‘According to information to the _Carriere della Sera_ from Cologne, via London, it is confirmed that the barbaric conquerors of Antwerp punished the unfortunate Belgian priests for their heroic refusal to ring the church bells by hanging them as living clappers to the bells with their heads down.’—_Le Matin_ (Paris.) When I was in the trenches a few months later I happened to belong to a company mess in which four of us young officers out of five had, by a coincidence, either German mothers or naturalized German fathers. One of them said: ‘Of course I’m glad I joined when I did. If I’d put it off for a month or two they’d have accused me of being a German spy. As it is I have an uncle interned at Alexandra Palace, and my father’s only been allowed to retain the membership of his golf club because he has two sons in the trenches.’ I said: ‘Well, I have three or four uncles sitting somewhere opposite, and a number of cousins too. One of my uncles is a general. But that’s all right. I don’t brag about them. I only advertise the uncle who is a British admiral commanding at the Nore.’ Among my enemy relatives was my cousin Conrad, who was the same age as myself, and the son of the German consul at Zurich. In January 1914 I had gone ski-ing with him between the trees in the woods above the city. We had tobogganed together down the Dolderstrasse in Zurich itself, where the lampposts were all sandbagged and family toboggans, skidding broadside on at the turns, were often crashed into by single-seater skeletons; arms and legs were broken by the score and the crowds thought it a great joke. Conrad served with a crack Bavarian regiment all through the war, and won the ‘Pour le Mérite’ Order, which was more rarely awarded than the British Victoria Cross. He was killed by the Bolsheviks after the war in a village on the Baltic where he had been sent to make requisitions. He was a gentle, proud creature, whose chief interest was natural history. He used to spend hours in the woods studying the habits of wild animals; he felt strongly against shooting them. Perhaps the most outstanding military feat was that of an uncle who was dug out at the age of sixty or so as a lieutenant in the Bavarian artillery. My youngest brother met him a year or two ago and happened to mention that he was going to visit Rheims. My uncle nudged him: ‘Have a look at the cathedral. I was there with my battery in the war. One day the divisional general came up to me and said: “Lieutenant, I understand that you are a Lutheran, not a Catholic?” I said that this was so. Then he said: “I have a very disagreeable service for you to perform, Lieutenant. Those misbegotten swine, the French, are using the cathedral for an observation post. They think they can get away with it because it’s Rheims Cathedral, but this is war and they have our trenches taped from there. So I call upon you to dislodge them.” I only needed to fire two rounds and down came the