“I SEE you can hold them up, but——”

The whole world sees that Germany can hold them up. Strength is concentrated first on one side, and then on the other, and at the time this cartoon was first published the little figure sitting up on the Western side watched, unmoved alike by German promises and German threats. It watched while the days of the Marne went by and proved that German efforts in the West would be confined to “holding up”—that the capture of Paris and of Calais were mere dreams that must pass unfulfilled. It watched the steady thrusting back of Russia, the apparent success in building an Eastern defense that could be held up indefinitely. Then it added its weight to the Western boulder, and the holding up process went on.

Neither boulder has yet fallen; the strong man is not yet exhausted, but the whole world knows what the end must be. Germany could not afford a mere defensive war—from the outset she knew that decision must be won in the first months, and that the alternative to this was defeat. This grim figure, bent on “holding up” the two main fronts, is typical of Germany to-day, a raging barbarian, wearying under the impossible task. For such a task there was needed not only physical strength, but spiritual strength, ideals as well as machinery, and soul as well as brain. By his methods of war this soulless barbarian has added to the weights that he must hold up; he has misinterpreted the meaning of civilization, misunderstood the aims common to humanity outside Germany. The weight that he must hold up and away is not merely that of Britain, Russia, France, and the rest of the Allies; it is the weight of all men who understand freedom rightly, steadily crushing freedom’s antithesis.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN.