This war is altogether unlike any previous war, and its ending, like its development, will follow a course of its own.  For a time people’s minds ran into the old grooves, the Germans were going nach Paris and nach London; Lord Curzon filled our minds with a pleasant image of the Bombay Lancers riding down Unter den Linden. But the Versailles precedent of a council of victors dictating terms to the vanquished is not now so evidently in men’s minds.  The utmost the Allies talk upon now is to say, “We must end the war on German soil.”  The Germans talk frankly of “holding out.”  I have guessed that the western offensive will be chiefly on German soil by next June; it is a mere guess, and I admit it is quite conceivable that the “push” may still be grinding out its daily tale of wounded and prisoners in 1918 far from that goal.

None of the combatants expected such a war as this, and the consequence is that the world at large has no idea how to get out of it.  The war may stay with us like a schoolboy caller, because it does not know how to go.  The Italians said as much to me.  “Suppose we get to Innsbruck and Laibach and Trieste,” they said, “it isn’t an end!” Lord Northcliffe, I am told, came away from Italy with the conviction that the war would last six years.

There is the clearest evidence that nearly everyone is anxious to get out of the war now.  Nobody at all, except perhaps a few people who may be called to account, and a handful of greedy profit-seekers, wants to keep it going.  Quietly perhaps and unobtrusively, everyone I know is now trying to find the way out of the war, and I am convinced that the same is the case in Germany.  That is what makes the Peace-at-any-price campaign so exasperating.  It is like being chased by clamorous geese across a common in the direction in which you want to go.  But how are we to get out—­with any credit—­in such a way as to prevent a subsequent collapse into another war as frightful?

At present three programmes are before the world of the way in which the war can be ended.  The first of these assumes a complete predominance of our Allies.  It has been stated in general terms by Mr. Asquith.  Evacuation, reparation, due punishment of those responsible for the war, and guarantees that nothing of the sort shall happen again.  There is as yet no mention of the nature of these guarantees.  Just exactly what is to happen to Poland, Austria, and the Turkish Empire does not appear in this prospectus.  The German Chancellor is equally elusive.  The Kaiser has stampeded the peace-at-any-price people of Great Britain by proclaiming that Germany wants peace.  We knew that.  But what sort of peace?  It would seem that we are promised vaguely evacuation and reparation on the western frontier, and in addition there are to be guarantees—­but it is quite evident that they are altogether different guarantees from Mr. Asquith’s—­that nothing of the sort is ever to happen again.  The programme