I know that many people in England are not daunted but depressed by the military successes of the enemy.  Our soldiers in the field are not depressed.  But we who are kept at home suffer from the miasma of the back-parlour.  We read the headlines of newspapers—­a form of literature that is exciting enough, but does not merit the praise given to Sophocles, who saw life steadily and saw it whole.  We keep our ears to the telephone, and we forget that the great causes which are always at work, and which will shape the issues of this war, are not recorded upon the telephone.  There are things truer and more important than the latest dispatches.  Here is one of them.  The organization of the second-rate can never produce anything first-rate.  We do not understand a people who, when it comes to the last push of man against man, throw up their hands and utter the pathetic cry of ‘Kamerad’.  To surrender is a weakness that no one who has not been under modern artillery fire has any right to condemn; to profess a sudden affection for the advancing enemy is not weakness but baseness.  Or rather, it would be baseness in a voluntary soldier; in the Germans it means only that the war is not their own war; that they are fighting as slaves, not as free men.  The idea that we could ever live under the rule of these people is merely comic.  To do them justice, they do not now entertain the idea, though they have dallied with it in the past.

No harm can be done, I think, by preaching to the English people the necessity for organization and discipline.  We shall still be ourselves, and there is no danger that we shall overdo discipline or make organization a thing to be worshipped for its own sake.  The danger is all the other way.  We have learnt much from the war, and the work that we shall have to do when it ends is almost more important than the terms of peace, or concessions made this way and that.  If the treacherous assault of the Germans on the liberties and peace of Europe is rewarded by any solid gain to the German Empire, then history may forgive them, but this people of the British Empire will not forgive them.  Nothing will be as it was before; and our cause, which will not be lost in the war, will still have to be won in the so-called peace.  I know that some say, ’Let us have war when we are at war, and peace when we are at peace’.  It sounds plausible and magnanimous, but it is Utopian.  You must reckon with your own people.  They know that when we last had peace, the sunshine of that peace was used by the Germans to hatch the spawn of malice and treason.  If the Germans are defeated in the war, we shall, I suppose, forgive them, for the very English reason that it is a bore not to forgive your enemies.  But if they escape without decisive defeat in battle, their harder trial is yet to come.