The Spectator

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 6 March 1915: The great German campaign against our shipping, under which we were to be cut off from all human aid and every merchant ship that dared to approach our ports torpedoed and sunk, has ended in what can only be called an amazing fiasco. In the first three days a little damage was done, but during the past week there have been no examples of the destruction of vessels by German submarines or even by mines. That no such losses are reported is not due, we are sure, to any economy of truth or holding back of news on the part of the authorities. It is the plain fact that the Germans have sunk none of our ships. To account for this failure is not an easy matter.

From ‘Lord Kitchener’, The Spectator, 6 March 1915: We are grateful to Lord Kitchener because at the very beginning of the war he formed what Mr. Bonar Law calls "a gigantic conception," not only of the military needs of the nation, but of our ability to meet those needs. Other men and lesser men, even though they might have bad enough imagination to see what might and ought to be done, would in the emergency have been daunted by the task before them.

From ‘The “Willing” Badge’, The Spectator, 6 March 1915: A final ground for giving badges to those who have offered themselves and been rejected must be mentioned. Under any scheme for the presentation of badges a register should be kept giving in general terms the ground on which each man was rejected—namely, medical reasons, such as heart weakness, and so on; physical defects, as, for example, some small deformity or some defect of vision; or, again, some such ground as inability to reach the standard of height or the standard of chest measurement. In the last two cases it may well be that the Government will come to see that after all small men can fight and march quite as well as big men, and endure hardship even better.