It is this moral and mental state of Germany rather than any question as to whether or not she shall be kept from starvation that has roused a "furor of resentment" in this country and throughout the Allied nations. "One thing is lacking in the appeals which come by wireless from Germany," says the Cleveland Press. "That is, the lack of any expression of apology or repentance. One thing remains unchanged. That is egoism and selfishness." Another editor suggests: "If the German women who are appealing to American women for special favors would kindly hold.aloof until some evidence is forthcoming that Germany is not still a rapacious wolf, harmless only because overpowered, there might be a better chance of them in the forthcoming drastic rationing of the world." "Their songs and shouts of hatred were as strident as the men's," declares the Syracuse Post-Standard. "We want returned the prisoners they spat upon that they may be brought back from semistarvation, before we feed their persecutors." "Right upon the heels" of revelations that "the worst rumors of the horrors inflicted by the Huns in Belgium and northern France were short of the actual facts," the editor of the Venango (Pennsylvania) Herald comments, comes this plea for assistance. He declares: "We indignantly protest. We are willing to go without to the last possibility of self-denial to feed France, to feed glorious Belgium, to feed England, if she needs it; but, by all that is decent, we are not willing to eat one more mouthful of war-bread or go without one more helping of meat to feed the brutes who ravaged Belgium, the savages who bayoneted little children, the cities that rung their church bells when the women and children of the Lusitania were murdered, and gave holidays to their schools when the schoolchildren of London and Paris were mangled by the air-raiders. "We have no desire to add to the sufferings of the common people of Germany, but we are perfectly willing that they should suffer enough to bring them to a realization of their sins." Nor does the common plea, advanced by The Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore News, the Seattle Daily Times, the Duluth Herald, and numerous other papers, that we must feed Germany to keep her from anarchy, appeal to this editor. He writes: "Berlin need not whine to us that the Germans must be fed or they will become even wickeder than they are. As well may a pickpocket, after stealing our purse, demand of us a dinner, with the threat of becoming a highwayman. If Germany is in danger of anarchy, it means, not that we should feed her and hope that she will be good, but that we should garrison her and make her be good." Into the midst of this heated controversy, which seems not so much a controversy as a united and nation-wide berating of the German attitude of mind, Mr. Herbert C. Hoover, our Food Administrator, projects a rebuke. "There has been a great deal of unnecessary furor in this country about feeding the Germans," remarked Mr. Hoover on the occasion of his recent departure for Europe to look over the international food situation. "We are not calling upon the American people to make any sacrifice with a view to feeding the Germans. Remove the water-tight blockade, and the Germans will take care of themselves." The New York Evening Post hails this as a masterly solution, but several other editors are moved to wonder whether Germany won't "take care of herself" by removing food from America, to the benefit of the German people and the American food profiteers rather than of the American people at large. "Of course the people were wrong again," remarks the New York Evening Telegram. "It was all furor about giving up our daily bread to feed the Hun enemy. . But we doubt whether Mr. Hoover will be able to persuade the Allies to lift the blockade of Germany, to permit the Scandinavian countries to fatten her up (via America) for better or for worse. Looks like more furor coming." Food prices went up two per cent. during the month of October, 200,000 tons of American food, part of it ... supposedly bound for Germany, were on the ocean "under sealed orders" late in November, the heads of the great Armour and Wilson food interests predict continued high prices, and the Government plans a "Food Conservation Week" on December 1, when Mr. Hoover's "message on the program of conservation for the immediate future" will be read in churches, clubs, and other organizations. "It requires the highest possible courage to be magnanimous," remarks the Cleveland Press, "when the exercise of magnanimity means painful, pinching, long-drawn-out sacrifice." "The thing that makes the people sore," remarks the Helena Independent, is that "every time the Food Administration urges conservation" prices go up. "No famine, but famine prices," comments the Boston Christian Science Monitor, in a widely quoted editorial. Nevertheless, "civilization can not afford to deal with barbarism as barbarism deals with civilization unless it wishes to descend to the level of barbarism," declares the Detroit Free Press in substantial agreement with editors north, south, east, and west, and we will feed even Germany. A new note of grimness, significant not only of our attitude toward the