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Title: The "Land & Water" edition of Raemaekers' cartoons
Author: Louis Raemaekers
Illustrator: Louis Raemaekers
Contributor: Various
Release Date: March 26, 2023 [eBook #70380]
Language: English
Produced by: Brian Coe, Charlie Howard, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE "LAND & WATER" EDITION OF
RAEMAEKERS' CARTOONS ***
THE “LAND & WATER” EDITION OF
RAEMAEKERS’
CARTOONS
Published by “Land & Water,”
EMPIRE HOUSE, KINGSWAY, W.C.
Copyright in all Countries.
INTRODUCTION
By the Editor of _Land and Water_
Louis Raemaekers will stand out for all time as one of the supreme
figures which the Great War has called into being. His genius has
been enlisted in the service of mankind, and his work, being entirely
sincere and untouched by racial or national prejudice, will endure;
indeed, it promises to gain strength as the years advance. When the
intense passions, which have been awakened by this world struggle, have
faded away, civilisation will regard the war largely through these
wonderful drawings. By them, not only the methods of German warfare
will be judged, but the resolution will surely be begotten and nurtured
that never again, so far as it is humanly possible, shall a recurrence
of Teuton inhumanity and barbarism be permitted.
* * * * *
Before the war had been in progress many weeks the cartoons in the
Amsterdam _Telegraaf_ attracted attention in the capitals of Europe,
many leading newspapers reproducing them. The German authorities, quick
to realise their full significance, did all in their power to suppress
them. Through German intrigue Raemaekers has been charged in the Dutch
Courts with endangering the neutrality of Holland--and acquitted. A
price has been set on his head, should he ever venture over the border.
When only a week or two ago he crossed to England, his wife received
anonymous post-cards, warning her that his ship would certainly be
torpedoed in the North Sea. The _Cologne Gazette_, in a leading article
on Holland, threatens that country that “after the War Germany will
settle accounts with Holland, and for each calumny, for each cartoon of
Raemaekers, she will demand payment with the interest that is due to
her.” Not since Saul and the men of Israel were in the valley of Elah
fighting with the Philistines has so unexpected a champion arisen. With
brush and pencil this Dutch painter will do even as David did with the
smooth stone out of the brook; he will destroy the braggart Goliath,
who, strong in his own might, defies the forces of the living God.
When Mr. Raemaekers came to London in December, he was received by the
Prime Minister, and was entertained at a complimentary luncheon by the
Journalists of the British capital. Similar honour was conferred on him
on his second visit. He was the guest of honour at the Savage Club; the
Royal Society of Miniature Painters elected him an Honorary Member. But
it has been left to France to pay the most fitting recognition to his
genius and to his services in the cause of freedom and truth. The Cross
of the Legion of Honour has been presented to him, and on his visit to
Paris this month a special reception is to be held in his honour at La
Sorbonne, which is the highest purely intellectual reward Europe can
confer on any man.
* * * * *
The great Dutch cartoonist is now in his forty-seventh year. He was
born in Holland, his father, who is dead, having been the editor of a
provincial newspaper. His mother, who is still alive and exceedingly
proud of her son’s fame, is a German by birth, but rejoices that she
married a Dutchman and thus escaped from the debasing influences of
her native land. Mr. Raemaekers, who is short, fair, and of a ruddy
countenance, looks at least ten years younger than his age. He took up
painting and drawing when quite young and learnt his art in Holland and
in Brussels. All his life he has lived in his own country, but with
frequent visits to Belgium and Germany, where, through his mother,
he has many relations. Thus he knows by experience the nature of the
peoples whom he depicts.
For many years he was a landscape painter and a portrait painter, and
made money and local reputation. Six or seven years ago he turned his
attention to political work, and became a cartoonist and caricaturist
on the staff of the Amsterdam _Telegraaf_, thus opening the way to a
fame which is not only world-wide but which will endure as long as the
memory of the Great War lasts. His ideas come to him naturally and
without effort. Suggestions do not assist him; they hinder him when
he endeavours to act on them. He is an artist to his finger-tips and
throws the whole force of his being into his work. Some years ago he
married a Dutch lady, who is devoted to music, and they have three
children, two girls and a boy (the youngest); the eldest is now twelve.
Very happy in his home, Mr. Raemaekers has no ambitions outside it,
except to go on with his work and to continue the fight against the
German Evil. A Teuton paper has declared that Raemaekers’ cartoons are
worth at least two Army Corps to the Allies. This saying has pleased
him greatly; he only wishes they were worth four Army Corps.
The strong religious tendency which so often distinguishes his work
makes one instinctively ask to what Church does the artist belong. He
replies that he belongs to none, but was brought up a Catholic, and
his wife a Protestant, and the differences which in later life severed
each from their early teaching caused them to meet on common ground.
But the intense Christian feeling of these drawings is beyond cavil or
dispute: they again and again bring home to the heart the vital truths
of the Faith with irresistible force, and the artist ever expresses
the Christianity, not perhaps of the theologian, but of the honest and
kindly man of the world.
Praise has been bestowed upon his work by several German
papers--qualified praise. The _Leipziger Volkszeitung_ has declared
that Raemaekers’ cartoons show unimpeachable art and great power of
execution, but that they all lack one thing. They have no wit, no
spirit. Which is true--in a sense. They do lack wit--German wit; they
do lack spirit--German spirit. And what German wit and German spirit
may be one can comprehend by a study of Raemaekers’ cartoons.
* * * * *
The cartoons by Louis Raemaekers properly need no introduction, since
they explain themselves in every line. But it might be usefully pointed
out that, so far, our Fleet has saved us from actual sight of Germany’s
war methods. What shells and bombs we know have arrived from the blue,
lacking the personality of the despatchers. Raemaekers lives on the
other side of an electrified wire within a very short distance of
the slaughter-houses at work. He has dealt with people still bloody,
sweating, and dusty from their flight. He knows, or he knows friends
who know men and women dead or dishonoured, or in present peril of
murder or rape. He understands, as well as all his countrymen, that
Belgium is being vivisected on Holland’s doorstep, that Holland may
take warning. He is more than any resident in Great Britain _of_ that
tragedy. His evidence then is as unimpeachable as his art.
Raemaekers also realises in his presentments what we do not--that the
German foulness in war is an integral part of the German philosophy
of life, and when the armies give themselves up to their reasoned
abominations, it is no more than Germany going joyously to the
realisation of the depraved dreams which have been instilled into
its mind in peace. He does not lose his temper over the fact. His
line cuts as deeply as possible because he knows not only the visible
act, but the life-tendency which made the act inevitable. We do
not. We still keep the idea that certain things “are not done.” Our
geographical position prevents us feeling the pressure that keeps the
neutral nations quiet and useful to Germany. Our caricaturists only see
the outside of things. So it happens that we who would be most affected
by defeat are the least affected now in our own minds.
* * * * *
The abomination of frightfulness in Belgium recalls the sufferings
and degradations which English women and children endured nearly
sixty years ago when a section of the Indian army rebelled, and the
mutineers, being joined by certain disaffected Indian princes and
landowners, overcame small and isolated British communities and
perpetrated identically the same barbarities as have been deliberately
practised by the German troops during the present war. It was then
that Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the distinguished American essayist,
gave utterance to the following opinion in the _Atlantic Monthly_; it
is now embodied in his well-known work “The Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table.” Although the official voice of the United States has uttered no
such protest, there is reason to believe that these words written by an
American pen nine-and-fifty years ago do still represent the reasoned
opinion of the bulk of American men and women:
Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying
that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with
the higher? No matter who he was. Now look at what is going on in
India--a white, superior “Caucasian” race, against a dark-skinned,
inferior, but still “Caucasian” race--and where are English and
American sympathies? We can’t stop to settle all the doubtful
questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure to come
out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general law that
the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as it does
the same nature in the inferior animals--tame it, or crush it.
The Indian mail brings stories of women and children outraged and
murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers.
England takes down the Map of the World, which she has girdled with
empire, and makes a correction thus: Delhi, _Dele!_ The civilised
world says, Amen.
* * * * *
_Dele!_ Destroy utterly! Wipe off the face of the world--not Germany,
or the German capital, or the German people, but the German philosophy
of life as it has been expounded by its chief evangels, Treitschke,
Bernhardi, and others. _Dele!_ That should be the motto of each one
of us. It is the message which Louis Raemaekers speaks with the whole
strength of his genius. It has to be accomplished by the individual
in his own sphere; it is a duty which cannot be deputised. Germany
has proclaimed: “War is war; no treaty too sacred, no human right too
divine, no woman too weak, no babe too tender to escape from the blind,
brutal violence of war.” We must fight to the death. Either German
philosophy is to be established, and freedom of body, mind, and soul
crushed beneath the iron heel of Prussian Kultur, or else, at whatever
the cost, this fearful menace to the peace and liberty of nations and
individuals has to be destroyed root and branch. “I came not to send
peace but a sword,” said the Saviour. Are we, who boast ourselves
Christians and have heretofore rejoiced in Christianity, too weak or
too fearful in this day of battle to take up the Saviour’s sword and to
war for the eternal principles and ideals of right, justice, mercy, and
loving-kindness?
This struggle is not merely a matter for the fighting men. It has to be
carried into our counting-houses, our shops, our schools, and, if need
be, our homes. Wherever we encounter the insidious presence of Germany
and German ideas, there must they be overthrown, no matter how costly,
difficult, or disagreeable the work may prove personally. The German
has been taught that duty to his own State outweighs the laws of God
and man. To betray hospitality, to be false to both written and spoken
word, to be full of deceit, lying, and treachery--these are esteemed
honourable actions even in times of peace where German interests are
concerned by all her people from the Kaiser downwards. And the reverse
is equally true. They who are not Germans, and who refuse to subscribe
to the canons of Kultur, are reckoned beyond the pale of civilisation.
* * * * *
Nothing has been stated here which cannot be proved by independent
testimony. The literature of the war and of the events antecedent to
the war has grown apace, and this short prefatory note is not the place
to review it. But attention may be profitably drawn to the testimony,
borne by another neutral, to German methods. Dr. Anton Nyström, one
of the most distinguished sons of Sweden, a historian of high repute,
who has travelled widely throughout Europe, in his book “Before,
During, and After 1914,” written only last summer, establishes that
public feeling has been deliberately created in Germany during the
last fifty years that that country should assume the mastery of all
nations related to Germany without regard to material and historical
factors. And wherever this mastery has been assumed, whether in
Schleswig-Holstein, Poland, or Alsace and Lorraine, a systematic and
ruthless suppression of the mother-tongue has been attempted, and the
peoples have been persecuted for any tokens of affection for their own
nationality. As it has been, so it will be again, if Germany triumphs.
Furthermore, we know well to-day that the mastery of the Germanic
peoples was intended only to be the beginning of the mastery of the
world.
* * * * *
When complete these portfolios of Louis Raemaekers’ cartoons will
constitute the most marvellous record of the horrible realities of
this vast world-struggle, and will have a historical value which will
grow greater with time. Already the originals have been purchased, and
their present owners, in most instances, would not part with them for
ten times the price they have paid. It has been well said that no man
living amidst these surging seas of blood and tears has come nearer to
the rôle of Peacemaker than Raemaekers. The peace which he works for is
not a matter of arrangement between diplomatists and politicians: it
is the peace which the intelligence and the soul of the Western world
shall insist on in the years to be. God grant it be not long delayed,
but it can only come when the enemy is entirely overthrown and the
victory is overwhelming and complete.
FRANCIS STOPFORD,
EDITOR, _Land and Water_.
EMPIRE HOUSE,
KINGSWAY, LONDON.
_February, 1916._
[Illustration:
_Photograph by Miss D. Compton Collier._
Louis Raemaekers]
AN APPRECIATION FROM THE PRIME MINISTER
DOWNING STREET,
WHITEHALL, S.W.
Mr. Raemaekers’ powerful work gives form and colour to the menace
which the Allies are averting from the liberty, the civilisation and
the humanity of the future. He shows us our enemies as they appear to
the unbiassed eyes of a neutral, and wherever his pictures are seen
determination will be strengthened to tolerate no end of the war save
the final overthrow of the Prussian military power.
_Signed_ H. H. ASQUITH
These pictures, with their haunting sense of beauty and their biting
satire, might almost have been drawn by the finger of the Accusing
Angel. As the spectator gazes on them the full weight of the horrible
cruelty and senseless futility of war overwhelms the soul, and, sinking
helplessly beneath it, he feels inclined to assume the same attitude of
despair as is shown in “Christendom after Twenty Centuries.”
“War is war,” the Germans preached and practised, and no matter how
clement and correct may be the humanity of the Allies, we realise
through these pictures what the human race has to face and endure once
peace be broken. Is “Christendom after Twenty Centuries” to be even as
Christianity was in the first century--an excuse for the perpetration
of mad cruelties by degenerate Cæsars or Kaisers (spell it as you will)
at their games? Cannot the higher and finer attributes of mankind be
developed and strengthened without this apparently needless waste of
agony and life? Is human nature only to be redeemed through the Cross,
and must Calvary bear again and again its heavy load of human anguish?
One cannot escape from this inner questioning as one gazes on
Raemaekers’ cartoons.
FRANCIS STOPFORD
[Illustration: CHRISTENDOM AFTER TWENTY CENTURIES]
Were I privileged to have a hand at the Peace Conference, my
co-operation would take the part of deeds and I should only ask to
hang the walls of the council chamber with life-size reproductions
of Raemaekers in blood-red frames. For human memory is weak, and as
mind of man cannot grasp the meaning of a million, so may it well fail
to keep steadily before itself the measure of Belgium--the rape and
murder, the pillage and plunder, the pretences under which perished
women and priests and children, the brutal tyranny--the left hand that
beckoned in friendly fashion, the right hand, hidden with the steel.
We can very safely leave France to remember Northern France and Russia
not to forget Poland; but let Belgium and Serbia be at the front of the
British mind and conscience; let her lift her eyes to these scorching
pictures when Germany fights with all her cunning for a peace that
shall leave Prussia scotched, not killed.
Already one reads despondent articles, that the English tradition,
to forgive and forget, is going to wreck the peace; and students of
psychology fear that within us lie ineradicable qualities that will
save the situation for Germany at the end.
To suspect such a national weakness is surely to arm against it and see
that our contribution to the Peace Conference shall not stultify our
contribution to the War.
The Germans have been kite-flying for six months, to see which way the
wind blows; and when the steady hurricane broke the strings and flung
the kites headlong to earth, those who sent them up were sufficiently
proclaimed by their haste to disclaim.
But when the actual conditions are created and the new “Scrap of
Paper” comes to light, since German honour is dead and her oath in her
own sight worthless, let it be worthless in our sight also, and let
the terms of peace preclude her power to perjure herself again. Make
her honest by depriving her of the strength to be dishonest. There
is only one thing on earth the German will ever respect, and that is
superior force. May Berlin, therefore, see an army of occupation; and
may “peace” be a word banished from every Allied tongue until that
preliminary condition of peace is accomplished, and Germany sees other
armies than her own.
Reason has been denied speech in this war; but if she is similarly
banished from the company of the peace-makers, then woe betide the
constitution of the thing they will create, for a “stable peace” must
be the very last desire of those now doomed to defeat.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
[Illustration: A STABLE PEACE
THE KAISER: “And remember, if they do not accept, I deny altogether.”]
Some “neutrals,” and even some of the people here in England, still
doubt the reality of the German atrocities in Belgium, but Raemaekers
has seen and spoken with those to whom the scene depicted in this
cartoon is an ugly reality. One who would understand it to the full
must visualise the hands behind the thrusting rifle butts, and the
faces behind the hands, as well as the praying, maddened, despairing,
vengeful women of the picture--and must visualise, too, the men thrust
back another way, to wait _their_ fate at the hands of these apostles
of a civilisation of force.
Yet even then full realisation is impossible; the man whose pencil has
limned these faces has only caught a far-off echo of the reality, and
thus we who see his picture are yet another stage removed from the
full horror of the scene that he gives us. Not on us, in England, have
the rifle butts fallen; not for us has it chanced that we should be
shepherded “men to the right, women to the left”; not ours the trenched
graves and the extremity of shame. Thus it is not for us to speak, as
the people of Belgium and Northern France will speak, of the limits of
endurance, and of war’s last terrors imposed on those whom war should
have passed by and left untouched. We gather, dimly and with but a
tithe of the feeling that experience can impart, that these extremities
of shame and suffering have been imposed on a people that has done no
wrong, and we may gain some slight satisfaction from the thought that
to this nation is apportioned a share in the work of vengeance on the
criminals.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN
[Illustration: THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS
“We _must_ do everything in good order--so men to the right, women to
the left.”]
It is the most bestial part of this most bestial thing that it is
calculated and a matter of orders. The private soldier takes his share
of the loot, and is generally the instrument of the cold and ordered
killing; but it is the officer-class which most profits in goods, and
it is the higher command which dictates the policy. It was so in 1870.
It is much more so to-day.
This note of calculation is particularly to be seen in the fluctuations
through which that policy has passed. When the enemy was absolutely
certain of victory, out-numbering the invader by nearly two to one and
sweeping all before him, we had massacres upon massacres: Louvain,
Aerschot, the wholesale butchery of Dinant, the Lorraine villages
(and in particular the hell of Guébervilliers). Even at the very
extremity of his tide of invasion, and in the last days of it, came
the atrocities and destruction of Sermaize. In the very act of the
defeat which has pinned him and began the process of his destruction he
was attempting yet a further repetition of these unnameable things at
Senlis under the very gates of Paris.
Then came the months when he felt less secure. The whole thing was at
once toned down by order. Pillage was reduced to isolated cases, and
murder also. Few children suffered.
A recovery of confidence throughout his Eastern successes last summer
renewed the crimes. Poland is full of them, and the Serbian land as
well.
In general, you have throughout these months of his ordeal a regular
succession, of excess in vileness when he is confident, of restraint in
it when he is touched by fear.
This effect of fear upon the dull soul is a characteristic familiar
to all men who know their Prussian from history, particularly the
wealthier governing classes of Prussia. It is a characteristic which
those who are in authority during this war will do well to bear in
mind. Properly used, that knowledge may be made an instrument of
victory.
HILAIRE BELLOC
[Illustration: BERNHARDIISM
“It’s all right. If I hadn’t done it someone else might.”]
“Moreover, by the means of Wisdom I shall obtain immortality, and leave
behind me an everlasting memorial to them that come after me.
“I shall set the people in order, and the nations shall be subject unto
me.
“Horrible tyrants shall be afraid, when they do but hear of me; I shall
be found good among the multitude, and valiant in war.” (Wisdom viii.
13, 14, 15.)
* * * * *
Wisdom and Wisdom alone could have painted this terrible picture--the
most terrible perhaps which Raemaekers has ever done and yet the
simplest. That he should have dared to leave almost everything to the
imagination of the beholder is evidence of the wonderful power which
he exercises over the mind of the people. Each of us knows what is in
that goods-van and we shudder at its hideous hidden freight, fearing
lest it may be disclosed before our eyes. Wisdom is but another name
for supreme genius. So apposite are the verses which are quoted here
from “The Wisdom of Solomon” in the “Apocrypha” that they seem almost
to have been written on Louis Raemaekers.
Moreover, this picture brings home to all of us in the most forcible
manner possible the full reality of the horror of war.
FRANCIS STOPFORD
[Illustration: FROM LIÈGE TO AIX-LA-CHAPELLE]
The feature that will stamp Prussian War for ever, and make this group
of campaigns stand out from all others, is the _character_ of its
murder and pillage.
Of all the historical ignorance upon which the foolish Pacifist’s case
is founded, perhaps the worst is the conception that these abominations
are the natural accompaniment of war. They _have_ attached to war when
war was ill organised in type. But the more subject to rule it has
become, the more men have gloried in arms, the more they have believed
the high trade of soldier to be a pride, the more have they eliminated
the pillage of the civilian and the slaughter of the innocent from its
actions. Those things belong to violent passion and to lack of reason.
Modern war and the chivalric tradition scorned them.
The edges of the Germanies have, in the past, been touched by the
chivalric tradition: Prussia never. That noblest inheritance of
Christendom never reached out so far into the wilds. And to Germany,
now wholly Prussianised--which will kill us or which we shall
kill--soldier is no high thing, nor is there any meaning attached to
the word “Glorious.” War is for that State a business: a business only
to be undertaken with profit against what is certainly weaker; to be
undertaken without faith and with a cruelty in proportion to that
weakness. In particular it must be a terror to women, to children, and
to the aged--for these remain unarmed.
This country alone of the original alliance has been spared pillage. It
has not been spared murder. But this country, though the process has
perhaps been more gradual than elsewhere, is very vividly alive to-day
to what would necessarily follow the presence of German soldiery upon
English land.
HILAIRE BELLOC
[Illustration: SPOILS FOR THE VICTORS
“We must despoil Belgium if only to make room for our own culture.”]
If the highly organised enemy with whom we are at grips in a
life-and-death struggle would only play the war game in accordance with
the rules drawn up by civilised peoples, he would, indeed, command our
admiration no less than our respect. Never on this earth was there
such a splendid fighting machine as that “made in Germany.” The armies
against us are the last word in discipline, fitness, and equipment; and
are led by men who, born in barracks, weaned on munitions, have but one
aim and end in view--“World-Dominion or Downfall.”
As a matter of fact, instead of winning our admiration they have drawn
our detestation. Not content with brushing aside all international
laws of warfare, they have trampled upon every law, human and divine,
standing in their way of conquest. Indeed, Germany’s method of fighting
would disgrace the savages of Central Africa.
Prussianised Germany has the monopoly of “frightfulness.” When not
“frightful,” Prussians troopers are not living down to the instructions
of their War-lords to leave the conquered with nothing but eyes to
weep with. Not content to crucify Canadians, murder priests, violate
nuns, mishandle women, and bayonet children, the enemy torpedoes
civilian-carrying liners, and bombs Red Cross hospitals. More, sinning
against posterity as well as antiquity, Germans stand charged before
man and God with reducing to ashes some of the finest artistic output
of Christian civilisation. When accused of crimes such as these,
Germany answers through her generals: “The commonest, ugliest stone
put to mark the burial-place of a German grenadier is a more glorious
and venerable monument than all the cathedrals of Europe put together”
(General von Disfurth in _Hamburger Nachrichten_). “Thus is fulfilled
the well-known prophecy of Heine: ‘When once that restraining talisman,
the Cross, is broken ... Thor, with his colossal hammer, will leap up,
and with it shatter into fragments the Gothic cathedrals’” (_Religion
and Philosophy in Germany in the Nineteenth Century_).
What, I ask, can you do with such people but either crush or civilise
them?
The very stones cry out against them.
BERNARD VAUGHAN, S.J.
[Illustration: THE VERY STONES CRY OUT]
The cartoon bears the quotation from Bernhardi “War is as divine as
eating and drinking.” Yes; and German war is as divine as German
eating and drinking. Anyone who has been in a German restaurant during
that mammoth midday meal which generally precedes a sleep akin to a
hibernation, will understand how the same strange barbarous solemnity
has ruined all the real romance of war. There is no way of conveying
the distinction, except by saying vaguely that there is a way of
doing things, and that butchering is not necessary to a good army any
more than gobbling is necessary to a good dinner. In our own insular
shorthand it can be, insufficiently and narrowly but not unprofitably,
expressed by saying that it is possible both to fight and to eat like
a gentleman. It is therefore highly significant that Mr. Raemaekers
has in this cartoon conceived the devil primarily as a kind of ogre.
It is a matter of great interest that this Dutch man of genius, like
that other genius whose pencil war has turned into a sword, Will Dyson,
tends in the presence of Prussia (which has been for many moderns their
first glimpse of absolute or positive evil) to depriving the devil of
all that moonshine of dignity which sentimental sceptics have given
him. Evil does not mean dignity, any more than it means any other good
thing. The stronger caricaturists have, in a sense, fallen back on the
medieval devil; not because he is more mystical, but because he is more
material. The face of Raemaekers’ Satan, with its lifted jowl and bared
teeth, has less of the half-truth of cynicism than of mere ignominious
greed. The armies are spread out for him as a banquet; and the war
which he praises, and which was really spread for him in Flanders, is
not a Crusade but a cannibal feast.
G. K. CHESTERTON
[Illustration: SATAN’S PARTNER
BERNHARDI: “War is as divine as eating and drinking.”
SATAN: “Here is a partner for me.”]
The Germans have committed many more indefensible crimes than
the military execution of the kind-hearted nurse who had helped
war-prisoners to escape. They have murdered hundreds of women who
had committed no offence whatever against their military rules. But
though not the worst of their misdeeds, this has probably been the
stupidest. It gained us almost as many recruits as the sinking of the
_Lusitania_, and it made the whole world understand--what is unhappily
the truth--that the German is wholly destitute of chivalry. He knows
indeed that people of other nations are affected by this sentiment; but
he despises them for it. Woman is the weaker vessel; and therefore,
according to his code, she must be taught to know her place, which
is to cook and sew, and produce “cannon-fodder” for the Government.
Readers of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche will remember the advice given
by those philosophers for the treatment of women. Nietzsche recommends
a whip. It never occurred to German officialdom that the pedantic
condemnation of one obscure woman, guilty by the letter of their law,
would stir the heart of England and America to the depths, and steel
our soldiers to further efforts against an enemy whose moral unlikeness
to ourselves becomes more apparent with every new phase in the struggle.
THE DEAN OF ST. PAUL’S
[Illustration: THROWN TO THE SWINE
The Martyred Nurse.]
What does this cartoon suggest? I am asked and I ask myself. At first
very little, almost nothing, only uninteresting, ugly death, gloomy,
ghastly, dismal, but dull and largely featureless, blank and negative.
Has the artist’s power failed him? No, it is strongly drawn. Has his
inspiration? What does it mean? Is it indeed meant? As I gaze and pore
on it longer, I seem to see that it is just in this blank negation that
its strength and its suggestion lie. It is meant. It has meaning. A
blast has passed over this place, and this is its sequel; its derelict
rubbish.
It is death unredeemed, death with no very positive suggestion, with no
hint of heroism, none of heroic action, little even of heroic passion;
just death, helpless, hopeless, pointing to nothing but decomposition,
decay, disappearance, _anéantissement_, reduction of the fair frame
of life to nothingness. That is the peculiar horror of this war.
Were the picture, as it well might be, even more hideous, and did it
suggest something more definite, a story of struggle, say, recorded in
contortion, or by wounds and weapons, it might be better.
But men killed by machines, men killed by natural forces unnaturally
employed, are indeed a fact and a spectacle squalid, sorry, unutterably
sad.
All wars have been horrible, but modern wars are more in extremes.
Heroism is there, but not always. It is possible only in patches.
There is much of the mere sacrifice of numbers. Strictly, there are
scenes far worse than this, for death unredeemed is not the worst of
sufferings or of ills. But few are sadder. This is indeed war made
by those who hold it and will it to be “not a sport, but a science.”
There is no sport here. Men killed like this are like men killed by
plague or the eruption of a volcano. And, indeed, what else are they?
They are victims of a diseased humanity of the eruption--literal and
metaphorical--of its hidden fires. And wars will grow more and more
like this. What can stop them and banish these scenes? Only the hate of
hate, only the love that can redeem even such a sight as this when at
last we remember that it is for love’s sake only that flesh and blood
are in the last resort content to endure it.
HERBERT WARREN
[Illustration: THE LAND MINE]
“FOR YOUR MOTHERLAND”
England’s your Mother! Let your life acclaim
Her precious heart’s blood flowing in your heart;
Take ye the thunder of her solemn name
Upon your lips with reverence; play your part
By word and deed
To shield and speed
The far-flung splendour of her ancient fame.
