Yet even then full realisation is impossible; the man whose pencil has limned these faces has only caught a far-off echo of the reality, and thus we who see his picture are yet another stage removed from the full horror of the scene that he gives us. Not on us, in England, have the rifle butts fallen; not for us has it chanced that we should be shepherded “men to the right, women to the left”; not ours the trenched graves and the extremity of shame. Thus it is not for us to speak, as the people of Belgium and Northern France will speak, of the limits of endurance, and of war’s last terrors imposed on those whom war should have passed by and left untouched. We gather, dimly and with but a tithe of the feeling that experience can impart, that these extremities of shame and suffering have been imposed on a people that has done no wrong, and we may gain some slight satisfaction from the thought that to this nation is apportioned a share in the work of vengeance on the criminals. E. CHARLES VIVIAN [Illustration: THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS “We _must_ do everything in good order--so men to the right, women to the left.”] It is the most bestial part of this most bestial thing that it is calculated and a matter of orders. The private soldier takes his share of the loot, and is generally the instrument of the cold and ordered killing; but it is the officer-class which most profits in goods, and it is the higher command which dictates the policy. It was so in 1870. It is much more so to-day. This note of calculation is particularly to be seen in the fluctuations through which that policy has passed. When the enemy was absolutely certain of victory, out-numbering the invader by nearly two to one and sweeping all before him, we had massacres upon massacres: Louvain, Aerschot, the wholesale butchery of Dinant, the Lorraine villages (and in particular the hell of Guébervilliers). Even at the very extremity of his tide of invasion, and in the last days of it, came the atrocities and destruction of Sermaize. In the very act of the defeat which has pinned him and began the process of his destruction he was attempting yet a further repetition of these unnameable things at Senlis under the very gates of Paris. Then came the months when he felt less secure. The whole thing was at once toned down by order. Pillage was reduced to isolated cases, and murder also. Few children suffered. A recovery of confidence throughout his Eastern successes last summer renewed the crimes. Poland is full of them, and the Serbian land as well. In general, you have throughout these months of his ordeal a regular succession, of excess in vileness when he is confident, of restraint in it when he is touched by fear.