Friday's Times contains extracts from an interview with Lord Kitchener,
published in the Saturday Evening Post— a weekly newspaper with a large circulation in all parts of the United States. Nothing could be better than the passage in which Lord Kitchener dealt with the action of the Germans in Belgium :—
" War has its ethics ; but if ever a soldier is to become judge of the behaviour of the civil population of a hostile country, if he is to be not only judge and jury, but the inflicter of punishment, why, then, to my conception, he loses his proper ordained functions as soldier and becomes executioner. If that standard is to prevail throughout the world we cease to enlist soldiers, we enrol, instead, hired executioners. Tears ago in the Sudan I was called on to fight an enemy who practised this code, but that enemy was a savage, so-called, and the Germans, they themselves tell us, are exclusive owners of the highest civilization the world has ever seen."
All Englishmen will feel proud that the most famous of living English soldiers should have so nobly vindicated the soldier's honour and the soldier's profession. It is a message to the world for which we are all gratefuL
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