And it is neither the spirit of a tyrant nor of a booby; but the spirit
of a sly invalid.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
[Illustration: MISS CAVELL
WILLIAM: "Now you can bring me the American protest."]
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THE HOSTAGES
Ay', boy--you may well ask.
And the world asks also, and in due time will exact an answer to the
last drop of innocent blood.
What have you done?
You have fallen into the hands of the most scientifically organized
barbarism the world has ever seen, or, please God, ever will see--to
whom, of deliberate choice, such words as truth, honour, mercy, justice,
have become dead letters, by reason of the pernicious doctrines on which
the race has been nourished--by which its very soul has been poisoned.
Dead letters?--worn-out rags, the very virtues they once represented,
even in Germany, long since flung to the dust-heaps of the past in the
soulless scramble for power and a place in the sun which no one denied
her.
Deliberately, and of malice prepense, the military caste of Prussia has
taught, and the unhappy common-folk have accepted, that as a nation they
are past all that kind of thing. There is only one right in the
world--the might of the strongest. The weak to the wall! Make way for
the Hun, whose god is power, and his high-priests the Kaiser and the
Krupps.
And so, every nation, even the smallest, on whom the eye of the Minotaur
has settled in baleful desire, has said, "Better to die fighting than
fall into the hands of the devil!" And they have fought--valiantly, and
saved their souls alive, though their bodies may have been crushed out
of existence by overwhelming odds.
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