England’s your Mother! Shall not you, her child,
Quicken the everlasting fires that glow
Upon your birthright’s altar? England smiled
Beside your cradle, trusting you to show,
With manhood’s might,
The undying light
That points the road her freeborn spirits go.
England’s your Mother! Man, forget it not
Wherever on the wide-wayed earth your fate
Calls you to labour; whatsoe’er your lot--
In service, or in power, in stress or state--
Whate’er betide,
With humble pride,
Remember! By your Mother you are great.
England’s your Mother! What though dark the day
Above the storm-swept frontier that you tread?
Her vanished children throng the glorious way:
A myriad legions of her living dead--
Those starry trains
That shared your pains--
Shall set their crown of light upon your head.
England’s your Mother! When the race is run
And you are called to leave your life and die,
Small matter what is lost, so this be won:
An after-glow of blessed memory,
Gracious and pure,
In witness sure
“England was this man’s Mother: he, her son.”
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
[Illustration: “My son, go and fight for your Motherland!”]
The bubble is very nicely balanced, for German “kultur,” which is in
reality but another word for “system” or “organisation,” rather than
that which English-speaking people understand by “culture,” has built
up a system of internal credit that shall ensure the correct balance
of the bubble--for just as long as the militarist policy of Germany
can endure the strain of war. But money alone is not sufficient for
victory; the peasant hard put to it to suppress his laugh, and the
crowned Germania that built up the paper pedestal of the bubble,
needed many other things to make that pedestal secure; there was
needed integrity, and the respect of neighbouring nations, and the
understanding of other points of view beside the doctrine of force, and
liberty instead of coercion of a whole nation, and many other things
that the older civilisations of Europe have accepted as parts of their
code of life--the things this new, upstart Germany has not had time to
learn. Thus, with the paper credit--and even with the gold reserve of
which Germany has boasted, the pedestal is but paper. And the winds
that blow from the flooded, corpse-strewn districts of the Yser, from
Artois, from Champagne and the Vosges hills and forests, and from the
long, long line of Russia’s grim defences--these winds shall blow it
away, leaving a nation bankrupt not only in money, but in the power to
coerce, in the power to inspire fear, and in all those things out of
which the Hohenzollern dynasty has built up the last empire of force.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN
[Illustration: THE GERMAN LOAN
“Don’t breathe on the bubble or the whole will collapse.”]
There are some English critics who have not yet considered so simple
a thing as that the case against horrors must be horrible. In this
respect alone this publication of the work of the distinguished foreign
cartoonist is a thing for our attention and enlightenment. It is the
whole point of the awful experience which has to-day swallowed up all
our smaller experiences, that we are in any case confronted with the
abominable; and the most beautiful thing we can hope to show is only
an abomination of it. Nevertheless, there is horror and horror. The
distinction between brute exaggeration and artistic emphasis could
hardly be better studied than in Mr. Raemaekers’ cartoon, and the use
he makes of the very ancient symbol of the wheel. Europe is represented
as dragged and broken upon the wheel as in the old torture; but the
wheel is that of a modern cannon, so that the dim background can be
filled in with the suggestion of a wholly modern machinery. This is a
very true satire; for there are many scientific persons who seem to
be quite reconciled to the crushing of humanity by a vague mechanical
environment in which there are wheels within wheels. But the inner
restraint of the artist is suggested in the treatment of the torment
itself; which is suggested by a certain rending drag in the garments,
while the limbs are limp and the head almost somnolent. She does not
strive nor cry; neither is her voice heard in the streets. The artist
had not to draw pain but to draw despair; and while the pain is old
enough the particular despair is modern. The victim racked for a
creed could at least cry “I am converted.” But here even the terms of
surrender are unknowable; and she can only ask “Am I civilised?”
G. K. CHESTERTON
[Illustration: EUROPE, 1916
“Am I not yet sufficiently civilised?”]
The Next to be Kicked Out--Dumba’s Master
Uncle Sam is no longer the simple New England farmer of a century ago.
He is rich beyond calculation. His family is more numerous than that
of any European country save Russia. His interests are world-wide, his
trade tremendous, his industry complex, his finance fabulous. Above
all, his family is no longer of one race. The hatreds of Europe are
not echoed in his house; they are shared and reverberate through his
corridors. It is difficult, then, for him to take the simple views of
right and wrong, of justice and humanity, that he took a century ago.
He is tempted to balance a hundred sophistries against the principles
of freedom and good faith that yet burn strongly within him. He is
driven to temporise with the evil thing he hates, because he fears, if
he does not, that his household will be split, and thus the greater
evil befall him. But those that personify the evil may goad him once
too often. Dumba the lesser criminal--as also the less dexterous--has
betrayed himself and is expelled. When will Bernstorff’s turn come?
That it will come, indeed _must_ come, is self-evident. The artist
sees things too clearly as they are not to see also what they will be.
He therefore skips the ignoble interlude of prevarication, quibble,
and intrigue, and gives us Uncle Sam happy at last in his recovered
simplicity. So we see him here, enjoying himself, as only a white man
can, in a whole-hearted spurning of lies, cruelty, and murder.
Note that Bernstorff--the victim of a gesture “fortunately rare amongst
gentlemen”--is already in full flight through the air, while Uncle
Sam’s left foot has still fifteen inches to travel. The promise of an
added velocity indicates that the flight of the unmasked diplomatist
will be far. The sketched vista of descending steps gives us the
satisfaction of knowing that the drop at the end will be deep. Every
muscle of our sinewy relative is tense, limp, and projectile--the
mouthpiece of Prussia goes to his inevitable end. There is no need of a
sequel to show him shattered and crumpled at the bottom of the stairway.
ARTHUR POLLEN
[Illustration: THE NEXT TO BE KICKED OUT--DUMBA’S MASTER]
The Friendly Visitor
Raemaekers is never false, and he never works for effect alone. That
is what makes him so terrible to the people he criticises, and so
effective.
When he wants to depict the sturdy Dutch soul he draws a sturdy Dutch
Body--ready to defend her home. No flags, no highfalutin, no symbolical
figure posed for show; just cleanliness, determination, and good sense
facing bestiality and oppression.
The figure that stands for the Freedom of the Home opposed to the
figure that stands for the Freedom of the Seas.
Many an Englishman might take this picture to heart.
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE
[Illustration: THE FRIENDLY VISITOR
THE GERMAN: “I come as a friend.”
HOLLAND: “Oh, yes. I’ve heard that from my Belgian sister.”]
“To Your Health, Civilisation!”
This terrible cartoon points its own lesson so forcibly that its effect
is more likely to be weakened than strengthened by any verbal comment.
Death quaffs a goblet of human blood to the health of Civilisation.
Death has never enjoyed such a carnival of slaughter before, and it is
Civilisation that has made the holocaust possible. The comparatively
simple methods of killing employed by barbarians could not have
destroyed so many lives; nor could barbarian states have raised such
huge armies. The artist makes us feel that such a war as this is an act
of moral madness, a disgrace to our common humanity. It is true that
some of the nations engaged are guiltless, and others almost guiltless;
but there is a solidarity of European civilisation which obliges us all
to share the shame and sorrow of this monstrous crime. Universal war is
the _reductio ad absurdum_ of false political theories and false moral
ideals; and the _reductio ad absurdum_ is the chief argument which
Providence uses with mankind. Perhaps it is the only argument which
mankind in the mass can understand.
THE DEAN OF ST. PAUL’S
[Illustration: “TO YOUR HEALTH, CIVILISATION!”]
Fox Tirpitz Preaching to the Geese
There is nothing more pathetic in some ways to-day than the position
of the small neutral countries in Europe, and especially those which
directly adjoin Germany. And there is nothing more galling than the
inability of the Allies to give them any help. For the hour they are
absolutely at the mercy of Germany, or would be, if she had any,
and they know it. They are certainly liable and exposed to all her
flouts and cuffs and to any displays of bad temper or bullying or
terrorism it may please her to exercise. And none perhaps is worse
off in this respect than Holland. It suits Germany to be fairly civil
to Switzerland, who could give her a good deal of trouble by joining
France and Italy; and no doubt it suits her too to some extent to
consider Denmark, for Denmark commands the entrance to the Baltic;
and, further, Germany does not wish to bring all Scandinavia down
upon herself just at present. That can wait; but Holland is in the
worst plight of all. She has the terrible spectacle of Belgium, ruined
and ravaged just on the other side of the way. And she has a very
considerable and valuable mercantile marine.
The great and good Germany cannot be troubled to distinguish between
Dutch and other boats, and if occasionally a Dutch ship is captured or
sent to the bottom, it is a useful reminder of what she might do to her
“poor relation” if she really let herself go. Fighting for the freedom
of the seas! Holland has fought for them herself. Holland has a great
naval tradition. She knows quite well what England has been and is.
She knows too, and can see, how her sons and brothers in South Africa
were treated by the British in England’s last war, and how they regard
England and Germany now.
Raemaekers’ cartoon is very skilful. If we had not seen it done, we
should not have believed it possible to produce at once so clever a
likeness of von Tirpitz and so excellent an old fox. But the goose is
by no means a foolish bird, though its wisdom may sometimes be shown
in knowing its own weakness. It was they, and not the watch-dogs, that
saved the Capitol. In old days it was the custom to call the Germans
the “High Dutch” and the inhabitants of Holland the “Low Dutch.” It
was a geographical distinction. The contrast in moral elevation is the
other way.
HERBERT WARREN
[Illustration: FOX TIRPITZ PREACHING TO THE GEESE
“You see, my little Dutch geese, I am fighting for the freedom of the
seas.”
(The Germans illegally captured several Dutch ships.)]
The Prisoners
A vile feature of German “frightfulness” is this: that she mixes poison
with her prisoners’ rations. Not content with starving their bodies,
she hides truth from them and floods their minds with lies. Those in
command--officers, educated men, claiming the service of their soldiers
and civil guard and the respect of their nation--deliberately hash a
daily meal of falsehood and serve up German victories and triumphs
on land and sea as sauce to the starvation diet of their defenceless
captives.
In the earlier months of the war, while yet the spiritual slough
into which Germany had sunk was unguessed, and the mixture of child
and devil exemplified by “frightfulness” continued unfathomed, these
daily lies undoubtedly answered their cowardly purpose, cast down the
spirit of thousands, and added another pang to their captivity. But
our armies know better now, and those diminishing numbers likely to be
taken prisoner in the future see the end more clearly than the foe can.
Lies will be met with laughter henceforth, for our enemies have put
themselves beyond the pale. They may starve and insult our bodies; but
their power to poison our brains has passed from them for ever. We know
them at last. They have spun a web of barbed villainy between their
souls and ours; and the evil committed for one foul purpose alone--to
terrify free men and break the spirit of the sons of liberty--has
produced results far different and created a situation more terrible
for them than for their outraged enemies.
For in this matter of misrepresentation and lying, born of Prussia and
by her spoon-fed pack of martinets, professors, and Churchmen, mingled
with Germany’s daily bread for a generation, it is she and not we who
will reap the whirlwind of that sowing; it is she and not we who must
soon pant and tear the breast in the pangs of the poison.
Between the mad and the sane there can be only one victor; and when the
time comes, may Germany’s robe of repentance be a strait-waistcoat of
the Allies’ choosing. For she has drunk deep of the poison, and those
who anticipate a speedy cure will be as mad as she. When the escaped
tigress is back in her cage, men look to the bars, for none wants a
second mauling.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
[Illustration: THE PRISONERS]
It’s Unbelievable
I am not sure that in this cartoon of Raemaekers the most pleasing
detail is not the servant’s right eye. You will observe in that
servant’s right eye an expression familiar in those who overhear this
sort of comment upon the peculiar bestialities of the Prussian in
Belgium and Poland, this extenuation of his baseness. When the war
was young the opportunity for giving that glance was commoner than it
is now. There were many even in a belligerent country who would tell
you in superior fashion how foolishly exaggerated were the so-called
“atrocities.” The greater number of such men (and women) talked of
“two Germanies”--one the nice Germany they knew and loved so well,
and the other apparently nasty Germany which raped, burned, stole,
broke faith, tortured, and the rest. Their number has diminished. But
there is a little lingering trace of the sort of thing still to be
discovered: men and women who hope against hope that the Prussian will
really prove good at heart after all. And it is usually just after
some expression of the kind that the most appalling news arrives with
a terrible irony to punctuate their folly. It reminds one a little of
the man in the story who was sure that he could tame a wild cat, and
was in the act of recording its virtues when it flew in his face. To an
impartial observer who cared nothing for our sufferings or the enemy’s
vices, there would be something enormously comic in the vision of these
few remaining (for there are still some few remaining) that approach
the wild beast with soothing words and receive as their only reward
a very large bomb through the roof of their house, or the news that
someone dear to them has been murdered on the high seas. But to those
actively suffering in the struggle the comic element is difficult to
seize, and it is replaced by indignation. This fantastic misconception
of the thing that is being fought is bound to be burned right out by
the realities of the enemy acts in belligerent countries. It will be
similarly destroyed--and that in no very great space of time--in all
neutral countries as well. Prussia will have it so. She is allowing no
moral defence to remain for her future. It is almost as though the men
now directing her affairs lent ear carefully to every word spoken in
praise of them abroad, and met it at once by the tremendous denial of
example. It is almost as though the Prussian felt it a sort of personal
insult to receive the praise of dupes and fools, and perhaps it is.
HILAIRE BELLOC
[Illustration: IT’S UNBELIEVABLE
DUTCH OFFICER: “How can they have soiled their hands by such
atrocities?”
SHE: “Can they have done it, my dear? German officers are so nice.”]
Kreuzland, Kreuzland über Alles
This war has produced examples of every kind of misery which human
beings can inflict upon each other, except one. Europe has mercifully
been spared long sieges of populous towns, ending in the surrender of
the starving population. But many towns and villages have been burnt;
and masses of refugees have fled before the invader, knowing too
well the brutal treatment which they had to expect if they remained.
Very many of the unhappy Belgians have taken refuge in Holland; a
considerable number have found an asylum in this country. They are
homeless and ruined; if the war were to end to-morrow, many of them
would not know where to go or how to live. Families have been broken
up; husbands and wives, parents and children, are ignorant of each
other’s fate. In this picture we see a crowd of children, herded
together like a flock of sheep, with nobody to take care of them.
Their _via dolorosa_ is marked by long rows of crosses on either side,
emblems of suffering, death, and sacrifice. In the distance rise the
smoke and flames from one of the innumerable incendiary fires which
the Germans, like the cruel banditti of the Middle Ages, have kindled
wherever they go.
THE DEAN OF ST. PAUL’S
[Illustration: KREUZLAND, KREUZLAND ÜBER ALLES
BELGIUM, 1914: “Where are our fathers?”]
The Ex-Convict
Prussia in every war has betrayed that peculiar mark of barbarism
consisting in using the intellectual weapons of a superior, but not
knowing how to use them. It is still a matter of mystery to the
directing Prussian mind why the sinking of the _Lusitania_ should have
shocked the world. A submarine cannot take a prize into port. The
_Lusitania_ happened to be importing goods available in war, therefore
the _Lusitania_ must be sunk. All the penumbræ of further consideration
which the civilised man weighs escape this sort of logic. Similarly,
the Prussian argues, if an armed man is prepared to surrender,
convention decrees that his life should be spared. Therefore, if an
armed man be just fresh from the murder of a number of children, he
has but to cry “Kamerad” to be perfectly safe. And Prussia foams at
the mouth with indignation whenever this strict rule of conduct is
forgotten in the heat of the moment. The use of poison in the field
which Prussia for the first time employed (and reluctantly compelled
her civilised opponents to reply to) is in the same boat. A shell
bursts because solid explosive becomes gaseous. To use shell which in
bursting wounds and kills men is to use gas in war; therefore if one
uses gas in the other form of poison, disabling one’s opponent with
agony, it is all one. Precisely the same barbaric use of logic--which
reminds one of the antics of an animal imitating human gestures--will
later apply to the poisoning of water supplies, or the spreading of
an epidemic. It is soldierly and excites no contempt or indignation
to strike at your enemy with a sword or shoot a pellet of lead at
him in such a fashion that he dies. What is all this foolish pother
about killing him with bacilli in his cisterns or with a drop of
poison in his tea? Men in war have burned groups of houses with the
torch in anger or for revenge. Why distinguish between that and the
methodical sprinkling of petroleum from a hose by one gang and the
equally methodical burning of the whole town house by house with little
capsules of prepared incendiary stuff? The rule always applies--but
only against the opponent: never to oneself. From that attitude of mind
the Prussian will never emerge. We shall, please God, see that mood
in all its beauty in later stages of the war, when the coercion of
the Prussian upon his own soil leads to acts indefensible by Prussian
logic. We have already had a taste of this sort of reasoning when the
royalties fled from Karlsruhe and when the murderers upon the sinking
Zeppelin received the reward due to men who boast that they will not
keep faith.
HILAIRE BELLOC
[Illustration: THE EX-CONVICT
“I was a ‘lifer,’ but they found I had many abilities for bringing
civilisation amongst our neighbours, so now I am a soldier.”]
Miss Cavell
Most of the English caricaturists are much too complimentary to the
German Emperor. They draw his moustaches, but not his face. Now his
moustaches are exactly what he, or the whole Prussian school he
represents, particularly wishes us to look at. They give him the fierce
air of a fighting cock; and however little we may like fierceness,
there will always be a certain residual respect for fighting, even in
a cock. Now the Junker moustache is a fake; almost as much so as if it
were stuck on with gum. It is, as Mr. Belloc has remarked, curled in a
machine all night lest it should hang down. Raemaekers, in the sketch
which shows the Kaiser as waiting for Nurse Cavell’s death to say, “Now
you can bring me the American protest,” has gone behind the moustache
to the face, and behind the face to the type and the spirit. The
Emperor is not commanding in a lordly voice from a throne, but with a
leer and behind a curtain. In the few lines of the lean unnatural face
is written the real history of the Hohenzollerns, the kind of history
not often touched on in our comfortable English humour, but common
to the realism of Continental art: the madness of Frederick William,
the perversion of Frederick the Great, the hint, mingled with subtler
talents, of the mere idiocy that seems to have flowered again in the
last heir of that inhuman house. The Hohenzollerns have varied from
generation to generation in many things and like many families; some
of them have been tyrants, some of them geniuses, some of them merely
boobies; but they have shared in something more than that hereditary
policy which has been the poison in Christendom for two hundred years.
There is a ghost who inhabits these perishing tenements, and in such a
picture as this of Raemaekers’ men can see it looking out of the eyes.
And it is neither the spirit of a tyrant nor of a booby; but the spirit
of a sly invalid.
G. K. CHESTERTON
[Illustration: MISS CAVELL
WILLIAM: “Now you can bring me the American protest.”]
The Hostages
Ay, boy--you may well ask.
And the world asks also, and in due time will exact an answer--to the
last drop of innocent blood.
What have you done?
You have fallen into the hands of the most scientifically organised
barbarism the world has ever seen, or, please God, ever will see--to
whom, of deliberate choice, such words as truth, honour, mercy,
justice, have become dead letters, by reason of the pernicious
doctrines on which the race has been nourished--by which its very soul
has been poisoned.
Dead letters?--worn-out rags, the very virtues they once represented,
even in Germany, long since flung to the dust-heaps of the past in the
soulless scramble for power and a place in the sun which no one denied
her.
Deliberately, and of malice prepense, the military caste of Prussia has
taught, and the unhappy common-folk have accepted, that as a nation
they are past all that kind of thing. There is only one right in the
world--the might of the strongest. The weak to the wall! Make way for
the Hun, whose god is power, and his high-priests the Kaiser and the
Krupps.
And so, every nation, even the smallest, on whom the eye of the
Minotaur has settled in baleful desire, has said, “Better to die
fighting than fall into the hands of the devil!” And they have
fought--valiantly, and saved their souls alive, though their bodies may
have been crushed out of existence by overwhelming odds. As nations,
however, they shall rise again, and with honour, when their treacherous
torturers have been crushed in their turn.
And, wherever the evil tide has welled over a land, indemnities,
incredible and unreasonable, have been exacted, and hostages for their
payment, and for good behaviour under the yoke meanwhile, have been
taken.
Woe unto such! In many cases they have simply been shot in cold
blood--murdered as brazenly as by any Jack-the-Ripper. Murder, too,
of the most despicable--murder for gain--the gain that should accrue
through the brutal terrorism of the act and its effect on the rest.
And, if deemed advisable to gloss the crime with some thin veneer of
imitation justice for the--unsuccessful--hoodwinking of a shocked and
astounded world, what easier than an unseen shot in some obscure corner
from a German rifle? Then--“Death to the hostages!--destruction to the
village!--a fine of £100,000 on the town!”
Those provocative shots from German rifles have surely been the
most profitably engineered basenesses in the whole war. They have
justified--but in German eyes only--every committable crime, and they
cost nothing--except the souls of their perpetrators.
“It’s your money we want--and your land--and your property--and, if
necessary, your lives! You are weak--we are strong--and so----!” That
is the simple Credo of the Hun.
But for all these things there shall come a day of reckoning and the
account will be a heavy one.
May it be exacted to the full--from the rightful debtors!
“What have you done?” You have at all events put the rope round the
necks of your murderers, and the whole world’s hands are at the other
end of it.
JOHN OXENHAM
[Illustration: THE HOSTAGES
“Father, what have we done?”]
King Albert’s Answer to the Pope
The war has been singularly barren of heroic figures, perhaps because
the magnitude of the events has called forth such a multitude of
individually heroic acts that no one can be placed before the rest;
yet, when this greatest phase of history comes to be written down with
historic perspective, one figure--that of King Albert of Belgium--will
stand as that of a twentieth-century Bayard, a great knight without
fear and without reproach.
Action on such far-flung lines as those of the European conflict has
called for no great leaders in the sense in which that phrase has
applied to previous wars; no Napoleon has arisen, though William
Hohenzollern has aspired to Napoleonic dignity; war has become more
mechanical, more a matter of mathematics--and the barbarians of Germany
have made it more horrible. But, as if to accentuate German brutality
and crime, this figure of King Albert stands emblematic of the virtues
in which civilisation is rooted; to the broken word of Germany it
opposes untarnished honour; to the treacherous spirit of Germany it
opposes inviolable truth; to the relentless selfishness of Germany it
opposes the vicarious sacrifice of self, of a whole country and nation
for the sake of a principle. And, in later days, men will remember how
this truly great king held steadfastly to the little portion of his
kingdom that the invasion left him; how he remained to inspirit his
men by noble example, stubbornly rejecting peace without honour, and
holding, when all else was wrecked, to the remnants of that army which
saved Europe in the gateway of Liége. Amid violation, desecration, and
destruction, Albert of Belgium has won imperishable fame.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN
[Illustration: KING ALBERT’S ANSWER TO THE POPE
“With him who broke his word, devastated my country, burned my
villages, destroyed my towns, desecrated my churches, and murdered my
people, I will not make peace before he is expelled from my country and
punished for his crimes.”]
The Gas Fiend
There is an order of minds that intuitively distrusts Science, detracts
from the force of her achievements, and contends that devotion to
machinery ends by making men machines. Many who argue thus have
fastened on Germany’s new war inventions as proof that Science makes
for materialism and opposes the higher values of humanity and culture.
This is special pleading, for against the destructive forces discovered
and liberated by German chemists in this war, one has only to consider
the vast amelioration of human life for which modern science has to be
thanked. Because art has been created to evil purpose, shall we condemn
pictures, or statues? Because the Germans have employed gas poisons in
warfare, are we to condemn the incalculable gifts of organic chemistry?
Look at the eye of Louis Raemaekers’ snake. That is the answer. It is
the force behind this application of it that has brought German Science
to shame. A precious branch of human knowledge has been prostituted
by lust of blood and greed of gain until Science, in common with all
learning, comes simply to be regarded by the masters of Germany as one
more weapon in the armoury, one more power to help win “The Day.” Every
culture is treated in their alembic for the same purpose.
We may picture the series of experiments that went to perfection
of their poison gas; we may see their Higher Command watching the
death of guinea-pig, rabbit, and ape with increasing excitement
and enthusiasm as the hideous effects of their discovery became
apparent. Be sure an iron cross quickly hung over the iron heart that
conceived and developed this filthy arm; for does it not offer the
essence--quintessence of all “frightfulness”? Does it not challenge
every human nerve-centre by its horror? Does it not, once proclaimed,
by anticipation awake those very emotions of dread and dismay that make
the stroke more fatal when it falls?
These people pictured their snake paralysing the enemy into frozen
impotence; the floundering Prussian psychology that cuts blocks
with a razor and regards German mind as the measure of all mind,
anticipated that poison gas would appeal to British and French as it
had appealed to them. But it was not so. Their foresight gave them an
initial success in the field; it slew a handful of men with additions
of unspeakable agony--and rekindled the execration and contempt of
Civilisation.
As an arm, poison gas cannot be considered conspicuously successful,
since it is easily countered; but for the Allies it had some value,
since it weighted appreciably the scale against Germany in neutral
minds and added to the universal loathing astir at the heart of the
world. Only fear now holds any kingdom neutral: there is not an
impartial nation left on earth.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
[Illustration: THE GAS FIEND]
The German Tango
A blonde woman, wearing the Imperial crown and with her hair braided
in pigtails like a German _backfisch_, is whirling in the tango with a
skeleton partner. Her face is livid with terror and fatigue, her limbs
are drooping, but she is held by inexorable bony claws. On the feet of
the skeleton are dancing pumps, a touch which adds to the grimness.
This ghoulish dance does not lack its element of ghastly ceremonial.
The Dance of Death has long been the theme of the moralist in art, from
Orcagna’s fresco on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa to Holbein’s
great woodcuts and our own Rowlandson. In Germany especially have
these _macabre_ imaginings flourished. The phantasmagoria of decay has
haunted German art, as it haunted Poe, from Dürer to Boecklin. But the
mediæval Dance of Death was stately allegory, showing the pageant of
life brooded over by the shadow of mortality. In M. Raemaekers’ cartoon
there is no dignity, no lofty resignation. He shows Death summoned in
a mad caprice and kept as companion till the revel becomes a whirling
horror.
It is the profoundest symbol of the war. In a hot fit of racial pride
Death has been welcomed as an ally. And the dance on which Germany
enters is no stately minuet with something of tragic dignity in it. It
is a common modern vulgar shuffle, a thing of ugly gestures and violent
motions, the true sport of degenerates. Once begun there is no halting.
From East to West and from West to East the dancers move. There is no
rest, for Death is a pitiless comrade. From such a partner, lightly
and arrogantly summoned, there can be no parting. The traveller seeks
a goal, but the dancers move blindly and aimlessly among the points of
the compass. Death, when called to the dance, claims eternal possession.
JOHN BUCHAN
[Illustration: THE GERMAN TANGO
“From East to West and West to East I dance with thee!”]
The Zeppelin Triumph
When the future historian gives to another age his account of all that
is included in German “frightfulness,” there is no feature upon which
he will dilate more emphatically than the extraordinary use made by the
enemy of their Zeppelin fleet. In the experience we have gained in the
last few months we discover that the Zeppelins are not employed--or, at
all events, not mainly employed--for military purposes, but in order
to shake the nerves of the non-combatant population. The history of
the last few Zeppelin raids in England is quite sufficient testimony
to this fact. London is bombarded, although it is an open city, and a
large amount of damage is done to buildings wholly unconnected with
the purposes of the war. The persons who are killed are not soldiers,
they are civilians; the buildings destroyed are not munition works, but
dwelling-houses, and some of the points of attack are theatres.
The same thing has happened in the provinces. In the last raid over the
Midlands railway stations were destroyed, some breweries were injured,
but, with exceedingly few exceptions, munition works and factories for
the production of arms were untouched. Here again the victims are not
either soldiers or sailors, or even workmen employed in turning out
instruments of war, but peaceable citizens and a large proportion of
women and children.
