Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/154

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name, M. Max. They no longer allow themselves to be bullied.

President Wilson once wrote that in order to be moral you must cultivate the feeling that somebody is always looking on. In Brussels the American Minister, Mr. Brand Whitlock, is looking on. As lawyer, politician, and novelist, he possesses a triple intensity of vision. There will be no Termondes while that eye is levelled.

One is glad to say that, amid the general softness and protestations, King Albert's Government is standing for the salutary, strong law. At Sempst, near Malines, yesterday a German trooper was captured in a farmyard, in which he had just killed two children. He was taken to Waelhem, the facts were briefly established, and, without further ado, he was shot.

I notice that the Right Hon. G. W. E. Russell asks in The Daily News if we have the right to kill. Have we the right to spare? One thing we cannot escape from: the duty to punish. Nobody talks of revenge, or vindictiveness, or cruelty. But since we are fighting for justice, and since the gospel of murder—murder of the body and of the spirit—has been loosed against Europe, we have no choice.

We cannot restore Louvain, but we can give back to Belgium the glory of her own Rubens now exiled in the great gallery of Munich. We cannot call back Rheims out of its smoke of dis-