defend his work, said very modestly (as we think)--"My work ... is no
more than an attempt to give week by week, at what I am proud to say is
a very great expense of time and of energy, an explanation of what is
taking place. There are many men who could do the same thing. I happen
to have specialized upon military history and problems, and profess now,
with a complete set of maps, to be doing for others what their own
occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do."

With part of this description we may heartily agree; with the rest we
must disagree. We agree with Mr. Belloc when he refers to his work as
being accomplished "at a very great expense of time and of energy."
There may be some who doubt the truth of this statement. There is
undoubtedly a large section of the public which, led astray by that
cynicism and that distrust of newspapers and journalists which a certain
section of our Press has engendered in the public, has come to regard
all newspaper reports on the war as unreliable and the writings of
so-called "experts" as mere vapourings, undertaken in the hope of
assisting the circulation of the paper in which they appear rather than
the circulation of the truth. If, then, any reader be inclined to
include Mr. Belloc in such a denunciation and to doubt that his weekly
commentary in _Land and Water_ is written as he says, "at a very great
expense of time and of energy," let him turn to one of Mr. Belloc's
articles, reprinted in _The Two Maps_, on "What to Believe in War News."

In this article Mr. Belloc asks the question--"How is the plain man to
distinguish in the news of the war what is true from what is false, and
so arrive at a sound opinion?" His answer to this question is that "in
the first place, the basis of all sound opinion are the official
_communiques_ read with the aid of a map." And to this he adds the
following explanation:

When I say "the official communiques" I do not mean those of the
British Government alone, nor even of the Allies alone, but of
_all_ the belligerents. You just read impartially the communiques
of the Austro-Hungarian and of the German Governments together with
those of the British Government and its Allies, or you will
certainly miss the truth. By which statement I do not mean that
each Government is equally accurate, still less equally full in its
relation; but that, unless you compare all the statements of this
sor