ONE may characterize the figures in this cartoon as not altogether imaginary. In the villages behind the lines of the Somme, and in the tumbled country north of Verdun, there must be many such little homes as that in which the old man is pictured, homes befouled and desecrated by the presence of these hard-faced men who look on contemptuously while the old man listens. He and his kind know the voices of the guns, for they have heard them before. What memories of ’70 and his own fighting days must come to him and to all his kind as they wait the coming of the guns that shall drive out this scourge of France—this vileness that for nearly half a century has poisoned the life of all Europe, and on France especially has set an abiding mark? What hopes must be his for the day when Prussianism shall be no more than a vague name, and the sons of those sons of his who fight to-day shall work content in the knowledge that their fathers have freed them from this Damoclean threat?

How these people in the conquered territories have endured, how they have waited and hoped, even when there seemed no ground for hope, in the darkest of the days, we shall perhaps know when peace comes again. Yet even then we in Britain can never know all, for there is given to us a shield that France has never known—our shield, and in a measure our danger. For no man in Britain sits and listens for the guns that shall free his house and his land, and in that fact is possible lack of comprehension and consequent great danger; as once it has been, so it may be again.

Yet it may be that, when the stories of these old men behind the enemy lines are told, they will waken the whole of the world, not only to the need for destruction of such a thing as the militarism of Prussia, but to the knowledge that only the strong man armed may keep his house. Had all realized this in time——

Meanwhile, as this third year of the war ends, the guns that speak freedom come nearer.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN