The World On Fire

Edward VII spoke English with an accent; and at the first hour of war with Germany we found the first Lord of the Admiralty a German Prince! Until this year England has never been at war with Germany in the course of history since the Conquest. Our very speech, half German, betrayeth us. All this is finished. The German is a Hun, and a Vandal, and a monster, and a woman-torturer, and a child-murderer, and runs away in his millions at the sight of a Territorial from Hoxton. And the British Army has won victory after victory against enormous odds, some sixtyfold, and some eightyfold, and some a hundredfold, and has retreated (for strategic purposes, luring the hosts of the Kaiser to their doom) nearly as fast as a frightened man can run, and exactly as fast as a victori- ous host can pursue them. Algerians, not only of Arab, but of negroid and even negro stock, have been hurled into the line; India has gushed out a venomous river of black troops — the des- perate Ghoorka, whose kukri is thrust upwards through the bowels, the Pathan, whose very women scavenge the battlefield to rob, murder, and foully mutilate the dead, the fierce Sikh, the lithe Panjabi, the Bengali even. Against the Boers we Englishmen did not dare em- ploy savage troops. Europe would have risen in arms at the abomination. Today we do it, because all armed Europe is already either for us or against us. And, with all that, we use the Japanese! Can we complain if the German papers say the that Kaiser is fighting for culture, for civilization, when the flower of the allied troops are black, brown, and yellow "hea- thens," the very folks whom we have stopped from hook-swinging, suttee, child-murder, human sacrifice, and cannibal feast? It is a lie. The Kaiser has always been, and is today, a man of peace. He has indeed lived up to the maxim Si vis pacem, para bellum and, loaded with the legacy of