Some such act of brutality is illustrated in the accompanying cartoon.
A private house has been attacked, the mother has been killed, the
father and child are left desolate. The little daughter at her father’s
knee, who cannot understand why guiltless people should suffer,
asks the importunate question whether her mother had done anything
wrong to deserve so terrible a fate. To the childish mind it seems
incomprehensible that aimless and indiscriminate murder should fall on
the guiltless.
Indeed the mother had done no wrong. She only happened to belong to one
of the nations who are struggling against a barbaric tyranny. In that
reckless crusade which the Central Powers are waging against all the
higher laws of morality and civilisation, some of the heaviest of the
blows fall on the defenceless. It is this appalling inhumanity, this
godless desire to maim and wound and kill, which nerves the arms of the
Allies, who know that in a case like this they are fighting for freedom
and for the Divine laws of mercy and loving-kindness.
And it is for the young especially that the war is being waged, young
boys and young girls like the motherless child in the picture, in order
that they may inherit a Europe which shall be free from the horrible
burden of German militarism, and be able to live useful lives in peace
and quietness. No, little girl, mother did no wrong! But we should be
guilty of the deepest wrong if we did not avenge her death and that of
other similar victims by making such unparalleled crimes impossible
hereafter.
W. L. COURTNEY
[Illustration: THE ZEPPELIN TRIUMPH
“But Mother had done nothing wrong, had she, Daddy?”]
Keeping Out the Enemy
The Prussian turns everything to account, from the scrapings of the
pig-trough to the Austrian Emperor.
The Bavarian lists, the Saxon lists, the Austrian lists--these are all
only indications of injuries to the Prussian’s life-saving waistcoat.
If this war is to be a war to the last penny and the last man, the last
Austrian will die before the last Saxon, the last Saxon before the last
Bavarian, the last Bavarian before the last Prussian--and the last
Prussian will not die: he will live to clutch at the last penny.
And the pity of it is that the Austrian is quite a good fellow, the
Saxon is a decent sort of man, the Bavarian is chiefly a brute in
drink, whilst the Prussian--we all know what the Prussian is, the black
centre of hardness, the incarnation of the shady trick, and the very
complex soul of mechanical efficiency.
The Hohenzollern here makes a sandbag of the Hapsburg, of whom Fate has
already made a football.
Fate has always been behind the Hapsburg for his own sins and those of
his house. She has made him kneel at last.
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE
[Illustration: “You see how I manage to keep the enemy out of _my_
country!”]
The German Offer
The German claim--not the Austrian nor the Turk, for the alliance
following Germany is to be allowed little force--is that, the
civilisation of Europe now being defeated, a Roman pride may be
generous to the fallen. Before modern Germany is routed, as may be seen
in the features of its citizens, the nobility of its public works, and
the admirable, restrained, and classic sense of its literature, this
generosity to a humbled world will take the form of letting nations,
of right independent, enjoy some measure of freedom under a German
suzerainty. In the matter of property the magnanimous descendants
of Frederick and William the Great will restore the machines which
cannot be wrenched from their concrete beds, and the walls of the
manufactories. More liquid property, such as jewellery, furniture,
pictures--and coin--it will be more difficult to trace. In any case,
Europe may breathe again, though with a shorter breath than it did
before Germany conquered at the Marne.... This is the majestic vision
which the subtle diplomats of Berlin present to the admiration of the
neutral Powers, happily free from wicked passions of war, and not
blinded, as are the British, French, Russians, Italians, Belgians, and
the Serbians, by petty spite. Their audience, their triple audience,
is part of Greece, some of the public of Spain, and sections of that
of the United States. To the French and the British armies in the
West, to the Russians in the East, and to the Italians upon their
frontiers, the terms appear insufficient. Therein would seem to lie
the gravity of Prussia’s case. These belligerent Powers will go so
far as to demand more than the mere restoration of stolen property,
from cottage furniture to freedom. And their anger has risen so high
that they even propose to make the acquirer of these goods suffer very
bitterly indeed. What plea he will then raise under discomforts more
serious than those he has caused to the peasants of Flanders and of
Poland, and how those pleas will affect his neutral audience, will have
no effect whatever on the result of the war, or on his own unpleasing
fate. Those appeals will have a certain interest, however, because we
know from the past that the German mind is unstable. Within fifteen
short months it proposed the annihilation of the French armies and the
occupation of Paris. It failed. It next offered terms upon suffering
defeat. It withdrew them. It next made certain at least of a conquest
of Russia, failed again, offered terms again, withdrew them again; was
directed to the blockading of England, failed; thought Egypt better,
and then changed its mind. It was but yesterday in the mood that this
cartoon suggests; to-morrow its mood will have utterly changed again,
probably to a whine, perhaps to a scream. Such instability is rare in
the history of nations which propose a conquest of others, and it is a
very poor furniture for the mind.
HILAIRE BELLOC
[Illustration: THE GERMAN: “If you will let me keep what I have, I will
let _you_ go.”]
The Wolf Trap
The wolf is not perhaps the beast by which one would most wish one’s
country to be represented. But the wolf, like every animal when
defending its dearest, and when assailed with treachery, has its
nobility. And the Roman she-wolf certainly has had in all ages her
dignity and her force.
“Thy nurse will hear no master,
Thy nurse will bear no load,
And woe to them that spear her,
And woe to them that goad.
When all the pack loud baying
Her bloody lair surrounds,
She dies in silence biting hard
Amidst the dying hounds.”
Italy certainly calls not only for our sympathy, but for our
admiration. She has had a very difficult course to steer. The ally for
so long of Germany and Austria, if owing them less and less as time
went on, it was difficult for her to break with them. But the day came
when she had to break with them, and once again “act for herself.” She
told them a year ago she would be a party to no aggressive or selfish
war, she would be no bully’s accomplice. She “denounced”--it is a good
word--such a compact. _Non haec in fœdera veni._
Then it was, when the she-wolf showed her teeth, that they offered
to give her what was her own. But what would the Trentino be worth
if Germany and Austria were victorious? No, the wolf is right, “she
must fight for it,” and behind Austria’s underhanded treachery stands
Germany’s open violence and guns.
And Italy loves freedom. This war is a war made by her people. As of
old her King and her diplomats go with them in this new _Resorgimento_.
And the she-wolf must beware the trap. She needs the spirit again not
only of her people and of Garibaldi and of Victor Emmanuel, but of
Cavour. And she has it.
The cartoon suggests all the elements of the situation. The wolf
ponders with turned head, half doubtful, half desperate. The poor
little cub whimpers pitifully. The hunters dissemble their craft, the
trap waits in the path ready to spring. It is not even concealed. Is
that the irony of the artist, or is it only due to the necessity of
making his meaning plain? Whichever it is, it is justified.
HERBERT WARREN
[Illustration: THE WOLF TRAP
“You would make me believe that I shall have my cub given back to me,
but I know I shall have to fight for it.”]
Ahasuerus II.
The legend of the Wandering Jew obsessed the imagination of the Middle
Age. The tale, which an Armenian bishop first told at the Abbey of St.
Albans, concerned a doorkeeper in the house of Pontius Pilate--or, as
some say, a shoemaker in Jerusalem--who insulted Christ on His way
to Calvary. He was told by Our Lord, “I will rest, but thou shalt go
on till the Last Day.” Christendom saw the strange figure in many
places--at Hamburg and Leipsic and Lubeck, at Moscow and Madrid, even
at far Baghdad. Goodwives in the little mediæval cities, hastening
homeward against the rising storm, saw a bent figure posting through
the snow, with haggard face and burning eyes, carrying his load of
penal immortality, and seeking in vain for “easeful death.” There is a
profound metaphysic in such popular fancies. Good and evil are alike
eternal. Arthur and Charlemagne and Ogier the Dane are only sleeping
and will yet return to save their peoples; and the Wandering Jew
staggers blindly through the ages, seeking the rest which he denied to
his Lord.
In George Meredith’s “Odes in Contribution to the Song of French
History” there is a famous passage on Napoleon. France, disillusioned
at last,
“Perceives him fast to a harsher Tyrant bound;
Self-ridden, self-hunted, captive of his aim;
Material grandeur’s ape, the Infernal’s hound.”
That is the penalty of mortal presumption. The Superman who would
shatter the homely decencies of mankind and set his foot on the world’s
neck is himself bound captive. He is the slave of the djinn whom he
has called from the unclean deeps. There can be no end to his quest.
Weariness does not bring peace, for the whips of the Furies are in his
own heart.
The Wandering Jew of the Middle Age was a figure sympathetically
conceived. He had still to pay the price in his tortured body, but his
soul was at rest, for he had repented his folly. Raemaekers in his
cartoon follows the conception of Gustave Doré rather than that of
the old fabulists. The modern Ahasuerus has no surety of an eventual
peace. We have seen the German War Lord flitting hungrily from Lorraine
to Poland, from Flanders to Nish, watching the failure of his troops
before Nancy and Ypres, inditing grandiose proclamations to Europe,
prophesying a peace which never comes. He is a figure worthy of Greek
tragedy. The [Greek: hubris] which defied the gods has put him outside
the homely consolations of mankind. He has devoted his people to the
Dance of Death, and himself, like some new Orestes, can find no solace
though he seek it wearily in the four corners of the world.
JOHN BUCHAN
[Illustration: AHASUERUS RETURNS.
“Once I drove the Christ out of my door; now I am doomed to walk
from the Northern Seas to the Southern, from the Western shores to
the Eastern mountains, asking for Peace, and none will give it to
me.”--_From the Legend of the “Wandering Jew.”_]
Our Candid Friend
The position of Holland and Denmark is one of excruciating anxiety to
the citizens of those countries. They know that the Allies are fighting
the battle of their own political existence, but they are so hypnotised
with well-founded terror of the implacable tyrant on their flank that
they are not only bound to neutrality, but are afraid to express their
sympathies too plainly. Dutch editors have been admonished and punished
under pressure from Berlin; the brilliant artist of these cartoons is
in danger on his native soil. A leading German newspaper has lately
announced that “we will make Holland pay with interest for these
insults after the war.” A German victory would inevitably be followed
in a few years by the disappearance from the map of this gallant and
interesting little nation, our plucky rival in time past, our honoured
friend to-day. No nation has established a stronger claim to maintain
its independence, whether we consider the heroic and successful
struggles of the Dutch for religious and political liberty, their
triumphs in discovery, colonisation, and naval warfare, their unique
contributions to art, or the manly and vigorous character of their
people. It is needless to say that we have no designs upon any Dutch
colony!
THE DEAN OF ST. PAUL’S
[Illustration: OUR CANDID FRIEND
GERMANY, TO HOLLAND: “I shall have to swallow you up, if only to
prevent those English taking your colonies.”]
Peace and Intervention
Here is pictured a grim fact that the Peace cranks would do well to see
plainly. The surgeon who is operating on a cancer case cannot allow
himself to be satisfied with merely the removal of the visible growth
which is causing such present agony to the patient. He must cut and
cut deep, must go beyond even the visible roots of the disease, slice
down into the clear, firm flesh to make sure and doubly sure that he
has cut away the last fragment of the tainted tissues. Only by doing
so can he reasonably hope to prevent a recurrence of the disease and
the necessity of another operation in the years to come. And so only
by carrying on this war until the last and least possibility of the
taint of militarism remaining in the German system is removed can
the Allies be satisfied that their task is complete. Modern surgery
has through anæsthetics taken away from a patient the physical pain
of most operations, but modern War affords no relief during its
operation. That, however, can be held as no excuse for refusing to
“use the knife.” What would be said of the surgeon who, because an
operation--a life-saving operation--was causing at the time even the
utmost agony, stayed his hand, patched up the wound, was content only
to stop the momentary pain, and to leave firm-rooted a disease which
in all human probability would some time later break out again in all
its virulence? What would be said of such a surgeon is only in lesser
degree what would be said by posterity of the Allies if they consented
or were persuaded to apply the bandage and healing herbs of Peace to
the disease of Militarism, to make a surface cure and leave the living
tentacles of the disease to grow again deep and strong. But here at
least the doctors do not disagree. Once and for all the Ally surgeons
mean to make an end to Militarism. The sooner the Peace cranks and
Germany realise that the sooner the operation will be over.
BOYD CABLE
[Illustration: PEACE AND INTERVENTION--GERMAN MILITARISM ON THE
OPERATING-TABLE
“For the sake of the world’s future we must first use the knife.”]
Little Red Riding Hood
If you wish to see the position of Holland look at the map of Europe as
it was before August 4th, 1914, and the map of Europe as it is to-day.
In 1914 Holland lay overshadowed by the vast upper jaw-bone of
a monster--Prussia--a jaw-bone reaching from the Dollart to
Aix-la-Chapelle.
In August and September, 1914, Prussia, by the seizure of Belgium,
developed a lower jaw-bone reaching from Aix-la-Chapelle to Cassandria
on the West Schelde. To-day Holland lies gripped between these two
formidable mandibles that are ready and waiting to close and crush her.
For years and years Prussia has been waiting to devour Holland. Why?
For the simple reason that Holland is rich in the one essential thing
that Prussia lacks--coast-line.
Look again at the map and see how Holland and Belgium together
absolutely wall Prussia in from the sea. Belgium has been taken on by
Prussia; if we do not tear that lower jaw from Prussia, Holland will be
lost, and the sea-power of England threatened with destruction.
The ruffian with the automatic pistol waiting behind the tree requires
the life as well as the basket of the little figure advancing towards
him.
He has been in ambush for forty years.
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE
[Illustration: LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD
Germany lying in wait for Holland.]
The Sea Mine
When Raemaekers pictures Von Tirpitz to us, he does so with savage
scorn. He is not the hard-bitten pirate of story--but a senile,
crapulous, lachrymose imbecile; an object of derision. He fits more
with one of Jacobs’s tales of longshore soakers, than with the
tragedies that have made him infamous. But when he draws Von Tirpitz’s
victims, the touch is one of almost harrowing tenderness. The Hun is
a master of many modes of killing, but however torn, or twisted, or
tortured he leaves the murdered, Raemaekers can make the dreadful
spectacle bearable by the piercing dignity with which he portrays the
dead. In none of these cartoons is his _sæva indignatio_ rendered with
more sheer beauty of design, or with a craftsmanship more exquisite,
than in this monument to the sea-mined prey. The symbolism is perfect,
and of the essence of the design. The dead sink slowly to their
resting-place, but the merciful twilight of the sea veils from us the
glazed horror of the eyes that no piety can now close. Even the dumb
senseless fish shoots from the scene in mute and terrified protest,
while from these poor corpses there rise surfaceward the silver bubbles
of their expiring breath. One seems to see crying human souls prisoned
in these spheres. And it is, indeed, such sins as these that cry to
Heaven for vengeance. Blood-guiltiness must rest upon the heads of
those that do them, upon the heads of their children--aye, and of their
children’s children too. This exquisite and tender drawing is something
more than the record of inexpiable crime. It is a prophecy. And the
prophecy is a curse.
ARTHUR POLLEN
[Illustration: THE SEA MINE]
“Seduction”
The cartoon in which the Prussian is depicted as saying to his bound
and gagged victim, “Ain’t I a lovable fellow?” is one of the most
pointed and vital of all pictorial, or indeed other, criticisms on
the war. It is very important to note that German savagery has not
interfered at all with German sentimentalism. The blood of the victim
and the tears of the victor flow together in an unpleasing stream.
The effect on a normal mind of reading some of the things the Germans
say, side by side with some of the things they do, is an impression
that can quite truly be conveyed only in the violent paradox of the
actual picture. It is exactly like being tortured by a man with an
ugly face, which we slowly realise to be contorted in an attempt at an
affectionate expression. In those soliloquies of self-praise which have
constituted almost the whole of Prussia’s defence in the international
controversy, the brigand of the Belgian annexation has incessantly
said that his apparent hardness is the necessary accompaniment of his
inherent strength. Nietzsche said: “I give you a new commandment: Be
hard.” And the Prussian says: “I am hard,” in a prompt and respectful
manner. But, as a matter of fact, he is not hard; he is only heavy. He
is not indifferent to all feelings; he is only indifferent to everybody
else’s feelings. At the thought of his own virtues he is always ready
to burst into tears. His smiles, however, are even more frequent and
more fatuous than his tears; and they are all leers like that which
Mr. Raemaekers has drawn on the face of the expansive Prussian officer
in the arm-chair. Compared with such an exhibition, there is something
relatively virile about the tiger cruelty which has occasionally
defaced the record of the Spaniard or the Arab. But to be conquered by
such Germans as these would be like being eaten by slugs.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
[Illustration: SEDUCTION
“Ain’t I a lovable fellow?”]
Murder on the High Seas
The recent descent of so many of her citizens from the people now
warring in Europe has of necessity prevented America from looking
on events in Europe with a single eye. But the predominant American
type and the predominant American frame of mind are still typified by
the lithe and sinuous figure of the New England pioneer. It is his
tradition to mind his own business, but it is also his business to
see that none of the old monarchies make free with his rights or with
his people. And he stands for a race that has been cradled in wars
with savages. No one knows better the methods of the Apache and the
Mohawk, and when women and children fall into such pitiless hands as
these, it goes against the grain with Uncle Sam to keep his hands off
them, even if the women and children are not his own. He would like
to be indifferent if he could. He would prefer to smoke his cigar,
and pass along, and believe those who tell him that it is none of his
affair. But when he does look--and he cannot help looking--he sees a
figure of such heavy bestiality that his gorge rises. He must keep his
hands clenched in his pockets lest he soils them in striking down the
blood-stained gnome before him.
Can he restrain himself for good? That angry glint in his eye would
make one doubt it. Here, surely, the artist sees with a truer vision
than the politician. And if Uncle Sam’s anger does once get the better
of him, if doubts and hesitations are ever thrust on one side, if he
takes his stand where his record and his sympathies must make him wish
to be, then let it be noted that this base butcher stands dazed and
paralysed by the threat.
ARTHUR POLLEN
[Illustration: MURDER ON THE HIGH SEAS
“Well, have you nearly done?”]
Ad Finem
Ay,--to your end!--to your end amid the execrations of a ravaged world!
Through all the ages one other only has equalled you in the betrayal of
his trust. May your sin come home to you before you go, as did his! May
his despair be yours! It is most desperately to be regretted that no
personal suffering on your part, in this life at all events, can ever
adequately requite you for the desolations you have wrought.
Outrage on outrage thunders to the sky
The tale of thy stupendous infamy,--
Thy slaughterings,--thy treacheries,--thy thefts,--
Thy broken pacts,--thy honour in the mire,--
Thy poor humanity cast off to sate thy pride;--
’Twere better thou hadst never lived,--or died
Ere come to this.
I heard a great Voice pealing through the heavens,
A Voice that dwarfed earth’s thunders to a moan:--
_Woe! Woe! Woe, to him by whom this came!
His house shall unto him be desolate.
And, to the end of time, his name shall be
A byword and reproach in all the lands
He rapined.... And his own shall curse him
For the ruin that he brought.
Who without reason draws the sword--
By sword shall perish!
The Lord hath said.... So be it, Lord!_
JOHN OXENHAM
[Illustration: TO THE END
WAR AND HUNGER: “Now you must accompany us to the end.”
THE KAISER: “Yes, to my end.”]
“U’s”
It is the essence of great cartooning to see things simply, and to
command the technical resources that shall show the things, so simply
seen, in an infinite variety of aspects. No series of Raemaekers’
drawings better exemplifies his quality in both these respects than
those which deal with Germany’s sea crimes.
In the cartoon before us the immediate message is of the simplest. The
Kaiser counts the head of British merchantmen sunk. Von Tirpitz counts
the cost. But note the subtlety of the personation and environment.
The Kaiser has those terrible haunted eyes that have marked the seer’s
presentment of him from quite an early stage of the war. There can be
no ultimate escape from the dreadful vision that has set the seal of
despair on this fine and handsome visage. He is shown, not as a sea
monster, but as some rabid, evasive, impatient thing, dashing from
point to point--as from policy to policy--with the angry swish that
tells the unspoken anger failure everywhere compels. For the victories
do not bring surrender, nor does frightfulness inspire terror. The
merchant ships still put to sea--and the U boats pay the penalty.
The futility of this campaign of murder is typified by making von
Tirpitz, its inventor, an addle-headed seahorse, the nursery comedian
of the sea. Stupid and ridiculous bewilderment stares from his foolish
eyes. Another submarine has failed to find a safe victim in a trading
ship, but has been hoisted with its own sea petard. The impotence of
the thing!
This conference of the Admirals of the Atlantic, held in the sombre
depths, is a biting satire, in its mingled comedy and tragedy, on the
effort to win command of the sea from its bottom.
ARTHUR POLLEN
[Illustration: “U’S”
HIS MAJESTY: “Well, Tirpitz, you’ve sunk a great many?”
TIRPITZ: “Yes, sire, here is another ‘U’ coming down.”]
Mater Dolorosa
You thought to grasp the world; but you shall keep
Its crown of curses nailed upon your brow.
You that have fouled the purple, broke your vow,
And sowed the wind of death, the whirlwind you shall reap.
Shout to your tribal god to bless the blood
Of this red vintage on the poisoned earth;
Clash cymbals to him, leap and shout in mirth;
Call on his name to stay the coming, cleansing flood.
We are no hounds of heaven, nor ravening band
Of earthly wolves to tear your kingdom down.
We stand for human reason; at our frown
The coward sword shall fall from your accursed hand.
We do not speak of vengeance; there shall run
No little children’s blood beneath our heel.
No pregnant woman suffers from our steel;
But Justice we shall do, as sure as set of sun.
Or short, or long, the pathway of your feet,
Stamped on the faces of the innocent dead,
Must lead where tyrant’s road hath ever led.
Alone, O perjured soul, your Justice you shall meet.
No sacrifice the balance of her scale
Can win; no gift of blood and iron can weigh
Against this one mad mother’s agony:
In her demented cry a myriad women wail.
The equinox of outraged earth shall blaze
And flash its levin on your infamous might.
Man cries to fellow-man; light leaps to light,
Till foundered, naked, spent, you vanish from our gaze.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
[Illustration: MATER DOLOROSA]
“Gott strafe Italien!”
When Italy, still straining at the leash which held her, helpless, to
the strange and unnatural Triplice, began to show signs of awakening
consciousness, Germany’s efforts to lull her back to the unhappy
position of silent partner in the world-crime were characteristic of
her methods. Forthwith Italy was loaded with compliments. The country
was overrun with “diplomats,” which is another name in Germany for
spies. Bribery of the most brazen sort was attempted. The newspapers
recalled in chorus that Italy was the land of art and chivalry, of song
and heroism, of fabled story and manly effort, of honour and loyalty.
Hark to the _Hamburger Fremdenblatt_ of February 21st, 1915:--
“The suggestion is made that Italy favours the Allies.
Preposterous! Even though the palsied hand of England--filled with
robber gold--be held out to her, Italy’s vows, Italy’s sense of
obligation, Italy’s _word once given_, can never be broken. Such a
nation of noblemen could have no dealings with hucksters.”
Germany is, indeed, a fine judge of a nation’s “word once given” and
a nation’s “vows,” which its Chancellor unblushingly declared to be
mere scraps of paper. Now let us see what the _Hamburger Nachrichten_
had to say about Italy immediately after her secession from the Triple
Alliance:--“_Nachrichten_, June 1st, 1915.--That Italy should have
joined hands with the other noble gentlemen, our enemies, is but
natural. It would, of course, be absurd--where all are brigands--were
the classical name of brigandage not included in the number.... We
do not propose to soil our clean steel with the blood of such filthy
Italian scum. With our cudgels we shall smash them into pulp.”
“_Gott strafe Italien_” indeed! Bombs on St. Mark’s in Venice, on the
Square of Verona, on world treasures unreplaceable. The poisoned breath
of Germany carries its venom into the land of sunshine and song, whose
best day’s work in history has been to wrest itself free from the grip
of the false friend.
RALPH D. BLUMENFELD
[Illustration: “GOTT STRAFE ITALIEN!”]
Serbia
Serbia has suffered the fate of Belgium. Germany and Austria, with
Bulgaria’s aid, have plunged another little country “in blood and
destruction.” Another “bleeding piece of earth” bears witness to the
recrudescence of the ancient barbarism of the Huns. Serbia’s wounds,
“Like dumb mouths,
Do ope their ruby lips,”
to beg for vengeance on “these butchers.” Turkey, whom the artist
portrays as a hound lapping up the victim’s blood, is fated to share
the punishment for the crime. But the prime instigator is the German
Emperor, whose Chancellor, with bitter irony, claims for his master
the title of protector of the small nationalities of Europe. Herr von
Bethmann-Hollweg can on occasion affect the mincing accents of the wolf
when that beast seeks to lull the cries of the lamb in its clutches.
The German method of waging war has rendered “dreadful objects so
familiar” that the essential brutality of the enemy’s activities
runs a risk of escaping at times the strenuous denunciation which
Justice demands. But the searching pencil of Mr. Raemaekers brings
home to every seeing eye the true and unvarying character of Teutonic
“frightfulness.” All instincts of humanity are cynically defied on the
specious ground of military necessity. Mr. Raemaekers is at one with
Milton in repudiating the worthless plea:
“So spake the fiend, and with necessity,
The tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deeds.”
SIR SIDNEY LEE
[Illustration: OCTOBER IN SERBIA
The Austro-German-Bulgarian attack on Serbia began in October, which in
Holland is called the “butcher’s month,” as the cattle are then killed
preparatory to the winter.]
“Just a moment--I’m coming”
Here is a drawing that ought to be circulated broadcast throughout
Australia and New Zealand, that ought to hold a place of honour on the
walls of their public chambers; should hang in gilded frames in the
houses of the rich; be pinned to the rough walls of frame-house and
bark humpy in every corner of “The Outback.” It should thrill the heart
of every man, woman, and child Down Under with pride and thankfulness
and satisfaction, should even bring soothing balm to the wounds of
those who in the loss of their nearest and dearest have paid the
highest and the deepest price for the flaming glory of the Anzacs in
Gallipoli.
Here in the artist’s pencil is a monument to those heroes greater than
pinnacles of marble, of beaten brass and carven stone; a monument that
has travelled over the world, has spoken to posterity more clearly,
more convincingly, and more rememberingly than ever written or
word-of-mouth speech could do. It is to the everlasting honour of the
people of the Anzacs that they refrained from echoing the idle tales
which ran whispering in England that the Dardanelles campaign was a
cruel blunder, that the blood of the Anzacs’ bravest and best had been
uselessly spilt, that their splendid young lives had been an empty
sacrifice to the demons of Incompetence and Inefficiency. To those in
Australia who in their hearts may feel that shreds of truth were woven
in the rumours--that the Anzacs were spent on a forlorn hope, were
wasted on a task foredoomed to failure--let this simple drawing bring
the comfort of the truth.
The artist has seen deeper and further than most. The Turkish armies
held from pouring on Russia and Serbia, from thumping down the scales
of neutrality in Greece and Roumania perhaps, from massing their troops
with the Central Powers; the Kaiser chained on the East and West for
the critical months when men and munitions were desperately lacking
to the Allies, when the extra weight of the Turks might have freed
the Kaiser’s power of fierce attack on East and West--this is what we
already know, what the artist here tells the wide world of the part
played by the heroes of the Dardanelles. In face of this, who dare hint
they suffered and died in vain?
BOYD CABLE
[Illustration: “Just a moment--I’m coming.”]
The Holy War
Surely the artist when he drew this was endowed with the wisdom of the
seer, the vision of the prophet. For it was drawn before the days in
which I write, before the Russian giant had proved his greatness on
the body of the Turk, before the bludgeon-strokes in the Caucasus, the
heart-thrust of Erzerum, the torrent of pursuit of the broken Turks to
Mush and Trebizond.
