We saw the results of the German Official Department of Demobilization, which had its headquarters in Alsace-Lorraine at Metz, under a General, by whose direct orders all the factories in the occupied regions were dismantled and sent back piecemeal to Germany, the shells of the plant then being dynamited under pretence of military necessity. We saw a country stripped of its resources, gutted, sacked, rendered sterile. What is the Kultur, the philosophy which not only renders such conduct thinkable, but puts it into the most thorough execution? Are we mad to think that such people can be admitted into a League of Nations until after hundreds of years of repentance and expiation in sackcloth and ashes? They should be made the slaves of Europe, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the road-sweepers and offal-burners, deprived of a voice in their own government, without standing in the eyes of all peoples. 2 French General Headquarters, to which I was then sent as liaison officer, was established in a little old-world town, not far from Paris, whose walls had been battered by the English centuries ago. Curious to think that after hundreds of years of racial antagonism we should at last have our eyes opened to the fact that our one-time enemies have the same qualities of courage and endurance, a far truer patriotism and a code of honour which nothing can break. No longer do we think of them as flippant and decadent. We know them for a nation of big-hearted men, loyal to the death, of lion-like courage, with the capacity for hanging on, which in our pride we ascribed only to the British bull dog. We have seen Verdun. We have stood side by side with them in mud and blood, in fat days and lean, and know it to be true. In this little town, where the bells chimed the swift hours, and market day drew a concourse of peasant women, we sat breathless at the ’phone, hourly marking the map that liberated each time a little more of France. Days of wild hope that the end was at hand, the end which such a short time back had seemed so infinitely remote, days when the future began to be a possibility, that future which for four years one had not dared to dream about. Will the rose colours ever come back? Or will the memory of those million dead go down with one to the grave? The Armistice was signed. The guns had stopped. For a breathless moment the world stood still. The price was paid. The youth of England and France lay upturned to the sky. Three thousand miles across the ocean American mothers wept their unburied sons. Did Germany shed tears of sorrow or rage? The world travail was over, and even at that sacred moment when humanity should have been purged of all pettiness and meanness, should have bowed down in humility and thankfulness, forces were astir to try and raise up jealousy, hatred and enmity between England, France and America.