It may not be so. Time alone will
reveal the truth.
But this much is reasonably certain. When peace is declared, the sincere
friendship which once existed between ourselves and the Dual Monarchy
may be reestablished, but many years must pass before we forgive or
forget the Huns. They are boasting to-day that as a nation they are
self-sufficing and self-supporting. Amen! Most of us desire nothing
better than to leave them alone till they have mended their manners and
purged themselves of a colossal and unendurable conceit. I cannot
envisage Huns playing tennis at Wimbledon, or English girls studying
music at Leipzig. The grass in the streets of Homburg will not, for many
years, be trodden out by English feet; the harpies of hotel keepers
throughout the Happy Fatherland will prey, it may be presumed, upon
their fellow Huns. Then they will fall to "strafing" each other instead
of England. And then, as now, their mouthings will provoke
inextinguishable laughter.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.
[Illustration: "HAVE ANOTHER PIECE?"]
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EASTER, 1915
Ever since with the beginning of Christendom a new soul entered the body
of exhausted Europe, it is true to say that we have not only had a
certain idea but been haunted by it, as by a ghost. It is the idea
crystallized in legends like those of St. Christopher and St. Martin.
But it is equally apparent in the most modern ethics and eloquence, as,
for instance, when a French atheist orator urged the reconsideration of
a criminal case by pointing at the pictured Crucifixion which hangs in a
French Law Court and saying: "Voila la chose jugee.
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