inevitably be a game of bluff. Neither side will admit its extremity.
Neither side, therefore, will make any direct proposals to its
antagonists nor any open advances to a neutral. But there will be much
inspired peace talk through neutral media, and the consultations of the
anti-German allies will become more intimate and detailed. Suggestions
will "leak out" remarkably from both sides, to journalists and neutral
go-betweens. The Eastern and Western Allies will probably begin quite
soon to discuss an anti-German Zollverein and the co-ordination of their
military and naval organisations in the days that are to follow the war.
A discussion of a Central European Zollverein is already afoot. A
general idea of the possible rearrangement of the European States after
the war will grow up in the common European and American mind; public
men on either side will indicate concordance with this general idea, and
some neutral power, Denmark or Spain or the United States or Holland,
will invite representatives to an informal discussion of these
possibilities.

Probably, therefore, the peace negotiations will take the extraordinary
form of two simultaneous conferences--one of the Pledged Allies, sitting
probably in Paris or London, and the other of representatives of all the
combatants meeting in some neutral country--Holland would be the most
convenient--while the war will still be going on. The Dutch conference
would be in immediate contact by telephone and telegraph with the Allied
conference and with Berlin....

The broad conditions of a possible peace will begin to get stated
towards the end of 1916, and a certain lassitude will creep over the
operations in the field.... The process of exhaustion will probably have
reached such a point by that time that it will be a primary fact in the
consciousness of common citizens of every belligerent country. The