Painter Vollbehr was authority for the following Kaiser anecdote: "One day as the Kaiser was motoring along a chaussee he met a herd of swine under the guardianship of a bearded Landsturm man, who drove them rapidly to one side to keep them from being prematurely slaughtered by the imperial auto. As the motor slowed up the Kaiser asked him if he was a farmer by profession. 'No; professor of the University of Tubingen,' came the answer, to the great amusement of the Over War Lord." Human Documents of the War Swift Reversal to Barbarism By Vance Thompson. [From The New York Sun, Sept. 13, 1914.] I. There is in Brussels--if the Uhlans have spared it--a mad and monstrous picture. It is called "A Scene in Hell," and hangs in the Musee Wiertz. And what you see on the canvas are the fierce and blinding flames of hell; and amid them looms the dark figure of Napoleon, and around him the wives and mothers and maids of Belgium scream and surge and clutch and curse--taking their posthumous vengeance. And since Napoleon was a notable Emperor in his time, the picture is not without significance today. Paint in another face; and let it go at that. War is a bad thing. Even hell is the worse for it. War is a bad thing; it is a reversal, sudden and complete, to barbarism. That is what I would get at in this article. One day there is civilization, authentic, complex, triumphant; comes war, and in a moment the entire fabric sinks down into a slime of mud and blood. In a day, in an hour, a cycle of civilization is canceled. What you saw in the morning was suave and ordered life; and the sun sets on howling savagery. In the morning black-coated men lifted their hats to women. Ere nightfall they are slashing them with sabres and burning the houses over their heads. And, the grave old professors who were droning platitudes of peace and progress and humanitarianism are screaming, ere today is done, shrill senile clamors for blood and ravage and rapine. (Not less shrill than others is the senile yawp of that good old man Ernst Haeckel, under whom I studied in my youth.) A reversal to barbarism. Here; it is in the tearoom of the smartest hotel in Munich; war has come; high-voiced women of title chatter over their teacups; comes swaggering in the Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria; he has just had his sabre sharpened and has girt his abdomen for war. His wife runs to him. And she kisses the sabre and shouts: "Bring it back to me covered with blood--that I may kiss it again!" And the other high-voiced women flock to kiss the sword. A reversal to barbarism. It has taken place in an hour; but yesterday these were sweet patrician ladies, who prattled of humanity and love and the fair graces of life; and now they would fain wet their mouths with blood--laughingly as harlots wet their mouths with wine.