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The frame of the window was taken out, and, being near the ground, it was perfectly easy to pass the coffin quietly out, where it was received by other hands.

Wrapped in a big Union Jack, on which a sheaf of flowers was placed with the words "From his mother," the boy was borne to his grave on the shoulders of his mates. The padre led the way and the Commander and one or two officers walked behind the coffin. Then followed a long cortège of soldiers, which had been reinforced by the hospital staff and a company of French poilus.

To get to the cemetery it was necessary to pass right through the village. Surrounding the church and far beyond, thousands of graves are stretched as far as the eye can see. We first passed the part where the civilian population are buried. Even here is the mark of the Hun. Freely sprinkled about are newly made graves of recent victims of local bombardments and air raidsold men, women, and children.

A neat green patch lies just beyond. It is about twenty feet in length, and the title it bears completes the story-" Tombes Allemands."

Thence through a little gate we step into a place which is reserved as a cemetery for the Allied forces. First of all we pass hundreds of graves in the burial-ground of the French army. In addition to the usual little black cross that is placed above many of the men, tall pointed slabs of wood standing up in sharp contrast are dotted amongst them. They are painted white, with a black star and crescent, the emblem of the Mussulman's faith. There is something strangely moving about those simple monuments. How splendidly those Orientals fought in the critical and early months of the war! Algerians and Senegalese alike, they hurled themselves into the Gehenna of fire and shell with all the frenzied recklessness of their race. some actions how few there were who came out alive!

And in

The appearance of those who survived was tragic enough. We could always recognize their wounded from afar by a certain weird, despairing cry with which they heralded their approach. The walking cases filed into the dressing-stations with anxious, distraught faces, their picturesque, but, as it seemed, peculiarly unsuitable native uniform usually hanging in shreds about them.

The East and the West have fought side by side, staking all for freedom. To see them now slumbering together it strikes one as fitting, indeed, that in death neither colour nor creed should divide them.

We are nearing the British part of the cemetery. What is that vast stretch of ground that lies still farther beyond, where wave upon wave of grass and flowers to right and left of the winding path spread like a brilliant sea ?

It is the resting-place of Le petit Belge. Thousands of men are lying there. That is one drop, but no more, in the life-stream poured forth by Belgium. Calmly she stepped into the gap whilst the nations armed. Swiftly she struck. Belgium," Warden of the Gateway," fearlessly and greatly have you fulfilled your destiny!

Hush! We are coming close to an open grave. The procession has stopped. They are lowering the body of the gunner, whilst the padre is quietly proceeding with the service.

How thrilling it is to find ourselves amongst so many familiar names! Here lies one of our gallant airmen who perished within a mile of our hospital; here a well-known officer; here the old Irish rifleman who died to save his machine-gun; ever so many brave men besides. The graves look much alike; only one seems to strike an original note. The name and regiment of the dead man are written on the wooden cross at the head, and also, right in the midst of some growing flowers, a little wooden slab is pegged deep into the ground with these arresting words:

How did you die?

It's not the fact that you're dead that counts,

But only-How did you die?

This was a message sent by a man to his mother when he lay in a neighbouring hospital dying of his wounds. The mother was comforted by the words, and in the certainty that some passer-by would derive consolation from them, something that would spur him on also in an uphill fight, she had them placed over her boy.

Close to that man we buried the gunner.

When the last word of the service had been said, every soldier present paid his final tribute of respect. Beginning with the Commander, they all stepped up to the grave one at a time, stood at attention, saluted their fallen comrade, then quietly passed on and joined their companions.

This silent little ceremony over, the word of command suddenly rang in the air. The various companies--French and Britishinstantly formed into line, marched in double-quick time through the cemetery, and in a few minutes were swinging along the road, back to the firing-line. We watched their retreating figures gradually disappearing over the plain, and long after they had been enveloped in a thick cloud of dust we could still hear the tramp, tramp, tramp of two hundred feet rapidly regaining the area whence proceeded the murderous thunder of a thousand guns.

DOSIA BAGOT

THE PERILS OF SECRET

DIPLOMACY

I. THE DOCTRINE

WHEN Mr. Balfour sang the praises of Secret Diplomacy in the House of Commons some weeks ago as a system in which he believed and to which he should adhere, he made not a few people very uncomfortable. He plumped so uncompromisingly for that exploded regime as to convince his audience that he would practise what he preached whenever opportunity offered. It was known that Herr von Kuhlmann had been appointed German Foreign Minister for the express purpose of creating such opportunities for British statesmen whose idiosyncrasies he had studied. Our present Foreign Minister is an exceptionally clever man, against whom no one can successfully compete in the field in which he excels. Indeed, in argument there are very few whom he cannot speedily make ridiculous, but he is usually too amiable to play the executioner-though not always, as Mr. Churchill found to his cost on a famous occasion when he tried a fall as ex-First Lord of the Admiralty with his

successor.

