Here in Great Britain the earliest days of the War saw available spaces everywhere covered with posters cheap in sentiment, and conveying childish and vulgar appeals to a patriotism already stirred far beyond the conception of the artists who designed them or the authorities responsible for their distribution.[1] This, perhaps, was inevitable in a country such as ours. The grimness of the world-struggle was not realised in its intensity until driven home by staggering blows at our very life as a nation. Then, and not till then, a Government which was always halting to "wait and see," or moving slowly behind the nation, at last got into its stride. Artists understood the call and responded. The poster, inspired by an enthusiasm unknown before, became the one form of Art answering to the needs of the moment, an instrument driving home into every mind its emphatic moral and definite message. It is characteristic that the first truly impassioned posters we saw in England were in aid of Belgian refugees or the Belgian Red Cross. They dealt with the violation of Belgium; and the stirring appeal of the work done by G. Spencer Pryse and Frank Brangwyn, R.A., in those early days will always linger in the memory. So numerous were the posters issued in every country, both by the Governments concerned and the various committees dealing with relief work and other aspects of the War, that the international collection acquired by the Imperial War Museum exceeds twenty thousand. Large numbers of these, many of them consisting of letterpress only, are outside the scope of the present volume, which is intended to make accessible to the public in a convenient form reproductions of a small selection distinguished for their artistic merit. The collection of original War posters acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum has provided most of the illustrations. It comprises several hundred posters from Germany, Austria, Hungary, and other countries, in addition to those issued by Great Britain and her Allies; and it illustrates, in a compact form, the finest artistic uses to which colour-lithography was put as a weapon in the World War. The small collection made for this volume is necessarily arbitrary. Our illustrations are often about one-twelfth the size of the originals, and the limit in size may perhaps be considered to detract from the value of the reproductions. This, however, has been considered, as far as possible, in selecting the examples chosen. A strong, impulsive design does not depend entirely upon size for the force of its appeal, nor does it change in character from being reduced; but a poster badly designed, though passable on a large scale, may be an unintelligible jumble in a small illustration. In many cases a design is knit together by its reduction, and so viewed as a whole more compactly. Its publication in book form gives it also a permanence and ultimately a wider audience than the original can hope to gain.