The correspondent of the Berlin Lokalanzeiger has, without knowing it,
shocked the whole world by his jaunty reference to " the great Corpse-Conversion Establishment " of an army group at Evergnicourt, where " nothing is to be allowed to go to waste." His seeming indifference to the final disposal of the poor " cannon- fodder" as pigs' food is the most dreadful touch in the horrible story. Respect for the dead is as old as the cave-men. When Antigone braved Creon's anger, rather than leave her brother Polyneices unburied, she obeyed a primitive instinct that, as. Sophocles makes us feel, was simply irresistible. In the Christian world and in the East, among Mohammedans and Buddhists and Hindus, the old and wholesome sentiment of respect for the bodies of the dead still persists as strongly as ever. It has been reserved for Germany, and Germany alone, to set the sentiment at defiance, and to convert her own brave dead to the basest uses. There must be something terribly wrong with a nation whose rulers can do such things, apparently without exciting the mildest: indignation.
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