o, of
the most despicable--murder for gain--the gain that should accrue
through the brutal terrorism of the act and its effect on the rest.

And, if deemed advisable to gloss the crime with some thin veneer of
imitation justice for the--unsuccessful--hoodwinking of a shocked and
astounded world, what easier than an unseen shot in some obscure corner
from a German rifle? Then--"Death to the hostages!--destruction to the
village!--a fine of L100,000 on the town!"

Those provocative shots from German rifles have surely been the most
profitably engineered basenesses in the whole war. They have
justified--but in German eyes only--every committable crime, and they
cost nothing--except the souls of their perpetrators.

"It's your money we want--and your land--and your property--and, if
necessary, your lives! You are weak--we are strong--and so----!" That is
the simple Credo of the Hun.

But for all these things there shall come a day of reckoning and the
account will be a heavy one.

May it be exacted to the full--from the rightful debtors!

"What have you done?" You have at all events put the rope round the
necks of your murderers, and the whole world's hands are at the other
end of it.

JOHN OXENHAM.

[Illustration: THE HOSTAGES

"Father, what have we done?"]

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KING ALBERT'S ANSWER TO THE POPE

The war has been singularly barren of heroic figures, perhaps because
the magnitude of the events has called forth such a multitude of
individually heroic acts that no one can be placed before the rest; yet,
when this greatest phase of history comes to be written down with
historic perspective, one figure--that of King Albert of Belgium--will
stand as that of a twentieth-century Bayard, a great knight without fear
and without reproach.

Action on such far-flung lines as those of the European conflict has
called for no great leaders in the sense in which that phrase has
applied to previous wars; no Napoleon has arisen, though William
Hohenzollern has aspired to Napoleonic dignity; war has become more
mechanical, more a matter of mathematics--and the barbarians of Germany
have made it more horrible. But, as if to accentuate German brutality
and crime, this figure of King Albert stands emblematic of the virtues
in which civilization is rooted; to the broken word of Germany it
opposes untarnish