n gentleman. And this decadent is his grandson!

"Unser Fritz" was a very noble-looking man. His grandson--oh, well, look
at him and judge for yourselves! Of a surety the sight is calculated to
heighten one's amazement that any nation under the sun, or craving it,
could find in such a personality, even as representative of a once great
but now exploding idea, anything whatever even to put up with, much less
to worship and die for.

The race of Hohenzollern has wilted and ravelled out to this. The whole
world, outside Prussia, devoutly hopes ere long to have seen the last of
it.

It has been at all times, with the single exception above noted, a
hustling, grabbing, self-seeking race. May the eyes of Germany soon be
opened! Then, surely, it will be thrust back into the obscurity whence
heaven can only have permitted it to escape for the flagellation of a
world which was losing its ideals and needed bracing back with a sharp,
stern twist.

JOHN OXENHAM.

[Illustration: SEPTEMBER, 1914, AND SEPTEMBER, 1915

1914: "Now the war begins as we like it."

1915: "But this is not as I wished it to continue."
(Published after the French success in Champagne)]

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LIQUID FIRE

When one sits down to think, there are few things in connection with the
devastating War now raging, wild-beast-like, almost throughout the
length and breadth of Europe, so appalling as the application of science
and man's genius to the work of decimating the human species.

Early in the conflict, which is being fought for the basal principles of
civilization and moral human conduct, one was made to realize that the
Allied Powers were opposed to an enemy whose resources were only
equalled by his utter negation of the rules of civilized warfare. Soon,
to the horrors of machine-guns and of high-explosive shells of a calibre
and intensity of destructive force never before known, were added the
diabolical engines for pouring over the field of battle asphyxiating
gases. We know the horrors of that mode of German "frightfulness," and
some of us have seen its effects in the slowly dying victims in
hospitals. But that was not enough. Yet other methods of "frightfulness"
and savagery, which would have disgraced the most ruthless conquerors of
old, were to be applied by the German Emperor in his blasphemous "Gott
mit uns" campaign.