Land & Water 
June 27, igi8 
appointments — an error which they would formulate in 
such terms. 
It would be as well to remark, before going further, that 
this formula is only one other example of the unconscious 
self-deception from which a particular type of mind often 
suffers. The plain English is not that "the enemy cannot 
be defeated," but r.ather "The enemy has beaten us and we 
may as well accept the situation." I know these gentlemen 
would be horrified to have such plain speaking put into their 
mouths, but that is the long and short of it. 
If we had broken up Austria-Hungary, if we had thereby 
reduced Prussia and her German armies to a position of grave 
numerical inferiority ; and if, in spite of that, after dreadful 
losses we had reached no decision, then the conception of a 
stale-mate through the robust defence of our opponent, 
would have some sense in it. As things are it is nonsense. 
As things are the enemy has detached from our alliance 
opponents more than half its potential numerical strength 
by the collapse of Russia. It is the enemy who has advanced ; 
the enemy who has recently taken vast numbers of prisoners 
and guns ; the enemy who menaces at least one of our capitals ; 
the enemy who has the initiative ; the enemy who can attack. 
To represent such a situation as a sort of negative one is 
to deceive oneself grossly with pleasant words in the place 
of unpleasant facts. One might add that such self-deceptions 
on the part of one's fellow citizens are verv humiliating for 
us who have to bear them and who know they are repeated 
abroad. When the lighter weight is getting pounded in a 
bo.xing match and needs all his stamina to hold out, it is not 
a pretty thing to hear his relations calling out that if the 
pounder will only stop, the poundee will magnanimously 
spare him. The enormous and immediate business of the 
time is to stand up to the pounding until the tide turns. If 
a man is prepared to accept defeat he ought to say so openly, 
and not to camouflage his moral breakdown with false phrases. 
But anyhow, that is the formula used, " No military victory 
is possible" ; and this under-lying conception that the whole 
forces of Central Europe (erroneously described as "the 
Germans") under the leadership of Prussia are too much for 
us, is the first element in the minds of those whom we would 
convince of their error. 
Now whether they are right or no it is absolutely impossible 
for the human intelligence to determine. The mass of men 
have by this time appreciated the justice of the position we 
have taken up in this j jurnal. that victory was the gift of 
the gods, and that prophecy and certitude upon it was (upon 
either side) essentially unmilitary. 
Historical Parallels 
But as aga'nst the crude idea that, while battle is still 
joined, victor/ is impossible, one may bring forward a certain 
historical argument which is of great weight. In every long 
and arduous struggle whatsoever there has always arisen 
during its later stages a feeling of this sort, and it has always 
become most acute just before a decision was reached. You 
find it in the Great American Civil war ; you find it in the 
Second Punic War ; you find it in the struggle against 
Napoleon ; you find it in Revolutionary France in 1894. 
You find it always and everywhere in proportion to the 
length and difficulty of the work to be done. If you could 
have heard -private conversations in Germany and Austria 
before Caporetto you would undoubtedly have found any 
amount of it. One may say, in passing, that if or when the 
AlHes achieve anything hke Caporetto, or the Second Battle 
of the Somme, or even the surprise which the enemy effected 
against us between Soissons and Rheims three weeks ago, 
then this false mood would be dissipated as rapidly on our 
side as it has unfortunately been dissipated among the 
enemy by their recent successes. 
The historical termination of great duels which were 
fought for something vital, not for mere dynastic points, • 
has invariably been a true decision upon one side or the 
other. And so it must be in the nature of things. But if 
people are fighting upon a matter of life and death, nothing 
short of a decision can put a permanent end to hostilities — 
and the old traditions and the old civilisation of Europe are 
undoubtedly fighting here for their lives. To put it simply : 
England would not be' England, nor France France, nor 
Italy survive at all if the enemy emerged from this war 
undefeated. 
The second element in this frame of mind is a sort of 
muddle-headed idea that all fighting is much of a muchness 
and all fighters equally in the wrong ; to which is sometimes 
added the still more extraordinary conception that fighting 
is itself wrong in some way ; in other words, that aggression, 
tyranny, injustice, treachery, and violence of every kind 
should be cheerfully accepted, and that if a man proposes to 
kill you you should say that you see no great harm in it, and 
that he is free to go ahead. 
