or the semicolon; though indeed a fine sense for the semicolon, like any sort of sense at all for the pluperfect tense and the subjunctive mood, on which the whole perspective in a sentence may depend, seems anything but common. Does nobody ever notice the calculated use by French writers of a short series of suggestive points in the current of their prose? I confess to a certain shame for my not employing frankly that shade of indication, a finer shade still than the dash.... But what on earth are we talking about?" And the Chairman of the Corps Committee pulled himself up in deprecation of our frivolity, which I recognized by acknowledging that we might indeed hear more about the work done and doing at the front by Richard Norton and his energetic and devoted co-workers. Then I plunged recklessly to draw my victim.

"May not a large part of the spirit which animates these young men be a healthy love of adventure?" I asked.

The question seemed to open up such depths that Mr. James considered a moment and began:

"I, of course, don't personally know many of our active associates, who naturally waste very little time in London. But, since you ask me, I prefer to think of them as moved, first and foremost, not by the idea of the fun or the sport they may have, or of the good thing they may make of the job for themselves, but by that of the altogether exceptional chance opened to them of acting blessedly and savingly for others, though indeed if we come to that there is no such sport in the world as so acting when anything in the nature of risk or exposure is attached. The horrors, the miseries, the monstrosities they are in presence of are so great surely as not to leave much of any other attitude over when intelligent sympathy has done its best.

"Personally I feel so strongly on everything that the war has brought into question for the Anglo-Saxon peoples that humorous detachment or any other thinness or tepidity of mind on the subject affects me as vulgar impiety, not to say as rank blasphemy; our whole race tension became for me a sublimely conscious thing from the moment Germany flung at us all her explanation of her pounce upon Belgium for massacre and ravage in the form of the most insolent, 'Because I choose to, damn you all!' recorded in history.

"The pretension to smashing world rule by a single people, in virtue of a monopoly of every title, every gift and every right, ought perhaps to confound us more by its grotesqueness than to alarm us by its energy; but never do cherished possessions, whether of the hand or of the spirit, become so dear to us as when overshadowed by vociferous aggression. How can one help seeing that such aggression, if hideously successful in Europe, would, with as little loss of time as possible, proceed to apply itself to the American side of the world, and how can one, therefore, not feel that the Allies are fighting to the death for the soul and the purpose and the future that are in us, for the defense of every ideal that has most guided our growth and that most assures our unity?

"Of course, since you ask me, my many years of exhibited attachment to the conditions of French and of English life, with whatever fond play of reflection and reaction may have been involved in it, make it inevitable that these countries should peculiarly appeal to me at the hour of their peril, their need and their heroism, and I am glad to declare that, though I had supposed I knew what that attachment was, I find I have any number of things more to learn about it. English life, wound up to the heroic pitch, is at present most immediately before me, and I can scarcely tell you what a privilege I feel it to share the inspiration and see further revealed the character of this decent and dauntless people.

"However, I am indeed as far as you may suppose from assuming that what you speak to me of as the 'political' bias is the only ground on which the work of our corps for the Allies should appeal to the American public. Political, I confess, has become for me in all this a loose and question-begging term, but if we must resign ourselves to it as explaining some people's indifference, let us use a much better one for inviting their confidence. It will do beautifully well if givers and workers and helpers are moved by intelligent human pity, and they are with us abundantly enough if they feel themselves simply roused by, and respond to, the most awful exhibition of physical and moral anguish the world has ever faced, and which it is the strange fate of our actual generations to see unrolled before them. We welcome any lapse of logic that may connect inward vagueness with outward zeal, if it be the zeal of subscribers, presenters or drivers of cars, or both at once, stretcher-bearers, lifters, healers, consolers, handy Anglo-French interpreters, (these extremely precious,) smoothers of the way; in short, after whatever fashion. We ask of nobody any waste of moral or of theoretic energy, nor any conviction of any sort, but that the job is inspiring and the honest, educated man a match for it.

"If I seem to cast doubt on any very driving intelligence of the great issue as a source of sympathy with us, I think this is because I have been struck, whenever I have returned to my native land, by the indifference of Americans at large to the concerns and preoccupations of Europe. This indifference has again and again seemed to me quite beyond measure or description, though it may be in a degree suggested by the absence throughout the many-paged American newspaper of the least mention of a European circumstance unless some not-to-be-blinked war or revolution, or earthquake or other cataclysm has happened to apply the lash to curiosity. The most comprehensive journalistic formula that I have found myself, under that observation, reading into the general case is the principle that the first duty of the truly appealing sheet in a given community is to teach every individual reached by it—every man, woman and child—to count on appearing there, in their habit as they live, if they will only wait for their turn.

"However," he continued, "my point is simply my plea for patience with our enterprise even at the times when we can't send home sensational figures. 'They also serve who only stand and wait,' and the essence of our utility, as of that of any ambulance corps, is just to be there, on any and every contingency, including the blessed contingency of a temporary drop in the supply of the wounded turned out and taken on—since such comparative intermissions occur. Ask our friends, I beg you, to rid themselves of the image of our working on schedule time or on guarantee of a maximum delivery; we are dependent on the humors of battle, on incalculable rushes and lapses, on violent outbreaks of energy which rage and pass and are expressly designed to bewilder. It is not for the poor wounded to oblige us by making us showy, but for us to let them count on our open arms and open lap as troubled children count on those of their mother. It is now to be said, moreover, that our opportunity of service threatens inordinately to grow; such things may any day begin to occur at the front as will make what we have up to now been able to do mere child's play, though some of our help has been rendered when casualties were occurring at the rate, say, of 5,000 in twenty minutes, which ought, on the whole, to satisfy us. In face of such enormous facts of destruction—"

Here Mr. James broke off as if these facts were, in their horror, too many and too much for him. But after another moment he explained his pause.

"One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one's words as to endure one's thoughts. The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk."

This sounded rather desperate, yet the incorrigible interviewer, conscious of the wane of his only chance, ventured to glance at the possibility of a word or two on the subject of Mr. James's present literary intentions. But the kindly hand here again was raised, and the mild voice became impatient.

"Pardon my not touching on any such irrelevance. All I want is to invite the public, as unblushingly as possible, to take all the interest in us it can; which may be helped by knowing that our bankers are Messrs. Brown Brothers & Co., 59 Wall Street, New York City, and that checks should be made payable to the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps."

A Talk With Belgium's Governor

By Edward Lyall Fox

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April 11, 1915.]

Copyright, 1915, by the Wildman News Service.

"It would have been a very grave mistake not to have invaded Belgium. It would have been an unforgivable military blunder. I justify the invading of Belgium on absolute military grounds. What other grounds are there worth while talking about when a nation is in a war for its existence?"

It is the ruler of German Belgium speaking. The stern, serious-faced Governor General von Bissing, whom they call "Iron Fist," the man who crushes out sedition. Returning, I had just come up from the front around Lille, and almost the only clothes I had were those on my back; and the mud of the trenches still clung to my boots and puttees in yellow cakes. They were not the most proper clothes in which to meet King Albert's successor, but in field gray I had to go.

The Governor General received me in a dainty Louis Quinze room done in rose and French gray, and filled incongruously with delicate chairs and heavy brocaded curtains, a background which instantly you felt precisely suited his Excellency. In the English newspapers, which, by the way, are not barred from Berlin cafés, I had read of his Excellency as the "Iron Fist," or the "Heavy Heel," and I rather expected to see a heavy, domineering man. Instead, a slender, stealthy man in the uniform of a General rose from behind a tapestry topped table, revealing, as he did, a slight stoop in his back, perhaps a trifle foppish. He held out a long-fingered hand.

General von Bissing spoke no English. Somehow I imagined him to be one of those old German patriots who did not learn the language simply because it was English. Through Lieut. Herrmann I asked the Governor General what Germany was doing toward the reconstruction of Belgium. I told him America, when I had left, was under the impression that Belgium was a land utterly laid waste by the German armies. I frankly told him that in America the common belief was that the German military Government meant tyranny; what was Germany doing for Belgium?

"I think," replied Governor General von Bissing, "that we are doing everything that can be done under the circumstances. Those farm lands which you saw, coming up from Lille to Brussels, were planted by German soldiers and in the Spring they will be harvested by our soldiers. Belgium has not been devastated, and its condition has been grievously misstated, as you have seen. You must remember that the armies have passed back and forth across it—German, Belgian, English, and French—but I think you have seen that only in the paths of these armies has the countryside suffered. Where engagements were not fought or shots fired, Belgium is as it was.

"There has been no systematic devastation for the purpose of intimidating the people. You will learn this if you go all over Belgium. As for the cities, we are doing the best we can to encourage business. Of course, with things the way they are now, it is difficult. I can only ask you to go down one of the principal business streets here, the Rue de la Neuf, for instance, and price the articles that you find in the shops and compare them with the Berlin prices. The merchants of Brussels are not having to sacrifice their stock by cutting prices, and, equally important, there are people buying. I can unhesitatingly say that things are progressing favorably in Belgium."

The conversation turned upon Belgian and English relations before this war. The Governor General mentioned documentary evidence found in the archives in Brussels, proving an understanding between these countries against Germany. He spoke briefly about the point that the subjects of King Albert had been betrayed into the hands of English financiers and then laconically said: "The people of Belgium are politically undisciplined children.

