There is nothing immoral in a fight between an elephant and a tiger, or even in a leopard’s pursuit of goats and other small deer—the neutral states and the helpless villagers of the jungle. The lions roaring after their prey do seek their meat from God. Attila and the Huns, whose methods the Kaiser ordered his soldiers to imitate in the war in China—even then the poison was working in his mind—were not, like the Emperor William and the Germans, an enlightened and semi-civilized state. The cruel ferocity of the modern Huns is infinitely more cruel and criminal than theirs was, because they call themselves Christians and have undoubtedly got a kind of Kultur. Every vile thing that they have done they have done deliberately and with their eyes open, and for that reason sooner or later their punishment is sure. For nations, like men and women, cannot for ever continue to sin with impunity against the light. Still, at the beginning, because they were ready and also unscrupulous and we were neither, they scored a great advantage over us, and it was only because we and the French had the enormous moral stimulus that we were fighting for the right that we were able to throw them back from the Marne and the Grand Couronné. For the inequality of men and material—but especially material—was still great, and I take it that if the positions had been reversed, if the Allies had been the aggressors and Germany the object of our iniquitous invasion, we could not have made nearly as good a showing as they did. The positions being, however, as they were, we were the better men, and, with the single exception that they were allowed to push forward the St. Mihiel salient through the gap between the armies in the Woevre, everywhere in the west we drove them many miles back from the advanced positions which they had reached at the end of their first irresistible rush.