WHAT GREAT BRITAIN IS DOING 



195 



are the most persistent grumblers in the 

 world. Nothing that other people say 

 about Englishmen can ever hope to equal 

 what Englishmen say about themselves. 



And, being a strong, rebellious, self- 

 sufficient people, tirelessly given to speak- 

 ing out, we have naturally found in the 

 dislocations and drama and surprises of 

 the war an endless theme for self-de- 

 preciation. 



Mr. Dooley once accused us of doing 

 our national housecleaning by sweeping 

 things under the sofa and sprinkling the 

 walls with eau de cologne. There has 

 been none of that in this war. We have 

 published every blunder, Ave have exposed 

 every shortcoming, we have taken every 

 opportunity of informing our rulers in 

 the plainest possible language just what 

 we thought of them. 



THE WAY OF DEMOCRATIC PEOPLES 



Compared with the silence of Prus- 

 sia — a silence never deeper than when 

 concealing some untoward incident, some 

 prodigious miscalculation — our British 

 turmoil has seemed a token of confusion 

 and inefficiency ; but in reality it has been 

 just the rough, wholesome, Anglo-Amer- 

 ican, democratic way of doing things. 

 That is how all self-governing peoples 

 who are used to free speech and who are 

 not used to the discipline of universal 

 military service must inevitably act when 

 caught in a great crisis and obliged to 

 shift the whole basis of public and pri- 

 vate life in order to strip themselves for 

 a fight for existence. 



The Prussians from the first day of the 

 war have shown themselves consummate 

 masters of the art of magnifying all their 

 successes and minimizing all their fail- 

 ures. Mirabeau more than a hundred 

 years ago declared, and declared truly, 

 that war was the national industry of 

 Prussia. But Prussia since then has sup- 

 plemented that industry with another — 

 the manufacture of opinion, and not 

 merely German opinion, but foreign opin- 

 ion. The submissive intelligence of her 

 own people she can, of course, mould as 

 she pleases ; but it is astonishing how 

 often she succeeds in imposing upon dis- 

 passionate and even hostile onlookers in 

 neutral lands. 



At this game of words and appearances 

 and making out a case she leaves everv 

 one of the Allies, and indeed all of them 

 combined, very far in the rear. 



Take, for instance, the Roumanian 

 campaign of last fall. It was unques- 

 tionably a German military success. But 

 it was nothing like the success that head- 

 quarters in Berlin tried to make out and 

 that Americans were very largely induced 

 to believe. 



All those tales that came clicking over 

 the wireless of the capture of huge stores 

 of grain and oil were fables out of whole 

 cloth. The Allies set fire to the oil wells 

 one by one as the Roumanians retreated 

 and removed or destroyed just as sys- 

 tematically almost the whole supply of 

 foodstuffs. 



The present position is that while the 

 great bulk of Roumania has been over- 

 run, from one-half to two-thirds of the 

 Roumanian army is still intact, is being 

 reformed and rearmed for the coming 

 offensive, and that the Germans have to 

 maintain an extra 300 miles of front that 

 would not have been added to their com- 

 mitments had Roumania remained neu- 

 tral. From the standpoint of the war as 

 a whole, we have, for the time being, but 

 I agree quite unnecessarily, and as the 

 result of some bad bungling somewhere, 

 lost a pawn, and a pawn that, if em- 

 ployed in another direction, might and 

 should have been extremely useful. 



But Prussia has gained nothing ex- 

 cept a barren kudos : the Roumanian ter- 

 ritories she occupies are a liability and 

 not an asset ; to defend them she has to 

 draw upon her swiftly diminishing re- 

 sources of man-power ; a few more such 

 victories and she would be undone. Yet 

 she has undoubtedly managed to fill the 

 unthinking public in more than one neu- 

 tral land with the idea that her successes 

 in Roumania were in some sort a turning 

 point in the war. I have read I know 

 not how many articles in the American 

 press gravely admonishing us to give up 

 the Balkans as a bad job and withdraw 

 our forces around Saloniki. 



EXAGGERATIONS ARE AVOIDED 



And in the same way it has been very 

 noticeable how skilfully the Prussians be- 



