Quito apart from the fact that that never has been
and never, will be the spirit of our people under disaster, all the old dread of invasion has passed away with the development of trench fighting. We know that if the Germans somehow managed to' land, we should have settled down to trench fighting within the' first forty-eight hours, and that the Germans would be in the hopeless position of fighting with their backs to the sea, not to a vast stretch of German territory ; and, further, that behind' them would be, not the huge pieces of artillery upon which they' relied in Flanders,' but only field-pieces of moderate size. The nation of rushing across giant howitzers or huge naval guns is a dream, unless of course they achieved, not merely a surprise, raid, but also the complete command of the sea. But for decent men's instinctive horror of the sin of hubris we should well know how to characterize such a theory. As for the land attack in the West, we will only say : " Let 'em all some ! " If the attempt to advance is twice as fierce and as heavily hacked as it was in 1914, we shall be quite prepared to meet it. We are not twice but literally ten times as strong and ten times as well prepared. But hese again we must avoid even the 'semblance of boasting. We mean to show the Germans that we knew how to fight much better than we know how to talk.
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