And now, before I leave the subject of Belgium, what have we done for Belgium?  Have we saved her soil from invasion?  Were we at her side with half a million men when the avalanche fell on her?  Or were we safe in our own country praising her heroism in paragraphs which all contrived to convey an idea that the Belgian soldier is about four feet high, but immensely plucky for his size?  Alas, when the Belgian soldier cried:  “Where are the English?” the reply was “a mass of concrete as large as a big room,” blown into the air by a German siege gun, falling back and crushing him into the earth we had not succeeded in saving from the worst of the horrors of war.  We have not protected Belgium:  Belgium has protected us at the cost of being conquered by Germany.  It is now our sacred duty to drive the Germans out of Belgium.  Meanwhile we might at least rescue her refugees by a generous grant of public money from the caprices of private charity.  We need not press our offer to lend her money:  German capitalists will do that for her with the greatest pleasure when the war is over.  I think the Government realizes that now; for I note the after-thought that a loan from us need not bear interest.

Now that we begin to see where we really are, what practical morals can we draw?

Unpreparedness the Price of Secrecy.

First, that our autocratic foreign policy, in which the Secretary for Foreign Affairs is always a Junker, and makes war and concludes war without consulting the nation, or confiding in it, or even refraining from deceiving it as to his intentions, leads inevitably to a disastrous combination of war and unpreparedness for war.  Wars are planned which require huge expeditionary armies trained and equipped for war.  But as such preparation could not be concealed from the public, it is simply deferred until the war is actually declared and begun, at the most frightful risk of such an annihilation of our little peace army as we escaped by the skin of our teeth at Mons and Cambrai.  The military experts tell us that it takes four months to make an infantry and six to make a cavalry soldier.  And our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment, voluntary or (better still from the Junker point of view) compulsory.  It seems to me that a nation which tolerates such insensate methods and outrageous risks must shortly perish from sheer lunacy.  And it is all pure superstition:  the retaining of the methods of Edward the First in the reign of George the Fifth.  I therefore suggest that the first lesson of the war is that the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs be reduced to the level of a simple Prime Minister, or even of a constitutional monarch, powerless to fire a single shot or sign a treaty without the authority of the House of Commons, all diplomatic business being conducted in a blaze of publicity, and the present regulation which exacts the qualification of a private income of at least L400 a year for a position in the Diplomatic Service replaced by a new regulation that at least half the staff shall consist of persons who have never dined out at the houses of hosts of higher rank than unfashionable solicitors or doctors.