"In the pages of the daily press we are still cheered and comforted by accounts of the economic exhaustion of the Central European powers. These began very early in the war when a Sydney paper discovered four companies of Germans minus arms and ammunition, wandering in a wood outside Paris, chewing bark off the trunks of trees like the remarkable rabbits in the terrible tales told at the Back o' Beyond in the Days of Drought.

"Now the alleged lack of metal for munitions has a thousand rippling changes in the fashion of its telling. One of the latest is that in Austrian country homes kitchen pots and pans are being hidden away from diligent military metal foragers.

"Probably the next yarn we shall hear about this phenomenon will be that the aged Emperor of Austria-Hungary [Franz Joseph] has dug himself in under the cellar of one of his country houses where he resolutely clasps to his bosom [to defy the metal hunters] the kettle in which his old foster mother used to make his infantile porridge.

"There he defies the brutal tyranny of the military caste which has snatched the reins of power from his palsied hands, while the world turns for a moment from the brawling spectacle of war to look at this tragic figure of loneliness."