f old French towns; and the more
poignantly when they recall how narrowly the best of its beauty
escaped from the hand of the spoiler.

* * * * *

[Illustration: EPILOGUE]

* * * * *

MR. PUNCH AS PROPAGANDIST.

I don't know what decided him to do it. I think he must have been
a little fed up with our silly British way (rather attractive, all
the same) of assuming that the whole world is bound to recognise
the justice of our point of view without the use of propaganda to
stimulate its intelligence.

Or else he had read somewhere that the Bolsheviks had been flooding
the Hun trenches with Socialist literature and that the German
Headquarters Staff had protested against this kind of thing as being
contrary to etiquette, and he thought he couldn't go far wrong if he
did something that was contrary to Bosch etiquette.

Anyhow he started off in his Bouverie biplane to distribute a million
or so leaflets of his own composition over the whole expanse of the
Fatherland. It has been my privilege to read a sample which he handed
to me just before leaving earth. It runs as follows:--

"GERMANS--Your Kaiser has taken good care that his Press should keep
you in ignorance of the feelings with which your nation is regarded
by the civilized world. I am therefore about to oblige you with a few
home-truths.

"You have probably heard a rumour that we and our Allies have no
quarrel with the German people, but only with its rulers. Don't you
believe a word of it. Possibly we still respected you when the War
began, for we had not guessed how many of you had been looking forward
for years to the coming of 'The Day.' It is what we have found out
about you since you started fighting that has made us loathe and
despise you.

"When, as a nation, you accepted without protest the filthy savagery
of your armies in Belgium and other occupied lands; when even your
women were vile in their cruelty to the helpless prisoners you had
taken; when you rang your church bells and waved flags and took
holidays for joy of the murder of innocent women and children, we were
not deceived by apologists who explained that your only defect was
that you were the slaves of a brutal militarism (though you were that,
all right). We knew that you must have something of the beast in your
hearts. How it got there was another matter; we only knew that it was
there and that while it remained you were