This seemed to be an entirely adequate reply from the point of view of the expert mind, and I gathered that the proper role for such an able-bodied civilian as myself was to keep indoors while the invader was about and supply him as haughtily as possible with light refreshments and anything else he chose to requisition.  I was also reminded that if only men like myself had obeyed their expert advice and worked in the past for national service and the general submission of everything to expert military direction, these troubles would not have arisen.  There would have been no surplus of manhood and everything would have gone as smoothly and as well for England as—­the Press Censorship.

An Improbable Invasion.

For a time I was silenced.  Under war conditions it is always a difficult question to determine how far it is better to obey poor, or even bad, directions or to criticise them in the hope of getting better.  But the course of the war since that correspondence and the revival of the idea of a raid by your military correspondent provoke me to return to this discussion.  Frankly, I do not believe in that raid, and I think we play the German game in letting our minds dwell upon it.  I am supposed to be a person of feverish imagination, but even by lashing my imagination to its ruddiest I cannot, in these days of wireless telegraphy, see a properly equipped German force, not even so trivial a handful as 20,000 of them, getting itself with guns, motors, ammunition, and provisions upon British soil.  I cannot even see a mere landing of infantrymen.  I believe in that raid even less than I do in the suggested raid of navigables that has darkened London.  I admit the risk of a few aeroplane bombs in London, but I do not see why people should be subjected to danger, darkness, and inconvenience on account of that one-in-a-million risk.  Still, as the trained mind does insist upon treating all unenlisted civilians as panicstricken imbeciles and upon frightening old ladies and influential people with these remote possibilities, and as it is likely that these alarms may even lead to the retention of troops in England when their point of maximum effectiveness is manifestly in France, it becomes necessary to insist upon the ability of our civilian population, if only the authorities will permit the small amount of organization and preparation needed, to deal quite successfully with any raid that in an extremity of German “boldness” may be attempted.

And, in the first place, let the expert have no illusions as to what we ordinary people are going to do if we find German soldiers in England one morning.  We are going to fight.  If we cannot fight with rifles, we shall fight with shotguns, and if we cannot fight according to rules of war apparently made by Germans for the restraint of British military experts, we will fight according to our inner light.  Many men, and not a few women, will turn out to shoot Germans.  There will be no preventing them after the Belgian