LAND 6? WATER 
November 21, 19l8 
LAND&WATER 
5 Chancery Lane, London, W.C.2. Ttl. H»lhm ziii 
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 191 8 
Contents 
PAGE 
Peace— The Child's Heritage 
(Cartoon) 
Racmaekers 
I 
Leading Articles . . 
2 
The Recovery of Europe 
Hilaire Belloc 
3 
The Bully on his Back . . 
Arthur Pollen 
5 
Labour and Peace Terms 
John Murray 
6 
German Humour . . 
Edward Shanks 
8 
The Tanks 
Major-General E. 
D. 10 
Swinton,C.B.,D.S.O. 
The Armenian Massacres 
H. Morgenthau 
13 
Sir Walter Raleigh 
Arthur Symons 
15 
The Blackamoor . . 
J. C. Squire 
16 
The Sculpture of Albert 
Toft 
Haldane Macfall 
17 
The Theatre : The Officers' 
Mess 
W. J. Turner 
18 
The Reader's Diary 
Peter Bell 
20 
Facing the Cost . . 
Hartley Withers 
22 
Household Notes . . 
■ 24 
Notes on Kit 
26 
Towards Peace 
THE carrying out of the armistice terms proceeds 
methodically. The English army, which was 
back at Mons on the day when hostilities ceased, 
will (we imagine) be in Brussels before these 
lines appear : King Albert, whose first challenge 
to the invaders rang like a tocsin through the world, will 
hare re-entered his capital. The German withdrawal has 
not been altogether orderly : soldiers, having a chance to 
pay off old scores, have been shooting their officers, and there 
has been a certain amount of looting, some of which no doubt 
the High Command has been unable to prevent. It will 
all -go on the bill. In Alsace-Lorraine the French are now 
quietly re-occupying the soil that Wilhelm's grandfather, 
against Bismarck's advice, stole nearly half a century ago : and 
they have been greeted with unqualified enthusiasm by a 
population, even the German-speaking members of which 
hated Prussian rule. Admiral Muerer, with the surrender 
of two hundred and fifty ships in his hand, has climbed the 
side of Admiral Beatty's flagship. Every day sees the beaten 
enemy denuded more and more of the still formidable, but 
now unavailing, power that remained to him when he threw 
up the sponge. There has been a certain amount of com- 
plaint in Germany about the hardness of the armistice 
demands. But what would they have ? We have been 
more than once bit and we are shy. We had to make it 
absolutely certain that they would not be in a position to 
think better of their surrender and impose on us the necessity, 
very terrible for the Allied populations to face, of resuming 
hostilities. If a man is giving himself into custody it would 
be ridiculous for him to ask to retain one of his pistols and 
protest if we did not leave one of his wrists without a hand- 
cuff. Germany has been sentenced and has given herself 
up to justice. Justice will be done her, neither more nor less ; 
but we should be fools if, however well her prison may be 
guarded, we left the window of her cell unbarred, and tempted 
her to an endeavour, however hopeless, to escape. 
The German De Wet 
Meanwhile in Africa what we all hope to be the last chapter 
of the actual fighting has been closed. General von Lettow- 
Vorbeck, who has defied all our efforts to catch him since 
1914, has been informed of the armistice and has yielded him- 
self up. We know very little about him personally, but his 
career in East Africa has been one of the most romantic 
.'subsidiary epi.sodes of the war : worthy to rank with the 
story (now divulged) of the 0-boats, the pirate cruise of the 
Emden, and the marvellous march of the Czecho- Slovaks 
across Siberia. He has had, of course, the advantages of 
his disabilities, particularly the advantage of a small mobile 
force able to live on the country. But for four and a half 
years he has kept his end up against large and well-organised 
forces continually cutting him off and closing in on him, 
and continually being evaded by him. The white element 
in his force has been gradually depleted by wounds and 
disease, and at the end he was left with only a few hundred 
whites and a few thousand devoted blacks. He has had 
no regular source of supplies, his only considerable accretions 
being the cargoes of a couple of blockade runners. He has 
been constantly on the move, often spending weeks in most 
pestilent country ; his medical arrangements must have been 
very defective ; and, above all, he must have had throughout 
the knowledge that, sooner or later, the game would be up. 
But his job was to keep the largest possible Allied force 
busy for the longest possible time : and, when his thi'eat 
to British East Africa was parried, he fought his way through 
German East Africa, and thence into Portuguese South-east 
Africa, and thence into Rhodesia, eluding his pursuers ia 
a manner which would have done credit to de Wet, but, 
unlike de Wet, fighting with a negro force thousands of miles 
from his home, and very imperfectly in touch with what 
was going on in the larger world. At a time when the abom- 
inations of the German army have made the name of 
German soldier stink, we can still pay tribute to one Germa* 
who has shown not merely great gallantry and endurance, 
but a remarkable gift for inspiring those qualities. 
The Election 
It is no good crying over spilt milk, and since the Election 
is certainly coming we can usefully say no more about its 
desirability or undesirability. It is an odd election. All 
the official parties were agreed about the war ; all were and 
are agreed (with minor reservations) about the nature of 
the Peace ; all insist on the necessity of thorough recon- 
struction. So far, indeed, very few differences have emerged 
even as to the nature of the reconstruction. The Labour 
Party has a large and sweeping programme of reforms, but 
as for the immediate problems before us all are at one in 
laying stress upon health, housing, education, increased 
production, better wages, and a carefully planned trans- 
formation of war industries and demobilisation of war- 
workers. The Coalition Government, as the Government in 
office, is asking for a mandate to see the countrj' through 
the immediate crisis, and is promising to provide solutions 
for all the problems before us. But it is going further. One 
thing leads to another ; and the result is an appeal t» 
the electorate to freeze out members of all three parties who 
will not describe themselves as supporters of the Coalitioa, 
and cannot get credentials from headquarters ratifying 
their claim. The extreme outcome of this would be a com- 
pact unanimous House of Commons all pledge-bound t» 
support the Government. We have two observations t» 
make. One is that even if the Government were a Govern- 
ment of all the talents and all the virtues, it would be a bad 
thing were there no Opposition in the House of Commons, 
and that even those who think that a large Government 
majority ought to be returned should dread a complete 
snowing-under of detached candidates. The other is that 
whatever opposition body is returned— and, humanly speak- 
ing, there is bound to be an Opposition — its members should 
forget the old maxim "The duty of an Opposition is to 
oppose." The duty of the Opposition in the new Parliament 
will be to watch, to criticise, and only to oppose when its 
conscience or its reason tells it that opposition is necessary-. 
There is this much evident truth in the common Coalition 
argument : that we have so much work to do and it has 
to be done so quickly, that we cannot afford to have a 
merely factious Opposition, and that, wherever possible, 
the next Opposition should actually co-operate in the Govern- 
ment's reconstructive work. 
