From News of the Week, The Spectator, 5 December 1914:
Friday’s Times contains extracts from an interview with Lord Kitchener, published in the Saturday Evening Post— a weekly newspaper with a large circulation in all parts of the United States. Nothing could be better than the passage in which Lord Kitchener dealt with the action of the Germans in Belgium :—
“War has its ethics; but if ever a soldier is to become judge of the behaviour of the civil population of a hostile country, if he is to be not only judge and jury, but the inflicter of punishment, why, then, to my conception, he loses his proper ordained functions as soldier and becomes executioner. If that standard is to prevail throughout the world we cease to enlist soldiers, we enrol, instead, hired executioners. Tears ago in the Sudan I was called on to fight an enemy who practised this code, but that enemy was a savage, so-called, and the Germans, they themselves tell us, are exclusive owners of the highest civilization the world has ever seen.”
All Englishmen will feel proud that the most famous of living English soldiers should have so nobly vindicated the soldier’s honour and the soldier’s profession. It is a message to the world for which we are all grateful.
Asked how long the war would last, Lord Kitchener replied:
“Not loss than three years. It will end only when Germany is thoroughly defeated, not before—defeated on land and sea. That the Allies will win is certain. That for us to win will require a minimum period of three years is, I think, probable. It might last longer, it might end sooner. It can end in only one way. If Germany gives up sooner so much the better for Germany and for us and for the world. If three years are required for the under- taking, or more than three years, the world will find that we for our part are prepared to go on, determined to go on, certain to go on. In any event, the war can have but one outcome—ono ultimate conclusion.”
Here again the country has cause to be grateful to Lord Kitchener for his brave and sensible words, and for his avoidance of that easy optimism which offers so many temptations to popular soldiers. Whether Lord Kitchener’s exact timetable will prove correct or not does not matter. The essential thing is that he is not afraid to “depress the public mind” and to tell us the truth as he sees it. If the war is to last three years, we shall want not a million more men, but at least two million more. That is the practical lesson of Lord Kitchener’s statement, and we trust the Government and the nation will heed it in good time.
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