Neglecting this rabid nonsense, one can understand though 
one cannot sympathise with that error which regards tliis 
war specifically as a great misunderstanding and its evils as 
being of a sort natural to all wars. It comes mainly from a 
considerable though insular acquaintance with modern North 
Germany and an extreme ignorance of other countries. 
It does not always proceed from this source. Sometimes 
it comes from a complete ignorance of all foreign nations, 
including modern Germany. But you will usually find that 
those who postulate the war as a great misunderstanding, 
and who can so easily put themselves in our opponent's 
shoes, are people who have lived in sympathy with one half 
of modem German thought and who are, therefore, able to 
keep in touch with German apologists. They admired those 
things in which modern Germany was rising, such as her 
chemical industry, her expansion in the manufacture of iron 
and steel, her growth in export. They were, indifferent to 
those things in which modern Germany was rapidly declining, 
such as manners, morals, the power of building and writing, 
and also one may add, sanity. The great mass of stuff which 
Germany produced in which she proclaimed lunatic theories 
of super-man and what-not and saw her own dull 
people as stage heroes conquering the world, they knew to 
exist indeed, but forgave as a pardonable excess — though 
they disapproved of it. But the German apologist who has 
become so vociferous since things went wrong with the 
German plan of immediate success in 1914 ; the German 
who points out that after all he also is fighting for life (which 
is quite true) ; that he was morally subject to aggression 
(which is quite false) ; that isolated acts of war in the past can 
be made to look parallel to his systematic, ordered, and con- 
stant negation of human morals to-day — that German 
apologist the pacifist understands, likes, and agrees with.» 
The error present in this second element of the disease we are 
studying is an error in proportion. 
Napoleon and his armies went into Spain. They brought 
with them the revolutionary ideas, equal law, a high material 
civilisation, a quite as strong, though less spiritual, conception 
of beauty as that which the Spaniards enjoyed. They also 
brought the crusade for what they called liberty and democ- 
racy and so forth. But they violated the conscience of 
the Spanish people. They proposed to force upon them a 
foreign rule. The Spanish people, by their unequalled 
courage and tenacity, broke the back of that invasion and 
secured immunity. 
Now an apologist for this great and wrong effort of 
Napoleon's could, if he liked, insist upon the one side of it 
at the expense of the other. He could point to the poverty 
and to the decline of Spain ; to the growing ignorance, in 
letters at least, of its population, to the corresponding advan- 
tages of what was virtually a French annexation. He could 
go further and say that Napoleon was "forced" to the in- 
vasion by the general international situation, etc. But 
if he let that weigh in the balance against the over- 
whelming and outstanding truth that the invasion was 
the application of force without right against a clear 
national will, he would have his sense of proportion so dis- 
torted that his judgment would be worthless. 
So it is, but in a much higher degree, with the British 
apologist for Prussia. Of course, a case can be made out 
for Prussia. You can make out a case for anyone. If yon 
doubt that go and hear any good lawyer at any criminal trial. 
But any sane sense of proportion discovers that Prussia in 
the mass has had the same lack of morals, the same methods, 
and the same insolence during all her vast and maleficent 
expansion of the last two hundred years. The important 
and typical thing is not the German apology : That was an 
after-thought. The important and typical thing is the 
Prussian boast and the deliberate Prussian forcing of war 
upon Europe. If a man denies that Prussia felt absolutely 
certain of victory in the summer of 1914, desired war and 
deliberately made war in order to achieve that victory ; if 
he denies that Western civilisation was peaceful and ill- 
prepared for such a challenge ; then he is like a man denying 
the fact that Great Britain is a maritime and commercial 
State, or the fact that the French are violent in religious 
controversy, or that the Arabs are Mohammedans, or any 
other moral fact notorious and undisputed. He has, through 
lack of the sense of proportion, lost his grip on reality. 
The third element in the hotch-potch is a conviction that 
if the war were to cease to-day, with things just as they are, 
it would certainly never be renewed after so awful a lesson, 
and that therefore if some stable arrangement could be 
come to on paper now the national currents of the future 
would again be much what they were before. This thu-d 
element I propose to consider next week. 
