We may take it, then, that the retention of Belgium is in German eyes now quite indispensable.  “If I abandon Belgium,” she says, “it is much more than a strategic retreat; it is a political confession of failure, and the moral support behind me at home will break down.”

If I were writing not of calculable considerations, but of other and stronger forces, I should add that to withdraw from Belgium, where so many women and children have been massacred, so many jewels of the past befouled or destroyed, so wanton an attack upon Christ and His Church delivered, would be a loss of Pagan prestige intolerably strong, and a triumph of all that against which Prussia set out to war.

2. Alsace-Lorraine. But Alsace-Lorraine is also “indispensable.”  We have seen on an earlier page what the retention of that territory means.  Alsace-Lorraine is the symbol of the old victory.  It is the German-speaking land which the amazingly unreal superstitions of German academic pedantry discovered to be something sacredly necessary to the unity of an ideal Germany, though the people inhabiting it desired nothing better than the destruction of the Prussian name.  It is more than that.  It is the bastion beyond the Rhine which keeps the Rhine close covered; it is the two great historic fortresses of Strassburg and Metz which are the challenge Germany has thrown down against European tradition and the civilization of the West; it is something which has become knit up with the whole German soul, and to abandon it is like a man abandoning his title or his name, or surrendering his sword.  Through what must not the German mind pass before its directors would consent to the sacrifice of such a fundamentally symbolic possession?  There is defeat in the very suggestion; and the very suggestion, though it has already occurred to the Great General Staff, and has already, I believe, been mentioned in one proposal for peace, would be intolerable to the mass of the enemy’s opinion.

3. East Prussia. East Prussia is sacred in another, but also an intense fashion.  It is the very kernel of the Prussian monarchy.  When Berlin was but a market town for the Electors of Brandenburg, those same Electors had contrived that East Prussia, which was outside the empire, should be recognized as a kingdom.  Frederick the Great’s father, while of Brandenburg an Elector, was in Prussia proper a king, a man who had emancipated that cradle of the Prussian power.  The province in all save its southern belt (which is Polish) is the very essence of Prussian society:  a mass of serfs, technically free, economically abject, governed by those squires who own them, their goods, and what might be their soil.  The Russians wasted East Prussia in their first invasion, and they did well though they paid so heavy a price, for to wound East Prussia was to wound the very soul of that which now governs the German Empire.  When the landed proprietors fled before the Russian invasion, and when there fled with