may see their Higher Command watching the death of
guinea-pig, rabbit, and ape with increasing excitement and enthusiasm as
the hideous effects of their discovery became apparent. Be sure an iron
cross quickly hung over the iron heart that conceived and developed this
filthy arm; for does it not offer the essence--quintessence of all
"frightfulness?" Does it not challenge every human nerve-centre by its
horror? Does it not, once proclaimed, by anticipation awake those very
emotions of dread and dismay that make the stroke more fatal when it
falls?

These people pictured their snake paralyzing the enemy into frozen
impotence; the floundering Prussian psychology that cuts blocks with a
razor and regards German mind as the measure of all mind, anticipated
that poison gas would appeal to British and French as it has appealed to
them. But it was not so. Their foresight gave them an initial success in
the field; it slew a handful of men with additions of unspeakable
agony--and rekindled the execration and contempt of Civilization.

As an arm, poison gas cannot be considered conspicuously successful,
since it is easily encountered; but for the Allies it had some value,
since it weighted appreciably the scale against Germany in neutral minds
and added to the universal loathing astir at the heart of the world.
Only fear now holds any kingdom neutral: there is not an impartial
nation left on earth.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS.

[Illustration: THE GAS FIEND]

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THE GERMAN TANGO

A blond woman, wearing the Imperial crown and with her hair braided in
pigtails like a German _backfisch_, is whirling in the tango with a
skeleton partner. Her face is livid with terror and fatigue, her limbs
are drooping, but she is held by inexorable bony claws. On the feet of
the skeleton are dancing pumps, a touch which adds to the grimness. This
ghoulish dance does not lack its element of ghastly ceremonial.

The Dance of Death has long been the theme of the moralist in art, from
Orcagna's fresco on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa to Holbein's
great woodcuts and our own Rowlandson. In Germany especially have these
_macabre_ imaginings flourished. The phantasmagoria of decay has haunted
German art, as it haunted Poe, from Duerer to Boecklin. But the mediaeval
Dance of Death was stately allegory, showing the pageant of life br