From ‘The food shortage and how to meet it’, The Spectator, 2 December 1916: A rise in prices, if properly understood and properly used, will be our salvation, not our injury. High prices help conservation, and, what is still more important, they help supply… If we artificially cut down prices here, we sterilise instead of stimulating
From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 25 November 1916: We admit that before the war we should have placed, and indeed did place, Female Suffrage in the catalogue of ‘no compromise’ subjects. The war, however, has modified our view by altering our belief that some fundamental difference of opinion might arise between the sexes upon
From ‘English versus German banking’, The Spectator, 18 November 1916: At the present moment a good many of us are in the mood to feel that we never wish to see any kind of German within our country again; but it is quite certain that this attitude of mind will not endure for ever, and it
From ‘How to Shorten the War. I. Prisoners’, The Spectator, 11 November 1916: Unless we altogether mistake the mental character of the German military authorities, they will hold that there is only one effective way of dealing with our invitation to a British fireside in a prison camp, and that is by stamping with the utmost
From ‘Romance’, The Spectator, 4 November 1916: There is indeed a glamour and a pathos about the private soldier, especially when, as so often happens, he is really only a boy… You can’t help loving him. Most of all, when he lies still and white with a red stream trickling from where the sniper’s bullet has made a
From ‘Secrecy and disease’, The Spectator, 28 October 1916: The war might have damned us, as Germany planned, but it will end in saving us. Afterwards we shall be a more highly organised nation than we once thought necessary or desirable, and we shall see all things rather differently, but we shall be much stronger.
From ‘A Royal contribution’, The Spectator, 7 October 1916: His Majesty has passed through troublous times, in the constitutional controversy, in the Irish imbroglio, and in the war, when passion rose to its highest point. The temptation to go behind his Ministers, and to snatch popular favour at their expense, must have been tremendous sometimes. ‘Remember,
From ‘Decisive victory at sea’, The Spectator, 7 October 1916: The only excuse for changing our views of the magnificent rightness of the strategy of continually searching out the enemy, forcing him to action, and destroying him — the strategy on which Britain has been built up — would be that submarines and mines have so
From ‘More men’, The Spectator, 7 October 1916: Are we or are we not to apply compulsory service to Ireland? The difficulties, we admit, are very great. Personally, we dislike the idea of seeing the privilege — for such it is — of defending the Empire accorded to men who have disgraced themselves as did the
From ‘The fall of Combles and Thiepval’, The Spectator, 30 September 1916: The trench — ugly, dirty, dull, untidy serpent of mud and sandbags — will always have the advantage of the most artful fortress. In the last resort, the reason for this seeming miracle is the fact that the trench has something of mobility in it,
From ‘The Battle of the Somme’, The Spectator, 23 September 1916: It may prove to be the fact that the battle of last week was, indeed, the most important fought by British troops in the whole war. For it is possible that just as our men advanced on to the forward slope of the ridge the
From ‘Mr. Asquith’, The Spectator, 16 September, 1916: King George has no other subject who is trusted so widely by his countrymen and who is respected so heartily by our Allies as the Prime Minister. Under his guidance we are now, after two strenuous years of war, an even more thoroughly united nation than we were
From ‘The burning of the Zeppelin’, The Spectator, 9 September 1916: Half London formed the vast proscenium for this tragedy of the air, and saw on the aerial stage the triumph of right over might — saw with their natural eyes David smite Goliath and hurl him in flaming ruin to the ground. Never before
From ‘Mr Churchill’s misfire’, The Spectator, 2 September 1916: There is nothing that democracy so much hates as unfair privilege, and Mr Churchill has enjoyed and has utilised an unfair privilege in getting himself in and out of the Army at his arbitrary will… The public now fully understands that his influence on our political life is almost
From ‘The bed-rock of war’, The Spectator, 26 August 1916: As a rule in war the bowling has a great advantage over the batting, but it happens that the newest fashion in combat has given a great temporary advantage to the defence. To break a trench line which rests like that of the Germans on the sea
From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 19 August 1916: The Parliamentary Air Committee having recently inhaled much ozone at giddy heights, during their visits to a R.F.C. park, have breathed some of it forth in a brilliant idea. They propose that the present clumsy and ugly system of designating aircraft by numbers and letters should
From ‘Restless politicians’, The Spectator, 12 August 1916: Even those journals which a few months ago were most zealous for a general election without delay now admit that there is no issue which could be presented to the country on which to take a vote… We have got to accept the continuance of the present government,
From ‘Armour of offence’, The Spectator, 5 August 1916: The soldier must never forget that it is his business to stand upon the offensive, not upon the defensive, and that for the offensive the power of rapid movement is essential. That is why, as the Germans are finding, and as the Austrians certainly found in
From ‘The military situation’, The Spectator, 29 July 1916: We have a new Secretary for War. Mr Lloyd George, as we all know, is a man of great personal power, with the faculty of stimulating and inspiring, and securing that what he desires shall be accomplished. With him good is not enough. He knows that more and
From ‘The Battle of the Somme’, The Spectator, 22 July 1916: What we seldom hear about is what Milton called the ‘raw edge of war’, of the 10 or 15 per cent or more of stragglers who fail to go on — men who do not show anything which can be reasonably called cowardice in face of the
