The gorilla, Professor Beek explains, evidently admired only strength; whenever he said ``I make myself terrible to Man,’’ a sentence he often repeated, he drew himself up and thrust out his huge chest and bared his frightful teeth; and certainly, the Professor says, there was something terribly grand about the menacing brute. ``Me terrible,’’ he repeated again and again, ``Me terrible.  Sky, sun, stars with me.  Man love me.  Man love me.  No?’’ It meant that all the great forces of nature assisted him and his terrible teeth, which he gnashed repeatedly, and that therefore man should love him, and he opened his great jaws wide as he said this, showing all the brutal force of them.

There was to my mind a genuine ring in Professor Beek’s story, because he was obviously so much more concerned, and really troubled, by the dreadful depravity of this animal’s point of view, or mentality as he called it, than he was concerned with whether or not we believed what he had said.

And I mentioned that there was a circumstance in his story of a plausible and even corroborative nature.  It is this.  Professor Beek, who noticed at the time a bullet wound in the tip of the gorilla’s left ear, by means of which it was luckily identified, put his analysis of its mentality in writing and showed it to several others, before he had any way of accounting for the beast having such a mind.

Long afterwards it was definitely ascertained that this animal had been caught when young on the slopes of Kilimanjaro and trained and even educated, so far as such things are possible, by an eminent German Professor, a persona grata at the Court of Berlin.

The Home of Herr Schnitzelhaaser

The guns in the town of Greinstein were faintly audible.  The family of Schnitzelhaaser lived alone there in mourning, an old man and old woman.  They never went out or saw any one, for they knew they could not speak as though they did not mourn.  They feared that their secret would escape them.  They had never cared for the war that the War Lord made.  They no longer cared what he did with it.  They never read his speeches; they never hung out flags when he ordered flags:  they hadn’t the heart to.

They had had four sons.

The lonely old couple would go as far as the shop for food.  Hunger stalked behind them.  They just beat hunger every day, and so saw evening:  but there was nothing to spare.  Otherwise they did not go out at all.  Hunger had been coming slowly nearer of late.  They had nothing but the ration, and the ration was growing smaller.  They had one pig of their own, but the law said you might not kill it.  So the pig was no good to them.

They used to go and look at that pig sometimes when hunger pinched.  But more than that they did not dare to contemplate.

Hunger came nearer and nearer.  The war was going to end by the first of July.  The War Lord was going to take Paris on this day and that would end the war at once.  But then the war was always going to end.  It was going to end in 1914, and their four sons were to have come home when the leaves fell.  The War Lord had promised that.  And even if it did end, that would not bring their four sons home now.  So what did it matter what the War Lord said.