and the next day and the day after--through many months yet,
perhaps--the same killing and destroying must still go on.

In many respects this war has been an amazing display of human
inadaptability. The military history of the war has still to be written,
the grim story of machinery misunderstood, improvements resisted,
antiquated methods persisted in; but the broad facts are already before
the public mind. After three years of war the air offensive, the only
possible decisive blow, is still merely talked of. Not once nor twice
only have the Western Allies had victory within their grasp--and failed
to grip it. The British cavalry generals wasted the great invention of
the tanks as a careless child breaks a toy. At least equally remarkable
is the dragging inadaptability of European statecraft. Everywhere the
failure of ministers and statesmen to rise to the urgent definite
necessities of the present time is glaringly conspicuous. They seem to
be incapable even of thinking how the war may be brought to an end. They
seem incapable of that plain speaking to the world audience which alone
can bring about a peace. They keep on with the tricks and feints of a
departed age. Both on the side of the Allies and on the side of the
Germans the declarations of public policy remain childishly vague and
disingenuous, childishly "diplomatic." They chaffer like happy imbeciles
while civilization bleeds to death. It was perhaps to be expected. Few,
if any, men of over five-and-forty completely readjust themselves to
changed conditions, however novel and challenging the changes may be,
and nearly all the leading figures in these affairs are elderly men
trained in a tradition of diplomatic ineffectiveness, and now overworked
and overstrained to a pitch of complete inelasticity. They go on as if
it were still 1913. Could anything be more palpably shifty and
unsatisfactory, more senile, more feebly artful, than the recent
utterances of the German Chancellor? And, on our own side--