In this book--pieced together amid preoccupations of a very different kind--I have reprinted certain articles on various aspects of the war published in its earlier stages. I have done so not out of vanity, the reader may rest assured, but to repel an imputation. It has been charged against us who have taken our stand with the Allies that we were merely dancing to the tune of Imperialism, that our ideas came to us from London, that we hated Prussia and Prussianism not honestly but simply to order. Our recruiting appeals have been twisted from their plain utterance and obvious meaning. Wordy young men, with no very notable public services to their record, have “stigmatised” (a word in which they delight) us all from Mr. Redmond down as renegades to Irish Nationalism. What we have said and done is to be remembered and is to rise up in judgment against us in the new Ireland that is coming. I do not know whether anybody else is pained or alarmed, but my withers are unwrung. Since I knew Prussian “culture” at close quarters I have loathed it, and written my loathing. The outbreak of war caught me in Belgium, where I was running arms for the National Volunteers, and on the 6th of August, 1914, I wrote from Brussels in the _Daily News_ that it was a war of “civilisation against barbarians.” I assisted for many overwhelming weeks at the agony of the valiant Belgian nation. I have written no word and spoken none that was not the word of an Irish Nationalist, who had been at the trouble of thinking for himself. Ireland was my centre of reference as it was that of Mr. Redmond, Mr. T. P. O’Connor, Mr. Dillon, and Mr. Devlin in their speeches, and of Mr. Hugh A. Law in his clear and noble pamphlet, _Why is Ireland at War?_ It is true that we have all made two assumptions. We assumed that Ireland had a duty not only to herself but to the world; we assumed further that, whatever befell, the path taken by her must be the path of honour and justice. If these postulates are rejected there is no more to be said: the future must in that case undoubtedly belong to the friends of the burners of Louvain. II.--THE BULLYING OF SERBIA The first declaration of war in this world-conflict was that of Austria-Hungary against Serbia on the 27th of July, 1914. The first shots fired in the war were those fired by Austrian monitors on the Danube into Belgrade on the 29th of July, 1914. Austria-Hungary is or was then a great Empire with a population of 50,000,000 and an army of 2,500,000; Serbia is or was then a peasant State with a population of 5,000,000 and an army of 230,000.