ance yet." Throughout the entire series the
Sick Man remains cynical and impenitent, blowing endless bubble-promises of
reform from his hookah, bullying and massacring his subject races whenever
he had the chance, playing off the jealousies of the Powers, one against
the other, to further his own sinister ends.

[Illustration: SOLID

GERMANY: "Donnerwetter! It's rock. I thought it was going to be paper."
(_Aug. 2, 1911_)]

Yet Mr. Punch does not wish to lay claim to any special prescience or
wisdom, for, in spite of lucid intervals of foresight, we were all deceived
by Germany. Nearly fifty years of peace had blinded us to fifty years of
relentless preparation for war. But if we were deceived by the treachery of
Germany's false professions, we had no monopoly of illusion. Germany made
the huge mistake of believing that we would stand out--that we dared not
support France in face of our troubles and divisions at home. She counted
on the pacific influences in a Liberal Cabinet, on the looseness of the
ties which bound us to our Dominions, on the "contemptible" numbers of our
Expeditionary Force, on the surrender of Belgium. She had willed the War;
the tragedy of Sarajevo gave her the excuse. There is no longer any need to
fix the responsibility. The roots of the world conflict which seemed
obscure to a neutral statesman have long been laid bare by the avowals of
the chief criminal. The story is told in the Memoir of Prince Lichnowsky,
in the revelations of Dr. Muehlon of Krupp's, in the official
correspondence that has come to light since the Revolution of Berlin.
Germany stands before the bar of civilisation as the _reus confitens_
in the cause of light against darkness, freedom against world enslavement.

So the War began, and if "when war begins then hell opens," the saying
gained a tenfold truth in the greatest War of all, when the aggressor at
once began to wage it on non-combatants, on the helpless and innocent, on
women and children, with a cold and deliberate ferocity unparalleled in
history. Let it now be frankly owned that in the shock of this discovery
Mr. Punch thought seriously of putting up his shutters. How could he carry
on in a shattered and mourning world? The chronicle that follows shows how
it became possible, thanks to the temper of all our people in all parts of
the Empire, above all to the unwavering confidence of our sailors and
soldiers, to that "wonderful spirit of light-heartedness, that perpe