The diplomatists are not, however, alone in their protest.

Everybody has protested, and is still protesting.

If it is a necessity of war to throw shells into a densely populated town like this; it is--to say the least--a barbarous necessity; but it seems to me that it is but waste of time and paper to register protests against it; and if it be thought desirable to do so, it would be far more reasonable to protest against human beings--women and children--being exposed to its effects, than to indite plaintive elegies about the possibility of the Venus de Milo being damaged, or the orchids in the hot-houses being killed.

I know that, for my part, I would rather that every statue and every plant in the world were smashed to atoms by shells, than that I were.

This, in an aesthetical point of view, is selfish; but it is none the less true.