Epilogue by Imre Hofbauer:

"Since the Pyramids were built the lot of humanity has been continually improving. This process has been going on despite immense relapses. Among others, Xerxes, the Romans and the Torquemadas failed to suppress completely the spirit of Hellenism, of Christianity, of the Reformation, or of other life forces. On the other hand, it can be said that they helped actually to create or enhance these forces.

Let us hope that the present war, together with the events that preceded it, is one of the relapses, though more complex than all the others -indeed unique in all recorded history, owing to the vastness of the ordeal to countless millions of combattants and civilians alike, as well as to the unprecedented scale of the sufferings of the conquered and totalitarian subjects who happen to be of some different race, religious domination or political conviction from the usurpers.

Let us hope that the amassing of immense fortunes and the wielding of immense power by the few, the systematic persecution and extermination of defenceless minorities, and the attempt to suppress freedom of thought, may set in motion the impulses that will create a new Reformation in the broadest sense of the word.

Let us hope that in a world where there is plenty for all, the law of the jungle will cease to prevail.

Let us hope that the return to the "night of the long knives", the burning of books, the "yellow spot", bondage and torture will provide the ingredients of that great ferment from which the new world will evolve.

It is the desire of the maker of these drawings that the text of Compton Mackenzie and Faith Compton Mackienzie and his own presentation of some aspects of the present cataclysm may signify more than the efforts of those few whom H. W. Nevinson has termed "the stage army of the good".

Peregrine, London, 1941