We may picture the series of experiments that went to perfection of their poison gas; we 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 paralysing 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 had 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 Civilisation. As an arm, poison gas cannot be considered conspicuously successful, since it is easily countered; 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] The German Tango A blonde 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 Dürer to Boecklin. But the mediæval Dance of Death was stately allegory, showing the pageant of life brooded over by the shadow of mortality. In M. Raemaekers’ cartoon there is no dignity, no lofty resignation. He shows Death summoned in a mad caprice and kept as companion till the revel becomes a whirling horror.