Mr. Punch’s History of the Great War
THE growing crescendo of success has reached Its climax in this, the most wonderful month of our annus mirabilis. Every day brings tidings of a new victory. St. Quentin, Cambrai, and Laon had all been recaptured in the first fortnight. On the 17th Ostend, Lille, and Douai were regained, Bruges was reoccupied on the 19th, and by the 20th the Belgian Army under King Albert, reinforced by the French and Americans, and with the Second British Army under General Plumer on the right, had compelled the Germans to evacuate the whole coast of Flanders. The Battle of Liberation, which began on the Marne in July, is now waged uninterruptedly from the Meuse to the sea. Only in Lorraine has the advance of the American Army been held up by the difficulties of the terrain and the exceptionally stubborn resistance of the Germans.
Elsewhere the "war of movement" has gone on with unrelenting energy according to Foch's plan, which suggests a revision of Pope:
Great Foch's law is by this rule exprest,
Prevent the coming, speed the parting pest.
The German, true to his character of the world's worst loser and winner, leaves behind him all manner of booby-traps, some puerile, many diabolical, which give our sappers plenty of work, cause a good many casualties, and only confirm the resolve of the victors.
According to a German paper—the Rhenish Westphalian Gazette—ex-criminals are being drafted into the German Army. But the Allies propose to treat them without invidious distinction. The Crown Prince recently observed that he had "many friends in the Entente countries"; as a matter of fact, we seem to be getting them at the rate of about twenty-five thousand a week. The criminals in the German Navy have again been busy, adding to their previous exploits the sinking of the passenger steamer Leinster, in the Irish Channel, with
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