ys and girls, crippled men, old men, deprived men, men
who had lost brothers and cousins and friends and ambitions. No triumph
now on land or sea could save Germany from becoming that. France too
would be that, Russia, and lastly Britain, each in their degree. Before
the war there had been no Germany to which an Englishman could appeal;
Germany had been a threat, a menace, a terrible trampling of armed men.
It was as little possible then to think of talking to Germany as it
would have been to have stopped the Kaiser in mid career in his hooting
car down the Unter den Linden and demand a quiet talk with him. But the
Germany that had watched those rushes with a slightly doubting pride had
her eyes now full of tears and blood. She had believed, she had obeyed,
and no real victory had come. Still she fought on, bleeding, agonising,
wasting her substance and the substance of the whole world, to no
conceivable end but exhaustion, so capable she was, so devoted, so proud
and utterly foolish. And the mind of Germany, whatever it was before the
war, would now be something residual, something left over and sitting
beside a reading-lamp as he was sitting beside a reading-lamp, thinking,
sorrowing, counting the cost, looking into the dark future....

And to that he wrote, to that dimly apprehended figure outside a circle
of the light like his own circle of light--which was the father of
Heinrich, which was great Germany, Germany which lived before and which
will yet outlive the flapping of the eagles....

_Our boys_, he wrote, _have died, fighting one against the other.
They have been fighting upon an issue so obscure that your German
press is still busy discussing what it was. For us it was that
Belgium was invaded and France in danger of destruction. Nothing
else could have brought the English into the field against you. But
why you invaded Belgium and France and whether that might have been
averted we do not know to this day. And still this war goes on and
still more boys die, and these men who do not fight, these men in
the newspaper offices and in the ministries plan campaigns and
strokes and counter-strokes that belong to no conceivable plan at
all. Except that now for them there is something more terrible than
war. And that is the day of reckoning with their own people._

_What have we been fighting for? What are we fighting for? Do you
know? Does any one know? Why am