Part of the plan, broken corpses in the waste. By the waste and the corpses that he made shall men remember the author and framer of this greatest war.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
The Higher Politics
THE HIGHER POLITICS
The Kaiser "We will propose peace terms; if they accept them, we are the gainers, if they refuse them, the responsibility will rest with them."
There is a significance in this cartoon which I believe will appeal much more strongly to the firing line than to Home. The Front distrusts politics, and especially the higher politics. That means the juggling and wire-pulling of the Chancelleries, and the Front has an uneasy conviction that at the subtleties and craftiness and cunning of the diplomatic game we cannot compete with "The Bosche." Hard knocks and straight fighting the Front does understand, and at that game are cheerfully confident of winning in the long run.
It would be bitter news to the fighting men that any peace had been patched up on any terms but those the Allies soon or late will be in a position to dictate, to lay down and say flatly, "Take them and have Peace; or leave them and go on getting licked." The Front doesn't like War. No man who has endured the horrors and savagery and "blood, mud, and misery" of civilized warfare could pretend to like it. No man who has endured the long-drawn misery of manning the waterlogged trenches for days and weeks and months can look forward with anything but apprehension to another winter of war. No man who has attacked across the inferno of the shell-and-bullet-swept "neutral ground," or has hung on with tight-clenched teeth to the battered ruins of the forward fire trench under a murderous rain of machine-gun and rifle bullets, a howling tempest of shells, an earth-shaking tornado of high explosives, can but long for the day when Peace will be declared and these horrors will be no more than a past nightmare.