Ju»: 
2?S. 
T917 
LAND . it WATER 
^hat ship Ix'lore ! But just when and wliorc she could not 
remember, any more than she could put a name to her. 
There was a certain unpleasantness connected with this 
vaj^'ue memory too. What a nuisance that she was unable 
to recall the details, try how she might! Then all of a sudden, 
it came back to her, iiist at the very mon^ent when Dane was 
making his report about ammunition. " By jove, yes ! 
She's the old Hertha ! The clumsy beggar that drifted 
across my bows in 'q^ and carried away my starboard sponson ! 
I'll sponson her now, see if 1 don't 1 This is where' i get a 
bit of m}' own back !" 
And with a quick leap ahead she charged at her ancient 
enemy arid rammed her amidships, .^nd that was the last 
of the Hertha ! 
Afterwards, when Jack Dane told Gillian that her father 
had fought his ship magnificently, she said " 1 told you so ! 
And yet you laughed at me for calling him a hero ! Now, 
then '.""-Which was just like Gillian. And when the 
n^ws reached Motherbank the old ships recked happily with the 
tide, well pleased that one of their number liad achieved 
immortal fame ; for they felt that the glory was reflected on 
them all — all the ships of the Motherbanlc 
Why There Must be Victory 
By G. K. Chesterton 
OUR attention would probably bt arrested, if we 
walked along the street and saw a butcher's shop 
in which the dead bodies of human beings were 
hung up for sale. We should think it an innovation 
of serious import ; and any explanations offered would leave 
us vaguely dissatisfied. We might be told it was only a 
detail in the terms of peace recently made with the King of 
the Cannibal Islands, after a war in which that prince was 
foiled in his ambitions, and forbidden to kidnap foreigners 
for the national food supply. We might be assured that 
1he traffic was now strictly confined to the subjects of this 
foreign state. It might be explained, for instance, that the 
shop supplied only those diplomatists attached to the Embassy 
of the Cannibal islands round the corner. It might be said 
that, even for this purpose, it was confined to the corpses of 
criminals legally t'xecuted by the Cannibal Commonwealth. 
But all this would but ])artially appease a sense of unrest 
and i^erhaps unreasonable repugnance ; a vague atmosphere 
of regret and alarm wliich, when approximately analysed, 
would resolve itself into two fundamental impressions. 
One would be an impression that the King of the Cannibal 
Islands had not been very badly beaten. The other would 
be the impression that people in London had lost something of 
the first freshness of their horror of cannibalism. 
Now to-day one question underlies all other questions m 
Eurojie. Is this \Aar to wash the world, or to stain it for ever? 
There are many other reasons for refusing the cosmopolitan 
conipromise with whicli some humanitarians would now con- 
clude the war. But of the two or three reasons which I wish 
to note here, I will ])ut first this psychological point of a habi- 
tuation to horror ; of which the above paragraph is not at 
all an exaggerated parable. Indeed, so far from being an 
exaggeration, it is rather an understatement. The mere 
eating of human corpses is a matter of taste, compared with 
some of the departures of Prussianised Germany in what are 
clearly matters of morality. As for the defence of it in theory, 
it would be, like most sophistry, a matter of insane simplicity. 
I could myself j^roduce in twenty minutes the scheme of the 
monumental " Defence of Anthropophagy " which a 
Prussian professor could produce in twenty years. It would 
be a matter of talking ideally about the dignity of digestion, 
of de.-5cribing the line between beasts and men as a matter of 
degree, of sympathising with the savages who eat a brave 
enemy as a compliment, of misinterpreting the language 
which refers to eating as a sacrament ; of calling canniba- 
lism "incorporation," or the highest form of human unity. 
The Prussian professor need say no more than this nonsense ; 
though he would fill several volumes with the statistics of 
the savage tribes and the description of the digestion, with 
diagrams. He could find historical inspiration in the heroic 
lore of the German lM)lk ; for there was cannibalism in 
Germany as late as the Thirty Years' War. German thought 
might any day propose the revival of anthropophagy, as it 
is already in some quarters proposing the revival of polygamy. 
The point is that the presence of this thing after a war with 
its champions, its presence though merely tolerated, though 
carefully conditioned, though theoretically limited to its 
present sphere — the presence of their shop in our street would 
prove that something had appeared on earth that was stronger 
than civilisation. 
