Peace! For the Hun there shall be no peace. For him, for the next hundred years, whether we fight him or guard the wall which we shall build about him, there will be no peace. We, who have seen the mud of France grow red with blood as if with poppy petals, will never forget. That we die is nothing, provided always that two German lives pay for our death. Beyond the Rhine, Germany lies intact; her towns are still snug and smiling. One journeys to them through a hundred miles of rotting corpses—the corpses of men who were our friends; yet the Imperial Chancellor appeals to our humanity and reminds us of mercy. Mercy! While I have been in hospital several batches of returned British prisoners have arrived. I have sat at table with them, seen their neglected wounds, and talked to them. One officer, in addition to his battlefield wound, has a face horribly disfigured. I scarcely know how to describe it. His jaw has been broken; his entire face has been pushed to one side. It was done by the butt of a Hun rifle in a prison hospital in Germany; an orderly woke him up by smashing his face in one morning as he lay in bed. You may say that this was the act of one man and cannot justly be taken as representative of a nation. The time has long gone by for such generous discriminations; in four years of warfare these ferocious cruelties have been too frequent and organized for their odium to be borne by individual men. When Germany speaks of mercy it is as though a condemned murderer on the scaffold appealed for his reprieve on the grounds of Christ’s commandment, “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” Bullies grow fluent at quoting scripture only when they feel the rope about their necks; their use of scripture phrases at the eleventh hour is proof of cowardice—not of repentance. Judas, the front-rank assassin of all times, set an example in decency which it would behove Germany to follow, when he went out into the garden and hanged himself.