present provisioning of Germany, but of the spirit in which American public opinion will turn to the final peace settlement, is the chief visible reaction to the Teuton appeal for American sympathy. "Justice, tempered with mercybut still justice," demands The Christian Science Monitor. Russia deserves consideration before Germany, declare the Watertown (N. Y.) Standard, the Pittsburg Dispatch, the Boston Globe, and the Lancaster (Pa.) News-Journal. The St. Joseph (Mo.) News-Press declares: "We will feed Germany that she may T HOW THE WAR WAS WON EUROPE'S CRADLE OF ANARCHY. HE CONFESSION of the German armistice envoys to Marshal Foch that the German Army was at his. mercy, with its reserves of men and munitions quite exhausted, is recalled by our editors as they hear German assertions that Hindenburg's army was still unbroken at the end and gave up the fight only because of unfortunate nonmilitary circumstances. Due credit is given to President Wilson's successful attempts to drive a wedge between the Kaiser and his people; the pressure of hunger and discontent in Germany is not underestimated. But, the New York World points out, the German warparty "would pay little heed to civilian sufferings and consequent turbulence if it could still make headway in the field; Germans might still be shot and hanged into subjection if the Allies and the Americans could be withstood." Only three days, writes a New York Tribune correspondent from London, separated the German Army "from complete collapse." Foch, we are told, "had prepared another great attack east of the Meuse which would have been the coup de grâce." And "even without this, after three more days of fighting, the German Army would have broken in two." The Allied -Fitzpatrick in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. armies, it is explained, had made such progress in the last days of fighting that Prince Rupprecht's seventy divisions and the German Crown Prince's sixty-odd could not both have escaped through the narrowing gap between the Dutch border and the advancing Allied armies. At the last, according to a correspondent of the New York Globe and Chicago Daily News, Germany was losing, on an average, a division a day in effective strength and had only nine divisions in reserve, none of them fresh. From January 1 to November 5, according to a British announcement, 405,000 prisoners were taken by the Allies in France and Belgium. During the last six weeks of the fighting twenty-five German divisions were decimated, writes Mr. William Cook from Paris to the New York World, and he points out that Germany's material losses have been as heavy as her losses in men: "out of 18,000 guns of all calibers that the German Army had in France July 15, 1918," a third have been captured. The last divisions brought back from Russia are said to have been "thrown into the battle without any artillery, trench-mortar, or machine-gun support." These losses in men and equipment, Mr. Cook hears, were causing a rapid decline in the German morale. Now that the war is won, the experts are beginning to ask who did it. Well, answers the New York Tribune, it was "actually won" by "everybody who put his heart and soul to the job and risked his all." Statesmen, generals, editors, the soldiers who did the fighting, and the citizens who paid the bills have, in each of the associated countries, been generously giving the credit to their allies. The Emporia Gazette calls especial attention to the characteristically brief and modest statement in the British War Office's announcement of the end of the war: "In the fiftysecond month of a war without precedent in history, the French Army, with the aid of the Allies, has achieved the defeat of the enemy." Marshal Foch has told Sir Douglas Haig that the terrific smash of the British Army through the Hindenburg and that we be able to bring forth the fruits of atonement- "There is hunger in Italy, in France, in Britain, wo in Belgium, in Servia, in Poland, shortage in neutral countries, every evil throughout Russia. The Germans have ravaged, ravished, ravened in the fashion of Attila, their exemplar Hun, have stolen goods out of households and machinery out of factories, have destroyed what they could not carry off, have sunk food cargoes innumerable. To the charity of Christendom the Germans have committed millions upon millions of their victims. And now they ask charity for themselves!" "They will get what food is necessary," in the opinion of the Baltimore Sun, "but that is because the rest of the world has more conscience and more humanity than Germany. They should be thankful for that fact, and stop whining." On the side of purely practical considerations, it is noted by several editors that the Allies' control of the food situation gives them a powerful argument, and one likely to appeal to the Teutonic temperament, in case of hitches in the peace negotiations. "President Wilson does not misjudge Germany when he takes it that the closest road to her tractability is through her stomach," announces the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph, which explains with mixed truth and humor: "As long as Germany conducts herself properly. . Mr. Hoover will keep her stomach full. If she backjumps, off