There is not between the men in one trench and those in another, each seeking the speediest opportunity to kill the other, any personal quarrel. On occasion they even fraternize, only to resume the work of mutual extermination. They would not have quarreled, if the Berchtolds, the von Bethmann-Hollwegs, and the von Jagows had had sufficient loyalty to civilization to submit any possible grievance, which either had, to the judgment of Europe. A spectacle more ghastly than this "far-flung battle line" has never been witnessed since the world began, for these soldiers in gray or khaki are not savages but are beings of an advanced civilization. Their fighting can have in method none of the old-time chivalry, such as was witnessed at Fontenoy when the French commander courteously invited his English rival to fire first. The present is a chemical, mechanical war, than which no circle in Dante's _Inferno_ is more horribly repellent. When was better justified the terrible but beautiful imagery in Milton's poem of _The Nativity_, when he says of Nature: "Only with speeches fair She woos the gentle air To hide her guilty front with innocent snow, And on her naked shame Pollute with sinful blame The saintly veil of maiden white to throw; _Confounded that her Maker's eyes Should look so near upon her foul deformities._" The snow cannot hide the horrors of the present conflict. Even night, in other wars more merciful, no longer throws its sable mantle of mercy over the dying and the dead. By the use of powerful searchlights the work of destruction continues. As though the surface of the earth were no longer sufficient for this malignant exercise of the genius of man, the heavens above and the waters under the earth have become at length the battlefields of the nations. Even from the infinite azure falls ".... a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies, grappling in the central blue." Can all history afford a parallel in malignity to the submarine, which, having sunk one vessel with all its human lives, calmly awaits, with its periscope projecting above the water like the malignant eye of a devil fish, the arrival of rescuing ships to sink them also? Was the gracious refrain of "Peace on earth, good will among men," merely a mockery of man's hope, making of his civilization a mere mirage? Will "Cæsar's spirit ranging for revenge With Ate from his side come hot from Hell"-- forever crucify afresh and put to an open shame the gentle Galilean? The angelic song of Bethlehem was neither the statement of a fact nor even a prophecy. In its true translation it was the statement of a profound moral truth, upon which in the last analysis the pacification of humanity must depend. The great promise was "Peace on earth _to men of good will_."