me why—­or any such intermediate object of self-abandonment?  We need a standard so universal that the platelayer may say to the barrister or the duchess, or the Red Indian to the Limehouse sailor, or the Anzac soldier to the Sinn Feiner or the Chinaman, “What are we two doing for it?” And to fill the place of that “it,” no other idea is great enough or commanding enough, but only the world kingdom of God.

However long he may have to hunt, the blind man who is seeking service and an end to bickerings will come to that at last, because of all the thousand other things he may clutch at, nothing else can satisfy his manifest need.

VI.  THE ENDING OF THE WAR

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About the end of the war there are two chief ways of thinking, there is a simpler sort of mind which desires merely a date, and a more complex kind which wants particulars.  To the former class belong most of the men out at the front.  They are so bored by this war that they would welcome any peace that did not definitely admit defeat—­and examine the particulars later.  The “tone” of the German army, to judge by its captured letters, is even lower.  It would welcome peace in any form.  Never in the whole history of the world has a war been so universally unpopular as this war.

The mind of the soldier is obsessed by a vision of home-coming for good, so vivid and alluring that it blots out nearly every other consideration.  The visions of people at home are of plenty instead of privation, lights up, and the cessation of a hundred tiresome restrictions.  And it is natural therefore that a writer rather given to guesses and forecasts should be asked very frequently to guess how long the war has still to run.

All such forecasting is the very wildest of shooting.  There are the chances of war to put one out, and of a war that changes far faster than the military intelligence.  I have made various forecasts.  At the outset I thought that military Germany would fight at about the 1899 level, would be lavish with cavalry and great attacks, that it would be reluctant to entrench, and that the French and British had learnt the lesson of the Boer war better than the Germans.  I trusted to the melodramatic instinct of the Kaiser.  I trusted to the quickened intelligence of the British military caste.  The first rush seemed to bear me out, and I opened my paper day by day expecting to read of the British and French entrenched and the Germans beating themselves to death against wire and trenches.  In those days I wrote of the French being over the Rhine before 1915.  But it was the Germans who entrenched first.