We know--and I am grateful for the chance to voice our gratitude to
him--the greatness of our Russian Ally. We remember the early days when
the Kaiser’s hosts were pouring in over France, and the Russian thrust
into Galicia drew some of the overwhelming weight from the Western
Front. We realise now the nobility of self-sacrifice that flung an army
within reach of the jaws of destruction, that risked its annihilation
to draw upon itself some of the sword-strokes that threatened to
pierce to the heart of the West. Our national and natural instinct
of admiration for a hard fighter, and still greater admiration for
the apex of good sportsmanship, for the friend or foe who can “take a
licking,” who is a “good loser,” went out even more strongly to Russia
in the dark days when, faced by an overwhelming weight of metal, she
was forced and hammered and battered back, losing battle-line after
battle-line, stronghold after stronghold, city after city; losing
everything except heart and dogged punishment-enduring courage.
And how great the Russian truly is will surely be known presently to
the Turk and to the masquerading false “Prophet of Allah.”
“No one is great save Allah,” says William, and even as the Turk spoke
more truly than he knew in calling the Russian great, even as he was
bitterly to realise the greatness, so in the fullness of time must
William come to realise how great is the Allah of the Moslem, the
Christian God Whom he has blasphemed, and in Whose name he and his
people have perpetrated so many crimes and abominations.
BOYD CABLE
[Illustration: THE HOLY WAR
THE TURK: “But he is so great.”
WILLIAM: “No one is great, save Allah, and I am his prophet.”]
“Gott mit Uns”
When we consider the public utterances of the German clergy, we can
very easily substitute for their symbol of Christian faith this
malignant, grotesque, and inhuman monster of Louis Raemaekers. Indeed,
our inclination is to thrust the green demon himself into the pulpit of
the Fatherland; for his wrinkled skull could hatch and his evil mouth
utter no more diabolic sentiments than those recorded and applauded
from Lutheran Leipsic, or from the University and the chief Protestant
pulpit in Berlin.
Such sermons are a part of that national _debâcle_ of reasoning faculty
which is the price intellectual Germany has paid for the surrender of
her soul to Prussia.
An example or two may be cited from the outrageous mass.
Professor Rheinhold Seeby, who teaches theology at Berlin University,
has described his nation’s achievements in Belgium and Serbia as a work
of charity, since Germany punishes other States for their good and out
of love. Pastor Philippi, also of Berlin, has said that, as God allowed
His only Son to be crucified, that His scheme of redemption might be
accomplished, so Germany, God with her, must crucify humanity in order
that its ultimate salvation may be secured; and the Teutonic nation has
been chosen to perform this task, because Germany alone is pure and,
therefore, a fitting instrument for the Divine Hand. Satan, who has
returned to earth in the shape of England, must be utterly destroyed,
while the immoral friends and allies of Satan are called to share his
fate. Thus evil will be swept off the earth and the German Empire
henceforth stand supreme protector of the new kingdom of righteousness.
Pastor Zoebel has ordered no compromise with hell; directed his flock
to be pleased at the sufferings of the enemy; and bade them rejoice
when thousands of the non-elect are sent to the bottom of the sea.
Yes, we will give the green devil his robe and bands until Germany is
in her strait-jacket; after which experience, her conceptions of a
Supreme Being and her own relation thereto may become modified.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
[Illustration: “GOTT MIT UNS”]
The Widows of Belgium
This deeply pathetic picture evokes the memory of many sad and patient
faces which we have seen during the last eighteen months. It is the
women, after all--wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters--who have the
heaviest load to bear in war-time.
The courage and heroism which they have shown are an honour to human
nature. The world is richer for it; and the sacrifices which they have
bravely faced and nobly borne may have a greater effect in convincing
mankind of the wickedness and folly of aggressive militarism than all
the eloquence of peace advocates.
We must not forget that the war has made about six German widows for
every one in our country. With these we have no quarrel; we know that
family affection is strong in Germany, and we are sorry for them. They,
like our own suffering women, are the victims of a barbarous ideal of
national glory, and a worse than barbarous perversion of patriotism,
which in our opponents has become a kind of moral insanity.
These pictures will remain long after the war-passion has subsided.
They will do their part in preventing a recrudescence of it. Who that
has ever clamoured for war can face the unspoken reproach in these
pitiful eyes? Who can think unmoved of the happy romance of wedded
love, so early and so sadly terminated?
THE DEAN OF ST. PAUL’S
[Illustration: THE WIDOWS OF BELGIUM]
The Harvest is Ripe
The artist spreads before you a view such as you would have on the
great wheat-growing plains of Hungary, or on the level plateau of
Asiatic Turkey--the vast, unending, monotonous, undivided field of
corn. In the background the view is interrupted by two villages from
which great clouds of flame and smoke are rising--they are both on
fire--and as you look closer at the harvest you see that, instead of
wheat, it consists of endless regiments of marching soldiers.
“The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few”: here is only
one, but he is quite sufficient--“the reaper whose name is Death,” a
skeleton over whose bones the peasant’s dress--a shirt and a pair of
ragged trousers--hangs loose. The shirt-sleeves of the skeleton are
turned well up, as if for more active exertion, as he grasps the two
holds of the huge scythe with which he is sweeping down the harvest.
This is not war of the old type, with its opportunities for chivalry,
its glories, and its pride of manly strength. The German development
of war has made it into a mere exercise in killing, a business of
slaughter. Which side can kill most, and itself outlast the other? When
one reads the calculations by which careful statisticians demonstrate
that in the first seventeen months of the War Germany alone lost over
a million of men killed in battle, one feels that this cartoon is not
exaggerated. It is the bare truth.
The ease with which the giant figure of Death mows down the harvest of
tiny men corresponds, in fact, to the million of German dead, probably
as many among the Russians, to which must be added the losses among
the Austrians, the French, the British, the Belgians, Italians, Serbs,
Turks, and Montenegrins. The appalling total is this vast harvest which
covers the plain.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY
[Illustration: THE HARVEST IS RIPE]
“Unmasked”
“The Yellow Book,” it may be remembered, was the official publication
of some of the details of atrocities committed by the Huns on the
defenceless women and children of ravished Belgium. It told in cold and
unimpassioned sentences, in plain and simple words more terrible than
the most fervid outpourings of patriot or humanitarian, the tale of
brutalities, of cold-blooded crimes, of murders and rape and mental and
physical tortures beyond the capabilities or the imaginings of savages,
possible only in their refinements of cruelty to the civilised apostles
of Kultur. There are many men in the trenches of the Allies to-day
who will say that the German soldier is a brave man, that he must be
brave to advance to the slaughter of the massed attack, to hold to his
trenches under the horrible punishment of heavy artillery fire.
As a nation we are always ready to admit and to admire physical
courage, and if Germany had fought a “clean fight,” had “played the
game,” starkly and straightly, against our fighting men, we could--and
our fighting men especially could, and I believe would--have helped her
to her feet and shaken hands honestly with her after she was beaten.
But with such a brute beast as the unmasking of the Yellow Book has
revealed Germany to be we can never feel friendship, admiration, or
respect.
The German is a “dirty fighter,” and to the British soldier that
alone puts him beyond the pale. He has outraged all the rules and
the instincts of chivalry. His bravery in battle is the bravery of
a ravening wolf, of a blood-drunk savage animal. It is only left to
the Allies to treat him as such, to thrash him by brute force, and
then to clip his teeth and talons and by treaty and agreement amongst
themselves to keep him chained and caged beyond the possibility of
another outbreak.
BOYD CABLE
[Illustration: UNMASKED
The Yellow Book]
The Great Surprise
In the note to another picture I have remarked on the farcical
hypocrisy of the German Emperor in presenting himself, as he so often
does, as the High Priest of several different religions at the same
time. They are nearly all of them religions with which he would have
no sort of concern, even if his religious pose were as real as it is
artificial.
Being in fact the ruler and representative of a country which alone
among European countries builds with complete security upon the
conviction that all Christianity is dead, he can only be, even in
theory, the prince of an extreme Protestant State. Long before the
War it was common for the best caricaturists of Europe, and even
of Germany, to make particular fun of these preposterous temporary
Papacies in which the Kaiser parades himself as if for a fancy-dress
ball; and in the accompanying picture Mr. Raemaekers has returned more
or less to this old pantomimic line of satire.
The cartoon recalls some of those more good-humoured, but perhaps
equally contemptuous, sketches in which the draughtsmen of the
French comic papers used to take a particular delight; which made a
whole comic Bible out of the Kaiser’s adventures during his visit to
Palestine. Here he appears as Moses, and the Red Sea has been dried up
to permit the passage of himself and his people.
It would certainly be very satisfactory for German world-politics if
the sea could be dried up everywhere; but it is unlikely that the
incident will occur, especially in that neighbourhood. It will be long
before a German army is as safe in the Suez Canal as a German Navy
in the Kiel Canal; and the higher critics of Germany will have no
difficulty in proving, in the Kiel Canal at all events, that the safety
is due to human and not to divine wisdom.
G. K. CHESTERTON
[Illustration: THE GREAT SURPRISE
Moses II. leads his chosen people through the Red Sea to the promised
(Eng)land.]
Thou art the Man!
The Man of Sorrows is flogged, and thorn-crowned, and crucified, and
pierced afresh, by this other man of sorrows, who has brought greater
bitterness and woe on earth than any other of all time. And in his
soul--for soul he must have, though small sign of it is evidenced--he
knows it. Deceive his dupes as he may--for a time--his own soul must
be a very hell of broken hopes, disappointed ambitions, shattered
pride, and the hideous knowledge of the holocaust of human life he has
deliberately sacrificed to these heathen gods of his. No poorest man on
earth would change places with this man-that-might-have-been, for his
time draws nigh and his end is perdition.
Let That Other speak:--
“Their souls are Mine.
Their lives were in thy hand;--
Of thee I do require them!
The fetor of thy grim burnt-offerings
Comes up to Me in clouds of bitterness.
Thy fell undoings crucify afresh
Thy Lord--who died alike for these and thee.
Thy works are Death:--thy spear is in My side,--
O man! O man!--was it for this I died?
Was it for this?--
A valiant people harried to the void,--
Their fruitful fields a burnt-out wilderness,--
Their prosperous country ravelled into waste,--
Their smiling land a vast red sepulchre,--
--Thy work!
Thou art the man! The scales were in thy hand.
For this vast wrong I hold thy soul in fee.
Seek not a scapegoat for thy righteous due,
Nor hope to void thy countability.
Until thou purge thy pride and turn to Me,--
As thou hast done, so be it unto thee!”
JOHN OXENHAM
[Illustration: “We wage war on Divine principles.”]
Sympathy
The cartoon requires no words to tell the story. It holds chapter upon
chapter of tragedy. “I will send you to Germany after your father!”
Where is the boy’s father in Germany? In a prison? Mending roads? Lying
maimed and broken in a rude hospital? Digging graves for comrades about
to be shot? Or, more likely still, in a rough unknown stranger’s grave?
Was the father dragged from his home at Louvain, or Tirlemont, or Visé,
or one of the dozen other scenes of outrage and murder--a harmless,
hard-working citizen--dragged from his hiding-place and made to suffer
“exemplary justice” for having “opposed the Kaiser’s might,” but in
reality because he was a Belgian, for whose nasty breed there must be
demonstrations of Germany’s frightfulness _pour encourager les autres_?
And the child’s mother and sisters--what of them? He is dejected, but
not broken. There is dignity in the boy’s defiant pose. The scene has,
perhaps, been enacted hundreds of times in the cities of Belgium, where
poignant grief has come to a nation which dared to be itself.
Follow this boy through life and observe the stamp of deep resolve on
his character. Though he be sent “to Germany after your father,” though
he be for a generation under the German jack-boot, his spirit will
sustain him against the conqueror and will triumph in the end.
RALPH D. BLUMENFELD
[Illustration: SYMPATHY
“If I find you again looking so sad, I’ll send you to Germany after
your father.”]
The Refugees
The wonder is not that women went mad, but that there are left any
sane civilians of the ravished districts of Belgium after all those
infamies perpetrated under orders by the German troops after the first
infuriating check of Liége and before the final turning of the German
line at the battle of the Marne. We have supped full of horrors since,
and by an insensible process grown something callous. But we never came
near to realising the Belgian agony, and Raemaekers does us service
by helping to make us see it mirrored in the eyes of this poor raving
girl. This indeed is a later incident, but will serve for reminder of
the earlier worse.
It is really _not_ well to forget. These were not the inevitable
horrors of war, but a deliberately calculated effect. There seems no
hope of the future of European civilisation till the men responsible
for such things are brought to realise that, to put it crudely and at
its lowest, they don’t pay.
What the attitude of Germany now is may be guessed from the blank
refusal even of her bishops to sanction the investigation which
Cardinal Mercier asks for. It is still the gentle wolf’s theory that
the truculent lamb was entirely to blame.
JOSEPH THORP
[Illustration: THE REFUGEES FROM GHEEL
Gheel has a model asylum for the insane. On the fall of Antwerp the
inmates were conveyed across the frontier. The cartoon illustrates an
incident where a woman, while wheeling a lunatic, herself developed
insanity from the scenes she witnessed.]
“The Junker”
There were few things that Junkerdom feared so much in modern Germany
as the growth and effects of Socialism; and it is certain that the
possible attitude of the German Socialists--who were thought by some
writers to number somewhere in the neighbourhood of two million--in
regard to the War at its outset greatly exercised the minds of
Junkerdom and the Chancellor. A few days after the declaration of War a
well-known English Socialist said to us, “I believe that the Socialists
will be strong enough greatly to handicap Germany in the carrying on of
the War, and possibly, if she meets with reverses in the early stages,
to bring about Peace before Christmas.”
That was in August, 1914, and we are now well on in the Spring of 1916.
We reminded the speaker that on a previous occasion, when Peace still
hung in the balance, he had declared with equal conviction that there
would be no War because “the Socialists are now too strong in Germany
not to exercise a preponderating restraining influence.” He has proved
wrong in both opinions. And one can well imagine that the Junker class
admires Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg for the astute manner in which
he has succeeded in shepherding the German Socialist sheep for the
slaughter, and in muzzling their representatives in the Reichstag.
CLIVE HOLLAND
[Illustration: THE JUNKER
“What I have most admired in you, Bethmann, is that you have made
Socialists our best supporters.”]
“Au milieu de fantômes tristes et sans nombre”
There is something daunting, even to the mind of one not guilty of
war or of massacres, in the thought of multitudes: the multitude of
the dead, of the living, of one generation, of men since there have
been men on earth. And war brings this horror to us daily, or rather
nightly, because such great companies of men have suddenly died
together, passing in comradeship and community from the known to the
unknown. Yet dare we say “together”? The unparalleled solitariness and
singleness of death is not altered by the general and simultaneous doom
of battle.
And it is with the multitude, and all the _ones_ in it, that the maker
of war is in unconscious relation. He does not know their names, he
does not know them by any kind of distinction, he knows them only by
thousands. Yet everyone with a separate life and separate death is in
conscious relation with _him_, knows him for the tyrant who has taken
his youth, his hope, his love, his fatherhood.
What a multitude to meet, whether in thought, in conscience, or in
another world! We all, no doubt, try to make the thought of massacre
less intolerable to our minds by telling ourselves that the sufferers
suffer one by one, to each his own share, and not another’s; that
though the numbers may appal, they do not make each man’s part more
terrible. But this is not much comfort. There is not, it is true, a
sum of multiplication; but there is the sum of addition. And that
addition--the multitude man by man--the War Lord has to reckon with:
Frederick the Great with his men, Napoleon with his, the German Emperor
with his--each one of the innumerable unknown knowing his destroyer.
ALICE MEYNELL
[Illustration: “Mais quand la voix de Dieu l’appela il se voyait seul
sur la terre au milieu de fantômes tristes et sans nombre.”]
Bluebeard’s Chamber
The Committee of Enquiry, like another Portia, clothed in the
ermine-trimmed robe of Justice and the Law, has unlocked with the
key of Truth the door of the closed chamber. The key lies behind her
inscribed in Dutch with the name that tells its nature. The Committee
then pulls back the curtain, and reveals the horrors that are behind
it. Before the curtain is fully drawn back, Enquiry sinks almost in
collapse at the terrible sight that is disclosed. There hang to pegs
on the wall the bodies of Bluebeard’s victims, a woman, an old man, a
priest, two boys, and a girl still half hidden behind the curtain. The
blood that has trickled from them coagulates in pools on the ground.
Bluebeard himself comes suddenly: he hurries down the steps brandishing
his curved sword, a big, burly figure, with square, thick beard,
and streaming whiskers, wearing a Prussian helmet, his mouth open
to utter a roar of rage and fury. The hatred and scorn with which
the artist inspires his pictures of Prussia are inexhaustible in
their variety: Prussia is barbarism attempting to trample on law
and education, brutality beating down humanity, a grim figure, the
incarnation of “frightfulness.” I can imagine the feelings with which
all Germans must regard the picture that the Dutch artist always gives
of their country, if they regard Prussia as their country. “For every
cartoon of Raemaekers,” said a German newspaper, “the payment will be
exacted in full, when the reckoning is made up.” To this painter the
Prussian ruling power is incapable of understanding what nobility of
nature means. He can practise on and take advantage of the vices and
weaknesses of his enemies; he can buy the services of many among them,
and have all the worser people in his fee as his servants and agents;
but he is always foiled, because he forgets that some men cannot be
bought, and that these men will steel their fellow-countrymen’s minds
to resist tyranny to the last. The mass of men can be led either to
evil or to good.
The Prussian military system assumes the former as certain, and is well
skilled in the way. But there is the latter way, too, which Prussia
never knew and never takes into account as a possibility; and men as
a whole prefer the way to good before the way to evil, when both are
fully explained and made clear. This saves men, and ruins Prussia.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY
[Illustration: BLUEBEARD’S CHAMBER
The horrors perpetrated by the Germans were brought to light by the
Belgian Committee of Enquiry.]
The Raid
The seaman of history is a chivalrous and romantic figure, a gallant
and relentless fighter, a generous and a tender conqueror. In
Codrington’s first letter to his wife after the battle of Trafalgar,
he tells her to send £100 to one of the French captains who goes to
England from the battle as a prisoner of war. The British and French
navies cherish a hundred memories of acts like these. If the German
navy survives the war what memories will it have? It must search the
gaols for the exemplars in peace of the acts that win them the Iron
Cross in war.
Note in this drawing that the types selected are not in themselves
base units of humanity. They have been made so by the beastly crimes
superior orders have forced them to commit. But even this has not
brought them so low but they wonder at the topsy-turvydom of war that
brings them honour where poor Black Mary only got her deserts in gaol.
The crimes of the higher command have passed in Germany uncondemned
and unbanned by cardinals and bishops. But the conscience of Germany
cannot be wholly dead. Nor will six years only be the term of Germany’s
humiliation and remorse. The spotless white of the naval uniform,
sullied and besmirched by those savage cruelties, cannot, any more than
the German soul, be brought back “whiter than snow” by any bestowal of
the Iron Cross. The effort to cleanse either would “the multitudinous
seas incarnadine.”
ARTHUR POLLEN
[Illustration: THE RAID
“Do you remember Black Mary of Hamburg?”
“Aye, well.”
“She got six years for killing a child, whilst we get the Iron Cross
for killing twenty at Hartlepool.”]
Better a Living Dog than a Dead Lion
Here is the grim choice of alternatives presented to other nations by
the creed of _Deutschland über Alles_--the cost of resistance and the
reward of submission. On one side lies the man who has fought a good
fight “for Freedom.” He has lost his life but won an immortal memory
inscribed upon the cross. The other has saved his life, and lo! it is
a “dog’s life.” He is not even a well-treated dog. Harnessed, muzzled,
chained, he crawls abjectly on hands and knees and drags painfully
along the road, not only the cart, but his heavy master too.
In the Netherlands and other parts of the Continent, where dogs are
used to pull little carts, the owner generally pulls too; it is a
partnership in which the dog is treated as a friend and visibly enjoys
doing his share. Partnership with Germany is another matter. The dog
does all the work, the German takes his ease with his great feet
planted on the submissive creature’s back.
The belligerent nations have made their choice. Germany’s partners
have chosen submission and are playing the dog’s part, as they have
discovered. The Allies on the other side are paying the price of
resistance in the sacrifice of life for Freedom. And what of the
neutrals? They are evading the choice under cover of the Allies and
waxing fat meanwhile. It is not a very heroic attitude and will
exclude them from any voice in the settlement. But we understand their
position, and at least they are ready to fight for their own freedom.
There are, however, individuals who are not ready to fight at all. They
call themselves conscientious objectors, prate of the law of Christ and
pose as idealists. If they followed Christ they would sacrifice their
lives for others, but they are only concerned for their own skins.
Their place is in the shafts. The true idealist lies beneath the Cross.
ARTHUR SHADWELL
[Illustration: BETTER A LIVING DOG THAN A DEAD LION
THE DRIVER: “You are a worthy Dutchman. He who lies there was a foolish
idealist.”]
“The Burden of the Intolerable Day”
Most people have wondered from time to time what the Kaiser thinks
in his inmost heart and in the solitude of his own chamber about the
condition of Germany and about the War. What impression has been made
on him by the alternation of victories and failures during the last
twenty months? After all he has staked everything--he has everything to
lose. What does he feel? What impression do the frightful losses of his
own people make on him?
Raemaekers tells in this cartoon. The Kaiser has this moment been
wakened from sleep by the entrance of a big gorgeously dressed footman,
carrying his morning tea. The panelling of the royal chamber in the
palace at Potsdam is faintly indicated. The Kaiser sits up in bed, and
a look of agony gathers on his face as he realises that he has wakened
up to the grim horror of a new day, and that the delightful time which
he has just been living through was only a dream. He had dreamed that
the whole thing was not true--that the War had never really occurred,
and that he could face the world with a conscience clear from guilt;
and now he has wakened up to bear the burden for another day. It is
written in his face what he thinks. You see the deep down-drawn lines
in the lower part of the face, the furrows upon the forehead, and the
look almost of terror in the eyes. But a smug-faced flunkey offers him
a cup of tea with buttered toast, and he must come back to the pretence
of that tragi-comedy, the life of the King-Emperor.
The Dutch artist is fully alive to the comic element which underlies
that tragedy. The King-Emperor, as he awakes from sleep and sits
forward from that mountain of pillows, would be a purely comic figure
were it not for the terrible tragedy written in his face. A footman in
brilliant livery is a comic figure. The splendour of this livery brings
out the comic element by its contrast to, and yet its harmony with,
the stupid self-satisfaction of the countenance and the curls of the
powdered hair.
The Kaiser, however, awakens to more than the pretences and shams
of court life. The vast dreams which he cherished before the War of
world-conquest and an invincible Germany are fled now, and he must
face, open-eyed and awake, the stern reality.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY
[Illustration: THE AWAKENING
“I had such a delightful dream that the whole thing was not true.”]
Eagle in Hen-run
The Dutchman who could see this cartoon and not admit its simple truth
would have to be a very blind pro-German. At the present time it pays
Germany to pretend a friendship for Holland, but the premeditated
murder of Belgium is a plain object-lesson of the sort of friendship
and agreement that Germany makes with a country and people which stand
in her way and are too small to withstand her brute force. Can any
Dutchman doubt what would be Holland’s fate if Germany emerged even
moderately victorious from this war? The German War Staff would give
a good deal to have the control of Holland and a free passage to the
sea from Antwerp. They refrain from using force to gain that control
only because they cannot afford to have a fresh frontier to guard and
because it is quite useful to have Holland neutral and a forbidden
ground and water to the Armies and Navies of the Allies, a shield over
the heart of Berlin and Germany. It would pay the Germans to have
Holland with them and openly against the Allies, and they would no
doubt gladly make an “agreement” to that effect; but there is little
likelihood of that as long as the Dutch can visualise the “agreement”
as clearly as the cartoonist has done here.
There are many people who for years past have suspected Germany’s
sinister designs on the whole of the Netherlands. The brutal ravaging
of Belgium, the talk that already runs, openly or in whispers, in
Germany of “annexation of conquered territories” and “extended
borders,” tell plainly the same tale--that any agreement between a
small country and Germany means merely the swallowing-up of the small
nation, the “agreement” of a meal with the swallower-up.
BOYD CABLE
[Illustration: THE EAGLE IN THE HEN-RUN
GERMAN EAGLE: “Come along, Dutch chicken, we will easily arrange an
agreement.”
THE CHICKEN: “Yes, in your stomach.”]
The Future
There can be no doubting of the future. The Allied forces, who in
Raemaekers’ drawing stand for Liberty, are assuredly destined to wring
the neck of the Prussian eagle, which typifies the tyranny of brute
force.
“For freedom’s battle, once begun ...
Though baffled oft, is ever won.”
“There is only one master in this country,” the Kaiser has said of
Germany. “I am he, and I will not tolerate another.” He has also told
his people: “There is only one law--my law; the law which I myself
lay down.” It is supererogatory to dispute either of these imperial
pronouncements. The Future contents herself with the comment: “Out of
thine own mouth will I judge thee.”
The Kaiser and his counsellors have now translated words into deeds,
and every instrument of savagery has been since August, 1914, enlisted
by Tyranny in the attempt to overthrow Liberty. “A thousand years
ago,” the Kaiser once declared to his Army, “the Huns under their king
Attila made themselves a name which still lives in tradition.” The
Future replies to him that he and his fighting hordes will also live in
tradition. They will be remembered for their defiance of the conscience
of the world, which obeys no call but that of Liberty.
SIDNEY LEE
[Illustration: L’AVENIR]
Christ or Odin?
You cannot well conceive a science, whether it be mathematics,
or architecture, or philosophy, without its axioms, dogmas, or
first principles. Without them there is no basis on which to raise
the superstructure. So it is with the science of religion. Take
Christianity: if it is to be taught scientifically, it must start with
the most tremendous dogma, the Divinity of Christ. Either Christ was or
He was not what He claimed to be. If He was not, you must shout with
the Sanhedrim: “Crucify Him!” If He was, you must sing with the Church:
“Come, adore Him.” One thing is certain, you cannot be indifferent to
His claim or to Him; you must either hate Him and His creed, like the
Prussian warring Superman, or love Him and it, like England’s Crusading
Kings.
The cartoon before us is the finished picture which I can trace from
its first rough sketch in the hands of Kant, through its different
stages of development in the schools of Hegel, of Schopenhauer, of
Strauss, till it was ready for its final touches in the hands of
Nietzsche. In fancy I see it hung, on the line, in the Prussian
picture-gallery under the direction of War Lords, whose boasted aim
it is that the world shall be governed only by Prussian Kultur and
Prussian Religion.
The fatal mistake made by the Teutonic race in the past was, we are
told, the adoption of Roman culture and Roman religion. Germany once
submitted to an alien God and to an alien creed. She, the mistress
of the earth, the mightiest of the mighty, and the most Kultured of
the Kultured, had actually once worshipped “an uncultured peasant
Galilean,” and made profession of “His slave morality.”
Now they had altogether done with Christ, the Nazarene. The shout had
gone forth: “We will not have this Man to rule over us.” In the future
no gods but Thor and Odin shall rule the “world-dominating race.”
Prussia seemed to think the world’s need to-day was the religion, not
of Virtue, but of Valour. “In a day now long fled was heard the cry:
‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,’ but to-day
there shall go forth the word: ‘Blessed are the valiant, for they shall
make the earth their throne.’ In the past ye heard it said: ‘Blessed
are the poor in spirit,’ but now I say to you: ‘Blessed are the great
in soul, for they shall enter into Valhalla.’ Again, in the dark ages
it was said to you: ‘Blessed are the peace-makers,’ but now in the
blaze of day I say unto you: ‘Blessed are the war-makers, for they
shall be called, if not the children of Jahve, the children of Odin,
who is greater than Jahve.’” For those who want more of this mad jargon
on the same lines let me refer them to the late Professor Cramb’s book
on Germany and England.
