They pave the way to Verdun; on their dust The Hohenzollern mount and, hand in hand, Gaze haggard south; for yet another thrust, And higher hills must heap, ere they shall stand To feed their eyes upon the promised land. One barrow, borne of women, lifts them high, Piled up of many a thousand human dead. Nursed in their mothers’ bosoms, now they lie-- A Golgotha, all shattered, torn and sped, A mountain for these royal feet to tread. A Golgotha, upon whose carrion clay Justice of myriad men, still in the womb, Shall heave two crosses; crucify and flay Two memories accurs’d; then in the tomb Of world-wide execration give them room. Verdun! Thy name is holy evermore; In thine heroic ruin the nations see A monument, upon whose living shore In vain the evil breaks; we bend the knee, Thou symbol of all human liberty. EDEN PHILLPOTTS. [Illustration] _Peace Reigns at Dinant_ The mere human criminal will cover his crime with disguises; but it may truly be said that the Prussian has buried even his crime in the evidences of it. He has made massacre itself monotonous; and made us weary of condemning what he was never weary of carrying out. It is said that General Von der Goltz, on receiving complaints of the scarcely human parade of cruelty which accompanied the first entrance into Belgium, declared that such first bad impressions of the Prussian would wear off after his victory in the real campaign; and that, as he expressed it, “Glory will efface all.” That sort of glory, however, was itself effaced from the German prospects as early as the battle of the Marne; and we shall never know whether humanity is capable of so vile a forgiveness; or whether glory will efface all. But there is a real sense in which we may say that infamy has effaced all. In the first stage of the war Prussia conducted assassination upon the same scale as grand strategy; and it is as difficult to recall every woman or child whose death was in itself a breach of all international understandings as it is to recall every poor fellow in uniform who has fallen in the open fighting which everyone understands. The pen becomes impotent when it attempts to give life to statistics; and I do not know that anything can come closer to it than the pencil, when it draws what the artist has drawn here--merely one quiet soldier, in the corner of one quiet town; and beyond only the corner of a heap of figures, which are yet more quiet. G. K. CHESTERTON. [Illustration] _Humanity v. Kultur_