balloon. Here is a picture of the
surrender of Maubeuge, showing two of the 40,000 French prisoners. I can
usually paint better during a battle because there's nobody looking on
over my shoulder to distract my attention. I have about 140 sketches
done in all. His Majesty has most of them now, to pick out those he
wants painted. This sketch of a pretty young Frenchwoman is 'Mlle. Nix
zu Macken,' so nicknamed by some sixty-odd hungry but good-natured
Landsturm men quartered in a tavern of a French village, where she was
the only woman left. Every time they made signs indicative of a desire
for food she would laugh and say in near-German, 'Nix zu macken,' and
that's how she got her name."

Painter Vollbehr was authority for the following Kaiser anecdote:

"One day as the Kaiser was motoring along a chaussee he met a herd of
swine under the guardianship of a bearded Landsturm man, who drove them
rapidly to one side to keep them from being prematurely slaughtered by
the imperial auto. As the motor slowed up the Kaiser asked him if he was
a farmer by profession. 'No; professor of the University of Tubingen,'
came the answer, to the great amusement of the Over War Lord."

Human Documents of the War

Swift Reversal to Barbarism

By Vance Thompson.

[From The New York Sun, Sept. 13, 1914.]

I.

There is in Brussels--if the Uhlans have spared it--a mad and monstrous
picture. It is called "A Scene in Hell," and hangs in the Musee Wiertz.
And what you see on the canvas are the fierce and blinding flames of
hell; and amid them looms the dark figure of Napoleon, and around him
the wives and mothers and maids of Belgium scream and surge and clutch
and curse--taking their posthumous vengeance.

And since Napoleon was a notable Emperor in his time, the picture is not
without significance today. Paint in another face; and let it go at
that.

War is a bad thing. Even hell is the worse for it.

War is a bad thing; it is a reversal, sudden and complete, to barbarism.
That is what I would get at in this article. One day there is
civilization, authentic, complex, triumphant; comes war, and in a moment
the entire fabric sinks down into a slime of mud and blood. In a day, in
an hour, a cycle of civilization is canceled. What you saw in the
morning was suave and ordered life; and the sun sets on howling
savagery. In the morning black-coated men lifted their hats to women.
Ere nightfall they are slashing them with sabres and