As a nation we are always ready to admit and to admire physical courage, and if Germany had fought a “clean fight,” had “played the game,” starkly and straightly, against our fighting men, we could--and our fighting men especially could, and I believe would--have helped her to her feet and shaken hands honestly with her after she was beaten. But with such a brute beast as the unmasking of the Yellow Book has revealed Germany to be we can never feel friendship, admiration, or respect. The German is a “dirty fighter,” and to the British soldier that alone puts him beyond the pale. He has outraged all the rules and the instincts of chivalry. His bravery in battle is the bravery of a ravening wolf, of a blood-drunk savage animal. It is only left to the Allies to treat him as such, to thrash him by brute force, and then to clip his teeth and talons and by treaty and agreement amongst themselves to keep him chained and caged beyond the possibility of another outbreak. BOYD CABLE [Illustration: UNMASKED The Yellow Book] The Great Surprise In the note to another picture I have remarked on the farcical hypocrisy of the German Emperor in presenting himself, as he so often does, as the High Priest of several different religions at the same time. They are nearly all of them religions with which he would have no sort of concern, even if his religious pose were as real as it is artificial. Being in fact the ruler and representative of a country which alone among European countries builds with complete security upon the conviction that all Christianity is dead, he can only be, even in theory, the prince of an extreme Protestant State. Long before the War it was common for the best caricaturists of Europe, and even of Germany, to make particular fun of these preposterous temporary Papacies in which the Kaiser parades himself as if for a fancy-dress ball; and in the accompanying picture Mr. Raemaekers has returned more or less to this old pantomimic line of satire. The cartoon recalls some of those more good-humoured, but perhaps equally contemptuous, sketches in which the draughtsmen of the French comic papers used to take a particular delight; which made a whole comic Bible out of the Kaiser’s adventures during his visit to Palestine. Here he appears as Moses, and the Red Sea has been dried up to permit the passage of himself and his people. It would certainly be very satisfactory for German world-politics if the sea could be dried up everywhere; but it is unlikely that the incident will occur, especially in that neighbourhood. It will be long before a German army is as safe in the Suez Canal as a German Navy in the Kiel Canal; and the higher critics of Germany will have no difficulty in proving, in the Kiel Canal at all events, that the safety is due to human and not to divine wisdom. G. K. CHESTERTON