Half of these stories of atrocities I do not believe. I remember when I was living in Germany at the time of the Boer war the German papers were full of accounts of Tommy Atkins's brutality. He spent his leisure time in tossing babies on bayonets. There were photographs of him doing it. Detailed accounts certified by most creditable witnesses. Such lies are the stock in trade of every tenth-rate journalist, who, careful not to expose himself to danger, slinks about the byways collecting hearsay. In every war each side, according to the other, is supposed to take a fiendish pleasure in firing upon hospitals--containing always a proportion of their own wounded. An account comes to us from a correspondent with the Belgian Army. He tells us that toward the end of the day a regrettable incident occurred. The Germans were taking off their wounded in motor cars. The Belgian sharpshooters, not noticing the red flag in the dusk, kept up a running fire, and a large number of the wounded were killed. Had the incident been the other way about it would have been cited as a deliberate piece of villainy on the part of the Germans. According to other accounts, the Germans always go into action with screens of women and children before them. The explanation, of course, is that a few poor terrified creatures are rushing along the road. They get between the approaching forces, and I expect the bullets that put them out of their misery come pretty even from both sides. The men are mad. Mad with fear, mad with hate, blinded by excitement. Take a mere dog fight. If you interfere you have got to be prepared for your own dog turning upon you. In war half the time the men do not know what they are doing. They are little else than wild beasts. There was great indignation at the dropping of bombs into Antwerp. One now hears that a French dirigible has been dropping bombs into Luxembourg--a much more dignified retort. War is a grim game. Able editors and club-chair politicians have been clamoring for it for years past. They thought it was all goose-step and bands. The truth is bad enough, God knows. There is no sense in making things out worse than they are. When this war is over we have got to forget it. To build up barriers of hatred that shall stand between our children and our foemen's children is a crime against the future.