Mr. Balfour is, however, one of the last men whom his countrymen would like to see embark on the troubled waters of Secret Diplomacy. In a trial of strength with any Boche he would have less than a dog's chance. For one thing Mr. Balfour, like his predecessor Viscount Grey, is too great a gentleman, though as we know from the late Lord Salisbury's remarkable career, it is possible for a very great gentleman to be aware that he is dealing with cunning cads. Not so our present Foreign Minister, who has been born and bred in the Parliamentary game, which is governed by rules that all Right Honourables are supposed to recognize, and who is consequently hopelessly handicapped by opponents who avowedly trample on every inconvenient rule. Also it must be said that Mr. Balfour's charming character is so unsuspicious that he can hardly be induced to be on his guard,

a circumstance of which it is feared cosmopolitan friends habitually took advantage before the war, if not subsequently. It is this detachment which is the most engaging intellectual and social quality of British statesmen that makes them such easy prey to the dirty tricksters of the Wilhelmstrasse. Mr. Balfour loftily informed the House of Commons (August 17): "There are critics in the chair who appear to think that diplomacy is a sort of conflict." The issue between the present controllers of our foreign policy and the outside world could not be more concisely or more fairly stated. We are not ashamed to say that in our benighted ignorance we do regard the British diplomatist as engaged in "a sort of conflict," for the simple reason that he is charged with the duty of upholding "British interests" against conflicting interests, using the word, not in any narrow sense, but in its largest and most enlightened meaning. Mr. Balfour, on the other hand, declares: "The whole energies of a diplomat, certainly in a country like this, are entirely directed, not to making quarrels, but to healing quarrels, not to producing difficulties, but to preventing difficulties, not to provoking war, but to stopping war.

Such is the orthodox Parliamentary conception of the whole duty of a British Foreign Minister. We have no hesitation in saying that it largely explains our drifting into the greatest war in human history without our Government being so much as aware that any war was impending. Our foreign policy was inspired by the Peace-at-any-price obsession, with the result disclosed when Mr. Balfour in the same speech pronounced this terrible, if unconscious, condemnation on his predecessors: "I do not believe that the Government in June 1914 had the slightest notion that there was any danger ahead." We would not dispute this for a single second, it is the only possible interpretation of their performance. Mr. Balfour's retrospective confession was confirmed by Mr. Lloyd George, who also spoke the exact truth when he stated early in the war :

There was not a man in the Cabinet who thought that war with Germany was a possibility under the present conditions. (Mr. Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, the City Temple, November 10, 1914.)

The Whig historians of the future, who like the Whig historians of the past will try and do their best for the Whig Governments of the present, will be hard put to it to vindicate Whiggery in the face of such appalling admissions. Nor will they be assisted by the evidence of Lord Rosebery, who has placed on record this considered opinion as to the genesis of the Potsdam plot :

The death of Queen Victoria coincided almost exactly with the first prominence of a Prussian plot, because it was then that the Prussians began to prepare a fleet which

was to be equal, even superior, to our own, and it was then quite clear that a nation with two centuries of tradition of unscrupulous and grasping policy, which aimed at having the greatest army and the greatest fleet in the world, was a danger to all mankind. (Edinburgh, September 9, 1915.)

The ex-Prime Minister, be it noted, is supported in his history by Mr. Balfour himself, who, in a letter to a correspondent in August 1915, when First Lord of the Admiralty, wrote this sentence, with which the readers of the National Review would be the last to quarrel because they had always regarded the great German Navy Bill as the declaration of war which Mr. Balfour now admits it to have been:

It was in 1900 that Germany first proclaimed the policy of building a fleet against Great Britain. (Mr. Balfour to " a correspondent," August 1915.)

Nevertheless, so strong is optimism within responsible breasts that actually two years after this public challenge to our existence the Prime Minister of the day (who happened to be Mr. Balfour) at the Lord Mayor's Banquet (November 9, 1902) perpetrated this prophecy :

I know not that any danger within the ken of human vision menaces in the smallest degree that peace which it should be our earnest endeavour to preserve.

Ten years later as Leader of the Opposition Mr. Balfour was still administering soothing syrup to the community (Hanley, January 4, 1910):

I do not believe there is going to be war between this country and any great foreign Power. Heaven knows I do not desire it, but I do not believe it.

It may be argued that Mr. Balfour as a patriotic Leader of His Majesty's Opposition was merely following the wisdom of the head of the Government, the Prime Minister being Mr. Asquith, who necessarily commanded superior because inside information, and who a few days before had thus pledged his reputation:

I assert unhesitatingly that . . . there is not, to my knowledge, a single Power, be it small or great, which is shaping its policy or basing its calculations upon the assumption that war between Great Britain and Germany is inevitable or even possible. Nor, gentlemen, can I discern in any quarter of the political horizon any cause of quarrel, direct or indirect, between us and that great and friendly nation. (Mr. Asquith, at Bath, January 6, 1910.)

Nor has the mystery of this astounding nescience in high places of everything that statesmen exist to know been lessened by the discovery that the Government had had the advantage of a strong, not to say startling, warning from Sir Eyre Crowe, one of the principal officials of the Foreign Office and an expert par excellence on German affairs, who, as we lately learnt from the present Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Lord Robert Cecil, endeavoured to awaken the sluggards of Downing Street. It is one of the few occasions on which an attempt to make a scape

VOL. LXX

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