So much for the recruiting. Now for the terms of peace. It is time to
take that subject in hand; for Lord Kitchener's notion that we are going
to settle down to years of war as we did a century ago is soldierly, but
not sensible. It is, of course, physically possible for us to continue
for twenty years digging trenches and shelling German troops and shoving
German armies back when they are not shoving us, whilst old women pull
turnips and tend goats in the fire zones across which soldiers run to
shelter. But we cannot afford to withdraw a million male adults who have
passed a strictish health test from the work of parentage for several
years unless we intend to breed our next generation from parents with
short sight, varicose veins, rotten teeth, and deranged internal organs.
Soldiers do not think of these things: "theirs not to reason why: theirs
but to do and die"; but sensible civilians have to. And even soldiers
know that you cannot make ammunition as fast as you can burn it, nor
produce men and horses as instantaneously as you can kill them by
machinery. It would be well, indeed, if our papers, instead of writing
of ten-inch shells, would speak of £1,000 shells, and regimental bands
occasionally finish the National Anthem and the Brabançonne and the
Marseillaise with the old strain, "That's the way the money goes: Pop
goes the Ten Inch." It is easy to rebuke Mr. Norman Angell and Herr
Bloch for their sordid references to the cost of war; and Mr. H.G. Wells
is profoundly right in pointing out that the fact that war does not pay
commercially is greatly to its credit, as no high human activity ever
does pay commercially. But modern war does not even pay its way. Already
our men have "pumped lead" into retreating Germans who had no lead left
to pump back again; and sooner or later, if we go on indefinitely, we
shall have to finish the job with our fists, and congratulate ourselves
that both Georges Carpentier and Bombardier Wells are on our side. This
war will stop when Germany throws up the sponge, which will happen long
before she is utterly exhausted, but not before we ourselves shall be