When you bend your eyes to the pathetic cartoon standing opposite this letterpress, is there not brought home to you in a way, touching even to tears, the “frightful” consequences of the misuse of human powers, more especially of the attribute of freedom? If Germany had chosen to use, instead of brute force, moral force, what a great, grand, and glorious mission might have been hers to-day. If, instead of trying the impossible task of dominating the whole world with her iron hand upon its throat and her iron heel upon its foot, she had been satisfied with the portion of the map already belonging to her, and had not by processes of bureaucratic tyranny driven away millions of her subjects who preferred liberty to slavery, America to Germany, by this date she might have consolidated an Empire second in the world to none but one. Alas! in her over-reaching arrogance she has, on the contrary, set out to de-Christianise, de-civilise, and even de-humanise the race for which Christ lived and died. Our high mission it is to try to save her from herself. Already I can read written in letters of blood carved into the gravestone of her corrupted greatness, “Ill-weaved ambition, How much art thou shrunk!” BERNARD VAUGHAN [Illustration: LES BEAUTÉS DE LA GUERRE Folk who do not understand them.] On the Way to Calais They are coming, like a tempest, in their endless ranks of grey, While the world throws up a cloud of dust upon their awful way; They’re the glorious cannon fodder of the mighty Fatherland, Born to make the kingdoms tremble and the nations understand. Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! the cannon fodder come Along their way to Calais; (God help the hearth and home.) They’ll do his will who taught them, on the earth and on the waves, Till land and sea are festering with their unnumbered graves. The garrison and barrack and the fortress give them vent; They sweep, a herd of winter wolves, upon the flying scent; For all their deeds of horror they are told that death atones, And their master’s harvest cannot spring till he has sowed their bones. Into beasts of prey he’s turned them; when they show their teeth and growl The lash is buried in their cheeks; they’re slaughtered if they howl; To their bloody Lord of Battles must they only bend the knee, For hard as steel and fierce as hell should cannon fodder be. Scourge and curses are their portion, pain and hunger without end, Till they hail the yell of shrapnel as the welcome of a friend; They drink and burn and rape and laugh to hear the women cry, And do the devil’s work to-day, but on the morrow die.