It may be some satisfaction to his selfishness to know that the
monument to it cannot pass away, to know that the shell holes go too
deep to be washed away by the healing rains of years, to know that the
wasted German generations will not in centuries gather up what has
been spilt on the Somme, or France recover in the sunshine of many
summers from all the misery that his devilish folly has caused. It is
likely to be to such as him a source of satisfaction, for the truly
vain care only to be talked of in many mouths; they hysterically love
to be thought of, and the notice of mankind is to them a mirror which
reflects their futile postures. The admiration of fools they love, and
the praise of a slavelike people, but they would sooner be hated by
mankind than be ignored and forgotten as is their due. And the truly
selfish care only for their imperial selves.

Let us leave him to pass in thought from ruin to ruin, from wasted
field to field, from crater to crater; let us leave his fancy haunting
cemeteries in the stricken lands of the world, to find what glee he
can in this huge manifestation of his imperial will.

We neither know to what punishment he moves nor can even guess what
fitting one is decreed. But the time is surely appointed and the
place. Poor trifler with Destiny, who ever had so much to dread?

A Walk to the Trenches

To stand at the beginning of a road is always wonderful; for on all
roads before they end experience lies, sometimes adventure. And a
trench, even as a road, has its beginnings somewhere. In the heart of
a very strange country you find them suddenly. A trench may begin in