tle capsules of prepared incendiary stuff? The rule always
applies--but only against the opponent: never to one's self. From that
attitude of mind the Prussian will never emerge. We shall, please God,
see that mood in all its beauty in later stages of the war, when the
coercion of the Prussian upon his own soil leads to acts indefensible by
Prussian logic. We have already had a taste of this sort of reasoning
when the royalties fled from Karlsruhe and when the murderers upon the
sinking Zeppelin received the reward due to men who boast that they will
not keep faith.
HILAIRE BELLOC.
[Illustration: THE EX-CONVICT
"I was a 'lifer,' but they found I had many abilities for bringing
civilization amongst our neighbours, so now I am a soldier."]
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MISS CAVELL
Most of the English caricaturists are much too complimentary to the
German Emperor. They draw his moustaches, but not his face. Now his
moustaches are exactly what he, or the whole Prussian school he
represents, particularly wishes us to look at. They give him the fierce
air of a fighting cock; and however little we may like fierceness, there
will always be a certain residual respect for fighting, even in a cock.
Now the Junker moustache is a fake; almost as much so as if it were
stuck on with gum. It is, as Mr. Belloc has remarked, curled in a
machine all night lest it should hang down. Raemaekers, in the sketch
which shows the Kaiser as waiting for Nurse Cavell's death to say, "Now
you can bring me the American protest," has gone behind the moustache to
the face, and behind the face to the type and the spirit. The Emperor is
not commanding in a lordly voice from a throne, but with a leer and
behind a curtain. In the few lines of the lean, unnatural face is
written the real history of the Hohenzollerns, the kind of history not
often touched on in our comfortable English humour, but common to the
realism of Continental art: the madness of Frederick William, the
perversion of Frederick the Great, the hint, mingled with subtler
talents, of the mere idiocy that seems to have flowered again in the
last heir of that inhuman house. The Hohenzollerns have varied from
generation to generation in many things and like many families; some of
them have been tyrants, some of them geniuses, some of them merely
boobies; but they have shared in somethin
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