mans would not permit us to do anything of the
sort. The Germans, it seems, are the authorities in these matters, a
point I had overlooked. They would refuse to recognize men with only
improvised uniforms, they would shoot their prisoners--not that I had
proposed that my irregulars should become prisoners--and burn the
adjacent villages. This seemed to be an entirely adequate reply from the
point of view of the expert mind, and I gathered that the proper role
for such an able-bodied civilian as myself was to keep indoors while the
invader was about and supply him as haughtily as possible with light
refreshments and anything else he chose to requisition. I was also
reminded that if only men like myself had obeyed their expert advice and
worked in the past for national service and the general submission of
everything to expert military direction, these troubles would not have
arisen. There would have been no surplus of manhood and everything would
have gone as smoothly and as well for England as--the Press Censorship.

*An Improbable Invasion.*

For a time I was silenced. Under war conditions it is always a difficult
question to determine how far it is better to obey poor, or even bad,
directions or to criticise them in the hope of getting better. But the
course of the war since that correspondence and the revival of the idea
of a raid by your military correspondent provoke me to return to this
discussion. Frankly, I do not believe in that raid, and I think we play
the German game in letting our minds dwell upon it. I am supposed to be
a person of feverish imagination, but even by lashing my imagination to
its ruddiest I cannot, in these days of wireless telegraphy, see a
properly equipped German force, not even so trivial a handful as 20,000
of them, getting itself with guns, motors, ammunition, and provisions
upon British soil. I cannot even see a mere landing of infantrymen. I
believe in that raid even less than I do in the suggested raid of
navigables that has darkened London. I admit the risk of a few aeroplane
bombs in London, but I do not see why people should be subjected to
danger, darkness, and inconvenience on account of that one-in-a-million
risk. Still, as the trained mind does insist upon treating all
unenlisted civilians as panicstricken imbeciles and upon frightening old
ladies and influential people with these remote possibilities, and as it
is likely that these alarms may even lead to the retention of