to
kill, to gain the end by any means whatever. Dropping bombs on
defenseless women and children and on Red Cross hospitals; torpedoing
merchant ships without warning and sending all the passengers, even
neutrals or friends, to death, or worse, in open boats far from land;
firing on stretcher-bearers and nurses; using poison gas and liquid
fire; poisoning wells and spreading disease germs; all are forbidden to
civilized races by the laws of war. The _boche_ regularly perpetrated
them all and committed other atrocities much worse. He hoped to
frighten the world by his cruelty and brutality, by making every man,
woman, and child among his enemies believe that each _boche_ was an
unconquerable giant possessed of a devil.

To the _boche_ war was simply a robbery, and he was one of a robber
band. On the land, he was a brigand, on the sea, a pirate. He went
about his business with no more mercy and chivalry than a New York
gunman or a Paris apache. To him war was a business, an unlawful
business to be sure, but, he believed, a profitable one. He went at
it, therefore, as he had at manufacturing and commerce in the days of
peace. He sought to do bigger things than any one else and to gain an
advantage by any means, fair or foul. Why should he think about being
fair or humane? He was a thief, not a judge.

And yet let it be recorded that while nearly all _boches_ acted like
brutes instead of men, there were some who were different and who
showed the highest type of courage and died bravely as soldiers may die.

THE POILU

The soldier of France, the _poilu_, is a crusader. He is fighting to
defend France, his great mother, in whose defense, centuries ago, the
invisible powers called and sustained Jeanne d'Arc. In his love of
country there is something almost religious, like that of the
Mohammedan for Mecca and Medina. To serve France, to fight for her, to
die for her--and every French soldier expects to die in battle--is a
privilege as well as a duty. He fights for his country as an
Englishman fights for his home. With the Englishman, his home comes
first and is nearest and dearest; with the Frenchman, his country.

Philip Gibbs, who has written from day to day, from the trenches and
the battlefields, letters that will never be forgotten because of their
beauty and truth, says of the French _poilu_:--

"Yet if the English reader imagines that because this thread of
sentiment runs through the character of