rather than to recognize that Republican Paris blots the globe with its presence. To-day, Joan of Arc has sadly embarrassed this proud Remnant. She has become a popular saint; the saint of the Victory of France. During the last four years, many an isolated aristocrat has doffed his aristocracy in favor of his nationality, and fought side by side with his butcher and his baker for France; and his mother and his aunts and his elderly young sisters have knitted for Jean as they have knitted for Raoul. Politics have deserved the banner of Joan, for it is hung with new laurels. During the celebration on the Place de l'Opera itself, an altar was raised to her. In the middle of the middle of the Republic! The procession which passed through Paris was watched by quantities of police, but they were far from interfering with it; their methods were in startling contrast to those they employed on May 1. The public was kept off the Place de l'Opera, but that was in order that the procession might have space in which to defile past the 'Altar to the Fatherland,' represented by a medallion of Victory and a medallion of Joan of Arc. The Allies were represented by Canadians and Australians and Americans, and the procession was headed by a group of Alsatians and Lorrainers in costume who had come to Paris for this purpose and every now and then responded to the shouts of 'Vive l'Alsace,' 'Vive la Lorraine,' 'Vive le Saar,' by joyous cries of 'Vive Paris.' It was a good-hearted sort of festival, and a bourgeois festival, which must have shocked the Faubourg very much. But the multitude Well for you Will wither out their joy in homes of If no harsh blundering heel of porter crushes Your splendor in the turmoil of the And a fourth who stands apart And over all the lark Outpiercing even the robin. ... And some on dim high altars shall be Wearily the sentry moves decked. These in the mellow loveliness of light Muttering the one word: 'Peace.' The Anglo-French Review THE LIVING AGE Founded by E. LITTELL in 1844 NO. 3914 JULY 12, 1919 MR. ASQUITH'S REPLY TO LORD FRENCH [EDITORIAL NOTE The publication of the concluding chapters of Lord French's book, 1914, has filled Great Britain with controversy. Issues of the most debatable description have been raised, and a vast area of speculation opened. The London Outlook thus attempts to state 'briefly and without passion' what it believes to be ‘a just view of the chief indictment' brought by Lord French against the War Office and Mr. Asquith's first war government. 'The Field-Marshal, in his concluding chapter, charges the War Office with a "deplorable apathy," if nothing worse, in regard to his frequent representations concerning the shortage of high explosive ammunition. The fighting at Neuye Chapelle, which "might have had great and important results," came to a standstill after three days through want of ammunition. Yet it was unofficially conveyed to him that "the impression existed at the War Office" that there had been waste, and he was officially enjoined to exercise the strictest economy. The War Office, he states, took no notice of his continual reports regarding the Germans' employment of various unfamiliar weapons of trench-warfare, and it became necessary for him to improvise as best he could hand-grenades, trench-mortars, and bombs. Concerning things he could not improvise, heavy guns and their shell, he personally warned Lord Kitchener that delay would be fatal. Yet very shortly after this interview he read the report of Mr. Asquith's Newcastle speech, to the effect that operations had never been seriously hampered by lack of ammunition. "When I read this speech," says Lord French, "after all my public and private appeals. I lost any hope that I had entertained of receiving help from the Government as then constituted." After watching the battle of Festubert, where the disparity between our fire and the enemy's convinced him that absence of artillery support was doubling and trebling British losses in men. Lord French decided on a course of action. He enlisted the interest of the Times, and the sympathy of Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Balfour, and Mr. Bonar Law, and as a result of these representations the first Coalition Government was formed; Mr. Lloyd George was put in charge of a new Ministry of Munitions, and the vital problem was at last "faced with the intelligence and energy that its gravity demanded."'] I SUPPOSE it is probably the case that we should not have met in this way at this particular moment if it had not been that we have just come to the end of a journalistic serial in which the late Commander-in-Chief of our armies in France and Flanders, purporting to describe the first year of the war, has made himself responsible for attacks and aspersions, both upon the living and the dead, which I, at any rate, cannot allow to pass without an immediate and definite protest. I cannot recall any parallel to this ill VOL. 15-NO. 737 advised and unhappy literary adventure. Lord French is not only a FieldMarshal on the active list of the army, but he occupies at the moment, one of the most responsible posts in the Civil Service of the Crown. He is Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, an office which, I agree, has often been more or less of a sinecure, and of which the Duke of Shrewsbury said, as far back as the reign of Queen Anne, that there was not enough business to keep one awake but enough to prevent one falling asleep. That is not the case to-day. |