"They are the victims of subtle propaganda that generally takes the form of articles in French and neutral newspapers," and General von Bissing looked me straight in the eyes, as though to emphasize that by neutral he meant the newspapers of the United States. "I can understand the French doing this," he said, "because they always use the Belgians and do not care what happens to them. It is beyond my comprehension, though, how the Government of any neutral country permits the publication of newspaper articles that can have but one effect, and that is to encourage revolt in a captured people. A country likes to call itself humanitarian, and yet it persists in allowing the publication of articles that only excite an ignorant, undisciplined people and lead them to acts of violence that must be wiped out by force," and the Governor General's mouth closed with a click.

"Do you know that the people of Brussels, whenever a strong wind carries the booming of heavy guns miles in from the front, think that French and English are going to recapture the city? Any day that we can hear the guns faintly, we know that there is an undercurrent of nervous expectancy running through the whole city. It goes down alleys and avenues and fills the cafés. You can see Belgians standing together, whispering. Twice they actually set the date when King Albert would return.

"This excitement and unrest, and the feeling of the English coming in, is fostered and encouraged by the articles in French and neutral newspapers that are smuggled in. I do not anticipate any uprising among the Belgians, although the thoughtless among them have encouraged it. An uprising is not a topic of worry in our councils. It could do us no harm. We would crush it out like that," and von Bissing snapped his thin fingers, "but if only for the sake of these misled and betrayed people, all seditious influences should cease."

I asked the Governor General the attitude of officials of the Belgian Government who were being used by the Germans in directing affairs.

"My predecessor, General von der Goltz," he replied, "informed me that the municipal officials in Brussels and most Belgian cities showed a good co-operative spirit from the start. The higher officials were divided, some refusing flatly to deal with the German administration. I do not blame these men, especially the railway officials, for I can see their viewpoint. In these days railway roads and troop trains were inseparable, and if those Belgian railway officials had helped us, they would have committed treason against their country. There was no need, though, for the Post Office officials to hold out, and only lately they have come around. Realizing, however, that without their department the country would be in chaos, the officials of the Department of Justice immediately co-operated with us. Today the Belgian Civil Courts try all ordinary misdemeanors and felonies. Belgian penal law still exists and is administered by Belgians. However, all other cases are tried by a military tribunal, the Feld Gericht."

I asked General von Bissing if there was much need for this military tribunal. I shall not forget his reply.

"We have a few serious cases," he said. "Occasionally there is a little sedition but for the most part it is only needle pricks. They are quiet now. They know why," and, slowly shaking his head, von Bissing, who is known as the sternest disciplinarian in the entire German Army, smiled.

We talked about the situation in America.

"The truth will come out," said von Bissing slowly. "Your country is renowned for fair play. You will be fair to Germany, I know. Your American Relief Commission is doing excellent work. It is in the highest degree necessary. At first the German Army had to use the food they could get by foraging in Belgium, for the country does not begin to produce the food it needs for its own consumption, and there were no great reserves that our troops could use. But the German Army is not using any of the Belgian food now."

H.M. MOHAMMED V.—Sultan of Turkey.—
(Photo from P.S. Rogers.)

H.M. VITTORIO EMANUELE III.—King of Italy.

I asked the Governor General if the Germans had not been very glad that America was sending over food.

"It is most important," he said, "that America regularly sends provisions to Belgium. Your country should feel very proud of the good it has done here. I welcome the American Relief Committee; we are working in perfect harmony. Despite reports to the contrary, we never have had any misunderstanding. Through the American press, please thank your people for their kindness to Belgium.

"But," he continued impressively, referring back to the justification of Germany's occupation and speaking with quiet force, "if we had not sent our troops into Belgium, the English would have landed their entire expeditionary army at Antwerp, and cut our line of communication. How do I know that? Simply because England would have been guilty of the grossest blunder if she had not done that, and the man who is in charge of England's Army has never been known as a blunderer."

A Charge In The Dark

By O.C.A. CHILD.

A New Poland

By Gustave Hervé

In spite of its vagueness, the Grand Duke Nicholas's proclamation justifies the most sanguine hopes. This has been recognized not only by all the Poles whom it has reached, those of Russian Poland, and the three million Polish refugees who live in America, but moreover, all the Allies have interpreted it as a genuine promise that Poland would be territorially and politically reconstructed.

What would it be right to include in a reconstructed Poland, if the great principle of nationality is to be respected?

First, such a Poland would naturally include all of the Russian Poland of today—by that I mean all the districts where Poles are in a large majority. This forms a preliminary nucleus of 12,000,000 inhabitants, among whom are about 2,000,000 Jews. This great proportion of Jews is accounted for by the fact that Poland is in the zone where Jews are allowed to live in Russia.

Our new Poland would not comprise the ancient Lithuania—the districts of Wilno, Kovno, and Grodno—although Lithuania formerly was part of Poland and still has about one million Polish inhabitants who form the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Lithuania, which is really the region of the Niemen, is peopled by Letts, who have their own language, resembling neither Polish nor Russian, and they likewise hope to obtain some day a measure of autonomy in the Russian Empire, with the right to use their language in schools, churches, and civil proceedings. One thing is certain: they would protest, and rightly, against actual incorporation into the new Poland.

The 125,000 square kilometers and 12,000,000 inhabitants of Russian Poland, lying around Warsaw, would constitute the nucleus of reconstructed Poland.

Must we add to this the 79,000 square kilometers and 8,000,000 inhabitants of Galicia, which was Austria's share in the spoils of old Poland? Certainly, so far as western Galicia around Cracow is concerned, for this is a wholly Polish region, the Poles there numbering 2,500,000.

As for eastern Galicia, of which the principal city is Lemberg, (Lvov in Polish,) the question is more delicate. Though Eastern Galicia has over 1,500,000 Poles and 600,000 Jews, most of the population is Ruthenian. Now these Ruthenians, who are natives, subjugated in former times by the conquering Poles, and who still own much of the big estates, are related to the "Little Russians," the southerners of Russia, and speak a dialect which is to Russian what Provençal is to French.

Besides, whereas the Poles are Catholics, the Ruthenians are Greek Orthodox Christians like the Russians, but differ from the latter in that they are connected with the Roman Church, and are thus schismatics in the eyes of the Russian priests.

Should these Ruthenians be annexed to Russia along with the 1,500,000 Poles and 500,000 Jews, among whom they have lived for centuries, they would scarcely look upon this as acceptable unless they were certain of having under Russian rule at least equal political liberty and respect for their dialect and religion as they have under Austrian rule.

Should they be incorporated with the rest of Polish Galicia into the new Poland? It is hardly probable that they desire this, having enjoyed under Austria a considerable measure of autonomy as regards their language and schools. Would not the best solution be to make of Eastern Galicia an autonomous province of the reconstructed Poland, guaranteeing to it its local privileges?

That leaves for consideration the portion of Poland now forming part of Prussia.

There can be no question as to what should be done with the districts of Posen and Thorn. These are the parts of Poland stolen by Prussia, which the Prussians, a century and a quarter after the theft, have not succeeded in Germanizing.

North of the Posen district is Western Prussia, whose principal city is Dantzic; that too is a Polish district, stolen in 1772. Since then Dantzic has been Germanized and there are numerous German officials and employes in the other towns of the region. All the rural districts and a part of the towns, however, have remained Polish in spite of attempts to Germanize them as brutal as those applied to Posnania. But, if united Poland should include Western Prussia, as she has the right to do—there being no rule against what is right—Eastern Prussia, including Königsberg, will be cut off from the rest of Germany.

Now, Eastern Prussia, with the exception of the southern part about the Masurian Lakes, which has remained Polish, has been German from early mediaeval times. It is the home of the most reactionary junkers of all Prussia, a cradle of Prussian royalty and of the Hohenzollerns. Despite our hatred for these birds of prey, could we wish that the new Poland should absorb these 2,000,000 genuine Germans?

If the region of Königsberg remains Prussian and the Masurian Lakes region is added to Poland, why not leave to Germany the strip of land along the coast, including Dantzic, in order that Eastern Prussia may thus be joined to Germany at one end?

Another question: There is in Prussian Upper Silesia a district, that of Oppeln, rich in iron ore, which was severed in the Middle Ages from Poland, but which has remained mostly Polish and which adjoins Poland. If the majority of Polish residents there demand it, would it not be well to join it once more to Poland, which would become, by this addition, contiguous to the Czechs of Bohemia?

To sum up:

Without laying hands on the German district of Königsberg, united Poland, by absorbing all the territory at present held by Prussia, in which the majority of the inhabitants are Poles, will take from the latter 70,000 square kilometers and 5,700,000 inhabitants. With these, the new Poland would have 24,000,000 inhabitants, including Eastern Galicia.

If Russia gave to this Poland in lieu of actual independence the most liberal autonomy and reconstructed a Polish kingdom under the suzerainty of the Czar—a Poland with its Diet, language, schools and army—would not the present war seem to us a genuine war of liberation and Nicholas II. a sort of Czar-liberator?

And if resuscitated Poland, taught by misfortune, compassionate toward the persecuted and proscribed because she herself has been persecuted and proscribed, should try to cure herself of her anti-Semitism, which has saddened her best friends in France, would not you say that she indeed deserved to be resuscitated from among the dead?

"With the Honors of War"

By Wythe Williams

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April, 1915.]

It was just at the dawn of a March morning when I got off a train at Gerbéviller, the little "Martyr City" that hides its desolation as it hid its existence in the foothills of the Vosges.

