A singular illustration of the efficiency of the British government was seen in the creation, in February, 1918, of a department of Propaganda. This department was placed in charge of Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian financier who had had a meteoric career in British politics, and who had played a leading part in the formation of the Lloyd George Cabinet; and the oversight of propaganda in enemy countries was given to Lord Northcliffe, whose great abilities had previously been employed in a special mission to the United States. The new department was the result of a realization that the issue of the war was likely to be decided as much on the home-front as on the battlefield, and that the struggle had now entered the realm of psychology.

The work of the department was twofold. On the one hand, it devoted itself to strengthening the "will-tovictory" of the British people and their allies, through the newspapers, through books and pamphlets, and even through the cinema; and on the other hand, it strove to break down the will of the Germans and their allies by getting the facts about the war effort of the Allies and the United States into the Central Empires, if only through literature scattered over enemy countries by British airmen. That the propaganda carried out was successful in weakening the German resistance was proved, during the war, by captured German army orders, and has been amply corroborated, since the armistice, by the narratives which the German generals and admirals have poured from the press.

Ministers of the British overseas Dominions. This new body, which was well described as a "Cabinet of Governments," and which possessed not merely advisory but executive powers, provided what had hitherto been lacking, a unified control for the war effort of the British Empire. Later, in November, 1917, largely as a result of the insistence of Mr. Lloyd George, a Supreme War Council was set up at Paris, which gave the same sort of unity to the war effort of all the Allies that the Imperial War Cabinet had given to the war effort of the British Empire; and the culmination of the process was reached in March, 1918, when Marshal Foch was made Generalissimo of the Allied armies on the Western Front.

RITICISM OF THE GOVERNMENT SOME-
TIMES HEARD.

CR

The Lloyd George government, of course, did not escape criticism. At times, indeed, criticism of both the policy and conduct of the administration was hardly less vigorous than it had been under the Asquithian régime. But it was criticism of a different kind. Little complaint was heard of vacillation or dilatoriness in government action; most of the critics of the government were people who believed, on various grounds, that the policy of the government was too thoroughgoing. From the beginning a part of the Labor party and the extreme Radical wing of the Liberal party had been opposed to the war; and under the Lloyd George régime this pacifist element grew bolder and more active. They attacked nearly every measure whereby the government sought to strengthen the war effort of Great Britain; and they continually advocated "a peace by negotiation" rather than a decision on the battlefield. As the war dragged on, a certain war-weariness, which began to appear among some people, gave to this party an accession of strength; and they received support from an unexpected quarter when, in November, 1917, no less a person than Lord Lansdowne wrote a letter to The Times urging that peace negotiations with the Germans should

be opened. But among the rank and file of the British people these pacifists were regarded as disloyal, and their attacks probably strengthened the government rather than weakened it.

ISAGREEMENT IN ARMY AND NAVAL

DCIRCLES.

An attack from a different angle was that conducted by certain groups connected with the War Office and the Admiralty. In this campaign a number of questions were at issue. The "Westerners"-those who believed that the war was to be decided on the Western Front-objected to the various "side-shows" which the government was conducting at Saloniki, in Palestine, and in Mesopotamia; and an element in British military circles condemned what they regarded as the undue centralization of authority in the hands of an Allied Generalissimo. The old cry was heard that the politicians were bedeviling the conduct of the war. Unfortunately, in the controversies that arose, personalities seemed to play a considerable part. The friends of Lord Jellicoe were angry at his dismissal from the post of First Sea Lord; the friends of General Sir W. R. Robertson were angry at his having been forced out of the position of Chief of the General Staff over the question of the unity of the Allied command; and when, on May 6, 1918, General Sir Frederick Maurice, the Director of Military Operations at the War Office, wrote a letter to The Times accusing Mr. Lloyd George of having misled the House of Commons with false information, the personal feeling between the professional soldiers and the politicians became all too apparent. The attack resulted only in a parliamentary victory for Mr. Lloyd George; General Maurice was disciplined by the Army Council; and as soon as the tide turned in France in the summer of 1918, and the advantages of the unity of command became apparent, the attack died down.