go the rations. Worked properly and with firmness, this simply can't lose. Not with a German. "After the first train-load of food in each province is well digested, then the general scheme for Germany should be presented. Full knowledge that non-acceptance would mean failure to eat further would do the job. That's a safe bet if ever there was one." positions between Cambrai and St. Quentin was the blow that killed German hopes of maintaining a successful defensive. Marshal Foch has likewise spoken to General Pershing of the importance of the American drive in the Argonne region and told him that the words "the Meuse" "can be borne with pride upon the standards of the American Army.” But all are agreed that no one army won the war. It was a joint victory, and the military expert of the New York Times thinks it "doubtful if the military history of the world records a more perfect example of cooperation of armies of different countries in the same battle than that of the British, the French, and the American armies." Why, asks the New York Evening Sun, was it that after waging for four long years a defensive and generally a losing struggle, the alliance should have "of a sudden, in less than four months, overthrown completely every one of its adversaries?" It seems to this New York paper that four causes united to bring about this year's climax: "They were the single command of Foch; the American reenforcement; the quitting spirit of the Germans; and, strange to say, the elimination of Russia." In reviewing the history of the war, it points out that the Battle of the Marne proved Germany's inferiority, man for man, to the Western Allies. In 1918, Germany, having disposed of Russia, started in to dispose of its opponents in the West. The effort at first succeeded, but led to the selection of Foch as the common leader of the Allied armies. Germany at the end was no longer in a mood to fight, and “the combined aid of soldierly superiority, American aid, the removal of Russian drain on Ally power, and, above all, the unity of command was irresistible." The admission of the Frankfurter Zeitung's military critic that "the Entente's Generalissimo has shown that he has some understanding in the province of strategy," is a clumsy German recognition of the preeminent military genius which all our writers gladly ascribe to the man whom our leading journalistic student of military history calls one of the half dozen great commanders of armies" and "the successful wielder of the most intricate and colossal military machine of which we have any knowledge." This "simple French soldier, a soldier of a republican nation, has broken, smashed, and wholly demolished not alone the German Army, but the legend of German militarism"; and Mr. Simonds declares in the New York Tribune that "in combining the military genius of Napoleon with the patriotic loyalty of Washington, Foch has written a new and splendid chapter in military history, imperishable henceforth.” Foch's campaign from the time he accepted the German challenge is made up of three great battles, according to Mr. Simonds. In the Second Marne, beginning July 15, he defeated the Germans, wrested the initiative from Ludendorff, and ended the German advance which had lasted from March 21 until July 18. In the Third Somme, beginning on August 8 and closing in the middle of September, he forced the Germans back to the Hindenburg line. In the battle of the Hindenburg line, "which began with the Anglo-Belgian offensive in Flanders and the Franco-American thrust in Lorraine on September 26 and culminated in the gigantic and magnificent British thrust between Cambrai and St. Quentin on October 8, Foch broke the German hold upon France, shattered their whole colossal defense system, and compelled a retreat" which released Laon, Lille, St. Quentin, Cambrai, and Douai, and made certain the liberation of all of France and most of Belgium. This battle was not a series of detached movements, but one perfectly coordinated operation" over a two-hundred-mile front "by nearly a dozen armies, each of them larger than the combined forces of Meade and Lee at Gettysburg." The November story, continues Mr. Simonds, "is one of swift and relentless pursuit": "by the British down the valley of the Sambre through Maubeuge and across the Belgian frontier," "to the Belgian frontier in the center by the French Armies," "to and beyond the Meuse by Pershing's young army." Thus, "By Sunday, November 10, whose official statements, in fact, close the military history of the war, the broken German armies were fleeing eastward from the Dutch frontier to the outskirts of Metz. They were still fighting back as they retired at certain points. They were not yet routed, in the narrow sense of the word, but their power for offensive or even for prolonged defensive operations was at an end." What was the strategy that won? According to Mr. Simonds: "The trouble with all previous Allied offensives had lain in the fact that all resources were concentrated on a narrow front and the concentration betrayed to the enemy the direction in which the attack was coming and enabled him to make a counterconcentration. The fault with the German offensives of this year has lain in the fact that