There was a dense fog. At 6 A.M. fog usually covers the valleys of the Meurthe and Moselle. From the station I could see only a building across the road. A gendarme demanded my credentials. I handed him the laisser-passer from the Quartier Général of the "First French Army," which controls all coming and going, all activity in that region. The gendarme demanded to know the hour when I proposed to leave. I told him. He said it would be necessary to have the permit "viséd for departure" at the headquarters of the gendarmerie. He pointed to the hazy outlines of another building just distinguishable through the fog.

This was proof that the town contained buildings—not just a building. The place was not entirely destroyed, as I had supposed. I went down the main street from the station, the fog enveloping me. I had letters to the town officials, but it was too early in the morning to present them. I would first get my own impressions of the wreck and the ruin. But I could see nothing on either hand as I stumbled along in the mud. So I commented to myself that this was not as bad as some places I had seen. I thought of the substantial station and the buildings across the road—untouched by war. I compared Gerbéviller with places where there is not even a station—where not one simple house remains as the result of "the day when the Germans came."

The road was winding and steep, dipping down to the swift little stream that twists a turbulent passage through the town. The day was coming fast but the fog remained white and impenetrable. After a few minutes I began to see dark shapes on either side of the road. Tall, thin, irregular shapes, some high, some low, but with outlines all softened, toned down by the banks of white vapor.

I started across the road to investigate and fell into a pile of jagged masonry on the sidewalk. Through the nearness of the fog I could see tumbled piles of bricks. The shapes still remained—spectres that seemed to move in the light wind from the valley. An odor that was not of the freshness of the morning assailed me. I climbed across the walk. No wall of buildings barred my path, but I mounted higher on the piles of brick and stones. A heavy black shape was now at my left hand. I looked up and in the shadow there was no fog. I could see a crumbled swaying side wall of a house that was. The odor I noticed was that caused by fire. Sticking from the wall I could see the charred wood joists that once supported the floor of the second story. Higher, the lifting fog permitted me to see the waving boughs of a tree that hung over the house that was, outlined against a clear sky. At my feet, sticking out of the pile of bricks and stones, was the twisted iron fragments that was once the frame of a child's bed. I climbed out into the sunshine.

I was standing in the midst of a desolation and a silence that was profound. There was nothing there that lived, except a few fire-blacked trees that stuck up here and there in the shelter of broken walls. Now I understood the meaning of the spectral shapes. They were nothing but the broken walls of the other houses that were. They were all that remained of nine-tenths of Gerbéviller.

I wandered along to where the street turned abruptly. There the ground pitched more sharply to the little river. There stood an entire half of a house unscathed by fire; it was one of those unexplainable freaks that often occur in great catastrophes. Even the window glass was intact. Smoke was coming from the chimney. I went to the opposite side and there stood an old woman looking out toward the river, brooding over the ruin stretching below her.

"You are lucky," I said. "You still have your home."

She threw out her hands and turned a toothless countenance toward me. I judged her to be well over seventy. It wasn't her home, she explained. Her home was "là-bas"—pointing vaguely in the distance. She had lived there fifty years—now it was burned. Her son's house for which he had saved thirty years to be able to call it his own, was also gone; but then her son was dead, so what did it matter? Yes, he was shot on the day the Germans came. He was ill, but they killed him. Oh, yes, she saw him killed. When the Germans went away she came to this house and built a fire in the stove. It was very cold.

And why were the houses burned? No; it was not the result of bombardment. Gerbéviller was not bombarded until after the houses were burned. They were burned by the Germans systematically. They went from house to house with their torches and oil and pitch. They did not explain why they burned the houses, but it was because they were angry.

The old woman paused a moment, and a faint flicker of a smile showed in the wrinkles about her eyes. I asked her to continue her story.

"You said because they were angry," I prompted. The smile broadened. Oh, yes, they were very angry, she explained. They did not even make the excuse that the villagers fired upon them. They were just angry through and through. And it was all because of those seventy-five French chasseurs who held the bridge. Some one called to her from the house. She hobbled to the door. "Anyone can tell you about the seventy-five chasseurs," she said, disappearing within.

I went on down the road and stood upon the bridge over the swift little river. It was a narrow little bridge only wide enough for one wagon to pass. Two roads from the town converged there, the one over which I had passed and another which formed a letter "V" at the juncture with the bridge. Across the river only one road led away from the bridge and it ran straight up a hill, when it turned suddenly into the broad national highway to Lunéville about five miles away.

One house remained standing almost at the entrance to the bridge, at the end nearest the town. Its roof was gone, and its walls bore the marks of hundreds of bullets, but it was inhabited by a little old man of fifty, who came out to talk with me. He was the village carpenter. His house was burned, so he had taken refuge in the little house at the bridge. During the time the Germans were there he had been a prisoner, but they forgot him the morning the French army arrived. Everybody was in such a hurry, he explained.

I asked him about the seventy-five chasseurs at the bridge. Ah, yes, we were then standing on the site of their barricade. He would tell me about it, for he had seen it all from his house half way up the hill.

The chasseurs were first posted across the river on the road to Lunéville, and when the Germans approached, early in the morning, they fell back to the bridge, which they had barricaded the night before. It was the only way into Gerbéviller, so the chasseurs determined to fight. They had torn up the street and thrown great earthworks across one end of the bridge. Additional barricades were thrown up on the two converging streets, part way up the hill, behind which they had mitrailleuses which could sweep the road at the other end of the bridge.

About a half mile to the south a narrow footbridge crossed the river, only wide enough for one man. It was a little rustic affair that ran through the grounds of the Château de Gerbéviller that faced the river only a few hundred yards below the main bridge. It was a very ancient château, built in the twelfth century and restored in the seventeenth century. It was a royal château of the Bourbons. In it once lived the great François de Montmorency, Duc de Luxembourg and Marshal of France. Now it belonged to the Marquise de Lamberty, a cousin of the King of Spain.

I interrupted, for I wanted to hear about the chasseurs. I gave the little old man a cigarette. He seized it eagerly—so eagerly that I also handed him a cigar. He just sort of fondled that cigar for a moment and then placed it in an inside pocket. It was a very cheap and very bad French cigar, for I was in a part of the country that has never heard of Havanas, but to the little old man it was something precious. "I will keep it for Sunday," he said.

I then got him back to the seventy-five chasseurs. It was just eight o'clock in the morning—a beautiful sunshiny morning—when the German column appeared around the bend in the road which we could see across the bridge, and which joined the highway from Lunéville. There were twelve thousand in that first column. One hundred and fifty thousand more came later. A band was playing "Deutschland über alles" and the men were singing. The closely packed front ranks of infantry broke into the goose step as they came in sight of the town. It was a wonderful sight; the sun glistened on their helmets; they marched as though on parade right down almost to the opposite end of the bridge.

Then came the command to halt. For a moment there was a complete silence. The Germans, only a couple of hundred yards from the barricade, seemed slowly to consider the situation. The Captain of the chasseurs, from a shelter behind the very little house that is still standing—and where his men up the two roads could see him—softly waved his hand.

Crack-crack-crack—crack-crack-crack-crack—crack-crack-crack! The bullets from the mitrailleuses whistled across the bridge into the front ranks of the "Deutchland über alles" singers, while the men behind the bridge barricade began a deadly rifle fire.

Have you ever heard a mitrailleuse? It is just like a telegraph instrument, with its insistant clickety click-click-click, only it is a hundred times as loud. Indeed I have been told by French officers that it has sometimes been used as a telegraph instrument, so accurately can its operator reel out its hundred and sixty shots a minute.

On that morning at the Gerbéviller barricade, however, it went faster than the telegraph. These men on the converging roads just shifted their range slightly and poured bullets into the next ranks of infantry and so on back along the line, until Germans were dropping by the dozen at the sides of the little straight road. Then the column broke ranks wildly and fled back into the shelter of the road from Lunéville.

A half hour later a detachment of cavalry suddenly rounded the corner and charged straight for the barricade. The seventy-five were ready for them. Some of them got half way across the bridge and then tumbled into the river. Not one got back around the corner of the road to Lunéville.

There was another half hour of quiet, and then from the Lunéville road a battery of artillery got into action. Their range was bad, so far as any achievement against the seventy-five was concerned, so they turned their attention to the château, which they could easily see from their position across the river. The first shell struck the majestic tower of the building and shattered it. The next smashed the roof, the third hit the chapel—and so continued the bombardment until flames broke out to complete the destruction.

Of course the Germans could not know that the château was empty, that its owner was in Paris and both her sons fighting in the French Army. But they had secured the military advantage of demolishing one of the finest country houses in France, with its priceless tapestries, ancient marbles and heirlooms of the Bourbons. A howl of German glee was heard by the seventy-five chasseurs crouching behind their barricades. So pleased were the invaders with their achievement, that next they bravely swung out a battery into the road leading to the bridge, intending to shell the barricades. The Captain of chasseurs again waved his hand. Every man of the battery was killed before the guns were in position. It took an entire company of infantry—half of them being killed in the action—to haul those guns back into the Lunéville road, thus to clear the way for another advance.

From then on until 1 o'clock in the afternoon there were three more infantry attacks, all failing as lamentably as the first. The seventy-five were holding off the 12,000. At the last attack they let the Germans advance to the entrance of the bridge. They invited them with taunts to "avancez." Then they poured in their deadly fire, and as the Germans broke and fled they permitted themselves a cheer. Up to this time not one chasseur was killed. Only four were wounded.

