THE GERMAN WAR

Some people, whose sense of orderliness is all enveloping, have spent a great deal of time, much more worry, and a modicum of intelligence on the problem of what to call the present war. Quite irrespective of the fact that war is fought as a vital mode of justice to preserve the living age, rather than as a spectacle to be duly nominated and recorded in history, the more important fact remains that wars are not named by those who fight them.

This war may not be named by a hyphenated title, as the Franco-Prussian, the Russo-Japanese, the Austro-Servian, because the nationalities which take part in it are too large, too many, and too intricate. It may not be named after one man, as the Napoleonic wars; for we know now that this is not the war of one man, but rather the war of a nation. It may not be named according to its duration, as the Seven Years, the Thirty Years, the Hundred Years Wars, because we have no accurate fore-shadowing of the time which will elapse before our victory will be achieved.

This we may know, that future generations, looking back on the second decade of the twentieth century, will have no difficulty in denoting by word this war, the agonizing, the terrible, and the sublime.