But can they,

such a case, if they can. while a single man of the crew stays on board? Now, on the Gambetta almost the whole crew was about to perish. So what do these officers who have arrived do? A simple and sublime thing that I have not seen mentioned anywhere: They light the steps of the men who are pressing together, groping at the foot of the ladders-they "make light for them!" "To make light" is the Provençal expression for "to illuminate," and here it takes on a grandeur worthy of those

M. Maurice Barres, of the Académie Française, writes in Les Annales for Sept. 26 of his visit to the headquarters of General French:

WO days after I had admired that

TWO

mysterious infantry, (the Gurkas,) those enigmatical visages from deepest Asia, I was permitted to see a parade of cavalry, the Sikhs of the Punjab, tall and strong, noble figures mounted on fine horses. All-beasts and men -bursting with health. Unlike the Gurkas, the Sikhs never cut their beard or their hair. Their beard is curiously rolled on their cheeks, their hair is bound back and hidden under high turbans. Here are no longer the pouchy eyes that had surprised me, and that seem planted awry in the face, but fine regular features, long ovals, a light golden color.

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may be, in fact, a simple manoeuvre to seek for a better field of operation, one that is known and is counted on. But it may also be a mere euphemism and an "honorable name to cover a defeat. The things that follow can alone teach us what it really is. Now, some things have followed the retreat of the Russians and have shown us that it really was a strategic manoeuvre. They are at this moment taking the lead in their affairs everywhere. In the north, they are resisting with serious advantage while the Germans are getting deep into the marshes, where their movements, forward or backward, are of equal difficulty. In Galicia, they are having a success to report each day, and are taking an imposing number of prisoners.

The German army in Russia is melting as if in a crucible. The Russians offer the Germans the hospitality of the tomb.

The Russians owe this good fortune to their tenacity, and their impassibality, to their phlegm. They are astonished at nothing. They lacked munitions; they fought without munitions or with an enormous inferiority of munitions. They had to evacuate important cities; they evacuated them, slowly, dispassionately, after having stripped them so bare that they could not be of any use to the enemy. They had to appear to be beaten, which is hard on one's pride; they resigned themselves to that, and even made of it an element of victory by inspiring in the enemy a feeling of confidence that has pushed him on to precipitous and rash movements. They have shown themselves adroit strategists and men of great coolness and of imperturbable decision. The new Russia, the Russia of glorious destinies, entitled to a great place, a place of honor in the European union, will date from 1915.

IT

T is with Dante's legend for the gates of Hell that Alfred Capus apostrophizes the Kaiser on the occasion of the Czar's assuming supreme command of his armies. The article is a recent editorial in the Figaro. M. Capus, member of the Académie Française and author of many successful novels and plays, is editor in chief of the Figaro.

Public opinion everywhere has immediately understood the design of the Czar in placing himself at the head of his armies. It is the Lasciate ogni speranza for German peace, which our enemies hoped to find before the Winter at the gateway to the plains of Russia. They know that that peace, so solemnly promised by the Kaiser, can now be gained by them only through crushing all Europe, through destroying the British fleet, forcing our lines, and taking London, Moscow, Rome, and Paris-which would be a disproportioned task for the talents of Marshal von Hindenburg and of von Tirpitz.

So there is no means for an arrangement, (of a separate peace with Russia.) Germany is faced with that implacable "all or nothing," which, since the beginning of the war has been accepted by the Allies. Germany will have everything, or the world which she was tending to render uninhabitable will be rid forever of her hegemony and her threats.

Neither the uncertainty of military operations in these last months nor the retreat of the Russian army, nor the cries of triumph from the press across the Rhine has succeeded in making us look on the situation differently. Bad days have not inclined us to the slightest concession: hope has remained unanimous and integral.

In Germany, and we cannot too much insist on this, the reverse is the case. Their views are changing ceaselessly and their ambitions are modified every day, according to events.

The fact is that between the Kaiser and his people there is a tragic misunderstanding-the one having sworn to give to the other, in exchange for three million of her sons, a victory which no longer belongs to him.

et

In the Revue des Deux Mondes for Oct. 1st, M. Jean Bourdeauf of the Académie des Sciences Morals el Politiques writes on the effect of the war on the Internationalists. He examines their movement in the fifty years which have passed since it was founded, notes its great development, but is compelled to conclude from actual events that " The facts deny the truth of the idea, their conduct refutes their dogma."

