In trenches, communication trenches, little dark labyrinths, little tunnels where men suffer and sacrifice themselves, there will be found established our best and purest school of socialism. But by this term socialism, a term too often profaned, I mean true socialism, be it understood, which is synonymous with tolerance and brotherhood, that socialism, in a word, which Christ came to teach us in that clear formula, which in its adorable simplicity sums up all formulæ, "Love one another." XXV THE TWO GORGON HEADS "My plan is first to take possession. At a later stage I can always find learned men to prove that I was acting within my just rights." FREDERICK II. (_called, for want of a better epithet, the Great_). I THEIR KAISER _April, 1916._ There are certain faces of the accursed, which reveal in the end with the coming of old age the accumulated horror and darkness that has been seething in the depths of the soul. The features are by no means always ignoble, but on these faces something is imprinted which is a thousand times worse than ugliness, and none can bear to look upon them. Thus it is with their Kaiser. The sight of his sinister presentment alone, a mere glimpse of the smallest portrait of him reproduced in a newspaper, is sufficient to make the blood run cold. Oh that viperine eye of his, shaded by flaccid lids, that smile twisted awry by all his secret vices, his utter hypocrisy, morbid brutality, added to cold ferocity, and overweening arrogance which in itself is enough to provoke a horsewhip to lash him of its own accord. Once in an old temple in Japan I saw a gruesome work of art, which was considered a masterpiece of genre painting, and had been preserved for centuries, wrapped in a veil, in one of the coffers containing temple treasures. It is well known how highly the Japanese esteem gruesome works of art, and what masters their artists are in the cult of the horrible. It was a mask of a human face, with features, if anything, rather regular and refined, but if you looked at it attentively its appalling expression, at the same time cruel and lifeless, haunted you for days and nights. From out the cadaverous flesh, livid and lined, gleamed its two eyes, partly closed, but one more so than the other, and they seemed to wink, as if to say: "For a long time, while I lay waiting there in my box, I meditated some ghastly surprise for you, and at last you have come; you are in my power, and here it is."