Are they to submit once again to that secret process of the
Germans?

[Illustration: PEASANTS' COTTAGES BURNED BY GERMANS.

The separate flame in each cottage is clearly visible, proving that each
house was separately set on fire. Radclyffe Dugmore took this photograph
at Melle, where he and the writer were made prisoners.]

The French, for instance, want to clear their country of a cloud which
has been thick and black for forty-three years. They always said the
Germans would come again with the looting and the torture and the
foulness. This time they will their fight to a finish. They are sick of
hate, so they are fighting to end war. But it is not an empty peace that
they want--peace, with a new drive when the Krupp howitzers are big
enough, and the spies in Paris thick enough, to make the death of France
a six weeks' picnic. They want a lasting peace, that will take fear from
the wife's heart, and make it a happiness to have a child, not a horror.
They want to blow the ashes off of Lorraine. Peace, as preached by our
Woman's Peace Party and by our pacifist clergy and by the signers of the
plea for an embargo on the ammunitions that are freeing France from her
invaders, is a German peace. If successfully consummated, it will grant
Germany just time enough to rest and breed and lay the traps, and then
release another universal massacre. How can the Allies state their terms
of peace in other than a militant way? There is nothing here to be
arbitrated. Pleasant sentiments of brotherhood evade the point at issue.
The way of just peace is by "converting" Germany. There is only one cure
for long-continued treachery, and that is to demonstrate its failure.
To pause short of a thorough victory over the deep, inset habits and
methods of Germany is to destroy the spirit of France. It will not be
well for a premier race of the world to go down in defeat. We need her
thrifty Lorraine peasants and Brittany sailors, her unfailing gift to
the light of the world, more than we need a thorough German spy system
and a soldiery obedient to commands of vileness.

Very much more slowly England, too, is learning what the fight is about.

It is German violation of the fundamental decencies that makes it
difficult to find common ground to build on for the future. It is at
this point that the spy system of slow-seeping treachery and the
atrocity program of dramatic frightfulness overlap. It is in part out of
the habit of betraying hospital