A BITTER satire on the moral and intellectual claims of Germany. The conquering hero of the twentieth century and the bearer of Kultur is no mere Hun. He is a “throw-back” to an ancestral type far more remote than Attila, who was a comparatively polished person. He is primitive Man, not Rousseau’s imaginary l’homme naturel, but the Urmensch, a veritable monster, gross, bloated, abominable, compact of evil, and more repulsive than the wild beasts he has tamed to do his hideous will. They are monstrous creatures too, but dull and brutish. They are incapable of moral judgment; they follow their instincts and know no better. But he knows. He is Man, to whom has been given understanding and lordship over all the beasts. He is their master by reason of his superior brain, and that superiority is the measure of his depravity. By choosing these savage creatures to be his companions and to do his pleasure he proclaims himself far lower than they, because he might have chosen otherwise.

We know those favorite satellites of his. One flies overhead—a vulture with gore dripping from beak and claws. Two others walk behind their master in docile servitude and ape his bearing as well as their dull senses and uncouth forms allow. One is a gorilla, with bared fangs and the glare of senseless destructiveness in his eyes; the other is a whiskered wolf, sly, murderous and ruthless. They bear the hero’s train and wear the marks of approbation he has bestowed upon them for the services they have rendered by the exercise of the qualities proper to their kind.

And there is one other. Ever as he goes, there wriggles along by his side a snake—that old serpent, the devil and the father of lies.

So accompanied and swelling with pride the conquering hero swaggers on over the bleached bones that bear witness to his triumph. He has decked his repulsive form with the incongruous trappings of civilization, and his foul visage wears an air of ineffable self-satisfaction and arrogant disdain. In his own conceit he cuts a splendid figure and is the object of universal admiration. From his girdle hang the heads of his latest victims and in his right hand he carries, delicately poised as a scepter and sign of sovereignty, a cudgel tipped with the hand of a child hacked off at the wrist. This is his title of honor. The savage beasts that accompany him cannot aspire to such majesty; they do not prey on their own kind.

And that is how a neutral sees the German hero.

ARTHUR SHADWELL.