The net result of these air raids is an inflexible determination of the British people rather to die in death grips with German militarism than to live and let it survive.  The best chance for the aircraft was at the beginning of the war, when a surprise development might have had astounding results.  That chance has gone by.  The Germans are racially inferior to both French and English in the air, and the probability of effective blows over the deadlock is on the whole a probability in favour of the Allies.  Nor is there anything on or under the sea that seems likely now to produce decisive results.  We return from these considerations to a strengthened acceptance of Bloch.

The essential question for the prophet remains therefore the question of which group of Powers will exhaust itself most rapidly.  And following on from that comes the question of how the successive stages of exhaustion will manifest themselves in the combatant nations.  The problems of this war, as of all war, end as they begin in national psychology.

But it will be urged that this is reckoning without the Balkans.  I submit that the German thrust through the wooded wilderness of Serbia is really no part of the war that has ended in the deadlock of 1915.  It is dramatic, tragic, spectacular, but it is quite inconclusive.  Here there is no way round or through to any vital centre of Germany’s antagonists.  It turns nothing; it opens no path to Paris, London, or Petrograd.  It is a long, long way from the Danube to either Egypt or Mesopotamia, and there—­and there—­Bloch is waiting.  I do not think the Germans have any intention of so generous an extension of their responsibilities.  The Balkan complication is no solution of the deadlock problem.  It is the opening of the sequel.

A whole series of new problems are opened up directly we turn to this most troubled region of the Balkans—­problems of the value of kingship, of nationality, of the destiny of such cities as Constantinople, which from their very beginning have never had any sort of nationality at all, of the destiny of countries such as Albania, where a tangle of intense tribal nationalities is distributed in spots and patches, or Dalmatia, where one extremely self-conscious nation and language is present in the towns and another in the surrounding country, or Asia Minor, where no definite national boundaries, no religious, linguistic, or social homogeneities have ever established themselves since the Roman legions beat them down.

But all these questions can really be deferred or set aside in our present discussion, which is a discussion of the main war.  Whatever surprises or changes this last phase of the Eastern Empire, that blood-clotted melodrama, may involve, they will but assist and hasten on the essential conclusion of the great war, that the Central Powers and their pledged antagonists are in a deadlock, unable to reach a decision, and steadily, day by day, hour by hour, losing men, destroying material, spending credit, approaching something unprecedented, unknown, that we try to express to ourselves by the word exhaustion.