The concluding phase of a process of general exhaustion must almost inevitably be a game of bluff.  Neither side will admit its extremity.  Neither side, therefore, will make any direct proposals to its antagonists nor any open advances to a neutral.  But there will be much inspired peace talk through neutral media, and the consultations of the anti-German allies will become more intimate and detailed.  Suggestions will “leak out” remarkably from both sides, to journalists and neutral go-betweens.  The Eastern and Western Allies will probably begin quite soon to discuss an anti-German Zollverein and the co-ordination of their military and naval organisations in the days that are to follow the war.  A discussion of a Central European Zollverein is already afoot.  A general idea of the possible rearrangement of the European States after the war will grow up in the common European and American mind; public men on either side will indicate concordance with this general idea, and some neutral power, Denmark or Spain or the United States or Holland, will invite representatives to an informal discussion of these possibilities.

Probably, therefore, the peace negotiations will take the extraordinary form of two simultaneous conferences—­one of the Pledged Allies, sitting probably in Paris or London, and the other of representatives of all the combatants meeting in some neutral country—­Holland would be the most convenient—­while the war will still be going on.  The Dutch conference would be in immediate contact by telephone and telegraph with the Allied conference and with Berlin....

The broad conditions of a possible peace will begin to get stated towards the end of 1916, and a certain lassitude will creep over the operations in the field....  The process of exhaustion will probably have reached such a point by that time that it will be a primary fact in the consciousness of common citizens of every belligerent country.  The common life of all Europe will have become—­miserable.  Conclusive blows will have receded out of the imagination of the contending Powers.  The war will have reached its fourth and last stage as a war.  The war of the great attack will have given place to the war of the military deadlock; the war of the deadlock will have gone on, and as the great combatants have become enfeebled relatively to the smaller States, there will have been a gradual shifting of the interest to the war of treasons and diplomacies in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Quickly thereafter the last phase will be developing into predominance, in which each group of nations will be most concerned, no longer about victories or conquests, but about securing for itself the best chances of rapid economic recuperation and social reconstruction.  The commercial treaties, the arrangements for future associated action, made by the great Allies among themselves will appear more and more important to them, and the mere question of boundaries less and less.  It will dawn upon