us needed to harvest an
unquestionable victory. In the long run this may not be an unmixed evil.
Victory, complete and dramatic, may be bought too dearly. We need not
triumphs out of this war but the peace of the world.

This war is altogether unlike any previous war, and its ending, like its
development, will follow a course of its own. For a time people's minds
ran into the old grooves, the Germans were going _nach Paris_ and _nach
London_; Lord Curzon filled our minds with a pleasant image of the
Bombay Lancers riding down _Unter den Linden._ But the Versailles
precedent of a council of victors dictating terms to the vanquished is
not now so evidently in men's minds. The utmost the Allies talk upon
now is to say, "We must end the war on German soil." The Germans talk
frankly of "holding out." I have guessed that the western offensive will
be chiefly on German soil by next June; it is a mere guess, and I admit
it is quite conceivable that the "push" may still be grinding out its
daily tale of wounded and prisoners in 1918 far from that goal.

None of the combatants expected such a war as this, and the consequence
is that the world at large has no idea how to get out of it. The war may
stay with us like a schoolboy caller, because it does not know how to
go. The Italians said as much to me. "Suppose we get to Innsbruck and
Laibach and Trieste," they said, "it isn't an end!" Lord Northcliffe,
I am told, came away from Italy with the conviction that the war would
last six years.

There is the clearest evidence that nearly everyone is anxious to get
out of the war now. Nobody at all, except perhaps a few people who may
be called to account, and a handful of greedy profit-seekers, wants to
keep it going. Quietly perhaps and unobtrusively, everyone I know is now
trying to find the way out of the war, and I am convinced that the
same is the case in Germany. That is what makes the Peace-at-any-price
campaign so exasperating. It is like being chased by clamorous geese
across a common in the direction in which you want to go. But how are
we to get out--with any credit--in such a way as to prevent a subsequent
collapse into another war as frightful?

At present three programmes are before the world of the way in which the
war can be ended. The first of these assumes a complete predominance
of our Allies. It has been stated in general terms by Mr. Asquith.
Evacuation, reparation, due punishment of those responsible for the war