A party of twenty-eight American soldiers happened to be passing the curtained room where the dismembered model of the Kaiser lay, and one of them made the request that they should be shown the “All-Highest” lying in state. “And a very bad state, too,” replied the attendant, who could not oblige. The second serious attack upon the Kaiser’s effigy took place two or three months after the first. On this occasion it was a Colonial soldier who, seeing the restored monarch gazing at him in a supercilious fashion, as he imagined, drew from its scabbard the sword of the defunct Austrian Emperor, whose model sits close by, and stabbed the Kaiser’s figure in the face. The force with which the thrust was delivered was such that off came the monarch’s head, and again the model had to be taken to hospital for the surgical operation of restoring the head and refixing it to its trunk. Count Zeppelin, whose name will for ever be associated with the introduction of aerial warships and the dropping of bombs upon defenceless people, has had many a clenched fist shaken at him standing there beside the portraits of Roger Casement and Tribich Lincoln. Though never actually assaulted, it was only the stolidity of the British character that kept people’s hands off his effigy during the Zeppelin raids on London. Visitors were too proud, I suppose, to touch him, and from the time the first German airship was brought down in flames on British soil Count Zeppelin’s model began to be ignored. A British matron quietly remarked, as she stopped an instant in front of the portrait, “So you’re going the way of all our enemies--beaten at your own game.” * * * * * In the early months of the war we borrowed from a soldier an Iron Cross that he had taken from the breast of a dead German officer whom he had found lying in a wood at Zillebeke, near Ypres, in November, 1914. According to the story of the soldier--Drummer Newman, of the Grenadier Guards--our men, comprising Grenadier Guards, Irish Guards, and Oxfordshire Light Infantry, were opposed to the Prussian Guards, who were driven out of the wood, leaving behind them several hundreds of their dead. Newman was searching for despatches when he happened upon the cross in question. I remember him coming to my studio with the trophy. He was a typical soldier, and he greatly amused me by his description of the way in which old soldiers--bearing in mind one of the trite sayings of Frederick the Great--would hearten their comrades, saying, just before going over the top, “Now then, boys, you don’t want to live for ever, do you?”