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28--THE ILLUSTRATED WAR NEWS, DEC. 30, 1914.--[Part 21]

[Illustration: THE ENEMY AS PORTRAYED BY HIMSELF ON CHALK: THE GERMAN
SOLDIER-CAVEMAN AS ARTIST IN THE AISNE QUARRIES.]

In more ways than one, the German soldier would seem on occasion to
represent, as it were, a reverting to primitive type: to the barbaric
European of centuries back in the world's history. The "reversion"
takes many shapes, and we have seen instances of it during the war
in various ways. It is surely readily recognisable, for example, in
that spirit of sheer ruthlessness which inspired the perpetration
of the inhuman outrages that have laid Belgium waste, and of the
killing of harmless women and children by naval shells at the peaceful
watering-place of Scarborough. Another and more innocuous form of
going back to the habits and methods typical of primitive man, is,
perhaps, traceable in the illustrations given above. They are some
of the handiwork of the twentieth-century German military cavemen of

[_Continued opposite._

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THE ILLUSTRATED WAR NEWS, DEC. 30, 1914--[Part 21]--29

[Illustration: THE ENEMY AS PORTRAYED BY HIMSELF ON CHALK: THE GERMAN
SOLDIER-CAVEMAN AS ARTIST IN THE AISNE QUARRIES.]

_Continued._]

the Aisne battlefield, while making use of the cover of the quarries and
natural excavations of the district along the northern side of the river.
In very much the same way, as modern exploration has brought to light, the
primaeval cave-dwelling inhabitants of Europe in prehistoric times left
rudimentary traces of their presence in certain places in the shape of
carvings and roughly painted "portraits" of themselves, of the creatures
they hunted for food and fought with, and of the implements they
used. According to the German newspaper from which we reproduce the
illustrations given here, they are the work of a German artist who has had
to go to the Front as a conscript and serve in the ranks of an infantry
battalion.

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30--THE ILLUSTRATED WAR NEWS, DEC. 30, 1914.--[Part 21]

[Illustration: AS LEFT BY