Having steadfastly declined the solution of a Peace without Victory, the Allies entered last November on the transitional period of Victory without Peace.  The fighting was ended in the main theatres of war, the Kaiser and Crown Prince, discrowned and discredited, had sought refuge in exile, the great German War machine had been smashed, and demobilisation began at a rate which led to inevitable congestion and disappointment.  The prosaic village blacksmith was not far out when, in reply to the vicar’s pious hope that the time had come to beat our sword into a ploughshare, he observed, “Well, I don’t know, sir.  Speaking as a blacksmith of forty-five years’ experience, I may tell you it can’t be done.”  “The whole position is provisional,” said the Times at the end of November.  If Germany, Austria, and Russia were to be fed, how was it to be done without disregarding the prior claims of Serbia and Roumania?  Even at home the food question still continued to agitate the public mind.

The General Election of December, 1918, which followed the dissolution of the longest Parliament since the days of Charles II., was a striking, if temporary proof, of the persistence of the rationing principle.  It proved a triumph for the Coalition “Coupon” and for Mr. Lloyd George; the extremists and Pacificists were snowed under; Mr. Asquith was rejected and his followers reduced to a mere handful; Labour came back with an increased representation, though not as great as it desired or deserved.  The triumph of the irreconcilables in Ireland was a foregone but sinister conclusion to their activities in the War, and an ominous prelude to their subsequent efforts to wreck the Pence.  The pledges in regard to indemnities, the treatment of the Kaiser, and conscription so lavishly given by the Coalition Leaders caused no little misgiving at the time, and pledges, like curses, have an awkward way of coming home to roost.  Mr. Punch’s views on the Kaiser, expressed in his Christmas Epilogue, are worth recalling.  Mr. Punch did not clamour for the death penalty, or wish to hand him over to the tender mercies of German Kultur.  “The only fault he committed in German eyes is that he lost the War, and I wouldn’t have him punished for the wrong offence—­for something, indeed, which was our doing as much as his.  No, I think I would just put him out of the way of doing further harm, in some distant penitentiary like the Devil’s Island, and leave him to himself to think it all over; as Caponsacchi said of Guido in ’The Ring and the Book’: 

  Not to die so much as slide out of life,
  Pushed by the general horror and common hate
  Low, lower—­left o’ the very edge of things.”

[Illustration: 

“Don’t you think we ought to hang the Kaiser, Mrs.  ’Arris?”

“It ain’t the Kaiser I’m worrying about—­it’s the bloke what interjuiced his war-bacon.”]

[Illustration:  REUNITED

Strasbourg, December 8th, 1918.]