ign, do not sign a German peace!"

We know what this attitude costs them. We know, from the report of those
few men who have been sent back to Belgium from the Western front and
from the German camps, the tortures to which the modern slaves are being
subjected. These men were so ill, so worn out, that their family
scarcely recognised them, and greeted them with tears, not with
laughter. It was like a procession of ghosts coming back from hell. At
Soltau, the prisoners are given only two pints of acorn soup and a
mouldy piece of bread, every day. They are so famished that they creep
at night to steal the potato parings which their German guards throw on
to--the rubbish heap. They divide them amongst themselves and eat them
raw to appease their hunger. After the first week of this regime,
several men went mad. Others were isolated for a few days and given
excellent food. "Will you sign now? If you do, you shall be kept on the
same diet; if not... you go back to camp?" The great majority refused
... and were sent back. This is not an isolated report. All the accounts
agree, even on the smallest details, and the deportees who have been
able to write to their families tell the same story as those who, being
henceforth useless, have been sent home to die.

* * * * *

It has always been the German policy to bully and to cajole almost at
the same time. But the image of Germania offering, with her sweetest
humanitarian smile, an olive-branch to the Allies whilst her
executioners are starving thousands of Belgian slaves and clubbing them
with their rifles, will stand in the memory of mankind as the climax of
combined brutality and hypocrisy.

Should we wonder if the present has been refused? There is only one
peace which matters, it is the peace of man with his own conscience, the
peace of the soul with its God. We have it already, and even the roar of
the German guns will not disturb it. It hovers over our trenches, over
the sea, even over these terrible German camps where the best blood of a
great people is being sucked by the vampires of War. And those who have
fallen stricken on the battlefields, those who have succumbed to the
slow tortures to which they were subjected, are resting now under its
great wings. Should we dare to disturb their sleep? Should we dare to
stain their glory?

It is not for Germany to offer peace. She has lost, it with her honour.
It lies in some pool, at the c