Page:Mr. Punch's history of the Great War, Graves, 1919.djvu/174

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Mr. Punch's History of the Great War


itself felt. Even the Crown Prince is reported to have felt misgivings as to the infection of anti-monarchial ideas, and Mr. Punch is moved to forecast possibilities of upheaval:

Not that the Teuton's stolid wits
Are built to plan so rude a plot;
Somehow I cannot picture Fritz
Careering as a sans-culotte;
Schooled to obedience, hand and heart,
I can imagine nothing odder
Than such behaviour on the part
Of inoffensive cannon-fodder.

And yet one never really knows.
You cannot feed his massive trunk
On fairy tales of beaten foes,
Or Hindenburg's "victorious" bunk;
And if his rations run too short
Through this accursed British blockade,
Even the worm may turn and sport
A revolutionary cockade.

On the German Roll of Dishonour this month appears the name of one who has been grande et conspicuum nostro quo que tempore monstrum. Baron Moritz Ferdinand von Bissing, the German Military Governor-General of Belgium, who was largely responsible for the murder of Nurse Cavell and the chief instigator of the infamous Belgian deportations, after being granted a rest from his labours, is reported to have died "of overwork." Here for once we find ourselves in perfect agreement with the official German view. In a recent character sketch of the deceased Baron, the Cologne Gazette observed, "He is a fine musician, and his execution was good." It would have been.

The proceedings in Parliament do not call for extended comment. Mr. Asquith has handsomely recanted his hostility to women's suffrage, admitting that by their splendid services in the war women have worked out their own electoral salvation. An old spelling-book used to tell us that "it is agreeable to watch the unparalleled embarrassment of a harassed pedlar when gauging the symmetry of a peeled pear." Lord Devonport, occupied in deciding on the exact architecture and decoration

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