.

He came obedient to the Call;
He might have shirked like half his mates
Who, while their comrades fight and fall,
Still go to swell the football gates.

And you, a patriot in your prime,
You waved a flag above his head,
And hoped he'd have a high old time,
And slapped him on the back and said:

"You'll show 'em what we British are!
Give us your hand, old pal, to shake;"
And took him round from bar to bar
And made him drunk--for England's sake.

That's how you helped him. Yesterday,
Clear-eyed and earnest, keen and hard,
He held himself the soldier's way--
And now they've got him under guard.

That doesn't hurt you; you're all right;
Your easy conscience takes no blame;
But he, poor boy, with morning's light,
He eats his heart out, sick with shame.

What's that to you? You understand
Nothing of all his bitter pain;
You have no regiment to brand;
You have no uniform to stain;

No vow of service to abuse,
No pledge to KING and country due;
But he had something dear to lose,
And he has lost it--thanks to you.

* * * * *

UNWRITTEN LETTERS TO THE KAISER.

No. VI.

(_From Professor HERMANN MUeLLER, Ph.D., Private in the ----th Regiment
of Prussian Infantry._)

_Belgium._

YOUR MAJESTY,--I am one of your Majesty's most loyal and most faithfully
devoted subjects, and, if I now write to you, it is not because I doubt
for one moment that you are inspired in all your actions by a clearer
wisdom and a firmer grasp of facts than any that I can pretend to, but
because there are certain questions which obstinately press upon me to
such an extent that I must relieve my mind of them.

At the beginning I was a firm believer in the necessity of this war, and
in the perfect and not-to-be-shattered justice of our cause. I had read
all that there was to read: TREITSCHKE, NIETZSCHE, BERNHARDI, FROBENIUS
and a hundred others, from whose writings it can be most easily shown
that Germany alone among nations has the power and the will to expand
and to rule; that expansion and rule must be accomplished by war, which,
far from being a misfortune, is a noble object to be aimed at and not
avoided by statesmen; that all other nations are degenerate and must for
their own good be crushed by Germany; and that any nation which resists
Germany is through that very act an enemy of the human race. I also
believed