Then will come the _débâcle_. And then, unless every scrap of grit and backbone has been Prussianised out of the Teuton, the revulsion of feeling will sweep the oppressors out of existence; and Germany, released from the strangle-hold, may rise once more to take the place among the civilised nations of the world which, by her foul doings of the last two years, she has deliberately forfeited. JOHN OXENHAM [Illustration: WAR LOAN MUSIC “Was blazen die Trompeten Moneten heraus?”] A Fact To understand the true inwardness of this cartoon, the reader must be familiar with the writings of General von Hartmann, one of the chief evangelists of German methods of warfare. The following gem is extracted from an article by von Hartmann, published in 1877, on “Military Necessities and Humanity”:-- “The warrior has need of passion. It must not, indeed, as the result of opposition, be regarded as a necessary evil; nor condemned as a regrettable consequence of physical contact; nor must we seek to restrain and curb it as a savage and brutal force; for in causing a powerful and exclusive concentration of individual energies it becomes an indispensable agent of the consummation of conflict. Every warlike exploit is before all things of a personal nature; it puts before all else the affirmation of the individual character, and it demands, in its agent, a release from the oppressive rule of the moderating laws of everyday life.... _Violence_ and _passion_ are the two levers essential to any warlike action, and, we say it advisedly, of all _military greatness_.” FRANCIS STOPFORD [Illustration: A FACT This brutalism by Major Tille of the German Army on a small boy of Maastricht was vouched for by an eye-witness.] The Free Sea It is when Germany’s absence of morals is most blatant that her presence of mind comes to the rescue. It is a strange and wonderful mind that she reveals--a weird combination of childishness without its innocence, of wickedness without its cunning. Yet somehow the German mental process is sometimes convincing. It is really one of the wonders of the world that it should be so. When a country that stole Silesia, Poland, Schleswig, Alsace-Loraine, Belgium and Serbia solemnly assures a shocked and startled world that its life-long object is to protect the freedom of small nationalities; when a Government, that kills peaceful passengers by the hundred and torpedoes neutral trading ships, says it does so in the cause of the freedom of the seas; when a frenzied Emperor, foiled in the effort to conquer Europe by a surprise attack, vows that his only purpose is self-defence, one would think that such talk could deceive nobody--not even the speaker. A child’s lie embarrasses but does not mislead its elders. Why, then, does the German lie mislead? Or is it that the bully only seems to be believed?