Life — November 29, 1917 — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

NOVEMBER 29, 1917 “While there is Life there's Hope"’ VOL. 70 No. 1831 Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY J. A. Mrrenett, Pres’t, A. Mitter, Sec’y and Treas. 17 West Thirty-first Street, New York English Offices, Rolls House, Breams Bldgs., London, E. C, GENTLE- MAN who said on Satur- day, the 17th of f) November, that hd it was the dark- est day of the war, may have felt better on Sunday morning, or may since then have experienced a day still darker, but it was one of the days on which an observant person with a dis- position to take the war despondently might find facts and prospects a-plenty to back his mood. Anybody who thinks. things are all going to pot, and fur- nishes reasons for thinking so, is hard to meet, because of the limitation and uncertainty of war information. Any- one who has, or thinks he has, private advices that are different from what one reads in the paper is particularly hard to meet, except by offers of counter-information of the same pri- vate sort. We get the war news, par- ticularly the political end of it, in great moderation. The newspapers seem to tell us what is happening at the various fronts, and who is on top, for the moment, in Petrograd or Mos- cow, and what Lloyd George says, and what Northcliffe says, but we know the censor is not on the job for nothing, and sometimes, when pessimists assail us, we wonder for the moment how much we are being told, and whether there is anyone who “really knows” what is going on. What makes this time of writing seem to some persons the darkest pe- riod so far of the war is, of course, the Russian collapse and the Italian disaster. With these serious disfigure- ments for a basis, it is possible to con- clude that the many-headed Allies are not a match at war-planning for the more unified Teutons, and that the Germans have more cards up their sleeve than the Allies can reckon with, With this start, Pessimism, when it gets into its stride, sees a bug-a-boo in Japan, and a dozen more in Wasning- ton, London and Paris, and even when it does not throw up its hands, predicts a big shake-down and reorganization of everybody, before the beating of the Germans can prosper as it should. ND something like that may come very promptly out of the labors of the Allied War Council in Paris. Lloyd George says it must come or he will ask to be relieved of his responsi- bilities. Northcliffe, fresh from his long visit here, tells the British pre- mier that if the Allies don’t do better, “the United States will rightly take into its own hands the entire manage- ment of a great part of the war.” The Americans, he intima won't stand it to see their good money and the lives of their good young men go for nothing. Probably not, though the Americans have not said they wouldn't, and Lord Northcliffe is not their spokesman. “T know how to get peace,” said our spokesman the other day at Buffalo, but that was not a demand to manage the war, but merely the expression of a resolve to fight it through. And in the cabled message which, at this writing, the President is reported to have sent to Colonel House, he asks, not for the management of the war, but for “unity of plan and control between all the Allies and the United States.” And that, by sending a delegation of experts to Europe, and a rep- resentative to the War Council in Paris, President Wilson has taken the best practical step to secure. How to obtain for the Allies such authoritative direction as all the Teutonic forces ‘get from Hindenburg and the German General Staff is a difficult problem, but the war council in Paris will work at it, and if it must be solved to win the war, it will be solved. ND in spite of Italy, and in spite of Russia, matters are not going so ill. Neither in Italy nor in Russia can the Germans win the war. They can do vast damage in Italy, but the end of the story there has not come out yet. They may capture and per- haps destroy Venice, thereby horribly abrading the feelings of civilized peo- - ple, but even if they do, it will not get them ahead much. They and their friends the Turks are being hard pressed in Jerusalem, and they may destroy that, rather than let the Brit- ish capture it. But if they do, it will only be another sign that the war-lords despair of conquering the world, and, facing destruction themselves, prefer to destroy whatever they cannot pos- sess. Russia is all up in the air. The gen- tlemen who try to keep us informed of what is happening there have given up Kerensky for the moment, and are looking for a new man. A new man may turn up, or Kerensky may come back, but Russia, though she is a great uncertainty and a gamble, is not dead yet, nor even out of the war. The British are doing well in West- ern Asia, and that is important for its