Shortly after 1 o'clock the German artillery wasted a few more shells on the ruined château and the chasseurs could see a detachment crawling along the river bank in the direction of the narrow footbridge that crossed through the château park a half mile below. The Captain of the chasseurs sent one man with a mitrailleuse to hold the bridge. He posted himself in the shelter of a large tree at one end. In a few minutes about fifty Germans appeared. They advanced cautiously on the bridge. The chasseur let them get half way over before he raked them with his fire. The water below ran red with blood.

The Germans retreated for help and made another attack an hour later with the same result. By 4 o'clock, when the lone chasseur's ammunition was exhausted, it is estimated that he had killed 175 Germans, who made five desperate rushes to take the position, which would have enabled them to make a flank attack on the seventy-four still holding the main bridge. When his ammunition was gone—which occurred at the same time as the ammunition at the main bridge was exhausted—this chasseur with the others succeeded in effecting a retreat to a main body of cavalry. If he still lives—this modern Horatius at the bridge—he remains an unnamed hero in the ranks of the French Army, unhonored except in the hearts of those few of his countrymen who know.

During the late hours of the afternoon aeroplanes flew over the chasseurs' position, thus discovering to the Germans how really weak were the defenses of the town, how few its defenders. Besides, the ammunition was gone. But for eight hours—from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon—the seventy-five had held the 12,000. General Joffre has said in one of his reports that the defense of the bridge at Gerbéviller had an important bearing on the battle of the Marne, which was just beginning, for it gave Castelnau's Army of the East time to dig its trenches a few miles back of Gerbéviller before the Germans got through.

Had that body of 12,000 succeeded earlier the 150,000 Germans that advanced the next day might have been able to fall on the French right flank during the most critical and decisive battle of the war. The total casualties of the chasseurs were three killed, three captured, and six wounded.

The little old man and I had walked to the entrance of the château park before he finished his story. It was still too early for breakfast. I thanked him and told him to return to his work in the little house by the bridge. I wanted to explore the château at leisure.

I entered the place—what was left of it. Most of the walls were standing. Walls built in the twelfth century do not break easily, even with modern artillery. But the modern roof and seventeenth century inner walls were all demolished. Not a single article of furniture or decoration remained. But the destruction showed some of the same freaks—similar to that little house left untouched by fire on the summit of the hill.

For instance, the Bourbon coat of arms above the grand staircase was untouched, while the staircase itself was just splintered bits of marble. On another fragment of a wall there still hung a magnificent stag's antlers. Strewed about in the corners I saw fragments of vases that had been priceless. Even the remnants were valuable. In the ruined music room I found a piece of fresh, clean music, (an Alsatian waltz,) lying on the mantelpiece. I went out to the front of the building, where the great park sweeps down to the edge of the river. An old gardener in one of the side paths saw me. We immediately established cordial relations with a cigarette.

He told me how, after the chasseurs retreated beyond the town, the Germans—reduced over a thousand of their original number by the activities of the day—swept over the barricades of the bridge and into the town. Yes, the old woman I had talked with was right about it. They were very angry. They were ferociously angry at being held eight hours at that bridge by a force so ridiculously small.

The first civilians they met they killed, and then they began to fire the houses. One young man, half witted, came out of one of the houses near the bridge. They hanged him in the garden behind the house. Then they called his mother to see. A mob came piling into the château headed by four officers. All the furniture and valuables that were not destroyed they piled into a wagon and sent back to Lunéville. Of the gardener who was telling me the story they demanded the keys of the wine cellars. No; they did not injure him. They just held him by the arms while several dozen of the soldiers spat in his face.

While the drunken crew were reeling about the place, one of them accidentally stumbled upon the secret underground passage leading to the famous grottoes. These grottoes and the underground connection from the château were built in the fifteenth century. They are a half mile away, situated only half above ground, the entrance looking out on a smooth lawn that extends to the edge of the river. Several giant trees, the trunks of which are covered with vines, semi-shelter the entrance, which is also obscured by climbing ivy. The interior was one of the treasures of France. The vaulted ceilings were done in wonderful mosaic. The walls decorated with marbles and rare sea shells. In every nook were marble pedestals and antique statuary, while the fountain in the centre, supplied from an underground stream, was of porphyry inlaid with mosaic.

The Germans looked upon it with appreciative eyes and cultured minds. But it did not please them. They were still very angry. Its destruction was a necessity of war. It could not be destroyed by artillery because it was half underground and screened by the giant trees. But it could be destroyed by picks and axes. A squad of soldiers was detailed to the job. They did it thoroughly. The gardener took me there to see. Not a scrap of the mosaic remained. The fountain was smashed to bits. A headless Venus and a smashed and battered Adonis were lying prone upon the ground.

The visitors to the château and environs afterward joined their comrades in firing the town. Night had come. Also across the bridge waited the hundred and fifty thousand reinforcements come from Lunéville. The five hundred of the two thousand inhabitants who remained were herded to the upper end of the town near the station. That portion was not to be destroyed because the German General would make his headquarters there.

The inhabitants were to be given a treat. They were to witness the entrance of the hundred and fifty thousand—the power and might of Germany was to be exhibited to them. So while the flames leaped high from the burning city, reddening the sky for miles, while old men prayed, while women wept, while little children whimpered, the sound of martial music was heard down the street near the bridge. The infantry packed in close formation, the red light from the fire shining on their helmets, were doing the goose step up the main street to the station—the great German army had entered the city of Gerbéviller with the honors of war.

General Foch, the Man of Ypres

An Account of France's New Master of War

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April, 1915.]

"Find out the weak point of your enemy and deliver your blow there," said the Commander of the Twentieth French Army Corps at Nancy at a staff banquet in 1913.

"But suppose, General," said an artillery officer, "that the enemy has no weak point?"

"If the enemy has no weak point," returned the commander, with a gleam of the eye and an aggressive tilt of the chin, "make one."

The commander was Foch—Ferdinand Foch—who has suddenly flashed before the world as the greatest leader in the French Army after Joffre, and who in that remark at Nancy gave the index to the basic quality of his character as a General. General Foch is today in command of the northern armies of France, besides being the chief Lieutenant and confidant of Joffre. Joffre conceives; Foch, master tactician, executes. He finds the weak point; if there is no weak point, he creates or seeks to create one.

When King George of England was at the front in France recently he conferred the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath—the highest military distinction in the form of an order within the gift of the British Crown—on two Frenchmen. Joffre was one. The other was Foch.

"Foch? Foch? Who is Foch?" asked the British public, perplexed, when the newspapers printed the news of the granting of this signal honor.

"Foch is the General who was at the head of the French military mission which followed our army manoeuvres three years ago," replied a few men who happened to have been intimately acquainted with those manoeuvres.

"But what has that to do with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath?" asked John Bull. And the manoeuvre experts not being able to reply, the English newspapers demanded from their correspondents in France an answer to the query, "Who is Foch? Why the Grand Cross?"

And the main features of the answers to that query were these:

Foch is the "greatest strategist in Europe and the humblest," in the words of Joffre.

Foch is the hero of the Marne, the man who perceived on Sept. 9 that there must be a gap between the Prussian Guard and the Saxon Army, and who gathered enough artillery to crush the guard in the St. Gond marshes and forced both the Prussians and the Saxons, now separated, to retreat.

Foch is the man of Ypres, the commander who was in general control of the successful fight made by the French and the British, aided by the Belgians, to prevent the Germans from breaking through to Calais.

Foch, in short, is one of the military geniuses of the war, so record observers at the front. He is a General who has something of the Napoleonic in his composition; the dramatic in war is for him—secrecy and suddenness, gigantic and daring movements; fiery, yet coldly calculated attacks; vast strategic conceptions carried out by swift, unfaltering tactics. Foch has a tendency to the impetuous, but he is impetuous scientifically. He has, however, taken all in all, much more of the dash and nervousness and warmth of the Southern Latin than has Joffre—cool, cautious, taciturn Joffre. Yet both men are from the south of France. They were born within a few miles of one another, within three months of one another, Foch being born on Oct. 2, 1851, and Joffre on Jan. 12, 1852.

Most writers who have dealt with Foch agree on this as one of his paramount characteristics—the Napoleonic mode of military thought. When Foch was director of the Ecole de Guerre, where he had much to do with shaping the military views of many of the men who are now commanding units of the French Armies, he was considered to be possessed of almost an obsession on the subject of Napoleon. He studied Napoleon's campaigns, and restudied them. He went back much further, however, in his choice of a master, and gave intense application to the campaigns of Caesar. Napoleon and Caesar—these were the minds from which the mind of the Marne and Ypres has learned some of its lessons of success.

Here Foch invites comparison with another of the dominant figures of the war—General French. For French is described by his biographer as "a worshipper of Napoleon," regarding him as the world's greatest strategist, and in following out and studying Napoleon's campaigns French personally covered and studied much of the ground in Belgium over which he has been fighting. French is a year younger than Foch. They are old friends, as are French and Joffre, and Joffre and Foch.

The inclination of Foch to something of the Napoleonic is shown beyond the realm of strategy and tactics. Foch is credited with knowing the French soldier, his heart, his mind, his capabilities, and the method of getting the most out of those capabilities, in a way reminiscent of the winner of Jena. And Foch knows not only the privates, but the officers. When he went to the front he visited each commander; the Colonels he called by name; the corps commanders, without exception, had attended his lectures at the Ecole de Guerre.

