mans had retreated. These beasts worked
out the theory that the largest possible number of British and French
officers and public men would be inspecting the building at that hour of
the day.

The plot was successful. Their devilish cunning was rewarded and their
hate glutted. The clock struck the detonator, the dynamite exploded,
blew the building and the visitors into atoms. Standing in the ruined
public square, one sees nothing but that great shell pit where the earth
opened up its mouth and swallowed a monument builded to beauty and
grandeur. This other building, therefore, that stands in the city fifty
miles to the south of Bapaume is there for the sole reason that the
seven-day clock failed to explode the dynamite--not because of any love
of architecture that possessed the Germans. It is there to tell us that
some part of the mechanism of death failed to connect.

In analyzing the German mind nothing is more certain than the fact that
they lack a fine sense of humour and are often quite devoid of
imagination.

As for sculpture, nothing can be more hideous than the statues of the
fifteen Prussian kings that do not decorate, but simply vulgarize, the
avenue leading towards Magdeburg. The vast broad statue of Hindenburg,
to which the Germans come to drive nails and scratch their names in lead
pencils, reminds one of the occasional public buildings in this country
defaced by thoughtless and vulgar boys. Nor is there anything in the
world as ugly as the German sculptor's statue of the present Kaiser out
at Potsdam Palace, unless it be the statue of an Indian in front of a
tobacco store down in Smithville, Indian Territory, though even this is
doubtful. It hardly seems possible that one earth only 7,000 miles in
diameter could hold two statues as ugly as that of the Kaiser!

It is this singular lack of imagination and failure to understand the
beautiful that explains the systematic destruction by the German army of
the glorious cathedrals, the fourteenth century churches, libraries,
chateaux and hotels des villes that were the glory and beauty of France.

"If we cannot have these vineyards and orchards," said the Germans,
"Frenchmen shall not have them."

So they turned the land into a desert. Not otherwise the German seems to
feel that if he cannot build structures as beautiful as these glorious
buildings in France that he will not leave one of them standing.

Next to the Parthenon in Athens and St. Peter's in R