Meanwhile, the martyred child life of Europe cries to heaven against this theory. The sufferings of the Central Empires in this respect have been heaviest. “Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin.” Germany, in pulling down the pillars of Europe, has involved all this for her own people. But why, one asks, should the heaviest toll be paid by those who have least measure of responsibility? Why should the Junkers and horrid old gentlemen covered with decorations, who made the war, be living comfortably on their estates while the children of the working-classes have perished? It is the natural instinct of every decent person to shield a child from suffering, and as I watch the boys and girls playing on the banks of the Rhine, the whole question of the war takes on an aspect from which every vestige of glamour and chivalry and romance has vanished. These merry children at their games: it is on them that the hand of Britain’s sea-power, however unwittingly, has rested in its heaviest form. The British people would repudiate with anger any idea of making war on children. But war has a horrible vitality of its own and goes its own way, moulding men more than it is moulded by them. These things follow inexorably from the very character of modern warfare, which is no more a struggle between armies, but between nations. Noncombatants have ceased to exist, and those who make wars must reckon on babies as cannon fodder. So long as there are wars, the weapon of the blockade is inevitable. We were fighting for our lives and had no choice but to use it. The German submarine campaign was directed to the starvation of England, and bitterly though they complain of our blockade, their own minds were set on identical ends so far as we were concerned. But blockade means infant mortality on an appalling scale, and if statesmen and militarists are indifferent to such things, it is to be hoped the democracies of the world will view matters differently. So far as Germany is concerned it is through her children she is hit.