"My own views as to what the general terms of peace should be if the Allies win are shared by men in both England and France whose opinions will have weight in the peace negotiations. They are:
"To erect an independent Polish kingdom or state; to reconstitute Belgium with indemnity; to hold a plebiscite in Alsace-Lorraine, taken by a neutral, preferably the United States, in order to determine to whom they should belong, and in what proportions; to dismember Turkey, excepting Anatolia, which, being strictly Turkish, should be left to the Turks; to enforce a very large degree of disarmament upon Germany and Europe; to leave the German-speaking German Empire intact. (This talk about the deposition of the Hohenzollerns as one of the peace terms is sheer impertinence.)
"Now, you must readily perceive that any peace made in the near future must conform or approximate to the German plans which I have outlined and must involve a continuance of militarism and a standing incitement to fresh wars. While a peace on the terms which we favor, a peace that will perpetuate peace, must be wrung from a decisively beaten Germany, and is therefore a long way off. That is why we shall have to go through a very bad time of it for some period to come, and why our ultimate victory will be at least one year, and possibly two or three years off."
The keenest realization that victory will be slow, the completest confidence that its certainty is axiomatic, is to be found in the allied armies. There, ungrudgingly, they give the Germans fullest credit for their preparedness, for their foresight, for their powers of systematic and sustained labor, for their inventiveness. And they do not waste their time trying to devise discrediting substitutes for such words as "ability" in talking of their Generals, "courageousness" in talking of their soldiers, and "patriotism" in talking of their people. It is only when you get far behind the firing line that manliness merges into meanness in estimating the enemy.
Yet these very officers who paid such soldierly tributes to their antagonists were so wholly assured of eventual victory that any scepticism on my part did not irritate them, but merely moved them to good-natured smiles.
"So far," an English staff-officer remarked to me, "we English have been bungling amateurs in the art of war contending against trained professional specialists. But with a couple of years' more experience I believe we shall know as much about it as they do, and then we shall win."
"In the last analysis, talking from the military standpoint, this war, like every war, will be won by men," said a French staff-officer. "The Germans will not be beaten through lack of guns or ammunition or machinery or supplies, but through lack of men. How long by the aid of mechanics they can postpone the hour when the lack of men becomes fatal to them I do not know—one year, two years. But in the end, with the allied man-power steadily growing, and the German man-power steadily lessening, their military collapse is inevitable."
These are typical of a score of similar views advanced by officers, from Generals down to subalterns.
In the French army, as they show you their elaborate machine-shops mounted on motor-lorries for the repair of all the vehicles in the transport service, they will say with the most complete conviction: "This mobility is not of much importance now, but when we begin the pursuit of the 'Boches' then they will come in handy!"