The net result of Germany's policy of "taking off the
bridle" at Verdun and pushing the attack with the extremity of vigour can be read in a most interesting article in the Vossische Zeitang, a translation of which is to be found in the Westminster Gazette of Wednesday. In many ways the article in question, evidently written by a soldier, and of course officially released for publication, is quite one of the most significant that have appeared during the war. The writer, with an emphasis which is hysterical, declares that the Germans are going to win at Verdun because "they must win "—in effect, because if they do not win they are lost. But it is one of tha shibboleths of our new sophists in the philosophy of will-power that not only does the admission of the possibility of defeat mean defeat, but that the only way to secure victory is to assert its certainty. Therefore the German writer keeps on declaring, with a tremulous intensity which is like that of a man raging in the agony of a crisis of the nerves, that the Germans must maintain and increase their will-power, and that nothing else but the will to win can save them.
