ot intend
to pay it. A blockade that cuts off "the grace of our Lord" is in the
long run less bearable than the blockades which merely cut off raw
materials; and against that blockade our Armada is impotent. In the
blockader's house, he has assured us, there are many mansions; but I am
afraid they do not include either Heartbreak House or Horseback Hall.

Plague on Both your Houses!

Meanwhile the Bolshevist picks and petards are at work on the
foundations of both buildings; and though the Bolshevists may be buried
in the ruins, their deaths will not save the edifices. Unfortunately
they can be built again. Like Doubting Castle, they have been demolished
many times by successive Greathearts, and rebuilt by Simple, Sloth, and
Presumption, by Feeble Mind and Much Afraid, and by all the jurymen of
Vanity Fair. Another generation of "secondary education" at our ancient
public schools and the cheaper institutions that ape them will be quite
sufficient to keep the two going until the next war. For the instruction
of that generation I leave these pages as a record of what civilian
life was during the war: a matter on which history is usually silent.
Fortunately it was a very short war. It is true that the people who
thought it could not last more than six months were very signally
refuted by the event. As Sir Douglas Haig has pointed out, its Waterloos
lasted months instead of hours. But there would have been nothing
surprising in its lasting thirty years. If it had not been for the fact
that the blockade achieved the amazing feat of starving out Europe,
which it could not possibly have done had Europe been properly organized
for war, or even for peace, the war would have lasted until the
belligerents were so tired of it that they could no longer be compelled
to compel themselves to go on with it. Considering its magnitude, the
war of 1914-18 will certainly be classed as the shortest in history. The
end came so suddenly that the combatant literally stumbled over it;
and yet it came a full year later than it should have come if the
belligerents had not been far too afraid of one another to face the
situation sensibly. Germany, having failed to provide for the war she
began, failed again to surrender before she was dangerously exhausted.
Her opponents, equally improvident, went as much too close to bankruptcy
as Germany to starvation. It was a bluff at which both were bluffed.
And, with the usual irony of war, it remains do