With this cartoon before me, I am driven to fear that when the war
is done there will rise up in Germany a louder and stronger cry
against the Christianity of Christ than ever was attempted after the
Franco-Prussian War. The “man of blood and iron,” the man with the
mailed fist and the iron heel, I much apprehend, will not be satisfied
with tearing down the emblem of the physical Body of Christ, but to
slake his bloodthirsty spirit he will want to go on to belabour His
Mystical Body no less. God avert it!
BERNARD VAUGHAN
[Illustration: “I crush whatever resists me.”]
Ferdinand
In this war, where the ranks of the enemy present to us so many
formidable, sinister, and shocking figures, there is one, and perhaps
but one, which is purely ridiculous. If we had the heart to relieve
our strained feelings by laughter, it would be at the gross Coburg
traitor, with his bodyguard of assassins and his hidden coat-of-mail,
his shaking hands and his painted face. The world has never seen a
meaner scoundrel, and we may almost bring ourselves to pity the Kaiser,
whom circumstances have forced to accept on equal terms a potentate so
verminous.
But we no longer smile, we are tempted rather to weep, when we think of
the nation over whom this Ferdinand exercises his disastrous authority.
Forty years will have expired this spring since the Christian peasants
of Bulgaria rose in arms against the Turkish oppressor. After a year of
wild mountain fighting, Russia, with fraternal devotion, came to their
help, and at San Stefano in March, 1877, the aspirations of Bulgaria
were satisfied under Russia auspices. Ten years later Ferdinand the
usurper descended upon Sofia, shielded by the protection of Austria,
and since then, under his poisonous rule, the honour and spirit of the
once passionate and romantic Bulgarian nation have faded like a plant
in poison-fumes.
Raemaekers presents the odious Ferdinand to us in the act of starting
for the wars--he who faints at the sight of a drawn sword. His hired
assassins guard him from his own people and from the revenge of the
thousands whom he has injured. But will they always be able to secure
so vile a life against the vengeance of history? How soon will Fate
condescend to crush this painted creature?
EDMUND GOSSE
[Illustration: Ferdinand s’en va t’en guerre ne sait s’il reviendra.
(_Old French song adapted._)]
Juggernaut
Yes, Kultur, the German Juggernaut, has passed this way. There is no
mistaking the foul track of his chariot-wheels.
Kultur is the German God. But there is a greater God still. He sees it
all. He speaks,--
“_Was it for this I died?_--
--Black clouds of smoke that veil the sight of heaven;
Black piles of stones which yesterday were homes;
And raw black heaps which once were villages;
Fair towns in ashes, spoiled to suage thy spleen;
My temples desecrate, My priests out-cast:--
Black ruin everywhere, and red,--a land
All swamped with blood, and savaged raw and bare;
All sickened with the reek and stench of war,
And flung a prey to pestilence and want;
--Thy work!
_For this?_--
--Life’s fair white flower of manhood in the dust;
Ten thousand thousand hearts made desolate;
My troubled world a seething pit of hate;
My helpless ones the victims of thy lust;--
The broken maids lift hopeless eyes to Me,
The little ones lift handless arms to Me,
The tortured women lift white lips to Me,
The eyes of murdered white-haired sires and dames
Stare up at Me.--And the sad anguished eyes
Of My dumb beasts in agony.
--Thy work!”
JOHN OXENHAM
[Illustration: KULTUR HAS PASSED HERE]
Michael and the Marks
“The Loan: good for 100 marks!” Look at him! He is the favoured of
the Earth, lives in Germany, where Kultur is peerless, and education
complete (even tho’ the man may become a martyr of method). War comes!
and he is seen, as an almond tree in blossom his years tell, when lo!
a War Loan is raised with real Helfferichian candour, and Michael has
just stepped out of the Darlehnskasse, at Oberwesel-on-the-Rhine, or
other seat of Kultur and War Loan finance. Are visions about? said
an American humorist now gone to the Shades; and Michael, Loan note
in hand, eyes reversed, after a visit to two or three offices, wants
to know, and wonders whether this note can be regarded as “hab und
gut,” and if so, good for how much? Is it a wonder that an artist in a
Neutral Country should depict German affairs as in this condition, and
business done in this manner? Michael is puzzled; and in the language
of the Old Kent Road, “’e dunno where ’e are!” He is puzzled, and not
without cause.
All who have followed Germany’s financing of the War share Michael’s
perplexity. Brag is a good dog: but it does not do as a foundation for
credit. Gold at Spandau was trumpeted for years as a “war chest”; but
when the “best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley,” especially
when a war does not end, as it should, after a jolly march to Paris
in six weeks, through a violated and plundered Belgium, then comes
the rub--and the paper which puzzles Michael. A German, possibly Dr.
Helfferich, the German Finance Minister, may believe, and some do
believe, that it does not matter how much “paper,” in currency notes, a
State, or even a Bank, may issue. The more experienced commercial and
banking concerns of the world insist upon a visible material, as well
as the personal security, to which the German is prone. The round-about
method of issuing German War Loans unquestionably puzzles Michael; but
will not impose on the world outside.
Let it be marked also, that German credit methods have been, in part,
the proximate cause of this War; a system of credit-trading may last
for some years only to threaten disaster and general ruin. Now, it is
“neck or nothing”; Michael goes the round of the Loan offices, and
behold him! Germany herself fears a crash in credit, and even the
German Michael feels that it is impending. Already the mark exchanges
over 30 below par.
W. M. J. WILLIAMS
[Illustration: LOAN JUGGLERY
MICHAEL: “For my 100 marks I obtained a receipt. I gave this for a
second 100 marks and I received a second receipt. For the third loan
I gave the second receipt. Have I invested 300 marks and has the
Government got 300, or have both of us got nothing?”]
Their Beresina
“_Is it still a long way to the Beresina?_”
The whole civilised world sincerely hopes not.
Death, with the grin on his fleshless face, is hurrying them along
to it as fast as his troika can go. Three black horses abreast he
drives--Dishonour, Disappointment, and Disgrace--and the more audacious
of the carrion-crows fly croaking ominously alongside.
Little Willie, with the insignia of his family’s doom on his head, is
not happy in his mind. “Father’s” plans have not worked smoothly, his
promises have not been fulfilled. Little Willie is concerned for his
own future. He is the only sold in the world who is.
When the First--the real--Napoleon entered Russia, on June 24th,
1812, he led an army of 414,000 men--the grande armée. When the great
retreat began from burnt-out Moscow he had less than 100,000. By the
time the Beresina was reached but little of the grand army was left.
“Of the cavalry reserve, formerly 32,000 men, only 100 answered the
muster-roll.” The passage of the river, which was to interpose its
barrier between him and the pursuing Russians, was an inferno of panic,
selfishness, and utter demoralisation. Finally, to secure his own
safety, Napoleon had the bridges burnt before half his men had crossed.
The roll-call that night totalled 8,000 gaunt spectres, hardly to be
called men.
“_Father, is it still a long way to the Beresina?_”
We may surely and rightly put up that question as a prayer to the God
whom Kaiser William claims as friend, but whom he has flouted and
bruised as never mortal man since time began has bruised and flouted
friend before.
“_Is it still a long way to the Beresina?_”
God grant them a short quick course, an end for ever to militarism, to
the wastage it has entailed, and to all those evils which have made
such things possible in this year of grace 1916.
JOHN OXENHAM
[Illustration: “Father, is it still a long way to the Beresina?”]
New Peace Offers
The present policy of Germany is a curious mixture of underhand
diplomacy and boastful threats. If she desires to impress the neutral
States, she vaunts the great conquests that she has been able to
accomplish. She points out, especially to Roumania and to Greece, how
terrible is her vengeance on States which defy her, such as Belgium
and Serbia, while vague promises are given to her Near-Eastern
Allies--Bulgaria and Turkey--that they will have large additions to
their territory as a reward for compliance with the dictates of Berlin.
But, on the other hand, it is very clear that, as part and parcel of
this vigorous offensive, Germany is already in more quarters than one
suggesting that she is quite open to offers of peace. As everyone
knows, von Bülow in Switzerland is the head and controlling agent of a
great movement in the direction of peace; while lately we have heard
of offers made to Belgium that if she will acknowledge a commercial
dependence on the Central Empires her territory will be restored to
her. Similar movements are going on in America, because throughout
Germany still seeks to pose as a nation which was attacked and had
to defend herself, and is therefore quite ready to listen if any
reasonable offers come from her enemies to bring the war to a close.
The unhappy German Imperial Chancellor has to play his part in this
sorry comedy with such skill as he can manage. To his German countrymen
he has to proclaim that the war has been one brilliant progress from
the start to the present time. This must be done in order to allay the
apprehensions of Berlin and to propitiate the ever-increasing demand
for more plentiful supplies of food. Secretly he has to work quite as
hard to secure for the Central Empires such a conclusion of hostilities
as will leave them masters of Europe. And, without doubt, he has to put
up with a good many indignities in the process. “The worst of it is, I
must always deny having been there.” Kicked out by the Allies, he has
to pretend that no advances were ever made. Perhaps, however, such a
task is not uncongenial to the man who began by asserting that solemnly
ratified treaties were only “scraps of paper.”
W. L. COURTNEY
[Illustration: NEW PEACE OFFERS
VON BETHMANN-HOLLWEG: “The worst of it is, I must always deny having
been there.”]
The Shields of Rosselaere.
The climax of meanness and selfishness would seem to be reached when
an armed man shelters himself behind the unarmed; yet it is not the
climax, for here the artist depicts a body of German troops sheltering
themselves behind women, calculating that the Belgians will not fire on
their own countrywomen and unarmed friends, and that so the attack may
safely gain an advantage.
There is a studied contrast between the calm, orderly march of the
troops with shouldered arms and the huddled, disorderly progress to
which the townspeople are compelled. These are not marching: they are
going to their death. Several of the women have their hands raised in
frantic anguish, their eyes are like the eyes of insanity, and one at
least has her mouth opened to emit a shriek of terror. Two of the men
are in even worse condition; they are collapsing, one forward, one
backward, with outstretched hands as if grasping at help. The rest
march on, courageously or stolidly. Some seem hardly to understand,
some understand and accept their fate with calm resignation.
One old woman walks quietly with bowed head submissive. In the front
walks a priest, his hand raised in the gesture of blessing his flock.
The heroism of the Catholic priesthood both in France and in Belgium
forms one of the most honourable features of the Great War, and stands
in striking contrast with the calculating diplomatic policy of the
Papacy. There is always the same tendency in the “chief priests” of
every race and period to be tempted to sacrifice moral considerations
to expediency, and to prefer the empty fabric of an imposing Church
establishment to the people who make the Church. But the clergy
of Belgium are there to prove what the Church can do for mankind.
This cartoon would be incomplete and would deserve condemnation as
inartistic if it were not redeemed by the priest and the old woman.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY
[Illustration: THE SHIELDS OF ROSSELAERE
At Rosselaere the German troops forced the Belgian townsfolk to march
in front of them.]
The Obstinacy of Nicholas
The venerable quip that what is firmness in ourselves is obstinacy
in our opponents is illustrated with a ludicrous explicitness in the
whole tenor of German official utterance since the failure of the
great drives. The obtuseness of the Allies is so abysmal (it is again
and again complained in the Reichstag and through Wolff) that they
are unable to see that Germany is the permanently triumphant victor.
Whereas for Germany, whose cause even the neutrals judge to be lost,
to hold out at the cost of untold blood and treasure is merely the
manifestation of heaven-conferred German steadfastness. The Army into
whose obstinate corporate head it is hardest to drive the idea of
German military all-powerfulness is the Russian, of which retreating
units, actually armed with staves against a superbly equipped (but
innocent and wantonly attacked) foe, were so stupid as to forget how to
be broken and demoralised.
And this long, imperturbable, _verdamte_ Nicholas, who was declared
on the highest German authority (and what higher?) to be annihilated
twice, having turned a smashing tactical defeat into strategical
victory, bobs up serenely in another and most inconvenient place.
Absurd; particularly when “what I tell you three times is true.”...
Neonapoleon didn’t remember Moscow. But he will.
JOSEPH THORP
[Illustration: “Why, I’ve killed you twice, and you dare to come back
again.”]
Bundles of Four
This cartoon is horribly suggestive of Hun utilitarian methods! I
am told by an eminent chemist that six pounds of glycerine can be
extracted from the corpse of a fairly well nourished Hun, and I can
well believe that such an opportunity for replenishing the diminishing
stocks of a much needed commodity is not neglected by the Great General
Staff.
_Bundles of Four!_
And why not, from the Hun point of view?
They have scrapped sentiment, together with humanity. What is
_gun-fodder_ to the Scourge of God? These unfortunates, when alive,
were driven ruthlessly to inevitable slaughter. They are sent as
ruthlessly to the blast furnaces. One million dead men are resolved
into six million pounds of glycerine. Thus the Happy Fatherland is
served.
One wonders whether the statisticians of the Central Powers have yet
computed what a million of dead Huns represents in cash. A soldier
capable of serving his country in the field must be worth at least
fifty pounds sterling per annum to that country. Let us say that each
dead man represents a capitalisation of one thousand pounds. We have
then, roughly, a loss of one thousand million pounds, leaving out the
totally and partially disabled.
What a handicap when they begin, after the war, the economic struggle
for supremacy!
Time was when the enemy losses sent a shiver down our spinal columns.
That time--thanks to Hun methods--has passed.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL
[Illustration: TO THE CREMATORIUM
GERMAN LETTER: “We send them in bundles of four.”]
The Order of Merit
Turkey had no illusions from the beginning on the subject of the war.
If the choice had been left to the nation she would not have become
Germany’s catspaw. Unfortunately for Turkey, she has had no choice. For
years upon years the Sultan Abdul Hamid was Turkey. Opposition to his
will meant death for his opponent. Thus Turkey became inarticulate. Her
voice was struck dumb. The revolution was looked upon hopefully as the
dawn of a new era. Abdul Hamid was dethroned; his brother, a puppet,
was exalted, anointed, and enthroned. Power passed from the Crown, not,
as expected, to the people and its representatives, but into the hands
of a youthful adventurer, in German pay, who has led his country from
one folly to another.
Turkey did not want to fight, but she had no choice, and so she was
dragged in by the heels. She has lost much beside her independence.
The crafty German has drained her of supplies while giving naught in
return. The German’s policy is to strive throughout for a weak Turkey.
The weaker Turkey can be made, the better will it be for Germany, which
hopes still, no matter what may happen elsewhere, so to manipulate
things as to dominate the Ottoman Empire after the war.
Turkey is still a rich country, in spite of her enormous sacrifices in
the past decade. She has been exploited from end to end by the German
adventurer, who will continue the process of bleeding so long as there
is safety in the method; but Turkey is beginning to ask herself, as
does the figure of the fat Pasha in the cartoon: “And is this all the
compensation I get?” An Iron Cross does not pay for the loss of half a
million good soldiers. Yet that is the exact measure of Turkey’s reward.
RALPH D. BLUMENFELD
[Illustration: THE ORDER OF MERIT
TURKEY: “And is this all the compensation I get?”]
The Marshes of Pinsk
In what are we most like our kinsmen the Germans, and in what most
unlike? I was convicted of Teutonism when first, in Germany, I ate
“brod und butter,” and found the words pronounced in an English way,
slurred. But if we are like the Germans in the names of simple and
childish things, we grow more unlike them, we draw farther apart from
them, as we grow up. We love war less and less, as they love it more.
We love our word of honour more and more as they, for the love of war,
love their word less.
There is no nation in the world more unlike us; because there is no war
so perfect, so conscious, so complete as the German. And being thus
all-predominant, German war is the greatest of outrages on life and
death. We English have a singular degree of respect for the dead. It
has no doubt expressed itself in some slight follies and vulgarities,
such as certain funeral customs, not long gone by; but such respect
is a national virtue and emotion. No nation loving war harbours that
virtue. And in nothing do the kinsmen with whom we have much language
in common differ from us more than in the policy that brought this
Prussian host to cumber the stagnant waters of the Marshes of Pinsk.
The love of war has cast them there, displayed, profaned, in the
“cold obstruction” of their dissolution. Corruption is not sensible
corruption when it is a secret in earth where no eye, no hand, no
breathing can be aware of it. There is no offence in the grave. But the
lover of war, the Power that loved war so much as to break its oath for
the love of war, and for the love of war to strike aside the hand of
the peace-maker, Arbitration, that Power has chosen thus to expose and
to betray the multitude of the dead.
ALICE MEYNELL
[Illustration: THE MARSHES OF PINSK, NOVEMBER, 1915.
The Kaiser said last spring: “When the leaves fall you’ll have peace.”
They have!]
God with Us
Three _apaches_ sit crouched in shelter waiting the moment to strike.
One is old and _gaga,_ his ancient fingers splayed on the ground to
support him and his face puckered with the petulance of age. One is a
soft shapeless figure--clearly with small heart for the business, for
he squats there as limp as a sack. One is the true stage conspirator
with a long pendulous nose and narrow eyes. His knife is in his teeth,
and he would clearly like to keep it there, for he has no stomach for a
fight. He will only strike if he can get in a secret blow. The leader
of the gang has the furtive air of the criminal, his chin sunk on his
breast, and his cap slouched over his brows. His right hand holds a
stiletto, his pockets bulge with weapons or plunder, his left hand is
raised with the air of a priest encouraging his flock. And his words
are the words of religion--“God with us.” At the sign the motley crew
will get to work.
It is wholesome to strip the wrappings from grandiose things. Public
crimes are no less crimes because they are committed to the sound
of trumpets, and the chicanery of crowned intriguers is morally the
same as the tricks of hedge bandits. It is the privilege of genius to
get down to fundamentals. Behind the stately speech of international
_pourparlers_ and the rhetoric of national appeals burn the old lust
and greed and rapine. A stab in the dark is still a stab in the dark
though courts and councils are the miscreants. A war of aggression is
not less brigandage because the armies march to proud songs and summon
the Almighty to their aid.
Raemaekers has done much to clear the eyes of humanity. The monarch
of _Felix Austria_, with the mantle of the Holy Roman Empire still
dragging from his shoulders, is no more than a puzzled, broken old
man, crowded in this bad business beside the Grand Turk, against whom
his fathers defended Europe. The preposterous Ferdinand, shorn of his
bombast, is only a chicken-hearted assassin. The leader of the band,
the All Highest himself, when stripped of his white cloak and silver
helmet, shows the slouch and the furtive ferocity of the street-corner
bravo. And the cry “God with us,” which once rallied Crusades, has
become on such lips the signal of the _apache_.
JOHN BUCHAN
[Illustration: GOD WITH US
“At the command ‘Gott mit uns’ you will go for them.”]
Ferdinand the Chameleon
There is one whole field of the evil international influence of
Germany in which Ferdinand of Bulgaria is a much more important and
symbolic person than William of Prussia. He is, of course, a cynical
cosmopolitan. He is in great part a Jew, and an advanced type of that
_mauvais juif_ who is the principal obstacle to all the attempts of
the more genuine and honest Jews to erect a rational status for their
people.
Like almost every man of this type, he is a Jingo without being a
patriot. That is to say, he is of the type that believes in big
armaments and in a diplomacy even more brutal than armaments; but
the militarism and diplomacy are not humanised either by the ancient
national sanctities which surround the Czar of Russia, or the
spontaneous national popularity which established the King of Serbia.
He is not national, but international; and even in his peaceful
activities has been not so much a neutral as a spy.
In the accompanying cartoon the Dutch caricaturist has thrust with his
pencil at the central point of this falsity. It is something which is
probably the central point of everything everywhere, but is especially
the central point of everything connected with the deep quarrels of
Eastern Europe. It is religion. Russian Orthodoxy is an enormously
genuine thing; Austrian Romanism is a genuine thing; Islam is a genuine
thing; Israel, for that matter, is also a genuine thing.
But Ferdinand of Bulgaria is not a genuine thing; and he represents
the whole part played by Prussia in these ancient disputes. That
part is the very reverse of genuine; it is a piece of ludicrous and
transparent humbug. If Prussia had any religion, it would be a northern
perversion of Protestantism utterly distant from and indifferent to the
controversies of Slavonic Catholics. But Prussia has no religion. For
her there is no God; and Ferdinand is his prophet.
G. K. CHESTERTON
[Illustration: FERDINAND THE CHAMELEON
“I was a Catholic, but, needing Russian help, I became a Greek
Orthodox. Now I need the Austrians, I again become Catholic. Should
things turn out badly, I can again revert to Greek Orthodoxy.”]
The Latin Sisters
The Latin Sisters! Note carefully the expression of France as
contrasted with that of Italy. France, violated by the Hun, exhibits
grim determination made sacrosanct by suffering. Italy’s face glows
with enthusiasm. One can conceive of the one fighting on to avenge
her martyrs, steadfast to the inevitable end when Right triumphs over
Might. One can conceive of the other drawing her sword because of the
blood tie which links them together in a bond that craft and specious
lies have tried in vain to sunder. What do they stand for, these two
noble sisters? Everything which can be included in the word--ART.
Everything which has built up, stone upon stone, the stately temple of
Civilisation, everything which has served to humanise mankind and to
differentiate him from the beasts of Prussia.
Looking at these two sisters, one wonders that there are still to
be found in England mothers who allow their children to be taught
German. One hazards the conjecture that it might well be imparted
to exceptionally wicked children, if there be any, because none can
question that the Teutonic tongue will be spoken almost exclusively in
the nethermost deeps of Hades until, and probably after, the Day of
Judgment.
For my sins I studied German in Germany, and I rejoice to think that I
have forgotten nearly every word of that raucous and obscene language.
Had I a child to educate, and the choice between German and Choctaw
were forced upon me, I should not select German. French, Italian and
Spanish, cognate tongues, easy to learn, delightful to speak, hold out
sweet allurements to English children. Do not these suffice? If any
mother who happens to read these lines is considering the propriety of
teaching German to a daughter, let her weigh well the responsibility
which she is deliberately assuming. To master any foreign language, it
is necessary to talk much and often with the natives. Do Englishwomen
wish to talk with any Huns after this war? What will be the feelings of
an English mother whose daughter marries a Hun any time within the next
twenty years? And such a mother will know that she planted the seed
which ripened into catastrophe when she permitted her child to acquire
the language of our detestable and detested enemies.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL
[Illustration: THE LATIN SISTERS
ITALY: “Indeed she is my sister.”]
Misunderstood
It need not necessarily be supposed that the directors of German
destiny, who are not devoid of intelligence, took the ravings of
Bernhardi over-seriously. He had his special uses no doubt before the
day. But on the morrow of the day, when questions of responsibility
came to be raised, he became one of many inconvenient witnesses; and
there has scarcely been a better joke among the grim humours of this
catastrophe than the mission of this Redhot-Gospeller of the New
Unchivalry of War to explain to “those idiotic Yankees” that he was
really an ardent pacifist. The most just, the most brilliant, the most
bitter pamphlet of invective could surely not say so much as this
reeking cleaver, those bloody hands, that fatuous leer and gesture,
this rigid victim. Bernhardism was not a mere windy theory. It was
exactly practised on the Belgian people.
And this spare, dignified figure of Uncle Sam, contemptuously
incredulous, is, I make bold to say, a more representative symbol of
the American people than one which our impatience sometimes tempts us
now to draw. Most Americans now regret, as Pope Benedict must regret,
that the first most cruel rape of Belgium was allowed to pass without
formal protest in the name of civilisation. But that occasion gone,
none other, not the _Lusitania_ even, showed so clear an opportunity. A
people’s sentiments are not necessarily expressed by the action of its
Government, which moves always in fetters. Nor has President Wilson’s
task been as simple as his critics on this or the other side of the
Atlantic profess to believe.
JOSEPH THORP
[Illustration: MISUNDERSTOOD
BERNHARDI: “Indeed I am the most humane fellow in the world.”]
Prosperity Reigns in Flanders
Wherever Prussia rules she has only one method of ruling--that
of terror. Wherever she finds civilisation and the wealth which
civilisation creates, she can do nothing but despoil. She is as
incapable of persuasion as of creation. No people forced to endure her
rule have ever been won to prefer it as the Alsatians came to prefer
the rule of France or as many Indians have come to prefer the rule of
England. In Belgium she has been especially herself in this respect.
A wise policy would have dictated such a careful respect for private
rights and such a deference to native traditions as might conceivably
have weakened the determination of the Belgians to resist to the
death those who had violated their national independence. But Prussia
is incapable of such a policy. In any territory which she occupies,
whether temporarily or permanently, her only method is terror and her
only aim loot. She did indeed send some of her tame Socialists to
Brussels to embark on the hopeless enterprise of persuading the Belgian
Socialists that honour and patriotism were _idéologies bourgeoises_
and that the “economic interests” of Belgium would be best promoted
by a submission. These pedantic barbarians got the answer which they
deserved; but on their pettifogging thesis Raemaekers’ cartoon is
perhaps the best commentary.
The “prosperity” of Belgium under Prussian rule has consisted in the
systematic looting, in violation of international law, of the wealth
accumulated by the free citizens of Belgium, for the advantage of their
Prussian rulers; while to the mass of the people it has brought and,
until it is for ever destroyed, can bring nothing but that slavery
which the Prussians have themselves accepted and which they would now
impose upon the whole civilisation of Europe.
CECIL CHESTERTON
[Illustration: PROSPERITY REIGNS IN FLANDERS
Four hundred and eighty millions of francs have been imposed as a war
tax, but soup is given gratis.]
The Last Hohenzollern
Behind him stands the embodiment of all that Prussian kultur and
efficiency mean, wooden uninventiveness, clockwork accuracy of
movement--without soul or inspiration. He himself is thin and
scraggy--Raemaekers has intensified these characteristics, but even so
the caricature of the reality is more accurate than unkind. Many months
ago, this vacuous heir of the house of Hohenzollern set to work on the
task of overcoming France, and the result ... may be found in bundles
of four, going back to the incinerators beyond Aix, in the piled
corpses before the French positions at and about Verdun; some of the
results, the swag of the decadent burglar, went back in sacks from the
châteaux that this despicable thing polluted and robbed as might any
Sikes from Portland or Pentonville.
He is the embodiment, himself, of the last phase of Prussian kultur.
Somewhere back in the history of Prussia its rulers had to invent and
to create, and then kultur brought forth hard men; later, it became
possible to copy, and then kultur brought forth mechanical perfection
rather than creative perfection, systematised its theories of life and
work, and brought into being a class of men just a little meaner, more
rigid, more automaton-like, than the original class; having reduced
life to one system, and that without soul or ideal, kultur brought
forth types lacking more and more in originality. Here stands the
culminating type; he will copy the good German Gott--he is incapable of
originating anything--and will “do the same to France.”
As far as lies in his power, he has done it; in the day of reckoning,
Germany will judge how he has done it, and it is to be hoped that
Germany will give him his just reward, for no punishment could be more
fitting. The rest of the world already knows his vacuity, his utter
uselessness, his criminal decadence. As his father was stripped of
the Garter, so is he here shown stripped of the attributes to which,
in earlier days, he made false claim. There remains a foolish knave
posturing--and that is the real Crown Prince of Germany.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN
[Illustration: GOTT STRAFE ENGLAND!
“Father says I have to do the same with France.”]
Piracy
In the summer of 1914 Germany stood before the world, a nation of
immense, and to a great extent of most honourable, achievement. Her
military greatness had never been in dispute. But in the previous
twenty years she had developed an internal industry and an external
commerce on a scale and with a rapidity entirely unprecedented. She had
to build a navy such as no nation had ever constructed in so short a
time. She seemed destined to progress in the immediate future as she
had progressed in the immediate past.