they consumed all their energy and resources in dealing one colossal blow, and when that failed to achieve a decision they had to stop and prepare a new blow, giving the enemy equal opportunity to prepare and to recover from the consequences of the first blow. "The merit of Foch's strategy has lain in his ability to expand the pressure over a very wide front and multiply his partial thrusts so that the enemy was never able to get his breath or to anticipate in which direction the next blow was to fall.” This contemporary historian of the war asks us to look at Foch's successful campaign "from the side of the obstacles": "The four lines of defense; the innumerable switch-lines, the rivers, and the canals; an opposing army which fights well even in defeat, still provided with all the modern weapons of war.... But this great army, these unparalleled defenses, are all mastered in less than four months; the war is won, for even had there been no defeats in the East the long succession of German reverses would have brought Bulgaria and Turkey to the point of surrender and Austria to the verge of revolution. 'What Napoleonic campaign can be hereafter reckoned to surpass that of Foch as a merely military achievement? British, French, American, Italian, Belgian troops, all perfectly controlled by a single hand, all used with exact coordination, all made to contribute to the uttermost of their possibilities, and— in less than four months-supreme victory, the smashing of the German machine, the Germany Army plucked bodily from its vast defenses and flung out of France." In the final scene of this triumphant last act, the young American Army played a rôle which the Dallas News fears has been overlooked in the rejoicing over the ending of the great tragedy. One of the clearest brief narratives of our last great achievement was cabled over by an Associated Press correspondent last week. He first informs us that twenty-one American divisions, more than 750,000 fighters, took part in the action beginning September 26, known both as the battle of the Argonne and the battle of the Meuse. American troops had shown what they could do at St. Mihiel and Pershing was called on to take the difficult Argonne sector. This is a densely wooded, broken country, almost roadless and fortified by the Germans to the last degree of military skill, but behind it ran the Mézières-Sedan-Metz railroad, which the Germans knew to be their "life artery." Pershing's first success was in bringing the First Army so promptly from St. Mihiel to the Argonne line. Nine divisions were thrown in on September 26, the others coming in later, tho some divisions remained on the line for three weeks. The first phase of the action ended October 31, up to which time American gains were small, but it was bitter fighting in woods, brush, and ravines, and it engaged thirty-six German divisions, which were, of course, unable to go to the help of the German armies being hammered by the French and British on the west. The attack delivered on the morning of November 1 "was the deathblow to the German Army." In the next six days "the enemy threw in fourteen fresh divisions, but all in vain." Fighting every foot of the way, our Army averaged an advance of three or four miles a day, and "for every mile the Germans gave way before them, they were yielding another mile to the British and French on the left." On November 2, the German official statement admitted that "the American attack had effected a break-through." On the 6th American soldiers entered Sedan. On the morning of the 11th the armistice was signed. WILHELM TO THE BAR OF JUSTICE T HE INDICTMENT of William Hohenzollern, alias the Kaiser, by civilization, stands whether he abdicated or merely went through a pretense of abdication in order to trick the Allies, and if he returns to Germany, as some predict, the call for his punishment will only grow more imperative. As the promoter and chief plotter of the war that has drenched Europe and the seas of the world with blood; he is regarded with an abhorrence that now seems to have been turned to contempt because of his inglorious escape into Holland. No action of his long theatrical career has shown him up so miserably, for think of the former Emperor of Germany, who plotted mastery of the world, says the Buffalo News, fleeing from his people in the hour of defeat like the meanest criminal. He stands alone, this journal adds, as the lowest outlaw that has come into the world "since the record of a man has been kept." Yet there are editorial observers who can not overlook farcical aspects of the downfall of the AllHighest to the abyss of the All-Lowest. It is recalled that when the Kaiser and his accompanying generals were awaiting their train in Belgium, some Belgian bystanders asked sardonically whether the party was bound for Paris, and the fact of Mr. William Hohenzollern traveling somewhere in Holland strikes the Detroit News as so commonplace and ordinary one might take him for "a salesman for a toy-factory or a buyer for a nursery, seeking tulip-bulbs in the Netherlands," or then again, he might be traveling "for his health." Divers forms of vengeance are suggested by press observers, tho the Toledo Blade believes "few of the things