Verdun still holds out: that is the best news of the month. The French with inexorable logic continue to exact the highest price for the smallest gain of ground. If the Germans are ready to give 100,000 men for a hill or part of a hill they may have it. If they will give a million men they may perhaps have Verdun itself. But so far their Pyrrhic victories have stopped short of this limit, and Verdun, like Ypres, battered, ruined and evacuated by civilians, remains a symbol of Allied tenacity and the will to resist.
The months in war-time sometimes belie their traditions, but it is fitting that in May we should have enlisted a new Ally--the Sun. The Daylight Saving Bill became Law on May 17. Here is a true economy, and our only regret is that Mr. Willett, the chief promoter of a scheme complacently discussed during his lifetime as ingenious but impracticable, should not have lived to witness its swift and unmurmuring acceptance under stress of war.
The official communiquÉs from the Irish Front in the earlier stages of the Dublin rebellion did not long maintain their roseate complexion. Even before the end of April a Secret Session--the second in a week--was held to discuss the Irish situation. By a strange coincidence this Secret Session immediately followed the grant by the Commons of a Return relating to Irish Lunacy accounts. From the meagre official summary we gather that the absence of reporters has at least the negative advantage of shortening speeches. In a very few days, however, the Prime Minister discarded reticence, admitting the gravity of the situation, the prevalence of street fighting, the spread of the insurrection in the West, the appointment of Sir John Maxwell to the supreme command, and the placing of the Irish Government under his orders. The inevitable sequel--the execution of the responsible insurrectionist leaders--has led to vehement protests from Messrs. Dillon and O'Brien against militarist brutality. The House of Commons is a strange place. When Mr. Birrell rose on May 3 to give an account of his nine years' stewardship, the Unionists, and not the Unionists alone, were thinking of a lamp-post in Whitehall. When he had concluded his pathetic apologia and confessed his failure to estimate accurately the strength of Sinn Fein, members were almost ready to fall on his neck, but they no longer wanted his head.
HELD!
HELD!
WANTED--A ST. PATRICK
WANTED--A ST. PATRICK
ST. AUGUSTINE BIRRELL: "I'm afraid I'm not so smart as my brother-saint at dealing with this kind of thing. I'm apt to take reptiles too lightly."
Even Sir Edward Carson admitted that Mr. Birrell had been well intentioned and had done his best. By the middle of the month Mr. Asquith had gone to Ireland, in the hope of discovering some arrangement for the future which would commend itself to all parties. By the 25th he was back in his place after nine days in Dublin. But he had no panacea of his own to prescribe; no cut-and-dried plan for the regeneration of Ireland. All he could say was that Mr. Lloyd George had been deputed by the Cabinet to confer with the various Irish leaders, and the choice is generally approved. If anyone knows how to handle high explosives without causing a premature concussion it should be the Minister of Munitions.
Ireland has dominated the political scene at home, for it is impossible not to connect our new commitments across St. George's Channel with the introduction and passing of the new Military Service Bill establishing compulsion for all men, married or single--always excepting Ireland. The question of man-power is paramount. Mr. Asquith is at last convinced that "Wait and See" must yield to "Do it Now": that the nation won't have the sword of Damocles hanging over its head any longer, but will have compulsion in its hand at once. On the progress of the War Mr. Asquith has said little in Open Session, but any omission on his part has been made good by Mr. Churchill, now home on unlimited leave, who has spoken at great length on the proper use of armies.
Mr. Arthur Ponsonby and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, who raised the question of Peace on Empire Day, urging the Government to open negotiations with Germany, have elicited from the Foreign Secretary the deliberate statement that the only terms of peace which the German Government had ever put forward were the terms of victory for Germany, and that we could not reason with the German people so long as they were fed with lies.Mr. Henry James, who so nobly repaid the hospitality England was proud to show him by adopting her nationality in her hour of greatest need, said shortly before his death that nothing grieved him more than the constant loss of England's "best blood, seed and breed." The mothers of England "give their sons," but they know that the choice did not rest with them:
We did not give you--all unasked you went,
Sons of a greater motherhood than ours;
To our proud hearts your young brief lives were lent,
Then swept beyond us by resistless powers.
Only we hear, when we have lost our all,
That far clear call.
But how can the grief be measured of those
Whose best,
Eager to serve a higher quest
And in the Great Cause know the joy of battle,
Gallant and young, by traitor hands,
Leagued with a foe from alien lands,
Struck down in cold blood, fell like butchered cattle?
Though Ireland is not for the moment a source of humour she contrives to be the cause of it in others. A daily paper tells us that Sir Robert Chalmers is to be "Permanent Under-Secretary of Ireland pro tem." Another daily paper, the Daily Mail, to be precise, has discovered a new test of valour: "Mr. Hellish, a regular reader of the Daily Mail for years, was awarded the V.C. last month for conspicuous bravery."