D

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URING July, 1914, Vorwaerts, the official journal of the German Socialists, published numerous articles militarism. against The Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia was condemned more severely by the German and Austrian Socialists than by those of other countries.

The directing committee of the Social Democracy, in a manifesto, blamed the assassination of Serajevo in an energetic manner, but protested not less forcefully against the provocation of Serbia by Austria-Hungary.

The German Government was rendered responsible, not for the ultimatum, but for the decision that Austria would take, for Germany could influence her and assure peace. At the end of the manifesto the directing committee took a demagogue's tone, saying- "Not a drop of German blood must flow in this cause; the proletariat must not serve as cannonmeat for the classes that exploit it."

In France, M. Bourdeau explains, the Confédération Générale du Travail issued a manifesto recalling the decisions of the Internationalist Congress to declare a general strike in case of war.

No strike movement could be attempted by the French if isolated from their German and Austrian comrades; a previous agreement with them was necessary. An interview took place in Brussels between Jouhaut, Secretary of the C. G. T., Legion, member of the

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Reichstag and Secretary of the centralized Gewerkschaften, and Mertens, Secretary of the Belgian Syndicates. To Jouhaut's urgent question: What do you count on doing to obstruct the war that is preparing-are you resolved to attempt a movement?" Legion insisted on giving no reply. Jouhaut concluded from that that there was nothing to expect from the Germans.

M. Bourdeau describes the vote at the Reichstag on the credits for the war: "Long and passionate controversies agitated the Socialist group of the Parliament." It decided finally that the credits be voted unanimously.

The violation of Belgian territory, with indemnity, had been announced by Bethmann-Hollweg before the close of the sitting. The Socialists could change nothing in their declaration; but not one of them protested.

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How vain, hypocritical, and empty was the pretention of the Social-Democrats to justify their vote by ignorance of conditions in which the war was begun. They belied their whole past. Julian Borchardt, author of a pamphlet, "Before and after the Fourth of August," writes that on that date the Socialists abdicated; that if they were right on that day, everything that they had taught for forty years was nothing but falseness and dupery. * * * That solemn acquiescence with imperialism caused immense disappointment in foreign countries. Bebel and Liebknecht had declared against the war in former days, when France attacked Germany, and this time it is Germany who attacks, who tramples treaties beneath her feet, and the Social-Democrats approve and follow. They cut the bond of that internationalist movement that they have been directing and governing for a quarter of a century, they transgress the laws they have decreed.

Under this title Signor Romolo Murri publishes in the Nuova Antologia a study of the deeper phases of the human mind revealed by the war. Signor Murri, who began his career as a priest, has gained a high place in the estimation of Italians for his writings and his work as a Deputy.

A

YEAR of war has not yet liberated us from the stupor into which it threw us itself at its outbreak. The spiritual unpreparedness among the nations of the Entente was even graver and more profound than the military unpreparedness-and this was enormous. And the first had naturally far more complex causes, and vaster ones, than the second, and was the cause of it.

All the currents of culture in recent times had contributed to draw men to the surfaces of social facts; the laws for these were searched for outside of human consciousness, outside of man, in so far as he is spiritual reality, will. *

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And in the always broader vision of inferences and relations and accords there appeared also manifold contrasts; but when the latter had also been reduced to concrete and external things they lost their intimately tragic quality, and ended by being an argument for ever more ingenious researches for combinations and accords.

We can now perceive, as in a bright light, that this mode of seeing ourselves and history from without, becoming-as it was always more familiar to our thought, detaching us from the true and intimate reasons and fountains of human action was not adapted to make us understand the satanic ambush that was concealing the war-and to prepare us for the struggle. * * *

And today it is evident that the whole of mankind (not simply certain nations) is in action; that is to say that we are struggling, not for immediate interests, but for all that we are, as individuals, as peoples-and for all that we love-for traditions, the future, for honor, for dignity, for liberty; all the things whose value is before all else ethical touch men to the extent that they represent conscience and will-spirit, in a word. * * *

And now [says Signor Murri at the end of his article] even in the sorrow of this infinite spectacle of massacre and destruction an intimate and joyous hope rises within us, the hope that in the war, and by virtue of it, the human conscience may regain its equilibrium in public and international life, and the individual and the State, recomposed in the superior harmony of the nation, may become quicker and more efficient instruments in the history of the conscious creation of pacific social institutions.