that ought to be done to the Kaiser are humane enough for a civilized world to inflict on him." While not harboring any especial vindictiveness, the Columbus Ohio State Journal feels it would not The various channels for the dissemination of news from Berlin are notoriously free. The propagandists, headed by Herr Solf, find them ample for the circulation of their documents. Yet not one word of the supremely important writing by which the head of the Hohenzollern is declared to have quit his imperial and kingly offices has reached the deeply interested peoples of other nations. "Why is the Wolff Bureau, official vehicle for the transmission of Kultur to the far ends of the earth, silent about this matter of gravest international import?" While the authorities on international law are debating what to do with the ex-Kaiser, writes Mr. Judson C. Welliver, a Washington correspondent of the New York Globe, opinion in the capital is developing in line with the program that for a long time has been favored by many leaders in Europe, and he adds: "Cabled reports say that the former Emperor was trying CAMOUFLAGE-THE LATEST PHASE. -From The Westminster Gazette (London). be any more than even-handed justice to "take the entire Hohenzollern fortune and give it to the Belgians and place the family in such straitened circumstances that father's lacecurtain pants would have to be cut down for Willie." That bristling Lucifer, observes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, he of the shining armor, the super-Hohenzollern of nine centuries of generous breeding, scurries into Holland, with who knows what visions of kingly heads on the block-Charles, Louis XVI., Nicholas, among the more notable, who had obstinate obsessions as to the divine right of kings. With him go variously, this journal reminds us, Ludwig of Bavaria, August of Saxony, and the small German king fry generally, all buried under the ruin of the House of Hohenzollern. Altho the Kaiser was reported to have abdicated before his flight into Holland, the singular fact remains, as noted by the New York Sun and other journals, that no document bearing his sign manual renouncing his authority and power as German Emperor and King of Prussia has been given to the public in his behalf or in behalf of the people of Germany. The Sun proceeds: "This curious omission is the more worthy of remark because the paper in which Charles of Austria remitted his authority has been published throughout the world. "It can not be argued that an embargo on official utterances from Germany has prevented the communication of the text of Wilhelm's abdication to the belligerent and neutral peoples to get to the British lines and surrender himself when he was turned back by German revolutionaries and forced to enter Holland without permission or arrangement. If he had succeeded in giving himself to General Haig the British Government would have faced the question of trying him for murder, of which he has been indicted by British grand juries, I think two or three times, on the ground of responsibility for air-raid killings. "Had he fallen into the custody of the British Army there would have been instant demand for procedure under the indictments; something that would have perplexed both the law officers of the crown and the politicians. With a general election impending, the disposal of the case might have become difficult because of its effect on the public mind. "But with the Kaiser in a neutral country and in one that has no ambition to become his permanent refuge, it is possible for his case to await attention without prejudice. If the new German Government should ask his return to Germany, he doubtless would be sent, especially if there were general agreement among the Powers on such a course." The Richmond Virginian protests that there can be for the "arch-criminal of the ages" no such oblivion as that into which his puppets Constantine, Ferdinand, and the rest have disappeared, and we hear from sundry quarters the serious warning that the Kaiser is still a menace. Whatever may be the immediate form of government in Germany, the Charleston Mail believes there is always the danger of a reaction, and we read: "The Junkers will never be satisfied with any save the old régime. They will plot the return of the Kaiser, and the exKaiser, who, in his day, has been a considerable plotter himself, may reciprocate. "The mere abdication of the Kaiser does not necessarily end all the troubles for which he, and the system under which he ruled, stand sponsors." The Milwaukee Journal suspects that the Kaiser, safe in Holland, may be watching for some juncture of affairs which he can turn to his own advantage, yet this daily thus analyzes the situation: "Within Germany, he would have been helpless. Outside of Germany, he remains a menace. Possibly he may dream in his disordered mind of a Napoleonic 'return from Elba,' whereby he may be able to gather together the remnants of his power and hazard another throw of fortune. If so, he is tragically mistaken. Germany is through with him. These four years he has been on trial. Judgment has been given against him. He is an outlaw from justice.". William Hohenzollern must be tried for his high crimes against |