What has the madness for world conquest done for her now? She has made
enemies of all, and made all her enemies suffer. Like the strong blind
man of history, she has seized the columns of civilisation and brought
the whole temple down. But has she not destroyed herself utterly amid
the ruins? Her industry is paralysed, her commerce gone. Her navy is
dishonoured. Some force she still possesses at sea, but it is force to
be expended on sea piracy alone. And it is not piracy that can save
her. At most, in her extremity, it will do for her what a life belt
does for a lone figure in a deserted ocean. It prolongs the agony
that precedes inevitable extinction. It is the throw of the desperate
gambler that Germany has made, when she flings this last vestige of her
honour into the sea.
ARTHUR POLLEN
[Illustration: TIRPITZ’S LAST HOPE--PIRACY]
“Weeping, She hath Wept”
While a world of mourners is plaintively asking, “What has become of
our brave dead, where are they? Alas! how dark is the world without
them, how silent the home, how sad the heart”; whilst the mourner is
groping like the blind woman for her lost treasure, the Belgian mother,
and the Belgian widow, and the Belgian orphan are on their knees,
praying, “Eternal rest give to them, O Lord; let a perpetual light
shine upon them,” the Christian plea that has echoed down the ages from
the day of the Maccabees till now, exhorting us to pray for the dead
that they may be loosed from their sins.
I would remind the broken-hearted mother beseeching me to tell her
where can her brave boy be gone, adding, “His was such a lonely
journey; did he find his way to God?” of the words of the poet, who
finds his answer to her question in the flight of a sea bird sailing
sunward from the winter snows:
There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along the pathless coast,
The desert and illimitable air,
Lone, wandering but not lost:
He who from zone to zone
Guides, through the boundless sky, thy certain flight,
In the lone way which thou must tread alone
Will lead thy steps aright.
The brave soldier, who in the discharge of high duty has been suddenly
shot into eternity by the fire of the enemy, will surely, far more
easily than the migrating bird, wing his flight to God, Who, let us
pray, will not long withhold him the happy-making vision of Heaven.
Pilgrims homeward-bound, as you readily understand, at different
stages of their journey will picture Heaven to themselves differently,
according as light or darkness, joy or sorrow encompass them. Some will
picture Heaven as the Everlasting Holiday after the drudgery of school
life, others as Eternal Happiness after a life of suffering and sorrow,
others again as Home after exile, and some others as never-ending
Rapture in the sight of God.
But to-day, when “frightfulness” is the creed of the enemy, and warfare
with atrocities is his gospel, very many amongst us, weary with the
long-drawn battle, sick with its ever-recurring horrors, and broken by
its ghastly revelations, will lift up their eyes to a land beyond the
stars.
FATHER BERNARD VAUGHAN
[Illustration: THE WIDOWS OF BELGIUM]
Military Necessity
It may be asserted that the plea of “Frightfulness” will not be
recognised a “military necessity” when Germany is judged, and that
this enemy of civilisation, even as the enemy of society, will be
held responsible for its crimes, though they stand as far above the
imagination as beyond the power of a common felon. Bill Sikes may
justly claim “military necessity” for his thefts and murders, if
Germany can do so for hers.
Under Article No. 46 of the Regulations of The Hague, we learn that
“Family honour and rights, individual life and private property must
be respected,” and, under Article No. 47, “all pillage is expressly
forbidden.” But while it was a political necessity to subscribe to that
fundamental formula of civilisation, Germany’s heart recognised no real
need to do so, and secretly, in cold blood, at the inspiration of her
educated and well-born rulers, she plotted the details of a campaign
of murder, rape, arson and pillage, which demanded the breaking of her
oath as its preliminary. Well might her Chancellor laugh at “the scrap
of paper,” which stood between Germany and Belgium, when he reflected
on the long list of sacred assurances his perjured country had already
planned to break.
No viler series of events, in Northern France alone, can be cited than
those extracted from the note-books of captured and fallen Germans.
Such blood-stained pages must be a tithe of those that returned to
Germany, but they furnish a full story of what the rank and file
accomplished at the instigation and example of their officers. Space
precludes quotation; but one may refer the reader to “Germany’s
Violations of the Laws of War,”[A] published under the auspices of the
French Foreign Office. It is a book that should be on the tables at the
Peace Conference.
[A] English translation. Heinemann
We cannot hang an army for these unspeakable offences, or treat those
who burn a village of living beings as we would treat one who made a
bonfire of his fellow-man; nor can we condemn to penal servitude a
whole nation for bestial outrages on humanity, ordered by its Higher
Command and executed by its troops; but at least we may hope soon to
find the offending Empire under police supervision of Europe, with a
ticket-of-leave, whose conditions shall be as strict as an outraged
earth knows how to draw them.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
[Illustration: ON TICKET-OF-LEAVE
CONVICT: “The next time I’ll wear a German helmet and plead ‘military
necessity.’”]
Liberté! Liberté, Chérie!
There have been many surprises in this war. The evil surprises,
patiently, scientifically, diabolically matured in the dark for the
upsetting and downcasting of a too-trusting world by the enemy of
mankind, whose “Teuton-faith” will surely for ever outrival that
“Punic-faith” which has hitherto been the by-word for perfidious
treachery. The heartening surprises of gallant little Belgium and
Serbia; the renascence of Russia; the wonderful upleap to the needs of
the times by Great, and still more by Greater Britain; and, not least,
the bracing of the loins of our closest Allies just across the water.
In the very beginning, when the Huns tore up that scrap of paper which
represented their honour and their right to a place among decent
dwellers on the earth, and came sweeping like a dirty flood over
Belgium and Northern France, the overpowering remembrance of 1870 still
lay heavy on our sorely-tried neighbours. They had not yet quite found
themselves. The Huns had a mighty reputation for invincibility. It
seemed impossible to stand against them. There were waverings, even
crumplings. There were said to be treacheries in high places.
The black flood swept on. Von Kluck was heading for Paris, and seemed
like to get there. Then suddenly, miraculously as it seemed, his course
was diverted. He was tossed aside and flung back.
And it is good to recall the reason he himself is said to have given
for his failure.
“At Mons the British taught the French how to die.”
That is a great saying and worthy of preservation for all time.
Whether von Kluck said it or not does not matter. It represents and
immortalises a mighty fact.
France was bending under the terrible impact. Britain stood and died.
France braced her loins and they have been splendidly braced ever since.
The Huns were found to be resistible, vulnerable, breakable. The
old verve and élan came back with all the old fire, and along with
these, new depths of grim courage and tenacity, and, we are told, of
spirituality, which may be the making of a new France greater than the
world has ever known.
And that we shall welcome. France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia have
suffered in ways we but faintly comprehend on this side of the water.
When the Great Settling Day comes, this new higher spirit of France
will, it is to be devoutly hoped, make for restraint in the universal
craving for vengeance, and prove a weighty factor in the righteous
re-adjustment of things and the proper fitting together of the jig-saw
map of Europe.
JOHN OXENHAM
[Illustration: LIBERTÉ! LIBERTÉ, CHÉRIE!]
I--“A Knavish Piece of Work”
There can be no defence of the spirit of hatred in which the Germans
have, so fatally for their future, carried on this amazing mad war
of theirs, in violation of all human instincts of self-respect and
self-preservation, to say nothing of the obligations of religion
and morality observed among mankind from the first dawnings of
civilisation. The knavery, the villainy, and the besotted bestiality
of it can never be forgotten, and must never be forgiven, and Louis
Raemaekers, gifted as he is with the rare dramatic genius that
discriminates his Cartoons, has but discharged an obvious patriotic
duty in publishing them to the world at large, as true and faithful
witnesses to the unspeakable and inexpiable abominations wrought
throughout Belgium and French Flanders by the Germans--which, already,
in the course of Divine retribution, have involved their own country in
material losses it will take from three to four generations to repair;
and their once honoured name in contempt, and reprobation, and infamy,
wherefrom it can never be redeemed.
Nevertheless, as an Englishman, I shrink from giving any emphasis there
may be in my “hand and signature” to these righteously condemnatory
and withering cartoons; and because, each one of them, as I turn to
it, brings more and more crushingly home to me the transcending sin
of England--of every individual Englishman with a vote for Members
of Parliament--in not having prepared for this war; a sin that has
implicated us in the destruction of the whole rising generation of the
flower of our manhood; and, before this date, would have brought us
under subjection to Germany but for the confidence placed by the rank
and file of the British people and nation in Lord Kitchener of Khartum.
Now--face to face with enemies--from the Kaiser downward to his
humblest subjects--animated by the highest, noblest ideals, but again
perverted for a time--as in the case of their ancestors in the Middle
Ages--by a secular epidemic of “Panmania,” they are to be faced not
with idle reproaches and revilings, still less with undignified taunts
and gibes, but with close-drawn lips and clenched teeth, in the
determination that, once having cast Satan out of them, he shall be
bound down to keep the peace of Christendom--“for a thousand years.”
GEORGE BIRDWOOD
[Illustration: WE’LL GIVE YOU THE TITLE OF MPRET OF POLAND
The new Governor has had the title of Mpret given to him, the same that
was given to the ill-starred Prince of Wied when made ruler of Albania
in 1914.]
II--“Sisyphus,--his Stone”
Sisyphus, as the story goes, was a King who widely extended the
commerce, and largely increased the wealth, of Corinth, but by
avaricious and fraudful ways; for the sin whereof he was sentenced
after death to the unresting labour of rolling up a hill in Tartarus,
a huge unhewn block of stone, which so soon as he gets it to the hill
top, for all his efforts, rolls down again. In classical representation
of the scene he is associated with Tantalus and Ixion; Tantalus,
who, presuming too much on his relations with Zeus, was after death
afflicted with an unquenchable thirst amidst flowing fountains and
pellucid lakes--like the lakes of “The Thirst of the Antelope” in
the marvellous mirages of Rajputana and Mesopotamia--that ever elude
his anguished approaches; and with Ixion, the meanest and basest of
cheats, and most demoniac of murderers, whose posthumous punishment
was in being stretched, and broken, and bound, in the figure of the
svastika, on a wheel which, self-moved--like the wheels of the vision
of Ezekiel--whirls for evermore round and round the abyss of the nether
world. The moral of these tortures is that we may well and most wisely
leave vengeance to “the high Gods.” They will repay!
GEORGE BIRDWOOD
[Illustration: SISYPHUS]
Concrete Foundations
Nothing has damned the Germans more in the eyes of other nations,
belligerent and neutral alike, and nothing will have a more subtle
and lasting influence on future relations, than the revelation of
stealthy preparation for conquest under a mask of innocent and friendly
intercourse. The whole process of “peaceful penetration,” pursued in
a thousand ways with infernal ingenuity and relentless determination,
is an exhibition of systematic treachery such as all the Macchiavellis
have never conceived. Germany has revealed herself as a nation of
spies and assassins. To take advantage of a neighbour’s unsuspecting
hospitality, to enter his house with an air of open friendship, in
order to stab him in the back at a convenient moment, is an act of the
basest treachery, denounced by all mankind in all ages. No one would
be more shocked by it in private life than the Germans themselves.
But when it is undertaken methodically on a national scale under
the influence of _Deutschland über Alles_, the same conduct becomes
ennobled in their eyes, they throw themselves into it with enthusiasm
and lose all sense of honour. Such is the moral perversion worked by
Kultur and the German theory of the State.
An inevitable consequence is that in future the movements and
proceedings of Germans in other countries will be watched with intense
suspicion, and if Governments do not prevent the sort of thing depicted
by Mr. Raemaekers the people will see to it themselves. The cartoon is
not, of course, intended to reflect personally on the owner of Krupp’s
works, who is said to be a gentle-minded and blameless lady. It is
her misfortune to be associated by the chance of inheritance with the
German war machine and one of the underhand methods by which it has
pursued its aims.
A. SHADWELL
[Illustration: ON CONCRETE FOUNDATIONS
BIG BERTHA: “What a charming view over Flushing harbour! May I build a
villa here?”]
Pallas Athene
“Has it come to this?” Well may the Goddess ask this question. Times
are indeed changed since the heroic days. Germany has still her great
Greek scholars, one or two of them among the greatest living, men who
know, and can feel, the spirit, as well as the letter, of the old
Classics. Do they remember to-day what the relation of the Goddess of
Wisdom was to the God of War, in Homer, when, to use the Latin names
which are perhaps more familiar to the general reader than the Greek,
Mars “indulged in lawless rage,” and Jove sent Juno and Minerva to
check his “frightfulness”?
“Go! and the great Minerva be thine aid;
To tame the monster-god Minerva knows,
And oft afflicts his brutal breast with woes.”
and how the hero Diomede, with Minerva’s aid, wounded the divine bully
and sent him bellowing and whimpering back, only to hear from his
father the just rebuke:--
“To me, perfidious! this lamenting strain?
Of lawless force shall lawless Mars complain?
Of all the gods who tread the spangled skies,
Thou most unjust, most odious in our eyes!
Inhuman discord is thy dear delight,
The waste of slaughter, and the rage of fight!”
It is most true. Such has ever been War for War’s sake, and when the
Germans themselves are wounded and beaten, they complain like Mars of
old of “lawless force.”
But Raemaekers has introduced another touch more Roman than Greek, and
reminding us perhaps of Tacitus rather than of Homer.
Who was Caligula, and what does his name mean? “Little Jackboots,” in
his childhood the spoiled child of the camp, as a man, and Cæsar, the
first of the thoroughly mad, as well as bad, Emperors of Rome, the
first to claim divine honours in his lifetime, to pose as an artist and
an architect, an orator and a _littérateur_, to have executions carried
out under his own eyes, and while he was at meals; who made himself a
God, and his horse a Consul.
Minerva blacking the boots of Caligula--it is a clever combination!
But there is an even worse use of Pallas, which War and the German
War-lords have made. They have found a new Pallas of their own, not the
supernal Goddess of Heavenly Wisdom and Moderation, but her infernal
counterfeit, sung of by a famous English poet in prophetic lines that
come back to us to-day with new force.
Who loves not Knowledge, who shall rail
Against her beauty, may she mix
With men and prosper, who shall fix
Her pillars? let her work prevail.----
Yes, but how do the lines continue?
What is she cut from love and faith
But some wild Pallas from the brain
Of Demons, fiery hot to burst
All barriers in her onward race
For power? Let her know her place,
She is the second, not the first.
Knowledge is power, but, unrestrained by conscience, a very awful power.
This is the Pallas whom the “Demons,” from whose brain she has sprung,
are using for their demoniac purposes. She too might have her portrait
painted and they. Perhaps Raemaekers will paint them both before he has
done.
HERBERT WARNER
[Illustration: PALLAS ATHENE: “Has it come to this?”]
The Wonders of Culture
Of all forms of “Kultur” or “frightfulness” that which materialises
in “the terror which flieth by night” is to the intelligent mind at
one and the same time the most insensate and damnable. It fails to
accomplish, either in Paris or in London, the subjugation by terror
of the people for which Germans seem to hope. It is only in German
imagination that it accomplishes “material and satisfactory damage to
forts, camps, arsenals, and fortified towns.” In reality it inflicts
misery and death upon a mere handful of people (horrible as that may
be) and destroys chiefly the homes of the poor. It serves no military
end, and the damage done is out of all proportion to the expenditure of
energy and material used to accomplish it.
The fine cartoon which Raemaekers has drawn to bring home to the
imagination what this form of “Kultur” stands for makes it easy for
us in London to sympathise with our brothers and sisters in Paris. We
have as yet been spared daylight raids in the Metropolitan area, and so
we needed this cartoon to enable us to realise fully what “Kultur” by
indiscriminate Zeppelin bombs means.
Who cannot see the cruel drama played out in that Paris street? The
artist has assembled for us in a few living figures all the actors.
The dead woman; the orphaned child, as yet scarcely realising her
loss; the bereaved workman, calling down the vengeance of Heaven
upon the murderers from the air; the stern faces of the _sergents de
ville_, evidently feeling keenly their impotence to protect; and in
the background other _sergents_, the lines of whose bent backs convey
in a marvellous manner and with a touch of real genius the impression
of tender solicitude for the injured they are tending. And faintly
indicated, further still in the background, the crowd that differs
little, whether it be French or English, in its deeper emotions.
CLIVE HOLLAND
[Illustration: THE WONDERS OF CULTURE]
“Folk Who Do Not Understand Them”
How often have I been asked by sorrow-stricken mothers and wives: “Why
does not Providence intervene either to stop, this war, or at least
to check its cruelties and horrors?” If for many amongst us not yet
bereaved this European massacre is a puzzle, it should not cause us
dismay or surprise if the widow or son-bereaved mother lifts up her
hands exclaiming: “Why did not God save him? Why did He let him be shot
down by those Huns?”
Truth to tell, God has, so to speak, tied up His own hands in
setting ours free. When He placed the human race upon the surface
of this planet He dowered them with freedom, giving to each man
self-determining force, by the exercise of which he was to become
better than a man or worse than a beast. Good and evil, like wheat
and cockle, grow together in the same field. The winnowing is at
harvest-time, not before. Meanwhile, we ourselves have lived to see
the fairest portions of this fair creation of God changed from a
garden into a desert--pillaged, ravaged, and brought to utter ruin
by shot and shell, sword and fire. When I have said this, I have but
uttered a foreword to the hideous story, spoken the prologue only of
the “frightful” tragedy. We are all familiar with at least some of the
revolting facts and details with which the German soldiery has been
found charged and convicted by Commissions appointed to investigate the
crimes and atrocities adduced against them. The verdicts of French,
Belgian, and English tribunals are unanimous. They all agree that
Germany has been caught red-handed in her work of dyeing the map of
Europe red with innocent blood.
When you bend your eyes to the pathetic cartoon standing opposite this
letterpress, is there not brought home to you in a way, touching even
to tears, the “frightful” consequences of the misuse of human powers,
more especially of the attribute of freedom? If Germany had chosen to
use, instead of brute force, moral force, what a great, grand, and
glorious mission might have been hers to-day. If, instead of trying
the impossible task of dominating the whole world with her iron hand
upon its throat and her iron heel upon its foot, she had been satisfied
with the portion of the map already belonging to her, and had not by
processes of bureaucratic tyranny driven away millions of her subjects
who preferred liberty to slavery, America to Germany, by this date she
might have consolidated an Empire second in the world to none but one.
Alas! in her over-reaching arrogance she has, on the contrary, set out
to de-Christianise, de-civilise, and even de-humanise the race for
which Christ lived and died.
Our high mission it is to try to save her from herself. Already I can
read written in letters of blood carved into the gravestone of her
corrupted greatness,
“Ill-weaved ambition,
How much art thou shrunk!”
BERNARD VAUGHAN
[Illustration: LES BEAUTÉS DE LA GUERRE
Folk who do not understand them.]
On the Way to Calais
They are coming, like a tempest, in their endless ranks of grey,
While the world throws up a cloud of dust upon their awful way;
They’re the glorious cannon fodder of the mighty Fatherland,
Born to make the kingdoms tremble and the nations understand.
Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! the cannon fodder come
Along their way to Calais; (God help the hearth and home.)
They’ll do his will who taught them, on the earth and on the
waves,
Till land and sea are festering with their unnumbered graves.
The garrison and barrack and the fortress give them vent;
They sweep, a herd of winter wolves, upon the flying scent;
For all their deeds of horror they are told that death atones,
And their master’s harvest cannot spring till he has sowed their
bones.
Into beasts of prey he’s turned them; when they show their teeth
and growl
The lash is buried in their cheeks; they’re slaughtered if they
howl;
To their bloody Lord of Battles must they only bend the knee,
For hard as steel and fierce as hell should cannon fodder be.
Scourge and curses are their portion, pain and hunger without end,
Till they hail the yell of shrapnel as the welcome of a friend;
They drink and burn and rape and laugh to hear the women cry,
And do the devil’s work to-day, but on the morrow die.
Drift! Drift! Drift! the cannon fodder go
Upon their way to Calais, (God feed the carrion crow.)
They’ve done his will who taught them that the Germans shall be
slaves,
Till land and sea are festering with their unnumbered graves.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
[Illustration: THE YSER
“We are on our way to Calais.”]
Von Bethmann-Hollweg and Truth
“_Incorrupta Fides, nudaque Veritas._”
HORACE.
“Good Faith unstained, and Truth all-unadorned.”
_Nuda Veritas_: it was Horace who in a famous Ode first presented the
figure of Truth thus. And whom did he make her companions and sisters?
They were three, and their names were “Modesty,” “Fair Dealing,” and
“Good Faith.” The four sisters do indeed go together in a quadruple
alliance and _entente_, and when one is flouted or estranged, the
others are alienated and become enemies too.
The Germans were believed to be--some few still believe them to be--a
“truth-loving nation.” They had a passion, we were told, for truth, for
accuracy, for scientific exactness. Theirs might be a blunt and brutal
frankness, but they were at least downright and truthful.
Well, they first flouted Modesty--they bragged and blustered, bluffed
and “bounded.” They could not keep it up. They had to act. Fair Dealing
went by the board. Then Good Faith became impossible, for, as this
very von Bethmann-Hollweg declared, “Necessity knew no law.” Now they
have forsaken Truth. They must deceive their own people. The “lie”
has entered into their soul. Never was so systematic a use made of
falsehoods small and great.
But Truth expelled is not powerless. Naked, she is still not
weaponless. She has her little “periscope,” her magic mirror, which
shows the liar himself, as well as the world, what he is like. And
she has another weapon, as those who know their “Paradise Lost” will
remember:
“Bright Ithuriel’s lance
Truth kindling truth where’er it glance.”
It is not shown here, for it is invisible, but none the less potent.
With it Truth can indeed “shame the devil.” She not only shows what the
liar is like outside, but reveals his inner hideousness, and actual
shape, for all to see.
There are many sayings about Truth, and they are all awkward for
the liar. “Truth will out,” said a witty English judge, “even in an
affidavit.” It will out, even in a German Chancellor’s _démenti_.
The most famous is
“_Magna est veritas et prævalet_”
“Great is Truth and she prevails,” in the end.
Yes, “She is on the path, and nothing will stop her.” She started on
the hills of the little but free republic of Switzerland; she is slowly
traversing the plains of the vast free republic of America. Her last
contest will be over the Germans themselves.
HERBERT WARREN
[Illustration: VON BETHMANN-HOLLWEG AND TRUTH
“Truth is on the path and nothing will stay her.”]
Van Tromp and De Ruyter
A generation ago a little clique of wise men at Oxford patted
themselves on the back for having discovered “The Historical Method.”
But the common people of all countries have always known it. The names
of the great dead are not forgotten, nor yet the great things for which
they stood. There may be no strict liturgy for the ancestor worship of
the West, but that worship is a simple fact, and it is a thing that
timorous politicians would do well to remember. Here Raemaekers appeals
to his countrymen to regard their past, to be worthy of the great
seamen who took the Dutch Fleet up the Medway, and lashed brooms to the
mast-head of the ships that swept the sea clear of British enemies.
The Dutch were fighting for their liberty then. Great Britain is
fighting for liberty in Europe to-day--and for Dutch liberty to
boot. The enemy of all liberty uses Holland as a short cut whereby
her pirates of the air can get more quickly to their murder work in
England. Would the hero ancestors, of whom the Dutch so boast, have
tolerated this indignity? The artist seer supplies the answer.
Note the mixture of the ghostly and the real in this vivid and
vivacious drawing. But if it is easy to see through the faint outlines
of the sailor spirits, it is easier for these gallant ghosts to see
through the unrealities of their descendants’ fears and hesitations.
The anger of the heroes is plainly too great for words. How compressed
the lips! How tense the attitude! The hands gripped in the angriest
sort of impatience! Mark the subtle mingling of seaman and burgher
in the poise and figures. Mark particularly van Tromp’s stiffened
forefinger on his staff.
Is the fate of L19 the fruit of our artist’s stinging reminder that
Holland once had nobler spirits and braver days?
ARTHUR POLLEN
[Illustration: VAN TROMP AND DE RUYTER
“So long as you permit Zeppelins to cross our land you surely should
cease to boast of our deeds.”
Whenever a Dutchman wishes to speak of the great past of his country he
calls to mind the names of these heroes.]
War and Christ.
The deliberate war made by Prussia in all those areas which she can
reach or occupy against the symbols and sacred objects of the Christian
faith is a phenomenon in every way worthy of consideration. It is
clearly not a matter of accident. The bombardment at Rheims Cathedral,
for example, can be proved to have been deliberate. It had no military
object; and the subsequent attempts to manufacture a military reason
for it only produced a version of the occurrence not only incredible
but in flat contradiction to the original admissions of the Germans
themselves. But such episodes as those of Rheims and Louvain merely
attract the attention of the world because of the celebrity of the
outraged shrines. All who are familiar with the facts know that
deliberate sacrilege no less than deliberate rape and deliberate murder
has everywhere marked the track of the German army.
The offence has been malignant. That does not, of course, mean that it
has been irrational; quite the contrary. One fully admits that Prussia,
being what she is, has every cause to hate the Cross, and every motive
to vent the agonised fury of a lost soul upon things sacred to the God
she hates.
The moral suggested by this cartoon of Raemaekers’ must not be confused
with the ridiculous and unhistoric pretence that war itself is
essentially unchristian. When Mr. Bernard Shaw, if I remember right,
drew from the affair of Rheims the astonishing moral that we cannot
have at the same time “glorious wars and glorious cathedrals,” he might
surely have remembered that the age in which Rheims Cathedral was
built, whatever else it was, was not an age of Pacifism. The insult
to Jesus Christ is not in the sword (which in His own words He came
to bring), but in the profanation of the sword. It is in cruelty,
injustice, treachery, unbridled lust, the worship of unrighteous
strength--in fact, in all that can be summed up in the single word
“Prussia.”
CECIL CHESTERTON
[Illustration: WAR AND CHRIST]
Barbed Wire
Save for the spiked helmets, the gruesome figures in the foreground
of this cartoon might have belonged in life to any one of the warring
nationalities. It is a noteworthy fact, however, that not one of the
nations at war has shown so little care for its dead as Germany, whose
corpses lie and rot on every front on which they are engaged.
The world cannot blame Germany for the introduction of barbed wire as
an accessory of war, though it is well known that German wire surpasses
any other in sheer devilish ingenuity; not that it is more effective
as an entanglement, but its barbs are longer, and are set more closely
together, than in the wire used by other nationalities; it is, in
short, more frightful, and thus is in keeping with the rest of the
accessories of the German war machine.
But this in the cartoon is normal barbed wire, with its normal burden.
One may question whether the All-Highest War Lord, who in the course
of his many inspections of the various fronts must have seen sights
like this, is ever troubled by the thought that these, his men, lie and
hang thus for his pleasure, that their ghastly fate is a part of his
glorious plan. He set out to remake the world, and here is one of the
many results--broken corpses in the waste.
Part of the plan, broken corpses in the waste. By the waste and the
corpses that he made shall men remember the author and framer of this
greatest war.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN
[Illustration: BARBED WIRE]
The Higher Politics
There is a significance in this cartoon which I believe will appeal
much more strongly to the firing line than to Home. The Front distrusts
politics, and especially the higher politics. That means the juggling
and wire-pulling of the Chancelleries, and the Front has an uneasy
conviction that at the subtleties and craftiness and cunning of the
diplomatic game we cannot compete with “The Bosche.” Hard knocks and
straight fighting the Front does understand, and at that game are
cheerfully confident of winning in the long run.
It would be bitter news to the fighting men that any peace had been
patched up on any terms but those the Allies soon or late will be in a
position to dictate, to lay down and say flatly, “Take them and have
Peace; or leave them and go on getting licked.” The Front doesn’t like
War. No man who has endured the horrors and savagery and “blood, mud,
and misery” of civilised warfare could pretend to like it. No man who
has endured the long-drawn misery of manning the waterlogged trenches
for days and weeks and months can look forward with anything but
apprehension to another winter of war. No man who has attacked across
the inferno of the shell-and-bullet-swept “neutral ground,” or has
hung on with tight-clenched teeth to the battered ruins of the forward
fire trench under a murderous rain of machine-gun and rifle bullets, a
howling tempest of shells, an earth-shaking tornado of high explosives,
can but long for the day when Peace will be declared and these horrors
will be no more than a past nightmare.