As for the men, Foch makes it his business to get into personal contact with them, as Napoleon used to do. Foch does not hobnob with them, there is no joking or familiarity, but he goes into the trenches and the occupied villages and looks the men over informally, inspects food or equipment, makes a useful comment or two, drops a phrase that is worth repeating, and leaves behind him enthusiasm and respect. The Paris Figaro says that he has the gift of setting souls afire, of arousing that élan in the French fighter which made that fighter perform military miracles when the "sun of Austerlitz" was high. It has been declared by a French writer that Foch knows the human element in the French Army better than any other man living.

With all his knowledge of men, his power of inspiring them, Foch is quiet, retiring, non-communicative, with no taste for meeting people in social intercourse. His life has been monotonous—work and work and work. He has the reputation of being a driver; he used to be particularly severe on shirkers in the war college, and such, no matter what their influence, had no chance of getting a diploma leading to an attractive staff position when Foch was Director. When he was in command at Nancy and elsewhere he used to work his staffs hard, and they had to share much of the monotony of work which has been chiefly Foch's life. He did not go in for society, merely making the formal calls required by the etiquette of garrison towns on the chief garrison hostesses, and giving dinners two or three times a year to his staff.

Foch, indeed, with his quiet ways and his hard work and his studying of Napoleon and Caesar, was characterized by some of the officers of the army as a pedant, a theorist, and these held that Foch had small chance of doing anything important in such a practical realm as that of real war.

Because of his Directorship of the Ecole de Guerre he was known to many officers, but as far as France at large was concerned his name was scarcely known at all last August. Yet officers knew him in other lands besides his own. His two great books, "Principles of War" and "Conduct of War," have been translated into English, German, and Italian, and are highly regarded by military men. He has been ranked by the Militär-Wochenblatt, organ of the German General Staff, as one of the few strategists of first class ability among the Allies.

Foch is a slim man, with a great deal of nervous energy in his actions, being so quick and graceful in movement, indeed, that a recent English observer declares he carries himself more like a man of 40 than one of 64. His gray blue eyes are particularly to be noticed, so keen are they. His speech is quick, precise, logical.

So little has Foch been known to the French public that it has been stated time and again that he is an Alsatian. He is not, but comes of a Basque family which has lived for many generations in the territory which is now the Department of the Hautes-Pyrénées, directly on the border of Spain. Foch was born in the town of Tarbes in that department. Joffre was born in the Department Pyrénées-Orientales, on the Spanish border to the east. Foch's father, Napoleon Foch, was a Bonapartist and Secretary of the Prefecture at Tarbes under Napoleon III. One of his two brothers, a lawyer, is also called Napoleon. The other is a Jesuit priest. Foch and these brothers attended the local college, and then turned to their professions.

In 1870 Foch served as a subaltern against the Germans, as did Joffre. After the war Foch began to win recognition as a man of brains, and at 26 he was given a commission as artillery Captain. Later he became Professor of Tactics in the Ecole de Guerre, with the title of Commandant, where he remained for five years, and then returned to regimental work. It was when Foch reached the grade of Brigadier General that he went back to the War College, this time as Director, one of the most confidential positions in the War Department. From this post he went to the command of the Thirteenth Division, thence to the command of the Eighth Corps at Bourges, and thence to the command of the Twentieth Corps at Nancy.

At the time that Foch was appointed Director of the Ecole de Guerre, Clemenceau was Premier, and upon the latter fell the task of choosing an officer for the important Directorship. There was keen competition for the position, many influential Generals desiring the appointment, and in consequence much wire-pulling went on. The story goes that Clemenceau, a man of action, became impatient of the intrigues for the post, and determined to make his own choice unhampered.

According to the story, Clemenceau, after a conference one day upon routine business with Foch, asked the latter to dine. The Ecole de Guerre was not mentioned during the meal, the men chatting upon general topics. But as the coffee was being brought on, the Premier turned suddenly to the General and said, brusquely:

"By the way, I've a good bit of news for you. You're nominated Director of the Ecole de Guerre."

"Director of the Ecole de Guerre! But I'm not a candidate for the post."

"That is possible. But you're appointed all the same, and I know you will do excellent work in the position."

Foch thanked the Premier, but he still had some doubts, and added:

"I fear you don't know all my family connections. I have a brother who is a Jesuit."

"Jesuit be d——-!" the Premier is reported to have roared in reply. "Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Director! You are the Director of the Ecole de Guerre. All the Jesuits in creation won't alter that—it is a fait accompli."

Among the confidential bits of work worthy of note that Foch has done for the War Department is the report he made upon the larger guns of the French field artillery, which have done such execution in the present war. For many weeks Foch went around the great Creusot gun works in the blouse of a workman, testing, watching, experimenting, analyzing.

Foch was one of the high officers in France who was not in the least surprised by the war and who had personally been holding himself in readiness for it for years. He felt, and often said, that a great war was inevitable; so much used he to dwell upon the certainty of war that some persons regarded him as an alarmist when he kept declaring that French officers should take every step within their power to get themselves and the troops ready for active service at an instant's notice. He also held that France as a nation should prepare to the utmost of her power for the assured conflict.

In a recent issue of The London Times there was a description of Foch by a Times correspondent who had been at Foch's headquarters in the north of France. The correspondent's remarks are prefaced by the statement that in a late dispatch General French mentions General Foch as one of those whose help he has "once more gratefully to acknowledge." The correspondent writes in part:

Ernest Dimnet in The London Saturday Review has this to say in part about Foch and his two widely known books:

The Unremembered Dead

By ELLA A. FANNING.

Canada and Britain's War Union

By Edward W. Thomson, F.R.S.L., F.R.S.C.

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April, 1915.]

Canada's political relation to Great Britain, and, indeed, to all other countries, has been essentially altered by Canada's quite voluntary engagement in the war. Were feudal terms not largely inapplicable, one might aver that the vassal has become the suzerain's ally, political equality connoted.

But, indeed, Canadians were never vassals. They have ever been Britons, whatever their individual origins, retaining the liberties of their political birthright. While in a certain tutelage to their own monarchs' immediate Ministries, they have continually, slowly, consciously, expanded their freedom from such tutelage, substituting for it self-government or rule by their own representatives, without forsaking but rather enhancing their allegiance to the common Crown. This has long been the symbol of their self-government, even as it is to old country kinsmen the symbol of rule by themselves.

The alteration manifested by Canada's active, voluntary engagement in the European war is the change from Canadians holding, as they formerly did, that Great Britain was bound to defend Canada, while Canadians were not bound to defend Great Britain outside Canada. The "dependency" has not been now dragged in; it acted as an independency; it recognized its participation with Great Britain in a common danger; it proceeded quite voluntarily, quite independently, to recruit, organize, dispatch, and maintain large forces for the common cause. Canada's course has become that of a partner in respect of acceptance of risks and of contribution to expenses.

This partner has no formally specified share in gains, or in authority, or in future policy of the concern. Canada has no obvious, distinct, admitted way or voice as to the conduct of war or making of peace. She appears, with the other self-governing Dominions of the Crown, as an ally having no vote in settlements, none of the prerogatives of an ally. Hence some observers in Great Britain, in Canada, in other realms of the Crown contend that the old, expressed relations between Great Britain, Canada, and the other Dominions must inevitably be extensively changed formally as well as actually in consequence of the war.

Some say imperial federation cannot but ensue. Others argue that formal independence must arrive if such federation come not speedily. Others contend for an Empire League of sister States. Nobody ventures to mention what was often talked publicly by Canadians from thirty to fifty years ago, and later by Goldwin Smith, viz., Canada's entrance to the United States as a new tier of sovereign States. The idea of severance from Great Britain has vanished. Discussion of the other alternatives is not inactive, but it is forced. It engages the quidnuncs. They are talkers who must say something for the delight of hearing themselves; or they are writers who live under the exigency of needing to get "something different" daily into print. They are mostly either "Jingoes" or Centralizationists, as contra to Nationalists or Decentralizationists, long-standing opponents.

Each set perceives their notions liable to be profoundly affected by Canada's fighting in Europe. Each affects belief that their own political designs cannot but be thereby served; each is afflicted with qualms of doubt. They alike appreciate the factors that make for their opponent's cause. Both know the strength of popular attachment to Great Britain; both know the traditional and inbred loathing of the industrious masses for the horrible bloodshed and insensate waste of treasure in war. Both sets balance inwardly the chances that sentiments seemingly irreconcilable and about equally respectable may, after the war, urge Canadians either to draw politically closer to their world-scattered kin, or to cut ligaments that might pull them again and again, time without end, into the immemorial European shambles.

But is the Canadian public excitedly interested in the discussion? Not at all. Spokesmen and penmen of the two contentious factions are victimized by their own perfervid imaginations. The electorate, the masses, are not so swayed. The Canadian people, essentially British no matter what their origins, are mainly, like all English-speaking democracies, of straight, primitive, uncomplicated emotions, and of essentially conservative mind. They "plug" along. The hour and the day hold their attention. It is given to the necessary private works of the moment, as to the necessary public conduct of the time.

They did not, as a public, spin themselves any reasons or excuses for their hearty approval of Canada's engagement in the war. Her or their contributions of men and money to its fields of slaughter and waste appeared and appear to them natural, proper, inevitable. They applauded seriously the country's being "put in for it" by agreement of the two sets of party politicians, and without any direct consultation of the electorate in this, the most important departure Canada ever made, because prompt action seemed the only way, and time was lacking for debate about what seemed the next thing that had to be done. In fact, the Canadian people, regarded collectively, felt and acted in this case with as much ingenuousness as did those Tyrolese mountaineers, bred, according to Heine, to know nothing of politics save that they had an Emperor who wore a white coat and red breeches.

