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IT'S UNBELIEVABLE

Dutch Officer: "How can they have soiled their hands by such atrocities?"

She: "Can they have done it, my dear? German officers are so nice."

I am not sure that in this cartoon of Raemaekers the most pleasing detail is not the servant's right eye. You will observe in that servant's right eye an expression familiar in those who overhear this sort of comment upon the peculiar bestialities of the Prussian in Belgium and Poland, this extenuation of his baseness. When the war was young the opportunity for giving that glance was commoner than it is now. There were many even in a belligerent country who would tell you in superior fashion how foolishly exaggerated were the so-called "atrocities." The greater number of such men (and women) talked of "two Germanies"—one the nice Germany they knew and loved so well, and the other apparently nasty Germany which raped, burned, stole, broke faith, tortured, and the rest. Their number has diminished. But there is a little lingering trace of the sort of thing still to be discovered: men and women who hope against hope that the Prussian will really prove good at heart after all. And it is usually just after some expression of the kind that the most appalling news arrives with a terrible irony to punctuate their folly. It reminds one a little of the man in the story who was sure that he could tame a wild cat, and was in the act of recording its virtues when it flew in his face. To an impartial observer who cared nothing for our sufferings or the enemy's vices, there would be something enormously comic in the vision of these few remaining (for there are still some few remaining) that approach the wild beast with soothing words and receive as their only reward a very large bomb through the roof of their house, or the news that some one dear to them has been murdered on the high seas. But to those actively suffering in the struggle the comic element is difficult to seize, and it is replaced by indignation. This fantastic misconception of the thing that is being fought is bound to be burned right out by the realities of the enemy acts in belligerent countries. It will be similarly destroyed—and that in no very great space of time—in all neutral countries as well. Prussia will have it so. She is allowing no moral defence to remain for her future. It is almost as though the men now directing her affairs lent ear carefully to every word spoken in praise of them abroad, and met it at once by the tremendous denial of example. It is almost as though the Prussian felt it a sort of personal insult to receive the praise of dupes and fools, and perhaps it is.

HILAIRE BELLOC.