But the Front will “stick it” for another winter or several winters,
will go through many bitter attacks and counter-attacks to win the
complete victory that will ensure, and alone will ensure, lasting
peace. We know our limitations and our weaknesses. We admit that, as
the American journalist bluntly put it, we are “poor starters,” but we
know just as surely he was right in completing the phrase, “but darn
good finishers.” Let the “higher politicians” on our side stand down
and leave the fighting men to finish the argument. Let them keep the
ring clear, and let the Front fight it out. The Front doesn’t mind
“taking the responsibility,” and it will give “Kaiser Bill” and “Little
Willie” all the responsibilities they can handle before the Great Game
is over.
BOYD CABLE
[Illustration: THE HIGHER POLITICS
THE KAISER: “We will propose peace terms; if they accept them, we are
the gainers; if they refuse them, the responsibility will rest with
them.”]
The Loan Game
Raemaekers is pitiless, but never oversteps the truth. National Debts
are ever national millstones, worn around the neck. They are worn
unwillingly, and they are not ornamental; they are a burden, and the
weight is sometimes crushing. A prospect of that sort seems to be the
lot of several of the “Great Powers” of Europe for the remainder,
and the greater portion, of the Twentieth Century. Though German
“civilisation” were more worthy of such a term and its associations as
Kultur ten times over, would it become any Potentate and his advisers
to impose it on so many countries at such a cost in suffering as all
this--and more?
But Kaiser Wilhelm and his crew of State-at-any-price men impose not
on other peoples only: they impose on their own kith and kin. Look at
these three sad and apprehensive figures playing the Loan Game--the
first, the second, the third Loan! Children, says the artist, passing
the coin from one hand to another’s, and getting richer at each pass!!
Yes, children, the German people treated so by a few dominies. State
dominies and the Director (or dupe!) at Berlin! No people gains, every
people loses by incurring a Debt; but in Germany, and to-day! to incur
an indebtedness, contract a loss, does not suffice; the people must not
know it.
Even the children know that coin has not left them richer: many,
very many Germans know the Kultur War to be ruinous: but Berlin must
play the Game still, and assume that the tricks and aims cannot be
understood! It is lack of regard for other nations carried into German
Finance; and all because the bureaucratic military heart is a stone.
The piling up of State paper goes on, but not merrily, as Michael
goes from Darlehnkasse to Reichsbank, one, two, three (and is about
to go the fourth time!). This game of processions to the Kasse does
not increase the available wealth within beleaguered Germany: and the
100-mark Note has no reference to material wealth securing it.
Now, the Commercial magnates of Germany realise the crushing fact--No
indemnity possible!! and what of the Notes which are held? When shades
of night fall heavily, and the Loan Game can be played no more, will
the German people, tricked and impoverished, go to bed supperless and
silent? German finance IS “a scrap of paper.”
W. M. J. WILLIAMS
[Illustration: WE DON’T UNDERSTAND THE LOAN GAME
In Germany there is a game by which children passing a coin from one to
another are supposed to, but do not, get any richer.]
A War of Rapine
True, O Liebknecht, it is indeed a war of rapine, engendered, planned,
and brought about by the nation to which you belong. Yet, foul as is
that nation, its foulness is not greater than your futility, by which
you show up the strength of that which you oppose with as much effect
as our own Snowden and Casement can claim for their efforts to arrest
the work of the Allies.
Men who claim British birth claim also the quality of loyalty, as a
rule, and thus there can be little sympathy with such a one as this
Liebknecht, whom Raemaekers shows as a little ascetic in the presence
of the sombre War Lord. It is part of the plan of Nature that every
country shall breed men like this: men who are constitutionally opposed
to the current of affairs, ridiculously futile, blatantly noisy, the
type of which extreme Socialists and Syndicalists are made. Possessed
of a certain obstinacy which is almost akin to courage, they accomplish
nothing, save to remain in the public eye.
Such is Liebknecht, apostle of a creed that would save the world by
the gospel of mediocrity, were human nature other than it is. But, in
considering this Liebknecht, let us not forget that he has no more
love for England, or for any of the Allies, than the giant whom he
attempts so vainly to oppose; he is an apostle, not of peace, but of
mere obstruction, perhaps well-meaning in his way, but as futile as the
Crown Prince, and as ludicrous.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN
[Illustration: LUTHER LIEBKNECHT IN THE REICHSTAG
“It is a war of rapine! On that I take my stand. I cannot do otherwise.”
Liebknecht was the one member who protested against the war.]
The Dutch Junkers
Some of these drawings remind us that the great cartoonist’s message
was primarily delivered to his own countrymen. They explain why he
was accused, but not convicted, of endangering the neutrality of the
Netherlands. He presents the German monster as a menace to all freedom,
and not least to the freedom of the Dutch people. Germany’s allies have
sold theirs; they are harnessed to the Prussian war chariot, and must
drag it whither the driver bids them, whip in hand. The nations in arms
against Germany are fighting for their own and each other’s freedom;
and the neutrals stand looking anxiously on. Raemaekers warns them that
their freedom too is at stake. He sees that it will disappear if the
Allies fail in the struggle, and he shows his countrymen what they may
expect.
In every country there are some ignoble souls who would rather embrace
servitude than fight for freedom. They have a conscientious objection
to--danger. How far the Dutch Junkers deserve Raemaekers’ satire it
is not for foreigners to judge. But we know the type he depicts--the
sporting “nuts,” with their careful get-up, effeminate paraphernalia
and vacuous countenances. So long as they can wear a sporting costume
and carry a gun they are prepared to take a menial place under a
Prussian over-lord and submit with a feeble fatalism to the loss of
national independence. It is light satire in keeping with the subject,
and it provides a relief to the sombre tragedy which is the artist’s
prevailing mood.
A. SHADWELL
[Illustration: THE DUTCH JUNKERS
“At least we shall get posts as gamekeepers when Germany takes us after
the war.”]
The War-makers
_Who are the Makers of Wars?_
The Kings of the Earth.
_And who are these Kings of the Earth?_
Only men--not always even men of worth,
But claiming rule by right of birth.
_And Wisdom?--does that come by birth?_
Nay then--too often the reverse.
Wise father oft has son perverse,
Solomon’s son was Israel’s curse.
_Why suffer things to reason so averse?_
It always has been so,
And only now does knowledge grow
To that high point where all men know--
Who would be free must strike the blow.
_And how long will man suffer so?_
Until his soul of Freedom sings,
And, strengthened by his sufferings,
He breaks the worn-out leading-strings,
And calls to stricter reckonings
Those costliest things--unworthy Kings.
Here you have them!--Pilloried for all time!
And what a crew! These pitiful self-seekers and their dupes!
Not the least amazing phenomenon of these most amazing times is the
fact that millions of men should consent to be hurled to certain death,
and to permit the ruin of their countries, to satisfy the insensate
ambitions of rulers, who, when all is said and done, are but men, and
in some cases even of alien birth and personally not specially beloved
by them.
Surely one outcome of this world-war will be the birth of a new
determination in every nation that its own voice and its own will shall
control its own destinies--that no one man or self-appointed clique
shall swing it to ruin for his or their own selfish purposes. Who pays
the piper must in future call the tune.
“The world has suffered much too long.
O wonder of the ages--
O marvel of all time--
This wonderful great patience of the peoples!
How long, O Lord, how long?”
The answer cannot come too soon for the good of the world.
JOHN OXENHAM
[Illustration: VOX POPULI SUPREMA LEX
THE KAISER: “Don’t bother about your people, Tino. People only have to
applaud what we say.”]
The Christmas of Kultur, A.D. 1915
Mary, worn with grief and fear, covers her emaciated face with scarred
hands, as she kneels in prayer before the infant Jesus. Joseph, grown
old and feeble, nails up a barricade of planks to strengthen the
door against the missiles of Kultur already bursting through it and
threatening the sleeping child. So in that first Christmas, nineteen
centuries ago, he saved Mary’s child from the baby-massacre ordered by
Herod to preserve his own throne.
Kultur, the gathered wisdom of the ages, has brought us back to the
same Holy War. What a Christmas! What a Festival of Peace and goodwill
towards men!
People ask: Why does God allow it? Is God dead? Foolish questions. When
I was at school I had the good fortune to be under a great teacher
whose name is honoured to-day. He used to tell us that the most
terrible verse in the Bible was: “So He gave them up unto their own
hearts’ lust and they walked in their own counsels” (Ps. lxxxi, 13).
Man has the knowledge of good and evil; he has eaten of the tree and
insists on going his own way. He knows best. Is not this the age of
science and Kultur? We must not cry out if the road we have chosen
leads to disaster.
Yet still the Child of Christmas lives and a divine light shines round
His head. He sleeps.
A. SHADWELL
[Illustration: CHRISTMAS EVE
JOSEPH: “The Holy War is at the door!”]
Serbia
Genius has set forth the most brutal characteristic of the Hun. In
moments of triumph, invariably he is the bully, and, as invariably,
he wallows in brutality--witness Belgium under his iron heel and, in
this cartoon, stricken Serbia impotent to ward off the blow about to
be dealt by a monstrous fist. That is the Teuton conception of War,
Merry War (_Lustige Krieg_)! In the English prize-ring we have an
axiom indelibly impressed upon novices--“Follow up one stout blow with
another--_quick!_” That, also, is the consummate art of war. But when
a man is knocked out we don’t savage him as he lies senseless at our
feet. The Hun does. His axiom is--“As you are strong, be merciless!”
In the small pig-eyes, in the gross, sensual lips, the mandril-like
jaw, the misshapen ear, I see not merely a lifelike portrait of a Hun,
but a composite photograph of all Huns, something which should hang in
every house in the kingdom until the terms of such a peace have been
imposed which will make the shambles in Belgium, Poland, and Serbia
an eternal nightmare of the past, never to be repeated in the future.
And over the anæmic hearts of the Trevelyans, the Ramsay MacDonalds,
the Arthur Ponsonbys, who dare to prattle of a peace that shall not
humiliate Germany, I would have this cartoon tattooed, not in indigo,
but in vermilion.
If Ulysses Grant exacted from the gallant Robert Lee “Unconditional
Surrender,” and if our generation approves--as it does--that grim
ultimatum, what will be the verdict of posterity should we as a
nation--we who have been spared the unspeakable horrors under which
other less isolated countries have been “bled white”--descend to the
infamy of a compromise between the Powers of Darkness and Light?
The Huns respect Force, and nothing else. Mercy provokes contempt
and laughter. I hold no brief for reprisals upon helpless women and
children; I am not an advocate of what is called the “commercial
extermination of Germany”; but it is my sincerest conviction that
criminals must be punished. The Most Highest War Lord and his people,
not excluding the little children who held high holiday when the
_Lusitania_ was torpedoed, are--CRIMINALS.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL
[Illustration: SERBIA]
The Last of the Race
Raemaekers, the master of an infinite variety of moods and touch,
reserves a special category of scorn for von Tirpitz. Savage cruelty in
war, the wanton destruction of life and property, the whole gospel of
frightfulness--these things have been abandoned (so the historians tell
us), not because savagery was bad morals, but because it was the worst
way of making war. It was wiser to take the enemy’s property and put it
to your own use than to destroy it. If it was plundered it was wasted.
It was wiser to spare men, women, and children, so that they should
be better subjects if they remained conquered, less irreconcilable
enemies, if they were restored to their old allegiance. Besides,
murder, plunder, and rapine demoralised your men. They made them less
efficient troops for fighting. Doubtless the argument is sound. But it
would never have been accepted had not the horrors of savagery been
utterly loathsome and repulsive to the nations that abandoned them.
Conventions in the direction of humanity are not, then, _artificial_
restrictions in the use of force. They are natural restrictions,
because all Christian and civilised people would far rather observe
them than not. Germany has revelled in abandoning every restraint.
Raemaekers shows the cruelty, the wickedness of this in scores of his
drawings. Here it is its folly that he emphasises.
The submarine is no longer a death-dealing terror. It has become
a blubbering fish. And the author of its crimes is no diabolical
triton, but a semi-imbecile old dotard, round whom his evil--but
terrified--brood have clustered; they fawning on him in terror, he
fondling them in shaky, decrepit fondness. Note the flaccid paunch,
the withered top, and the foolish, hysterical face. How the full-dress
cocked hat shames his nakedness!
And this, remember, is the German High Admiral as history will know
him, when the futility of his crimes is proved, their evil put out of
memory, and only their foolishness remains!
ARTHUR POLLEN
[Illustration: THE LAST OF THE RACE
VON TIRPITZ: “No, my dears, I’m not sending any more of you to those
wicked English; the survivors shall go to the Zoo.”]
The Curriculum
The nations are being educated amain, let us hope. Germany has prided
herself on her education, her learning, and on her Kultur. To-day she
is beyond the calculation of all that foresight which has been her
boast, and foible. Human nature, other than German, has not been on the
national curriculum, and, as in other departments of study, what has
not been reduced to rule and line is beyond the ken and apprehension.
How stupendously wrong a Power which could count, and into a European
War! on insurrection in India, the Cape, and other parts of the British
Empire! and how naively did Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg disclose the
_Zeitgeist_ of German rulers when with passion he declared Britain to
be going to war for “a scrap of paper”! A purpose to serve, a treaty
becomes “a scrap”--in German courtly hands.
The artist depicts a scene, with masterly pencil, where von
Bethmann-Hollweg himself is charged by the All-Highest to be
schoolmaster. It is a grim department of the training. Think of the
unseen as well as that shown. What you do see is the lordly, truculent
Kaiser, raising that menacing finger again. In spacious chair, he sits
defiant, aggressive, as a ferocious captain; and there opposite is the
“great Chancellor,” bent, submissive, apprehensive, tablet and pencil
ready to take down the very word of Kaiserly wisdom and will. What is
it? The day’s fare for a week! reaching a climax of “No dinner” on
Saturday, and “Hate” on Sunday! Educative! of course it will be.
Some day, not so far, even the German people will not regard the
orders of the Army and Navy Staff, the cruel mercies of the Junkers,
as a revelation of Heaven’s will. Three pounds of sugar for a family’s
monthly supply will educate, even when the gospel of force has been
preached for fifty years to a docile people. Many of us are in “a
strait betwixt two” as we see how thousands of inoffensive old men,
women, and children are made to suffer, are placed by the All-Highest
in this Copper and Hate School. It is not this, that, and the other
that causes this, but the Director of the School, who does not, while
the miserable scholars do, know what it is to endure “No dinner,” not
only on Saturdays, but many other days. And all to gratify the mad
projectors imposing Kultur on an unwilling world!
W. M. J. WILLIAMS
[Illustration: THE NEW SCHOOL CURRICULUM
WILLIAM: “Write it down, schoolmaster--Monday shall be Copper Day;
Tuesday, Potato Day; Wednesday, Leather Day; Thursday, Gold Day;
Friday, Rubber Day; Saturday, No Dinner Day; and Sunday, Hate Day!”]
The Dutch Journalist to his Belgian Confrère
Whether the type here taken is a true criticism of a commercial
attitude in a neutral State like Holland, it does not become us to
discuss. Raemaekers is a Dutchman, and doubtless a patriotic Dutchman.
And the patriot, and the patriot alone, has not only the right but the
duty of criticising his own country.
For us it is better to regard the figure as an international, and
often anti-national, character who exists in all nations, and who,
even in a belligerent country like our own, can often contrive to be
neutral and worse than neutral. A prosperous bully with the white
waistcoat and coarse, heavily cuffed hands, with which such prosperity
very frequently clothes itself, is represented as thrusting food in
the starved face of an evicted Belgian and saying: “Eat and hold your
tongue.”
The situation is worthy of such record, if only because it emphasises
an element in the general German plot against the world which is often
forgotten in phrases about fire and sword. The Prussianised person is
not only a military tyrant; he is equally and more often a mercantile
tyrant. And what is in this respect true of the German is as true or
truer of the Pro-German.
The cosmopolitan agent of Prussia is a commercial agent, and works by
those modern methods of bribing and sacking, of boycott and blackmail,
which are not only meaner, but often more cruel, than militarism. For
anyone who realises the power of such international combinations, there
is the more credit due to the artists and men of letters who, like
Raemaekers himself, have decisively chosen their side while the issue
was very doubtful. And among the Belgian confrères there must certainly
have been many who showed as much courage as any soldier, when they
decided not to eat and be silent, but to starve and to speak.
G. K. CHESTERTON
[Illustration: THE DUTCH JOURNALIST TO HIS BELGIAN CONFRÈRE: “Eat and
hold your tongue.”]
A Bored Critic
From Homeric warfare to subterranean conflict of modern trenches is a
far cry, and Ares, God of Battles, may well yawn at the entertainment
with which the Demon of War is providing him. But the spectator of
this grim “revue” lacks something of the patience of its creator, and
our Mephistopheles, marking the god’s protest, will doubtless hurry
the scene and diversify it with new devilries to restore his interest.
Indeed, that has happened since Raemaekers made his picture.
The etiquette of butchery has become more complicated since Troy fell,
yet it has been so far preserved till now that the fiend measures
Ares with his eyes and speculates as to how far the martial god may
be expected to tolerate his novel engines. Will asphyxiating gas, and
destruction of non-combatants and neutrals on land and sea, trouble
him? Or will he demand the rules of the game, and decline to applaud
this satire on civilisation, although mounted and produced regardless
of cost and reckoning?
As the devil’s own entertainment consists in watching the effects of
his masterpiece on this warlike spectator, so it may be that those
who “staged” the greatest war in mankind’s history derive some bitter
instruction from its reception by mankind. They know now that it is
condemned by every civilised nation on earth; and before these lines
are published their uncivilised catspaws will have ample reason to
condemn it also. Neutrals there must be, but impartials none.
The sense and spirit of the thinking world now go so far with human
reason that they demand a condition of freedom for all men and nations,
be they weak or powerful. That ideal inspires the majority of human
kind, and it follows that the evolution of morals sets strongly on the
side of the Allies.
“War,” says Bernhardi, “gives a biologically just decision, since its
decisions rest on the very nature of things.” So be it.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
[Illustration: “I say, do suggest something new. This is becoming too
boring.”]
“The Peace Woman”
In this humorous yet pathetic cartoon--humorous because of its truth
to the type, and pathetic because of the futility of the effort
depicted--with unfailing skill the artist shows the folly of the cry
“Peace! Peace!” when there is none. In the forefront is a type of woman
publicist who can never be happy unless the limelight secured by vocal
effort and the advocacy of a “crazy” cause is focussed upon her. She
calls “Peace!” that the world may hear, not attend. Behind her stands
that other type of detached “peace woman,” who has, judging from her
placid yet grieved expression, apparently scarcely realised that the
War is too serious and has its genesis in causes too deep-rooted to be
quelled by her or her kind. One can imagine her saying: “A war! How
terrible! It must be stopped.”
The soldier, who is wise enough to prefer armour-plate even to a shield
provided by substantially built peace women clad in white, looks on
amused. The thinking world as a whole so looks on at “Arks” launched by
American millionaire motor manufacturers, and at Pacifist Conferences
held whilst the decision as to whether civilisation or savagery shall
triumph, and might be greater than right, yet hangs in the balance.
There must be no thought of peace otherwise than as the ultimate reward
of gallant men fighting in a just cause, and until with it can come
permanent security from the “Iron Fist” of Prussian Militarism and
aggression, and the precepts of Bernhardi and his kind are shown to
be false. Those who talk of peace in the midst of “frightfulness,” of
piracy, of reckless carnage and colossal sacrifices of human life which
are the fruits of an attempt to save by military glory a crapulous
dynasty, however good their intention, lack both mental and moral
perspective.
CLIVE HOLLAND
[Illustration: THE PEACE WOMAN: “We will march in white before our
sons.”
THE NEUTRAL SOLDIER: “Madam, we would prefer the protection of an
armour-plate.”]
The Self-satisfied Burgher
The artist has depicted the ordinary attitude of a self-satisfied
burgher not only in Holland but in other countries also. “What does
it matter if we are annexed afterwards, so long as we remain neutral
now?” That is the sort of speech made by selfish merchants in some of
the neutral countries, especially those of Scandinavian origin. It is
really a variety of the old text: “Let us eat, drink, and be merry;
for to-morrow we die.” Why not, it is urged, make the best of present
facilities? As long as we are left alone we can pursue our ordinary
industrialism. We can heap up our percentages and profits. Our trade
is in a fairly flourishing condition, and we are making money. No
one knows what the future may bring; why, therefore, worry about it?
Besides, if the worst comes to the worst and Germany annexes us, are
we quite sure that we shall be in a much worse condition than we are
now? It will be to the interest of Berlin that we should carry on our
usual industrial occupations. Our present liberty will probably not be
interfered with, and a change of masters does not always mean ruin.
So argues the self-satisfied burgher. If life were no more than a mere
matter of getting enough to eat and drink and of having a balance at
the banker’s, his view of the case might pass muster. But a national
life depends on spiritual and ideal interests, just as a man’s life
“consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.”
Freedom is the only principle of growth, and freedom is the one thing
which German militarism desires to make impossible for all those whom
she gathers into her fold. The loss of liberty means the ruin of all
those ends for which a State exists. Even the material prosperity which
the self-satisfied burgher desires will be definitely sacrificed by a
submission to Teutonic autocracy.
W. L. COURTNEY
[Illustration: THE SELF-SATISFIED BURGHER
“What does it matter if we’re annexed afterwards, so long as we remain
neutral now?”]
The Decadent
War is a fiery winnower of incapacities. Many reputations have gone to
the scrap-heap since August, 1914. None more surely than that of the
braggart Crown Prince. It is said that this terrible catastrophe was
largely of his bringing about and his great desire and hope.
Well--he has got his desire, and more than he expected.
He was going to do mighty things--to smash through the frontier and
lead the German hordes triumphantly through France. And what has he
done?
In the treacherous surprise of the moment he got across the frontier,
and there the weighty French fist met the Imperial optic, and has
since developed many stars in it. He has been held, wasting men, time,
opportunity, and his own little apology for a soul. He has done nothing
to justify his position or even his existence. He has wrecked his
home-life by wanton indulgence. He has made himself notorious by his
private lootings of the châteaux cursed with his presence.
Even in 1870 the native cupidity of the far finer breed of conquerors
could not resist the spoils of war, and, to their eternal disgrace,
trainloads of loot were sent away to decorate German homes--as
burglars’ wives might wear the jewellery acquired by their adventurous
menfolk in the course of their nefarious operations.
But we never heard of “Unser Fritz,” the then Crown Prince, ransacking
the mansions he stayed in. He was a great man and a good--the very last
German gentleman. And this decadent is his grandson!
“Unser Fritz” was a very noble-looking man. His grandson--oh, well,
look at him and judge for yourselves! Of a surety the sight is
calculated to heighten one’s amazement that any nation under the sun,
or craving it, could find in such a personality, even as representative
of a once great but now exploding idea, anything whatever even to put
up with, much less to worship and die for.
The race of Hohenzollern has wilted and ravelled out to this. The whole
world, outside Prussia, devoutly hopes ere long to have seen the last
of it.
It has been at all times, with the single exception above noted, a
hustling, grabbing, self-seeking race. May the eyes of Germany soon be
opened! Then, surely, it will be thrust back into the obscurity whence
heaven can only have permitted it to escape for the flagellation of a
world which was losing its ideals and needed bracing back with a sharp,
stern twist.
JOHN OXENHAM
[Illustration: SEPTEMBER, 1914, AND SEPTEMBER, 1915
1914: “Now the war begins as we like it.”
1915: “But this is not as I wished it to continue.”
(Published after the French success in Champagne.)]
Liquid Fire
When one sits down to think, there are few things in connection with
the devastating War now raging, wild-beast-like, almost throughout
the length and breadth of Europe, so appalling as the application of
science and man’s genius to the work of decimating the human species.
Early in the conflict, which is being fought for the basal principles
of civilisation and moral human conduct, one was made to realise that
the Allied Powers were opposed to an enemy whose resources were only
equalled by his utter negation of the rules of civilised warfare.
Soon, to the horrors of machine-guns and of high-explosive shells
of a calibre and intensity of destructive force never before known,
were added the diabolical engines for pouring over the field of
battle asphyxiating gases. We know the horrors of that mode of German
“frightfulness,” and some of us have seen its effects in the slowly
dying victims in hospitals. But that was not enough. Yet other methods
of “frightfulness” and savagely which would have disgraced the most
ruthless conquerors of old, were to be applied by the German Emperor in
his blasphemous “Gott mit uns” campaign. And against the gallant sons
of Belgium, France, England, and Russia in turn were poured out with
bestial ingenuity the jets and curtains of “liquid fire” which seared
the flesh and blinded the eyes. For this there will be a reckoning if
God be still in heaven whilst the world trembles with the shock of
conflict, and the souls of men are seared.
Raemaekers in this cartoon shows not only the horror of such a method
of warfare, but also, with unerring pencil, the unwavering spirit of
the men who have to meet this “frightfulness.” There is a land to be
redeemed, and women and children to be avenged, and so the fighting men
of the allied nations go gallantly on with their stern, amazed faces
set towards victory.
CLIVE HOLLAND
[Illustration: LIQUID FIRE]
Nish and Paris
Very happily and very graphically has Raemaekers here pointed the
contrast between the Gargantuan hopes with which the Kaiser and his
Junker army embarked on the War, and the exiguous and shadowy fruits of
their boasted victories up to the present. They foretold a triumphal
entry into the conquered capital of France within a month of the
opening of hostilities. Yet the irony of Fate has, slowly but surely,
cooled the early fever of anticipation. The only captured town where
the All-Highest has found an opportunity of lifting his voice in
exultant pæan is Nish, a secondary city of the small kingdom of Serbia.
There, too, he perforce delayed his jubilation until the lapse of some
eighteen months after the date provisionally and prematurely fixed in
the first ebullition of over-confidence, for his triumphal procession
through Paris.
Nish is a town of little more than 20,000 inhabitants; about the size
of Taunton or Hereford--smaller than Woking or Dartford. Working on
a basis of comparative populations, the Emperor would have to repeat
without more delay his bravery at Nish in 150 towns of the same size
before he could convince his people that he is even now on the point of
fulfilling his first rash promises to them of the rapid overthrow of
his foes. Pursuing the same calculation, he is bound to multiply his
present glories 350 times before he can count securely on spending a
night as conquering hero in Buckingham Palace.
Even the Kaiser must know in his heart that woefully, from his own and
his people’s point of view, did he overestimate his strength at the
outset. For the time he contents himself with the backwater of Nish
for the scene of his oratory of conquest. His vainglorious words may
well prove in their environment the prelude of a compulsory confession
of failure, which is likely to come at a far briefer interval than the
eighteen months which separate the imaginary hope of Paris from the
slender substance of Nish.
SIDNEY LEE
[Illustration: THE TRIALS OF A COURT PAINTER
“I commenced this as the entry into Paris, but I must finish it as the
entry into Nish.”]
The Fire Fiend
Among the many inventions which German ingenuity and science have
devised for the effective conduct of this war, and for the elevation
of Germany to supremacy in the world, the most repellent in general
estimation has been the use of fire; but this commends itself with
peculiar zest to Mephistopheles, who here sits on a chair beside the
telephone and calls up the Prussian Palace at Potsdam. He cannot
restrain his admiration and delight at this new invention. It is
entirely to his heart. He sits with one leg rested on the knee of
the other; and you will notice that the foot of this leg, with its
carefully careless drawing, suggests a cloven hoof, while the scanty
hair, by its arrangement, gives the effect of a pair of horns: even in
this figure, an ornament of high-class society, there linger the signs
of the half-bestial figure of Satan. The face is wholly the countenance
of the devil, conceived as the man of society, who has moved amid the
luxury of the most fashionable circles, where his wit and cynicism have
made him popular.
