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From The Spectator, 12 September 1914: WE are not going to begin shouting before we are out of the wood. We say this out of no foolish superstition that it is unlucky to do so, but for the very plain and good reason that we are not out of the wood, though we admit that during the week things have gone fairly well, and that the prospects look somewhat brighter. But even so our success may well turn out to be temporary. Indeed, we might almost say that in one sense it is certain to prove temporary, because a campaign with fairly equal forces such as are now arrayed against

THE WAR AND THE CIVIL SERVICE. [To the Editor of The Spectator] SIR,—May I suggest that some of the normal public services may, for the time, be curtailed in order to give patriotic young men the opportunity of serving their country in another way? The number of deliveries of letters might be reduced without serious inconvenience; a possible curtailment may be suggested in many other directions. Service with the colours is the one thing that matters now, and it should be made plain in every town and village how greatly those who are debarred from it honour and appreciate those who accept it. Everywhere the families of those who have

From The Spectator, 5 September 1914: LONDON changes day by day, and the London of the first few days of the war lies far in the past, distant for all of us by differently measured aeons of time. The trainloads of troops, the horses, the hurry, the altered railway service, the packed streets, the questioning crowds, the visible stress and strain of meeting the new conditions and the new standards of the world—these are gone. London instead is very quiet, and exceedingly hard at work. The noise of preparation has ceased, and now the silence that has followed has a quality of its own. There is a new sound in

‘Distraction’, from The Spectator, 5 September 1914: EVER since the world began great trouble has been surrounded by ceremonial. From age to age the ceremonial changes. It tends to become a bondage or a hypocrisy, and bold social reformers step in, as they think, to destroy it, but immediately it appears again in a new form. Modern mourning is the sackcloth and ashes of the past. The grave tone in which we address the afflicted, though their trouble touch us but little, is as much a ceremonial as was the wailing of the ancient Jewish sympathizer. The Psalmist was greatly aggrieved because, when his false friends were in distress, he

The Giving up of Louvain to ‘Military Execution’, from The Spectator, 5 September 1914: GERMANY has dealt herself the hardest blow which she has yet suffered in the war. By burning Louvain, killing we know not how many of its inhabitants, and turning the rest (say nearly forty thousand men, women, and children) adrift in the fields and on the pillaged countryside, she has forfeited the consideration of decent men. She has committed a deed which two centuries of exemplary conduct could scarcely efface. “German” must for a long time to come be almost synonymous with those epithets of nationality which we use to denote barbaric behaviour, particularly barbarism directed

The Spectator, 29 August 1914: THE loafers in London look more pitiable than ever. The best have enlisted, and the rest are drinking to their good fortune and safe return. In the poorer streets a kind of holiday atmosphere prevails, and a sort of excitement which is in a measure pleasurable fills the air. The children rush out of school eager to go on playing at soldiers. The smallest boys tie tin cans about their persons and beat them with hoop-sticks as they march. In the byways of poor neighbourhoods London is still the London of thirty years ago. There is not much traffic. It is still possible to walk

The Spectator, 29 August 1914: NO decent or self-respecting person will ever indulge in a word of recrimination even against those men who supported Germany and German aspirations till the beginning of the war, who deprecated any attempt to make adequate military provision for war in these islands, and who denounced as criminal, and even inhuman, the distrust of the governing class in Germany when it was publicly set forth. Time has proved those who held these views to be wrong, and they are now, as a rule, the last men in the world to entertain them; but their forced disillusionment, though it may prove them to have been wrong

The Spectator, 22 August 1914: WHEN so great a business as war comes upon England, the sports and games of the country fall into their proper places. Cricket has been packed into an obscure corner of the daily newspaper. Golf clubs have expended their activities largely in trenching vacant ground, and in forwarding subscription lists to the Prince of Wales’s Fund. The Scottish Football Union, sending its contribution to the Fund, exhorts its members to prove what they may owe to the discipline and self-control given by the game. But these games—just because they are merely games—are less seriously affected than other country activities. The sports of hunting and shooting

From The Spectator, 22 August 1914: THE Times of Wednesday published a piece of news in regard to the final interview between Sir Edward Goschen, our Ambassador at Berlin, and the German Imperial Chancellor, Herr von Bethmann Hollweg, which is of the highest significance. If the report is true—and we feel confident that the Times would not have given it such prominence unless convinced of its truth—the Imperial Chancellor expressed with considerable irritation his inability to understand the attitude of England, and added: “Why should you make war upon us for a scrap of paper?” The Times goes on to tell us that “Sir Edward Goschen is reported to have

From The Spectator, 22 August 1914: SIR,—The article on this subject in your last issue has prompted me to write down some of the things said to me about the war by the women in my district. Our rector wished me to ask at each house whether any one from it was serving with the forces. The usual answer was: “No one from here, I’m glad to say. I shouldn’t like any of mine to go.” One mother said: “There’s no one here could go but Eddie, and I’ve told him he needn’t offer. If they want him they’ll take him.” This idea is general. One woman had heard that

‘A pacifist protest’, a letter from the 15 August 1914 Spectator in response to a piece in the 8 August edition: SIR, – One is willing to believe that your article in last week’s issue called “Keep Your Temper” was not intentionally provocative, but it shows some lack of justice and of courtesy towards the pacifist. You divide pacifists into three classes. The first consists of obstinate fools who refuse to think their own country can do right; the second consists of cowards; and the third, which you are generous enough to admit to be a small one, of knaves. One would like to ask to which class you consign