let us face the fact that the Germans are just as cultured as we are (to say the least) and that war has nevertheless driven them to do these things as irresistibly as it will drive us to do similar things tomorrow if we find ourselves attacking a town in which the highest point from which our positions can be spotted by an observer with a field glass in one hand and a telephone in the other is the towering roof of the cathedral.  Also let us be careful how we boast of our love of medieval art to people who well know, from the protests of Ruskin and Morris, that in times of peace we have done things no less mischievous and irreparable for no better reason than that the Mayor’s brother or the Dean’s uncle-in-law was a builder in search of a “restoration” job.  If Rheims cathedral were taken from the Church to-morrow and given to an English or French joint stock company, everything transportable in it would presently be sold to American collectors, and the site cleared and let out in building sites.  That is the way to make it “pay” commercially.

The Fate of The Glory Drunkard.

But our problem is how to make Commercialism itself bankrupt.  We must beat Germany, not because the Militarist hallucination and our irresolution forced Germany to make this war, so desperate for her, at a moment so unfavourable to herself, but because she has made herself the exponent and champion in the modern world of the doctrine that military force is the basis and foundation of national greatness, and military conquest the method by which the nation of the highest culture can impose that culture on its neighbors.  Now the reason I have permitted myself to call General Von Bernhardi a madman is that he lays down quite accurately the conditions of this military supremacy without perceiving that what he is achieving is a reductio ad absurdum.  For he declares as a theorist what Napoleon found in practice, that you can maintain the Militarist hold over the imaginations of the people only by feeding them with continual glory.  You must go from success to success; the moment you fail you are lost; for you have staked everything on your power to conquer, for the sake of which the people have submitted to your tyranny and endured the sufferings and paid the cost your military operations entailed.  Napoleon conquered and conquered and conquered; and yet, when he had won more battles than the maddest Prussian can ever hope for, he had to go on fighting just as if he had never won anything at all.  After exhausting the possible he had to attempt the impossible and go to Moscow.  He failed; and from that moment he had better have been a Philadelphia Quaker than a victor of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena and Wagrarn.  Within a short breathing time after that morning when he stood outside Leipsic, whistling Malbrook s’en va-t-en guerre whilst his flying army gasped its last in the river or fled under a hail of bullets from enemies commanded by generals without a tenth of his ability or prestige,