The victory of the Allies in the autumn of 1918-the collapse of Bulgaria, the break-up of Austria-Hungary, the defeat of Germany-was almost a personal triumph for Mr. Lloyd George. It proved the soundness of his views with regard to the prosecution of the war; and it justified the shining optimism with which he inspired the people of Great Britain even in the darkest days of the struggle. His presence at the head of affairs in Great Britain during the critical years of 1917 and 1918 was worth many army corps to the Allies; and it was not surprising that, as the war closed, he became a popular idol among the majority of his countrymen. The general elections held at the end of 1918 resulted in the tribute of an overwhelming victory for the Lloyd George government a tribute rendered more remarkable since a new Act (the Representation of the People Act, 1918) had enormously widened the electorate, inaugurating not only manhood suffrage, but female suffrage as well.

But great as was the contribution made by Mr. Lloyd George and his colleagues in the government to the final victory of the Allied arms, the chief credit for the war effort of Great Britain rests with the average British citizen. Encompassed about with dangers of which he had never dreamt, faced with famine, subject to restrictions against which at other times his liberty-loving soul would have revolted, enduring the daily torture of the casualty lists, and often mourning the fact that the light of his life had gone out, the average Britisher nevertheless played his part with stolid and unfaltering constancy-not doubting that the clouds would break. Never, not even in the Napoleonic Wars, did the prosaic heroism of the British people shine more brightly or clearly than in the Great War of 1914-1918.

W. S. WALLACE.

soldier?

M.POILU, the French
M. Which way shall one turn to find

the type? Take the bearded old man you see in the roadway there, sitting with his hammer beside a heap of stones. He is bent and rheumatic; his eyes are failing, and, despite the spectacles he wears behind his stonebreaker's goggles, he can hardly see the stones he is so busily breaking. His lunch is by his side-a loaf, an apple and half a bottle of mixed wine and water. He will work there from sunrise till sundown, and then, with bent back and slow step, he will hobble to some neighboring cottable to sup and sleep. A quaint, pathetic old figure! But he is a French soldier, none the less. His weather-worn blue coat was served out to him by a regimental commissariat goodness knows how many years ago. His corduroy trousers are also uniform; his cap is the uniform peak cap of the French Army.

cause his sight is a little better or because he can walk along the roads at a whole mile an hour instead of only at half a mile. Both are equally soldiers of France, and they work for soldier's pay-which is the luxurious sum of three or five sous (three cents to five cents) a day.

HE FRENCH ARMY AND THE FRENCH

TNATION SYNONYMOUS.

They may never go near the front. They may be now, as you watch them, a good fifty miles away from the nearest trench. But over the roads they make or mend pass the troops and the stores, the horses and the guns, that go to the winning of France's battles. And just as those guns are necessary so also are the stones for the roads that take the guns, and the stonebreakers that break the stones for the roads that take the guns. It is like the "House that Jack Built" over again; and in France, when the house is to be built is a war to be won, every man necessary for building that house is caught up in that immense and all-embracing labor net, the Army of the French Republic. He may make you a boot or pull you out a tooth, bake you a loaf or bury you, but he becomes a soldier. The French Army just now is the French nation.

greater contrasts in individual types than are to be found in even our own Army. To reduce the French fighting soldiers to a type, therefore, to take, that is, all the types of French soldier, and in the manner of those horrid little sums we used to do at school, to take their G. C. M. or H. C. F. and say this is the French fighting soldier type would be rather speculative speculative mathematics. I don't think one could do it. What I will try to do instead is to set down certain qualities which I think belong especially to the French soldier, at least to a greater degree than to any others.

had invited me), and, as he stood with a lantern peering into my face, said, "Swear to me that you are not a Boche." Even though I was not a Boche the look in that man's eyes quite scared me then and still remains in my memory as the most fearful examination I have ever undergone. Had he not been satisfied and had my papers not been in order as well as my general appearance, I could have hoped for no mercy, even no respite from a man who could look like that.

I saw that look several times again in French soldiers. Once when walking along a country road near Ypres I