Over the Front in an Aeroplane, and Scenes Inside the French and Flemish Trenches

by Ralph Pulitzer

I have had the privilege of studying the spirit of the English, the French and the Belgians at a time when that spirit was being severely tested—when their fortunes were at their lowest ebb since the days just before the battle of the Marne. Their spring advance had utterly failed to materialize; throughout the summer they had been held in almost complete check by the Germans' depleted line. The Dardanelles had turned out to be a slaughter-house, with success appearing more and more precarious, and the only alternative to success seeming to be disaster.

The starvation of Germany had become a conceded impossibility. Her dearth of rubber, copper, cotton, etc., had assumed more and more the nature of a superable handicap rather than a decisive crippling. Her financial situation had already made fools of so many economic seers that they had become less and less didactic regarding her impending bankruptcy.

The practical success of allied diplomacy among the Balkan neutrals had grown to seem more and more dubious.

Finally, Russia had been so manhandled that in the opinion of British and French military authorities with whom I talked it would take her from one to two years to reorganize her armies into condition for an effective offensive.

Yet, in spite of all these admitted disadvantages, I did not meet a single Frenchman, Englishman or Belgian who was not sincerely confident of ultimate victory. But only an ultimate peace could, in their conviction, be victorious. An immediate peace, or a peace in the near future, no matter what the German concessions, would for the Allies be the peace of defeat.

From Germany must come, not concessions, but abandonments, or the war, with all its hideous sacrifices unredeemed, would be a failure. Such an artificially fabricated peace, such a compromise between irreconcilable principles, would be but the prelude, more or less dragged out, to a fresh conflict.

I have talked to men and women of many classes, of many degrees of education and of many grades of intelligence. I found their views unanimous and their reasons for these views so constantly the same as finally to seem almost hackneyed.

I am aware of the existence in England of such a body of peace propagandists as the Union of Democratic Control, and in Holland of some French pacifists, and scattered here and there of Internationalists. But of all the men and women with whom I casually talked there was not one who shared these gentlemen's views.

Of all the French statements of reasons why the war must go on, which were iterated and reiterated to me, the best came from a prince, a retired naval captain and a little dressmaker. Unfortunately, they may not be quoted by name.

The prince said: "After this taste of blood the world can never remain long at peace while any powerful nation dedicates itself to the ideals and instincts of militarism. Germany, under the guidance of Prussia, is to-day such a nation. These aims and instincts have been so thoroughly absorbed by her people that, even if they sincerely wished to, these people could not eliminate them inside of two or three generations. It is ludicrous to imagine that these characteristics, which have become nearly if not quite hereditary, could be negotiated out of them. They must be subjugated out of the German people."