Britain’s horizon is clouded, wherever one looks. No forced optimism can blink iron facts. In the East, Russia is paralyzed for months to come, even if not "crushed." Her fortresses, "deemed impregnable," writes Lloyd-George in the preface of his compiled war speeches, "are falling like sand castles before the resistless tide of Teutonic invasion." The "steam-roller" must go into winter quarters. In the West, the great Anglo-French offensive in Artois and the Champagne punctures the German front and advances the Allied lines two or three miles. The German losses are her severest of the war--140,000, so the French say, including vast heaps of dead, whole regiments of maimed and at least 25,000 prisoners and 145 field-guns. But the victory, substantial and promising as it is, has been dearly bought. The Germans claim that the preliminary seventy-two-hour bombardment represented an expenditure of 65,000,000 shells--mostly of American production, so allege the "inspired" war-correspondents at German headquarters, with sneering references to "blood-smeared dollars." The Allies’ casualties are not tabulated. They are only known to be cruelly heavy. Englishmen fear there has been another Neuve Chapelle. Joffre and French have demonstrated that the German front is not quite impenetrable. But the enemy, on his part, has shown that for the Allies to "break through" in the West is a task fraught with peril and toll sickening to contemplate. General Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief at the Dardanelles, has been recalled "to report." Another British general, unnamed, is dismissed for having led an army into a shambles at Suvla Bay. The campaign in Gallipoli is a tacitly acknowledged failure. General Sir Charles Monro is hurried to Turkey to succeed Hamilton and retrieve the fortunes of an expedition which has already cost 100,000 casualties, a trio of battleships, a transport full of troops, and heart-breaking incalculable. There are ugly rumors that the Allies, facing the inevitable, are about to abandon the ill-starred Dardanelles venture, and try their luck elsewhere. Against the German-led Turks twelve miles of precarious "front" with a back to the sea is all Anglo-Colonial-French valor has been able to achieve. But misfortune has dogged the Allies in fields remote from the actual theaters of war. While Germanic-Turko armies have been wrecking their military hopes East, West and Near East, Allied diplomacy has been disastrously foiled in the pivotal Balkans. Bulgaria, deemed friendly, though venal, openly goes over to the enemy. Sir Edward Grey, like his fellow-idol, Kitchener, is under withering fire. He is charged with permitting Berlin to score a victory which might have been London’s if British diplomacy had been characterized by less tentativeness of policy and greater impetuosity of deed. It seems the old story--"too late." "Have we a Foreign Office?" bitterly asks Fleet Street. But the cup of