The Death’s-Head Hussars are a perfect example of that boastful pride and transgression of the bounds of due proportion which it is the function of Nemesis to punish. By their name and their device they make a mock of the most solemn tragedy--of Death itself. Whether their emblem threatens death to others or signifies their own contempt for death it is a wanton and arrogant jest. The skull and cross-bones were the traditional device of pirates, and it well became those grim outlaws who declared a ruthless war against all mankind. There was no jest about it, but a dreadful seriousness, and their proper end was the yard-arm. But the Death’s-Head Hussars are what is called a “crack” regiment, one officered by rich, aristocratic, and elegant young men, who have not set themselves against the world, but are very much of it. Nor are they any braver or more formidable than other regiments. The Death’s-Head business is a silly and boastful affectation. Here is the just sentence of chastising Nemesis. The last of the Death’s-Head Hussars, its imperial colonel, is being shot over the head of his skeleton charger on to the heaped ranks of dead soldiers which ring him round. He has his fill of skulls and cross-bones now. The Crown Prince of Germany has confessed it to the world. A. SHADWELL. [Illustration] _The “Franc-tireur” Excuse_ It is well sometimes, despite all that has happened since, to turn back to Belgium and remember the rape, rapine, and arson of 1914. There will be plenty of time to let bygones be bygones when might and right are found on the same side and Justice, who is using her sword just now, resumes her impartial scales; but until the Central Nations experience a defeat of magnitude sufficient to penetrate to the hearts and heads of their people, we may continue to keep in the forefront of our minds the story of Belgium under Germany’s heel. That tale of brutal tyranny is not even yet told, for, short of selling the deported Belgians as slaves, Germany would seem still to be doing all that Hun and Vandal ever accomplished. But Raemaekers gives us a glimpse from the past, when conquest was still in progress and the German obsession of _franc-tireurs_ reached its height. How far they pretended this fear to excuse their own murder of the defenseless, or how far they really felt it, matters little; for it has been shown that the cry was deliberately excited--by fabrication and circulation through Germany of countless “fearful” falsehoods. Soldiery about to pass from the Fatherland to Belgium were inflamed, as with drink, by lies of the horrible treatment they must expect and endure from civil populations and non-combatants. They were warned by calculated propaganda at home that their eyes would be gouged out, their legs sawn off, their wounded men murdered, with fiendish details of suffering by the Belgians.