caught in a terrific storm of human
passions, who seemed to feel that this Red Sea of blood should part
until they could walk dry-shod to the shore of safety.

In Germany similar scenes were enacted and a like spirit of courage
and self-sacrifice was shown.

It is a reflection upon civilization that two nations, each so brave,
heroic, and self-sacrificing, should, without their consent and by the
miserable and iniquitous folly of scheming statesmen and diplomats, be
plunged into a war, of which no man can see the end and which has
already swept away the flower of their manhood.

One great lesson of this conflict may be that no aggressive war ought
to be initiated unless the policy of that war is first submitted to
the masses of the people, upon whom the burdens in the last analysis
fall and who must pay the dreadful penalty with their treasure and
their lives.

If the policy of this war had been submitted by a referendum to the
Austrian and German peoples with a full statement of the facts of
the Servian controversy, would they not have rejected a form of
arbitrament, which creates but does not settle questions, convinces no
one, and only sows the seeds of greater hatred for future and richer
harvests of death? If the be-ribboned diplomats and decorated generals
of the General Staffs at Berlin and Vienna had been without power to
precipitate this war, unless they themselves were willing to occupy
the trenches on the firing line, this war might never have been.

* * * * *

Nearly five months have passed since that summer day, when I passed
through smiling harvest fields from the mountains to the Seine. The
trenches, in which innumerable brave men are writing with their blood
the records of their statesmen's follies, are filled with snow. The
blackest Christmas Eve within the memory of living man has come and
gone, perhaps the blackest, since in the stillness of the night there
fell upon the wondering ears of the shepherds the gracious refrain of
"Peace on earth, good will among men." On that night devout German
soldiers sang in their trenches in Flanders and along the Vistula the
hymn of Christmas Eve, "_Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht_."

Was this unconscious mockery, an expression of invincible faith, or a
reversion from habit to the gentler associations of childhood? The
spirit of Christmas was not wholly dead, for it is narrated that these
brave men in English and German trenches o