ea is great enough or commanding enough, but only the
world kingdom of God.

However long he may have to hunt, the blind man who is seeking service
and an end to bickerings will come to that at last, because of all the
thousand other things he may clutch at, nothing else can satisfy his
manifest need.

VI. THE ENDING OF THE WAR

1

About the end of the war there are two chief ways of thinking, there is
a simpler sort of mind which desires merely a date, and a more complex
kind which wants particulars. To the former class belong most of the men
out at the front. They are so bored by this war that they would
welcome any peace that did not definitely admit defeat--and examine
the particulars later. The "tone" of the German army, to judge by its
captured letters, is even lower. It would welcome peace in any form.
Never in the whole history of the world has a war been so universally
unpopular as this war.

The mind of the soldier is obsessed by a vision of home-coming for
good, so vivid and alluring that it blots out nearly every other
consideration. The visions of people at home are of plenty instead
of privation, lights up, and the cessation of a hundred tiresome
restrictions. And it is natural therefore that a writer rather given to
guesses and forecasts should be asked very frequently to guess how long
the war has still to run.

All such forecasting is the very wildest of shooting. There are the
chances of war to put one out, and of a war that changes far faster than
the military intelligence. I have made various forecasts. At the outset
I thought that military Germany would fight at about the 1899 level,
would be lavish with cavalry and great attacks, that it would be
reluctant to entrench, and that the French and British had learnt
the lesson of the Boer war better than the Germans. I trusted to
the melodramatic instinct of the Kaiser. I trusted to the quickened
intelligence of the British military caste. The first rush seemed to
bear me out, and I opened my paper day by day expecting to read of the
British and French entrenched and the Germans beating themselves to
death against wire and trenches. In those days I wrote of the French
being over the Rhine before 1915. But it was the Germans who entrenched
first.

Since then I have made some other attempts. I did not prophesy at all in
1915, so far as I can remember. If I had I should certainly have backed
the Gallipoli attempt to win. It was the right