Now (iermany has in this war committed cruelties worse 
than cannibalism. She has publicly confessed and commanded 
acts that had hitherto been considered exactly as we consider 
cannibalism. Her soldiers have not only done, but been 
ordered to do, things the wickedness of which has long been 
a popular proverb ; such as poisoning wells. They have 
carried off women and children into literal bondage, in the 
manner attributed to literal heathens and literal barbarians 
by every historian or moralist who has distinguished between 
such barbarians and Christendom or modern Europe. They 
h.nve done things that nobody had ever ihought of, far less 
palliated, such as crucifying babies. Everyone was aghast 
at tflSSe unheard-of things when they were first done ; a 
few'Senied them ; nobody dreamed of merely accepting them. 
They have only come to be recognised by being repeated ; 
as if the sensationalism of a murder grew milder because it 
turned into a massacre. Now these things will really become 
human habits unless one thing is secured ; unless the horror 
we all felt, when v^e first had to deal with them, is expressed 
in our attitude when we finally have to deal with them. 
The way we end the war must express the amazement, as 
well as the abhorrence, we felt at the way they began the war. 
We must keep inviolate the virgin astonishment of our anger. 
If we do not, it means that they have not only degraded war, 
but they have degraded us. It means that they have not 
only dulled the conscience of their subjects, but the conscience 
of their enemies. It means that what our own souls once, 
saw as a dance of devils has become for us, as for the blinded 
Prussians, a dull routine of discipline ; that henceforth the 
corpses of a massacre will be a mere self-repeating pattern 
like the uniforms of a regiment ; that henceforth a column 
-of slaves will go by with as mechanical a beat as a column of 
soldiers ; and that even a child nailed to a door would tell 
us little, except that it was as dead as' a door nail. But it 
would not be the child that was dead. 
That is the first and most elemental fact ; .that if the end 
does not somehow express the holy horror of the beginning 
— then for our enemies as for ourselves there will be no pur- 
gation but only perpetuation. Blood shamefully shed will 
have soaked into the earth and the smell of it will never 
depart. There will be more wars, of course, and in every war 
these monkey tricks will have become military models. 
But even the peace will be full of this war ; of the lost stan- 
dards and sickening pessimism of such a war. There is only one 
way to wake from such a nightmare, and that is to punish 
Prussia as one punishes something quite new and unnatural 
in history. And the only way to punish Prussia is, of course, to 
conquer "her. If we allow her stately diplomatists to dictate 
this and that in the terms of an ordinary treaty— well, it is 
precisely as if we allowed the stately diplomatists of' the 
Embassy of the Cannibal Islands to keep a camiibal shop 
round the corner. We are admitting an entirely new sort of 
butcher into our social circle. We condone something we 
can never afterwards condemn. This, I say, is the first fact, 
psychological or rather spiritual. But for those for whom this 
is what they would call too mystical, and I should call too 
moral, there are quite cold and practical reasons that drive 
us directly to the same end. The first, of course, is the 
inevitable imminence of another war ; which again, being 
a fact, has many facets. Perhaps the simplest way of sta- 
ting it is this ; it can be proved that all Prussia's original 
reasons for prompting this war will remain and will indeed 
be renewed. 
The opinion, or rather the certainty, that Prussia will, if 
she can, return to the charge, is not in itself any part of the 
accusation against Prussia. It is part of the defence always 
offered for Prussia ; of the only defence ever offered for 
Prussia. The one plea made for modern Germany, of which 
we have all of us heard hundreds of times wherever there was 
any difference of opinion about modern Germany, was the 
argument that modern Germany is too big for its boundaries. 
We were told it would be forced to overflow ; and it was 
the friends, not the enemies, of Germany who told us it was 
forced to overflow. More often it was not even the friends of 
Germany so much as the Germans themselves. Whether 
we think this a weak or a strong reason for the removal of 
a neighbour's landmark, it is quite self-evident that it re- 
mains as weak or as strong as before, after a peace that merely 
restores the neighbour's landmark. It is, of course, a ma- 
terialistic argument ; it represents a German demand in the 
sordid sense in which we talk about supply and demand. 
But it is plain that a policy of no annexations is a policy of 
