n this saddest of Christmas
Eves declared for a few hours of their own volition a Christmas truce.

"Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated
The bird of dawning singeth all night long,
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
So hallowed and so gracious is the time."

There is not between the men in one trench and those in another, each
seeking the speediest opportunity to kill the other, any personal
quarrel. On occasion they even fraternize, only to resume the work
of mutual extermination. They would not have quarreled, if the
Berchtolds, the von Bethmann-Hollwegs, and the von Jagows had had
sufficient loyalty to civilization to submit any possible grievance,
which either had, to the judgment of Europe.

A spectacle more ghastly than this "far-flung battle line" has never
been witnessed since the world began, for these soldiers in gray or
khaki are not savages but are beings of an advanced civilization.
Their fighting can have in method none of the old-time chivalry, such
as was witnessed at Fontenoy when the French commander courteously
invited his English rival to fire first. The present is a chemical,
mechanical war, than which no circle in Dante's _Inferno_ is more
horribly repellent.

When was better justified the terrible but beautiful imagery in
Milton's poem of _The Nativity_, when he says of Nature:

"Only with speeches fair
She woos the gentle air
To hide her guilty front with innocent snow,
And on her naked shame
Pollute with sinful blame
The saintly veil of maiden white to throw;
_Confounded that her Maker's eyes
Should look so near upon her foul deformities._"

The snow cannot hide the horrors of the present conflict. Even night,
in other wars more merciful, no longer throws its sable mantle of
mercy over the dying and the dead. By the use of powerful searchlights
the work of destruction continues. As though the surface of the earth
were no longer sufficient for this malignant exercise of the genius
of man, the heavens above and the waters under the earth have become
at length the battlefields of the nations. Even from the infinite
azure falls

".... a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies, grappling in the central blue."

Can all history afford a parallel in malignity to the subm