But did they forsake their relish of and devotion to their customary, legendary Tyrolese liberties? No more will the Canadian masses, by reason of their hearty participation in the war, incline to yield jot or tittle of their usual, long-struggled-for, gradually acquired, valuable and valued British self-governing rights. Can the Jingoes or Centralizationists scare them backward? Or the Decentralizationists or Separatists hurry them forward? Won't they just continue to "plug along" as their forefathers did in the old country and in the new, gaining a bit more freedom to do well or ill at their own collective choice—that is, if the war result "as usual" in British security, according to confident British expectation.

Such is the Canadian political situation. It has been essentially similar any time within living memory. The people approve in politics what they feel, instinctively, to be the profitable or the decent and reasonable necessary next thing to do. Which signifies that those controversialists are probably wrong who conceive that a result of the war, if it be a win for the Allies, will cause any great formal change in Canada's political relation to Great Britain.

The truly valuable change in such relations is already secured; it cannot but become more notably established by future discussion; it is and will be a change by reason of greatly increased influence on Great Britain by Canada and the other Dominions. And it appears highly probable that such inevitable change in influence or weight of the new countries is sufficient for all sentiments concerned, and for all useful purposes on behalf of which formal changes are advocated by doctrinaires and idealists.

The British peoples have acquired by long practice in very various politics a way of making existing arrangements "do" with some slight patching. They are instinctively seized of the truth of Edmund Burke's maxim, "Innovation is not improvement." They have "muddled along" into precisely the institutions that suit any exigency, their sanest political philosophers recognizing that the exigency must always be most amenable to the most flexible system.

It is because the existing arrangements between London and the several Dominion capitals don't suit logicians that they do suit experienced statesmen pretty well. Because these institutions can be patched as occasion may require, they are retained for patching on occasion. Because the loose, go-as-you-please organization of the so-called "empire" has revealed almost incredible unity of sentiment and purpose, practiced statesmen regard it as a prodigious success. They are mighty shy of affiliating with any of the well-meaning doctrinaires who have been explaining any time within the last century that the system is essentially incoherent and absurd and urgently needs profound change with doctrinaire improvements.

Sir Robert Borden, for instance. Some days ago he most amiably gave me a little private talk on these matters, of course on the tacit understanding that he was not to be "interviewed" as for close reporting of his informal sentences. He was, by the way, apparently in robust health, as if, like Mr. Asquith, of a temperament to flourish under the heaviest responsibilities ever laid on a Prime Minister in his own country. No statesman could be of aspect and utterance less hurried, nor more pleasant, lucid, cautious, disposed to give a friendly caller large and accurate information briefly, while disclosing nothing at variance with or unfindable in his published speeches. Of some of them he repeated apposite slices; to others he referred for further enlightenment as to his views on imperial federation. Really he was neither secretive nor newly informative. The Premier of Canada at any time is governed, much as I have endeavored to show how the electors are, by that natural, instinctive course of the general loyal Canadian mind, which constitutes "the situation" and controls Governmental proceedings on behalf of the public.

Well meaning persons who allege Sir Robert to have either favored or disfavored imperial federation have been inaccurate. Precisely what imperial federation may be nobody knows, for the simple and sufficient reason that nobody has ever sketched or elaborated a scheme in that regard which appeared or appears desirable as a change from the all-compelling situation. What has never been adopted as desirable cannot be termed practicable in statesmen's language. To declare an untried scheme impracticable might be an error of rashness.

The idea of federating the empire has long attracted Sir Robert, with many other admirable Canadians and Britons, since it connotes or involves the concept of British Union for all worthy and necessary purposes, including maintenance of local autonomy or self-government, surely a most praiseworthy design. Discussion of that idea is unlikely to be harmful; it may be useful; something may come of it that may seem desirable and practicable to substantially all interests and people concerned. A consummation devoutly to be wished, but not to be rushed! One point, frequently specified in Sir Robert's public speeches, was stated as follows in a recent report, pamphleted for distribution by his own side:

There Sir Robert was recommending no particular solution. A little earlier in the same speech he illustrated the deep sense of all experienced British statesmen that there never is or can be in the British system any final solution of any grave problem, the vital essence of the system being flux and change to suit ever-changing circumstance.

YUAN SHIH-KAI—President of the Chinese Republic.—
(Photo by Rio V. De Sieux.)

PRINCE VON BUELOW—German Ambassador to Italy.

Which was admonition at once of the Centralizationists and their opponents, the Nationalists.

Whatever alteration of existing British inter-arrangements may come after the war will be done on instinct in view of circumstances that cannot now be foreseen. Wherefore clamorers for this or that, their favorite scheme, are now inopportunists. Hence they are neglected by the public as unimpressive, futile wasters of breath or ink. Indeed Canada, Great Britain, the whole race of mankind are now swept on the crest of a huge wave of Fate. When it casts them ashore, recedes, leaves men to consider what may best be done for the future, then will have come the time to rearrange political fabrics, if need be. Then Sir Robert Borden will probably continue in his often clearly specified opinion that Canada, if remaining liable as now to be drawn into Great Britain's more perilous wars—a liability which must ever urge Canada to strong participation in order that the peril may be the sooner ended—ought to have a share in controlling Great Britain's foreign policy. Which sharing Mr. Asquith declared last year impracticable, in that sense inadmissible.

Westminster must retain freedom to move, act, strike quickly. Her course toward Germany had to be decided last August within a few hours. Obviously her freedom, her power for promptitude would be hindered in proportion to need for such consultation with and approval by councilors of many distant countries as is presupposed by advocates of imperial federation. Why establish control by cumbersome, superfluous machinery when the war has made it clear as the sun at high noon that the essential desideratum, British Union, exists now? All the notable communities of the King's realms have demonstrated that they are in the mind, the condition of a voluntary empire. What more can be desired save by such as desire old country domination of all the concerned countries, and who really long for a formal and subservient Empire?

Sir Richard Jebb, a deep student of the Empire problem, declared clearly last November the meaning of that general voluntary British war union which is a wonder of mankind, and in the course to teach a profound, general political lesson. He wrote:

Sir Richard Jebb's sentence, specifying the nature of the Australian influence on foreign policy, seems apt reply to Sir Robert Borden's oft-repeated specification that a share in control of foreign policy should accrue to the Dominions by reason of their participation in or liability to war. This liability really compels them to engage with all their strength, lest they comfort an enemy by abstention, or by confining their armaments to self-defense, which might and would be read as disapproval of Britain's course, if the war were one of magnitude endangering her. A system more powerfully requiring Great Britain to take heed that her quarrel be just, lest she be not thrice armed by approving children, can scarcely be imagined.

On this matter I have had the pleasure and benefit, during the last twelve years, of talking with Sir Wilfrid Laurier often. In the quoted Jebb view he agreed closely when I saw him a few days ago. He remarked, with special regard to this article for THE NEW YORK TIMES, that his point of insistence at the Imperial Conferences of 1902, 1907, 1911, and on all proper occasions, has been that local autonomy—that is, complete self-government for each of the Dominions—is not only consistent with British unity but necessary thereto as promoting and conserving that unity.

When Mr. Asquith's denial of the practicability of giving the Dominions a direct share in control of Great Britain's foreign policy is considered, the Jebb-Laurier view would appear one to which Sir Robert Borden, cautious statesman, must be led by recognition that potent influence on foreign policy cannot but come to Dominions energetically providing at once for their own defense and for their power to aid Great Britain all along the line.

As to imperial federation, Sir Wilfrid remarked that he has ever been openly attracted by that aspiration toward permanent British union, on which advocacy of the vague project has ever been bottomed. He is, as he said to me, and as all his long series of political actions have manifested, British in heart and way of political thinking, as indeed substantially all his French-Canadian compatriots are. British liberality, not to say liberalism, has attached them to the British system as firmly as any community originating from the United Kingdom. It was a French-Canadian statesman who asserted, some fifty years ago, when many British-Canadians seemed tending toward union with the United States, "The last shot fired in Canada for British connection will be from a French-Canadian." That was before the civil war abolished slavery.

But, even as the Britishism of Old Country liberals is strongly tinctured by devotion to ideals which Americans are wont to regard as theirs—ideals making for settled peace, industry, the uplift of the "common people," fair room and reward for those abilities which conspicuously serve the general welfare—so Sir Wilfrid and his compatriots acknowledge their Britishism to be acutely conscious of political kinship with the American people. The French-Canadian yearning, like that of many Canadians of British origin, is rather for English-speaking union—a union of at least thorough understanding and common designs with the American people—than for the narrower exclusive British union sought by Canadian imperial federationists.

Sir Wilfrid said, in effect, (I do not profess to report his very words,) that federation of those British communities widely separated by geography, but alike in race, language, laws, principles, has always attracted him as a project of excellent intentions. It is at worst a noble dream. That dream has become less impracticable than it was formerly, he thinks, by reason of the essential diminution of the world, diminution of distances and of time by latter-day inventions.

Against the idea of general representation in a central Parliament at London, Sir Wilfrid pointed out that Edmund Burke objected "opposuit natura"—nature forbade it. The wisest of political philosophers could not foresee the telegraph, wireless, steam, airships. These have made a useful central imperial Parliament at least conceivable. Could it be more useful than the advisory council, or Imperial Conference which has become quadrennial, and might possibly become annual? That is matter for discussion. Sir Wilfrid said that such is the political genius of the British race that he would be rash who alleged any design impracticable toward which the race may tend so generally as to put it under discussion for arrangement of details. Conservation of local self-government, prime essential to agreement for union on common purposes, might prove reconcilable with federated defense.

