“Their self-restraint and adaptability are beyond words.  These hundreds of honest people, just relieved from the domineering of the Master Swine, and restored to their own good France again, were neither hysterical nor exhausted.”  The names of the new German lines—­Wotan and Siegfried and Hunding—­are not without significance.  We accept the omen:  it will not be long before we hear of fresh German activities in the Goetterdaemmerung line.  Count Reventlow has informed the Kaiser that without victory a continuation of the Monarchy is improbable.  The “repercussion” of Revolution is making 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 quoque 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 of the Bath bun (official sealed pattern), would make a companion picture.  For the rest the House has been occupied with the mysteries of combing and re-combing.  The best War saying of the month was that of Mr. Swift MacNeill, in reference to proposed peace overtures, that it would be time enough to talk about peace when the Germans ceased to blow up hospital ships.