But there is, to Sir Wilfrid's way of thinking, one large objection against now attempting imperial federation. Its agitators contemplate a scheme immense, yet not sufficiently inclusive. They do not contemplate English-speaking solidarity. They purpose leaving out the majority of English-speakers—the American people. In this they do not follow Cecil Rhodes, a chief propagandist of their main design. It is true that the idea of getting Americans to participate in any formal union with all the rest of their brethren by race and tongue seems now impractical. But time works wonders. Mr. Gladstone foresaw the United States a people of six hundred comfortable millions, living in union before the end of the next century. The hegemony of the English-speaking nations seems likely to be within attainment by that one of them which appears destined to become far the most powerful of all in numbers, in wealth, and in security of environment. Time may show to our successors in this world some effective method of establishing agreements amounting to that solidarity for English-speaking action which has been acclaimed as existent for English-speaking thinking by a mind so eminently reasonable as that of Lord Haldane.

It would be hasty, thinks Sir Wilfrid, and it might be injurious for the British countries to move toward any sort of formal union ostensibly tending to set them collectively apart from the United States. Give great beneficent ideas time to develop. Britons can well afford to take their time, since the war has shown existent among them an almost perfect union of sentiment and purpose. And this, apparently, with the blessed effect of enhancing general American good-will to Britons. From so much good understanding more may ensue, Sir Wilfrid concluded.

Such Canadians as hold Edmund Burke to have been a spokesman of consummate political wisdom are apt to regard the busy stir of doctrinaires, who scream for closer political junction of the British peoples, even as Burke regarded the hurry of some of the same kidney in his time. Resolute to bind the thirteen colonies forever to England, they proceeded to offend, outrage, and drive those colonies to independence. Be it remembered that these colonies had contributed so loyally, so liberally to England's armaments and wars that grateful London Parliaments had insisted on voting back to them the subsidies they had granted, holding the contributions too generous. To later proposals of foolish henchmen of George III., proposals that the colonies, since they had revealed themselves as strong and rich, should be dragged into some formal political subordination by which, as by latter-day Imperial Federation, they might be involuntarily mustered and taxed for imperial purposes, Burke said:

And the doctrinaires of Centralization, vociferating their fad of Imperial Federation, would have that Constitution, in the moment of its supreme triumph for unity, cast away! Cast away for a new and written one by which Great Britain and all her children alike would chain themselves together! Well may practical statesmen view the doctrinaires with some disdain, not unmindful of Burke's immortal scorn of such formalists:

"A sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material, and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. To men truly initiated and rightly taught, those ruling and master principles which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth everything and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together."

England.

By JOHN E. DOLSON.

American Aid of France

By Eugène Brieux

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April, 1915.]

Miss Marie Van Vorst, who nursed the wounded at the American Ambulance in Paris, will speak to you of it as an eyewitness. From her you will receive direct news of your splendid work of humanity. While she was caring for wounded French, English, and German I was attached to another hospital at Chartres. It happens, therefore, that I have never seen the American Military Hospital created by you, but I am not in ignorance concerning it any more than any other Parisian, any more, indeed, than the majority of the French people. I know that the American Ambulance is the most remarkable hospital that the world has seen. I know that you, since the beginning of the war, have brought the aid of medical science to wounded men and that you have given not only money, but an institution, all ready, complete and of the most modern type, and, even more, that you have sent there your best surgeons and a small army of orderlies and nurses.

I know that at first one could not find a place; that there was available only a building in course of construction, intended to be the Pasteur School at Neuilly. This building was far from completion; it lacked doors and there were no stairs. I know that in three weeks your generosity, your energy, and your quick intelligence has made of this uncertain shell a modern military hospital, with white walls, electric light, baths, rooms for administering anaesthetics, operating rooms, sterilizing plants, apparatus for X-rays, and a dental clinic. I know that automobiles, admirably adapted to the service, carried the wounded. And yet I do not know all. I know only by instinct of the devotion of your young girls, of your women, and of your young men, belonging often to prominent families, who served as stretcher bearers and orderlies.

I am not ignorant of the fact that they count by the hundreds those who have been cured at the American Ambulance at Neuilly, nor of the further fact that the rate of mortality is extremely low, although they have sent you those most gravely injured. I know that it is all free; that there are no charges made for the expenses of administration; that for the service rendered by your people there is no claim, and that every cent of every dollar subscribed goes entirely and directly to the care of the wounded. I know also that the expenses at the hospital are $4,000 a day, and that ever since the beginning your charity has met this demand.

Such splendid effort has not been ignored or misunderstood. The President of the French Republic has cabled to President Wilson his appreciation and his gratitude; General Fevier, Inspector General of Hospitals of the French Army, has publicly expressed his admiration; the English physicians and public men have shared their sentiments.

As to the people of Paris, as to the French nation, they have been touched to the depths of their being. And yet in France we have found all this quite natural. I shall tell you why. We have so high a regard for you that when you do anything well no one is surprised. I believe that if a wounded soldier arriving at your hospital exclaimed, "This is wonderful!" his comrade who had been ahead of him would answer in a tone of admonition: "That surprises you? You do not know then that it is done by the Americans, by the people from the United States?" In this refusal to be astonished in the face of remarkable achievements, when they come from you, there is a tribute, a praise of high quality which your feelings and your patriotism will know how to appreciate.

I have said that all that comes from you which is good and great seems natural to us, and I have given you a reason; but there is another. In France we are accustomed to consider the Republic of the United States as an affectionate, distant sister. When one receives a gift from a stranger one is astonished and cries out his thanks, but when the gift comes from a brother or from some one who, on similar occasions, has never failed, the thanks are not so outspoken but more profound. One says: "Ah, it is you, my brother. I suffer. I expected you. I knew that you would come, for I should have gone to you had you needed me. I thank you."

And, indeed, we are closely bound together, you and we. Without doubt, common interest and an absence of possible competition helps to that end, but there is something more which unites us—it is our kindred sentiments. It is this kinship which has created our attraction for each other and which has cemented it; it is our common ground of affections, of hatreds, of hopes; our ideals rest upon the same high plane. To mention but one point, one of you has said: "The United States and France are the only two nations which have fought for an ideal." And it is that which separates us, you and us, from a certain other nation, and which has served to bring us two close together.

We love you and we are grateful for what you are doing for us. When the day came for my departure from France to represent here the French Academy I asked of Mr. Poincaré, who had visited the American Ambulance at Neuilly, if duty did not forbid me to go. "No," he said to me. "Go to the United States. Carry greetings to the great nation of America." And he gave to me, for your President, the letter with which you are familiar, where he expressed the admiration and the sympathy that he has for you.

I have been traveling North and South in the Eastern part of the United States. I have had many opportunities to admire your power and the extent of your efforts. Today, in thinking of the American Ambulance Hospital in Paris, I admire your persistence in labor. You have established this hospital. That was good. But it costs a thousand dollars a day, and yet you keep on with the work. That is doubly good. Indeed, one can understand that you have not been willing, after having created this model hospital, that some day through lack of support its doors should close and the wounded you have taken in be turned over to others; certainly those first subscribers undertook a sort of moral obligation to themselves not to permit the work to fail. But, none the less, it is admirable that it should be so. To give once is something, but it is little if one compares the value of the first gift to those which follow.

The first charity is easily understood. Suddenly war is at hand. Its horrors can be imagined and every one feels that he can in some measure lessen them, and he opens his purse. Then time passes, the war continues, and one becomes accustomed to the thoughts that were at first unbearable—it is so far away and so long. Others in this way were checked after their first impulse.

But you, you have thought that, if it is good to establish a hospital, that alone was not enough, and that each day would bring new wounded to replace those who, cured, took up their guns again and returned to the field of battle. And since at the American Ambulance the wounded are cured quickly, the very excellence of your organization, the science of your surgeons, and the greatness of your sacrifices all bring upon you other and new sacrifices to be made.

But the word "sacrifice" is badly chosen. You do not make sacrifices, for you are strong and you are good. When you decide upon some new generous act you have only to appeal to your national pride, which will never allow an American undertaking to fail. You have the knowledge of the good that you are doing, and that, for you, is sufficient. You know that, thanks to your generosity, suffering is relieved, and you know that, thanks to the science of your surgeons, this relief is not merely momentary, but that the wounded man who would have remained a cripple if he had been less ably cared for, will be, thanks to you, completely cured, and that, instead of dragging out a miserable existence, he will be able to live a normal life and support a family which will bless you. Such men will owe it all to the persistence of your generosity.

I return always to that point, and it is essential. To give once is a common impulse, common to nearly all the world. It means freeing one's self from the suffering which good souls feel when they see others suffer. But to give again after having given is a proof of reflection, of an understanding of the meaning of life; it is to work intelligently; it is to insure the value of the first effort; it means the possession of goodness which is lasting and far-seeing. That is a rare virtue. You have it. And that is why I express a three-fold thanks, for the past, for the present, and for the future—thanks that come from the bottom of the heart of a Frenchman.

A Farewell.

By EDNA MEAD.

Stories of French Courage

By Edwin L. Shuman

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April, 1915.]

There has just appeared in Paris a book called "La Guerre Vue d'Une Ambulance," which brings the war closer to the eye and heart than anything else I have read. It is written by Abbé Felix Klein, Chaplain of the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly, a suburb of Paris, and has the added merit of describing the noble work which American money and American Red Cross nurses are doing there for the French wounded. The abbé, by the way, has twice visited the United States in recent years, has many warm friends here, and has written several enthusiastic books about the "Land of the Strenuous Life."

When the war broke out this large-hearted priest and busy author dropped all his literary and other plans to minister to the wounded soldiers brought to the war hospital established by Americans in the fine new building of the Lycée Pasteur, which was to have received its first medical students a few weeks later. There were 250 beds at first, and later 500, with more than a hundred American automobiles carrying the wounded to it, often direct from the front.

Through all these months Abbé Klein has labored day and night among these sufferers, cheering some to recovery, easing the dying moments of others with spiritual solace, and, hardest of all, breaking the news of bereavement to parents.

From day to day, through those terrible weeks of fighting on the Aisne and the Marne, with Paris itself in danger, the good abbé wrote brief records of his hopes and fears regarding his wounded friends, and set down in living words the more heroic or touching phases of their simple stories. Let me translate a few of them for the reader.

Take, for instance, the case of Charles Marée, a blue-eyed, red-bearded hero of thirty years, an only son who had taken the place of his invalid father at the head of their factory, and who had responded to the first call to arms. During his months of suffering his parents were held in territory occupied by the enemy and could not be reached. The abbé goes on to tell his story:

After three months of suffering, borne without complaint, this man died without having been able to get a word to his parents. The abbé had become deeply attached to him, and the whole hospital corps felt the loss of his courageous presence.

Some of the horror of war is in these pages, as where the author says:

Some of the pathos of war is here, and even a little of its humor, but most of all its courage. Both of the latter are mingled in the case of an English soldier who was brought in wounded from the field of Soissons.

An English infantry officer, a six-footer, brought to the hospital with his head bandaged in red rather than white, showed the abbé his cap and the bullet hole in it.

"A narrow escape," said the abbé in English, and then learned that the escape was narrower than the wounded forehead indicated. Another bullet, without touching the officer, had pierced the sole of his shoe under his foot, and a third had perforated his coat between the body and the arm without breaking the skin.

The author's attitude toward the Germans, always free from bitterness, is sufficiently indicated in such a paragraph as this:

The French wounded in the hospital at Neuilly—during the period when the German right wing was being beaten back from Paris—frequently accused the German regulars of wanton cruelty, but testified to the humanity of the reservists. The author relates several episodes illustrating both points. Here are two:

Another, who also begins by praising the German field officers, saw soldiers of the active army stripping perfectly nude one of our men who had a perforated lung, and whom they had made prisoner after his wound:

One of the most amazing escapes is that of a soldier from Bordeaux, told partly in his own racy idiom, and fully vouched for by the author. After relating how he left the railway at Nanteuil and traversed a hamlet pillaged by the Germans he continues:

These wounded men passed two whole days there without help. On the third day the Germans arrived and the narrator gave himself up for lost. But the German Captain, with whom the Frenchmen had divided their food and drink, begged that they be cared for. Ultimately they were taken to the German camp and their wounds attended to. But in a few minutes the camp became the centre of a violent attack, and again it looked as if the last day of the wounded prisoners had come.

Suddenly the Germans ran away and left everything. An hour later, when the firing ceased, they returned, carried away the wounded of both nationalities on stretchers, crowded about twenty-five of them into one wagon (the narrator's broken leg was not stretched out, and he suffered,) and all the way the wagon gave forth the odor of death. All day they rode without a bite to eat. At 1 o'clock at night they reached the village of Cuvergnon, where their wounds were well attended to. The following day the Germans departed without saying a word, but the villagers cared for the wounded, both friends and enemies, and in time the American automobiles carried them to Neuilly.

All these recitals of soldiers are stamped with the red badge of courage. A priest serving as an Adjutant was superintending the digging of trenches close to the firing line on the Aisne. He had to expose himself for a space of three feet in going from one trench to another. In that instant a Mauser bullet struck him under the left eye, traversed the nostril, the top of the palate, the cheek bone and came out under the right ear. He felt the bullet only where it came out, but soon he fell, covered with blood and believed he was wounded to death. Then his courage returned, and he crawled into the trench. Comrades carried him to the ambulance at Ambleny, with bullets and "saucepans" raining about them from every direction. In time he was transferred to the American Hospital at Neuilly. "I'm only a little disfigured and condemned to liquids," he told his friend the abbé. "In a few weeks I shall be cured and will return to the front."

Abbé Klein tells the curious story of a Zouave and his faithful dog. In one of the zigzag corridors connecting the trenches near Arras the man was terribly wounded by a shell that killed all his companions and left him three-quarters buried in the earth. With only the dead around him, he "felt himself going to discouragement," to use the author's mild phrase, when his dog, which had never left him since the beginning of the war, arrived and began showing every sign of distress and affection. The wounded man told the author:

But when the Zouave was sent to Neuilly the two friends had to separate. At the railway station he begged to take his dog along, and told his story; but the field officer, touched though he was, could not take it upon himself to send a dog on a military train. The distress of both man and beast was so evident that more than one nurse had tears in her eyes as the train pulled out.

They tried to pet the dog, dubbed him Tue-Boches, offered him dog delicacies of all sorts, but in vain. He refused all food and remained for two days "sad to death." Then some one went to the American Hospital, told how the dog had saved the Zouave, and the upshot of it was that the faithful animal, duly combed and passed through the disinfecting room, was admitted to the hospital and recovered his master and his appetite. But at last accounts his master was still very weak, and "in the short visit which the dog is allowed to make each day, he knows perfectly, after a tender and discreet good morning, how to hold himself very wisely at the foot of the bed, his eyes fixed upon his patient."

Thanks to modern science, the cases of tetanus are few in this war, but there are many deaths from gangrene, because, with no truce for the removal of the wounded, so many lie for days before receiving medical aid. Abbé Klein tells of one Breton boy, as gentle a soul as his sister—"my little Breton," he always calls him, affectionately—and comments again and again upon the boy's patient courage amid sufferings that could have but one end. The infection spread in spite of all that science could do, and even amputation could not save him. At last he ceased to live, "like a poor little bird," as his French attendant, herself a mother with three boys in the army, said with tears.

Saddest of all are the bereaved wives and mothers. The reader will find many of them in the good Chaplain's book, and they will bring the war closer than anything else. Sometimes they stand mute under the blow, looking on the dead face without a sound, and then dropping unconscious to the floor. Sometimes they cry wild things to heaven. The Chaplain's work in either case is not easy, and some of his most touching pages depict such scenes.

There was a boy of twenty years, who was slowly but surely dying of gangrene. Let the abbé tell the end of the story:

One day last Fall President Poincaré, accompanied by M. Viviani and General Gallieni, was received at the American Hospital by Mr. Herrick, the American Ambassador, and by the members of the Hospital Committee. Abbé Klein has words of praise not only for Mr. Herrick, but also for his predecessor, Mr. Bacon, and for his successor, Mr. Sharp. His admiration for the devoted American women who are serving as nurses in the hospital is expressed frequently in his pages. He says the labors of the American nurses and those of the French nurses complement each other admirably. Of the founding and maintenance of the hospital at Neuilly, he says:

Later the abbé recorded in his diary that the 500 beds would soon be filled, but added that the generous activity of the Americans would not end there. They would establish branch hospitals. Large sums had been placed at the disposal of the committee to found an "ambulance" in Belgium and another in France as near the front as prudence permitted. Toward the end of January he recorded the gift of $200,000 from Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, and its use by the committee to establish an affiliated hospital at the College of Juilly, in the Department of Seine-et-Marne. He added that still other branches were about to be founded with American funds.

Abbé Klein writes out of a full and sincere heart, whether as a priest, a patriot, or a man who loves his fellowmen; and, without seeking it, he writes as a master of phrase. His new book probably will soon be translated and published in the United States.

A Trooper's Soliloquy

By O.C.A. CHILD

Endowed With A Noble Fire Of Blood

By A. Kouprine

[From King Albert's Book.]

Not applause, not admiration, but the deep, eternal gratitude of the whole civilized world is now due to the self-denying Belgian people and their noble young sovereign. They first threw themselves before the savage beast, foaming with pride, maddened with blood. They thought not of their own safety, nor of the prosperity of their houses, nor of the fate of the high culture of their country, nor of the vast numbers and cruelty of the enemy. They have saved not only their fatherland, but all Europe—the cradle of intellect, taste, science, creative art, and beauty—they have saved from the fury of the barbarians trampling, in their insolence, the best roses in the holy garden of God. Compared with their modest heroism the deed of Leonidas and his Spartans, who fought in the Pass of Thermopylae, falls into the shade. And the hearts of all the noble and the good beat in accord with their great hearts....

No, never shall die or lose its power a people endowed with such a noble fire of blood, with such feelings that inspire it to confront bereavement, sorrow, sickness, wounds; to march as friends, hand in hand, adored King and simple cottager, man and woman, poor and rich, weak and strong, aristocrat and laborer. Salutation and humblest reverence to them!

Chronology of the War

Showing Progress of Campaigns on All Fronts and Collateral Events from Feb. 28, 1915, Up To and Including March 31, 1915

[Continued from the March Number]

The Day

By HENRY CHAPPELL.

Reprinted from The London Daily Express (Copyright).