All his surroundings are suited to his character. The chair on which he
sits has goat’s feet, and its back is the bearded head of a goat. The
very telephone has something about it subtly suggestive of the devil. A
gorgeously attired flunkey who stands behind the chair does not attempt
to conceal his delight at the joke; for he is not the conventional
English serving man, who betrays no appreciation of what is said by his
master. He is in perfect sympathy with the devil, for he is himself
a devil. The nature of the devil is expressed more completely in the
footman than in the master. His legs are the legs of a goat, and his
feet are its cloven hoofs; and, whereas on the master’s head the idea
of horns is suggested only by the arrangement of the hair, horns openly
protrude from the bald skull of the serving-man. There is no veneer of
fashion and intellect and wit here: the hateful animalism of the face
is in keeping with the animal limbs.
From these surroundings comes the message to Potsdam. The Prussian
monarchs have always been given to the outward forms of religion in
their messages. For every success which they have announced to their
people they have professed their appreciation of the good conduct of
that German God whom alone they recognise. But Mephistopheles has been
struck with one omission in the series of messages from the Kaiser
at the front announcing the stages of his success. There has been no
expression of thanks to the “dear old God” for the application of fire
as an agent of victory, and he calls up his friend at Potsdam to twit
him with the omission.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY
[Illustration: BURNING FIRE
“Hullo! Potsdam? Did you thank your dear old God for this new
success?”]
The German Oculist
The position of Holland as a neutral state is one of increasing
difficulty. She has no desire to join in the war on either side; all
she asks for is to be left alone to pursue her own mercantile path and
to maintain the rights and privileges of her kingdom. Naturally enough,
however, she feels very uneasy at the close proximity of a power like
Germany, which has shown how little the independence of nationalities
is regarded in her military councils. Holland, it must be remembered,
has the example of Belgium before her eyes. She knows therefore what
it must mean to be overrun by Hunnish hordes, and to lose at once the
vitality of her national life and the security of her towns.
Raemaekers’ picture graphically depicts the efforts that are being
made by German agents to convert Holland’s neutrality into an active
support of Berlin. The German oculist trying on spectacles persuades
his patient that the Dutch cry “Oranje Boven” is synonymous with
“Deutschland über Alles.” In the earlier stages of the war it did not
interfere with German projects that Holland should remain neutral, for
hers was a useful country through which to import the various supplies
of munitions and food which Germany needed. Now, however, that the
stringency of the British blockade has so largely interfered with the
transit of goods, Germany may discover it to be to her advantage to
possess Holland as an Ally. Hence the zeal of the Teuton oculist and
his insidious attempts to make the Dutchman see things as Germany sees
them. The fact is, of course, that the possession of the Dutch coast
line would add not a little to German facilities in her submarine and
Zeppelin attacks.
W. L. COURTNEY
[Illustration: ORANJE BOVEN
GERMAN OCULIST (trying on spectacles): “What do you read now?”
DUTCHMAN: “Deutschland über Alles.”
GERMAN OCULIST: “That is right; that pair exactly suits you.”
“Oranje Boven” is the Dutch cry which answers to the German
“Deutschland über Alles.”]
Willy-Nilly
The question uppermost in most of our minds at the present moment is, I
take it, what are the Huns thinking? And, in particular, what are the
Willies thinking?
Raemaekers answers the question with his wonderful pencil in this
cartoon.
We know that the Huns prepared for and started this war with a bee in
their bonnets, a bee which buzzed about Xerxes, Hannibal, Alexander
and Napoleon. The two Willies were avowedly “out” for what they
call “Weltmacht,” or world dominion. Bernhardi put it in tabloid
form:--“Weltmacht oder niedergang.”
If one fact shines out conspicuously after these dreadful months of
slaughter it is this--that the Willies will not achieve world dominion.
What are their inmost thoughts--now?
Raemaekers pourtrays the All Highest with snow white hair and a dyed
moustache still pointing upwards. The dyed moustache seems to me the
keynote of the cartoon--la petite note qui chante. It should be white
to match the hair, and drooping. What an effort to keep a stiff upper
lip, when day after day the War Lord scans the casualty lists, and
realises--as he must--that sooner or later the deluded Fatherland will
know what he knows, and draw from that knowledge conclusions which he
is powerless to modify or avert!
They have drunk to “Der Tag.” And that Day is about to dawn, the DAY
which will present them to their own people as discredited rulers and
humiliated schemers.
The Ramsay Macdonalds, the Charles Trevelyans, the Arthur Ponsonbys--et
id genus omne--have prattled about the inexpediency of humiliating
Germany. What a waste of foolish words! Can the imagination of Man
conceive of any greater humiliation than that which Destiny, not the
Allies, must inflict upon Hunland? That humiliation, inevitably, will
come from within, and prey like a hideous cancer upon the body politic.
No publicist, however prescient, can measure its ravages, for they are
hidden from our sight. But none can doubt that, like a cancer, these
ravages will grow and spread till the world gapes aghast at them.
Whatever punishment we may be able to inflict upon these Baby-Killers
and Pirates will be as nothing compared with the humiliation which,
pede claudo, dogs the steps of failure and bankruptcy.
In this cartoon, the younger of the two Weary Willies is fitly
habited in sable. He is in deepest mourning for the last of his
dynasty--HIMSELF.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL
[Illustration: THE CROWN PRINCE: “Isn’t it an enjoyable war?”
WILLIAM: “Perhaps, but hardly as much so as I anticipated.”]
The Shirkers
Current experience is proving that war is a grim condition of life, and
that none can escape its effects. No religious or philosophic precept
is potent enough in practical application to prevent its outbreak or to
stay its course. The strong man of military age, who claims the right
to pursue normal peaceful avocations when his country is at war, pleads
guilty, however involuntarily, to aberrations of both mind and heart.
There are few who do not conscientiously cherish repugnance for war,
but practically none of those to whom so natural a sentiment makes most
forcible appeal deem it a man’s part to refuse a manifest personal call
of natural duty. The conscientious objector to combatant service may in
certain rare cases deserve considerate treatment, but very short shrift
should await the able-bodied men who, from love of ease or fear of
danger, simulate conscientious objection in order to evade a righteous
obligation.
Lack of imagination may be at times as responsible for the sin of the
shirker as lack of courage. Patriotism is an instinct which works
as sluggishly among the unimaginative as among the cowardly and the
selfish. The only cure for the sluggish working of the patriotic
instinct among the cowardly and the selfish is the sharp stimulus
of condign punishment. But among the unimaginative it may be worth
experimenting by way of preliminary with earnest and urgent appeals to
example such as is offered not only by current experience, but also
by literature and history. No shirkers would be left if every subject
of the Crown were taught to apprehend the significance of Henley’s
interrogation:
What have I done for you,
England, my England?
What is there I would not do,
England, my own?
SIDNEY LEE
[Illustration: THE SHIRKERS]
Lager Beer for Tripoli
It is interesting to consider how absolute has been the rupture of
Germany’s oath, as taken on her subscription to the Hague Convention.
In the light of the violation of the neutrality of Belgium--that
colossal infamy, destined to rank for all time as the greatest and
vilest betrayal to which a civilised nation has ever sunk--the rest,
considered singly, may seem lesser offences. Yet the violation of
the neutrality of Luxemberg; the violation of the French frontier
before declaration of War; the violation of the Geneva Convention;
the slaughter of prisoners and wounded; the rape and arson, loot and
murder; the use of forbidden bullets and forbidden asphyxiating gas;
the bombardment of unfortified towns; the treachery and needless
cruelty inflicted against civil populations; the crimes on the high
seas--all tower together into such a massive indictment as no nation
has yet been driven by her tyrants to endure. But beyond this, the
warfare, as carried on by Germany’s creatures in all lands, alone
amounts to a wide infraction of the promise that Count Münster signed
at the Hague for the German Empire in 1899. “Treacherous methods of
warfare” were then abjured by a people which has sunk to such depths of
treachery that Judas, Brutus, Cassius, in the threefold jaws of Dis,
might protest at their intrusion.
The French arms for Tripoli were a typical trifle; they sink into
subject for laughter before the understanding between France and Italy
and the knowledge of what Germany has done since that incident. And
now, in the hour of need, we learn that Teutonic inspiration has taken
another hint from Frederick the Great. Forged English paper money
begins to circulate in the Fatherland.
To this they have come; and since English Treasury notes do not go to
Germany, and we are told that all leaving this country return swiftly
to it, let us trust that any presentation of the forged paper in London
may win the attention it deserves.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
[Illustration: LAGER BEER FOR TRIPOLI
French rifles were seized at Genoa in beer casks. These had been
consigned by Germans to Tripolitan insurgents, it being hoped that
their discovery might lead to trouble between France and Italy.]
The German Anti-Bellicist
After wading through the oceans of casuistry by which German
“Professors” and others have sought to exonerate Germany for the
violation of Belgian neutrality and for the appalling crimes of
Louvain, Visé, and the “Lusitania,” one is no nearer comprehending that
“attitude of mind” which is exemplified by the question of the German
Anti-Bellicist, and of the German apostles of “Kultur” in general.
It is not sheer muddleheadedness, but has been brought about by a
calculated, immoral perversion of intellect.
It is an attitude of mind that is lost to a sense of humour--the
absence of which indeed is a German national characteristic. And there
is nothing more deadening as regards the finer subtleties of life and
conscience. “The saving grace of humour” is a phrase containing a
crystallisation, of an idea of far greater moment than appears on the
surface.
What thousands of German so-called “Anti-Bellicists” are saying and
will continue to say is, as Raemaekers’ cartoon suggests, “We think we
hate War, but we know we covet our neighbour’s vineyard, and having
seized it mean to keep it if we can.”
CLIVE HOLLAND
[Illustration: THE GERMAN ANTI-BELLICIST
“If you insist upon Belgium being evacuated by Germany, what is the
good of my being a member of the Anti-War Council?”]
One of the Kaiser’s Many Mistakes
Louis Botha--we touch our hats to you!
You are supremely and triumphantly one of the Kaiser’s many mistakes.
You have proved yourself once again a capable leader and a man among
men. You have proved him once more incapable of apprehending the
meaning of the word honour. You are an honourable man. Even as a foe
you fought us fair and we honoured you. You have valiantly helped to
dig the grave of his dishonour and have proved him a fool. We thank
you! And we thank the memory of the clear-visioned men of those old
days who, in spite of the clamour of the bats, persisted in tendering
you and yours that right hand of friendship which you have so nobly
justified.
You fought us fair. You have uprisen from the ashes of the past like
the Phœnix of old. You are Briton with the best.
Fair fight breeds no ill-will. It is the man, and the nation, that
fights foul and flings God and humanity overboard that lays up for
itself stores of hatred and outcastry and scorn which the ages shall
hardly efface.
And Germany once was great, and might have been greater.
Delenda est Germania!--so far as Germania represents the Devil and all
his works.
The following lines were written fourteen years ago when we welcomed
the end of the Boer War. We are all grateful that the hope therein
expressed has been so amply fulfilled. That it has been so is largely
due to the wisdom and statesmanship of Louis Botha.
No matter now the rights and wrongs of it;
You fought us bravely and we fought you fair.
The fight is done. Grip hands! No malice bear!
We greet you, brothers, to the nobler strife
Of building up the newer, larger life!
Join hands! Join hands! Ye nations of the stock!
And make henceforth a mighty Trust for Peace;--
A great enduring peace that shall withstand
The shocks of time and circumstance; and every land
Shall rise and bless you--and shall never cease
To bless you--for that glorious gift of Peace.
Germany, if she had so willed, could have come into that hoped-for
Trust for Peace.
But Germany would not. She put her own selfish interests before all
else and so digs her own grave.
JOHN OXENHAM
[Illustration: BOTHA TO BRITAIN
“I have carried out everything in accordance with our compact at
Vereeniging.”]
The German Spy
Ridicule is the rapier which pierces the pachydermatous hide of the Hun.
William of Potsdam, portrayed in this cartoon as a Cook’s tourist,
chatters with rage whenever he is laughed at. Behold here the All
Highest in a composite portrait of Himself in a few of his favourite
“stunts.” Mark the hat of the mighty hunter who slays hecatombs of
wild boars without running any risk to his august person, the asker of
innumerable and importunate questions (he expected one of our generals
to tell him the official length of our ballet dancers’ skirts!), the
snapshotter, the wearer of English clothes of sporting cut, and first,
last, and all the time--the SPY. Britons forgive and forget easily, but
we may well wonder whether, after this war, high-born Huns all of them
now revealed as spies will be received as of yore by our magnates and
lavishly entertained? Shall we see immense Junkers mixing champagne and
stout in our clubs? Shall we lose our own appetites at the sight of
gracious ladies wolfing our best food with all four feet in the trough?
I hope not, but I hae ma doots.
What rankles in my humble breast is not so much the barbarity of the
Beast, but the humiliating reflection that we allowed him to prowl
amongst us masquerading as a fat sheep, grazing peacefully in our
verdant pastures!
I submit that all Huns, male and female, should be sent to Coventry by
the Allies for at least one decade. It would be fatuous to suppose that
any Hun could change his character during so brief a period, but “doing
time” may teach him--as it has taught other criminals--that it pays
to be honest. It is not likely that the Baby Killers and Pirates will
recognise any principle except expediency.
It is a comforting thought, also, that the Hun, after this war, will
be ill provided with what schoolboys call--“journey-money.” In the
pleasant land of France, sur les côtes d’azur et éméraude, our ears
will not be split by their raucous, spluttering accents; our eyes will
not be offended by their obese, ridiculous persons. We shall, I hope,
wander in peace through the Eternal City. I remember a young Hun at
Wengen who barged into every skater on the rink not adroit enough to
avoid him. I do not expect to meet him again.
For this alone may the Lord be praised!
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL
[Illustration: THE GERMAN SPY
THE SPY: “Military secrets behind? Eh?”
POLICEMAN: “Much more dangerous things for Germany--Raemaekers’
cartoons.”]
Belgium in Holland
In the present crisis of Belgian affairs there is much to remind the
historical student of the events which led to the fall of Antwerp in
1585, and the outrageous invasion of the Southern Netherlands by the
army of Parma. Then, as now, Holland opened her arms to her wounded and
captive sister. The best Flemish scholars and men of letters emigrated
to the land where Cornheert and Spieghel welcomed them.
Merchants and artisans flocked to a new sphere of energy in Amsterdam.
Several of the professorial chairs in that city, and in the great
universities of Leyden and Harderwijk, were filled by learned
Flemings, and the arts, that had long been flourishing in Brussels,
fled northward to escape from the desolating Spanish scourge. The
grim pencil of Raemaekers becomes tender whenever he touches upon
the relation of the tortured Belgium to her sister, Holland, his own
beloved fatherland.
We do not know yet, in this country, a tithe of the sacrifices which
have been made in Holland to staunch the tears of Belgium. “Your
sufferings are mine, and so are your fortunes,” has been the motto of
the loyal Dutch.
EDMUND GOSSE
[Illustration: BELGIUM IN HOLLAND
“Your sufferings are mine as are your fortunes.”]
Serbia
The fight of the one and the four might, in view of the difference in
the size of the combatants, be called quite fairly “the fight of the
one and the fifty-three.” Each of the assailants has his own character.
Germany is represented as a ferocious giant; Austria follows Prussia’s
lead, a little the worse for wear, with a bandaged head as the souvenir
of his former campaign: he does his best to look and act like Germany.
Bulgaria loses not a moment, but puts his rifle to his shoulder to
shoot the small enemy: he acts in his own way, according to his own
character: kill the enemy as quickly as possible and seize the spoil,
that is his principle. Turkey is a rather broken-down and dilapidated
figure, who is preparing to use his bayonet, but has not got it quite
ready. Serbia, erect, with feet firmly planted, stands facing the
chief enemy, a little David against this big Goliath and his henchman,
Austria; and the other two, so recently deadly foes, now standing
shoulder to shoulder, attack him while his attention is directed on
Germany.
The leader and “hero” of this assault is Prussia, big, brutal,
remorseless. The Dutch artist always concentrates the spectator’s
attention on him. You can almost hear the roar coming out of his mouth:
“Gott strafe Serbien.” This is the figure, as Raemaekers paints him,
that goes straight for his object, regardless of moral considerations.
Serbia is in his way, and Serbia must be trampled in the mire. The
artist’s sympathy is wholly with Serbia, who is pictured as the man
fighting against the brute, slight, but active and noble in build,
facing this burly foe.
And poor old Turkey! Always a figure of comedy, never ready in time,
always ineffective, never fully able to use the weapons of so-called
“civilisation.” Let it a ways be remembered that in the Gallipoli
peninsula, when the Turks at first were taking no prisoners, but
killing the wounded after their own familiar fashion with mutilation,
for the sake of such spoil as could be carried away, Enver Pasha issued
an order that thirty piastres should be paid for every prisoner brought
in alive, a noble and humane regulation. Let us hope that the reward
was always paid, not stolen on the way, as has been so often the case
in Turkey.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY
[Illustration: SERBIA
“Now we can make an end of him.”]
Slow Asphyxiation
Many a stout-hearted man can “bite upon the bullet” and bear pain up
to the varying but inevitable limit when unconsciousness puts an end
to literally unbearable agony. But is there anyone who could face with
any show of courage the unutterable terror of slow asphyxiation? This
is indeed a horrible picture. Raemaekers has helped us to realise the
unrealisable, setting down with his swift and merciless pencil the
oft-repeated incident of the despair, even to tears, of surgeons and
nurses who, God knows, might well have thought they had little to learn
about human suffering.
The German will blush for this devilry till the last day of history.
One other deed of his was near as bad--the attempt to fasten on the
French the guilt of this infamous departure from the laws of chivalry
in war. One other deed was worse--that of the Prussian officer prisoner
who, as reported by our “Eye-witness,” saw some of our men writhing on
the ground in the throes of this agony and--laughed.
This bad business of the poison-gas was a damnable crime and a
short-sighted. It tempered the fighting resolution of our men. Ask in
particular any Canadian since Ypres, and certainly after and because
of that day many a German in the field has received a bayonet wound
instead of quarter and a kindly cigarette. It is for Germans after
repentance to ask themselves whether after all such initiative has
really any military value--except to the other side.
JOSEPH THORP
[Illustration: SLOW ASPHYXIATION]
The German Propagandist
If you don’t see what you want, pay for it, is Germany’s motto to-day.
A veritable rain of German gold has fallen in all the neutral countries
during the war. Italy, Roumania, Greece, Spain, Holland, Switzerland,
and Scandinavia have had the tares of German secret funds sown amongst
the wheat of genuine public opinion. It was Bismarck’s belief that by
gold all newspapers and most men are to be bought.
To-day it is hard to make any German bureaucrat believe that it is not
possible to make neutrals think black is white if only enough money be
spent. The fact that German black is very very black does not deter the
industrious secret fund distributors. Newspapers are bought, agitators
are subsidised, a false public opinion is artificially created--and the
principal end is always to help those who made the war in Germany and
those who keep it going to calm the masses in repeating what neutral
papers and neutral led captains say.
A nation which has to depend upon such means of drugging itself into
acquiescence has little to hope for. In Italy, in Roumania, the
scattering of German gold has availed nothing--but while there remains
a neutral State there will German secret funds be scattered. And with
it all, the bellowing, blustering German propagandist, thumping any
neutral table and endeavouring to make people believe that all men are
as he is, knows well that he only gets a hearing, even from the lowest
elements of any nation, because behind him is his colleague with the
money-bag--Raemaekers has expressed in the money-bag holder all the
true inwardness of the German system of propaganda.
ALFRED STEAD
[Illustration: THE GERMAN PROPAGANDIST
“I assure you, my friends, that anyone who does not love us, whatever
his nationality, has assuredly been bought over by the enemy.”]
Jackals in the Political Field
“When the tiger,” says the naturalist, “has killed some large animal,
such as a buffalo which he cannot consume at one time, the jackals
collect round the carcase at a respectful distance and wait patiently
until the tiger moves off. Then they rush from all directions,
carousing upon the slaughtered buffalo, each anxious to eat as much as
it can contain in the shortest time.”
The human jackal is one of the most squalid and sordid creatures and
features of war. We saw him in Dublin the other day emerging from his
slum den to loot Sackville Street. Every battlefield feeds its carrion
beasts and birds.
This picture of Belgium and its jackals is doubtless only too true.
Mr. Raemaekers and the Dutch have better means of knowing than we. The
jackal, says the same naturalist, belongs to the _Canidæ_, the “dog
tribe.” The scientific name of the true dog is _Canis familiaris_,
“the household dog.” The jackal is _Canis aureus_, the “gold dog.” The
epithet describes no doubt his colour. The human _Canis aureus_ perhaps
deserves his title on not less obvious grounds.
“The continent of Europe,” the naturalist goes on, “is free from the
jackal.” It was supposed till yesterday to be free from the lion and
tiger.
But in the prehistoric times of the cave man, geologists say, there was
both in England and Europe the great “sabre-tooth” tiger. Kipling, who
knows everything about beasts, knows him and puts him into his “Story
of Ung”: “The sabre-tooth tiger dragging a man to his lair.”
To-day the cave tiger has come back and with him the cave jackal. There
is a terrible beauty about the tiger. The jackal is a mean and hideous
brute. But both are out of date. Did not Monsieur Capus say the other
day that Europe “cannot allow a return of the cave epoch”?
HERBERT WARREN
[Illustration: JACKALS IN THE POLITICAL FIELD
JACKALS (_Flemish pro-Germans_): “What he leaves of Belgium will be
enough for us.”]
The Sacrifice
The Kaiser is presumably human, though, in the language of former
times, he is also presumably--if not undoubtedly--possessed of a devil,
or of many legions of devils.
How any human being can support the thought of the woeful red horror
into which he, deliberately, and of long-planned evil intention,
plunged the world passes the possibilities of human comprehension.
Deliberately, cold-bloodedly, for the simple purpose of furthering his
own ends, he has ordered the massacre of women and children in untold
multitudes, and his orders have been executed by the tools he fashioned
in the years of treacherous peace for the purpose. Executed too by
fiends in human shape who were forced to do as they were ordered or
take the consequences. Fathers of families themselves in many cases
no doubt, it is one of the marvels of this new savagery that men, so
calling themselves, could be found to do such deeds. Many of them have
gone to their account. The arch-fiend still survives.
And this man calls upon God to bless his evil doings!
“Suffer the little ones to come unto Me!” said Christ. And His wounded
heart must bleed afresh at knowledge of it all.
There was massacre of the innocents in Judea when Herod thought to save
himself by slaying the infant Christ with all the other children. But
Christ lived. The Kaiser out-Herods Herod, and slays Christ afresh in
the murder of all these little ones.
They are pitiful sacrifices to the blood-lust of this modern Moloch.
Their blood cries aloud to God. He is Justice. Their cries shall not
go unheard of Him. But by their death and the horror of it they are
helping to rid the world of the most monstrous tyranny which ever
aspired to rule it.
JOHN OXENHAM
[Illustration: THE SACRIFICE
For humanity’s sake.]
“Lusitania” Amok
The unerring insight to motive which characterises Raemaekers’ work is
well displayed in this cartoon, in which is shown not only the German
fury against England, but the senselessness of that fury. The raging,
soulless hate depicted here is the hate that takes no count of the
lives of women and children, but would sacrifice these and all else to
its own ends. The crime is one that will live in men’s memories while
recollection of this war endures, and will be placed at the head of
that long list of acts which can have no possible effect on the result
of the war, and, in fact, can have no result at all beyond showing the
guiding spirit of Germany as Raemaekers shows it--ugly, mad, and a
thing worthy only of destruction at the hands of sane civilisation.
In the rush of events we are in danger, not of forgetfulness, but
of neglect of comprehension of the spirit prompting acts like the
sinking of the _Lusitania_, for the stern purpose of these times is
all-absorbing, and material urgencies must, for the time, stand before
the reckoning out of a rate of payment for such deeds as this. But in
the day of the great reckoning it would be well if this cartoon could
be kept full in sight of the reckoners; not for mere vengeance, for
that would not bring back those who went down with the _Lusitania_, or
fell under bombs dropped aimlessly or with intent to terrorise--and,
in any case, humanity could never exact full vengeance for such acts
as these, nor is such a figure as this true presentation of Germany
of to-day capable of feeling human vengeance. For the sake of future
generations, for the safety of humanity and that civilisation as we
know it may endure, the reckoning must include the extinction of
this spirit which Raemaekers shows as that of a raging and senseless
slaughterer.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN
[Illustration: “LUSITANIA” AMOK
“Gott strafe England, or I will do it myself.”]
A Letter from the German Trenches
In this cartoon Raemaekers has contrived to indicate powerfully what
is after all the dominant and peculiar note of the German people. No
European nation has ever taken war--as people say--so “seriously,” that
is, with so much concentration of attention and elaborate preparation,
as has the German Empire. No people has ever had it so thoroughly
drilled into its collective mind as have the German subjects of that
Empire that war is not only, as all Christian people have always
believed, an expedient lawful and necessary upon occasion, but a thing
highly desirable in itself, nay, the principal function of a “superior”
race and the main end of its being.
And yet after all the actual German is never, like the Frenchman,
a natural and instinctive warrior--any more than he is, like the
Englishman, a natural and instinctive adventurer. The whole business
of Prussian militarism, with the half-witted philosophy by which it is
justified, has to be imposed upon him from without by his masters. He
fights just as he works, just as he tortures, violates and murders,
because he is told to do so by persons in a superior position, holding
themselves stiffly, dressed in uniform, and able to hit him in the face
with a whip.
Long before the war the absurd Koepenick incident gave us a glimpse
of this astonishing docility on its farcical side. Its tragic side is
well illustrated by the droves of helpless and inarticulate barbarians
driven into the shambles daily (as at Verdun) for the sole purpose
of covering up the blunders of their very “efficient” superiors. One
could pity the wretches if there were not so considerable a leaven of
wickedness in their stupidity.
CECIL CHESTERTON
[Illustration: A LETTER FROM THE GERMAN TRENCHES
“We have gained a good bit; our cemeteries now extend as far as the
sea.”]
“It was I who opened fire on Rheims”
Extremes so meet that the perversions of the Pacifist make but the
reverse of the Prussian shield. As to the Pacifist all war is crime, so
to the Prussian all crime is legitimate war. In the sublime resistance
of the soldier who defends his country, its women and its children,
even to the spilling of his soul, the Pacifist will see nothing but
the crime of murder; and to the Prussian the act of war is mainly
the perpetration of crime unhindered, from common lying to murder
most foul, and beyond that. These crimes the Pacifist palliates and
condones, with his Fellowships of Reconciliation and his schools for
the Conscientious Liar; while the Prussian celebrates them as victories.
The wilful destruction of works of art as an act of war is a crime
unknown among civilised peoples; and if there be degrees in that
crime the destruction of such a work as Rheims Cathedral--the
pious labour of a colony of artists directed to one end for seven
generations--is surely the most monstrous. At Rheims, at Louvain,
at Ypres, at a dozen places this spite of the grinning _crétin_ has
been manifested; and perhaps after all we were never justified in our
amazement. Dull savages do such things in mere incomprehension; and
mere incomprehension before a work of art is Prussian nature. The
best Prussian use of such a work is to build upon it some irrelevant
statistic, some ludicrous _polemik_, some laborious medley of
meaningless side-issue.
Let one thing be borne in mind, however, against the settlement to be
made at the end of this war. It is against the policy of civilised
peoples to trust savages with the possession either of works of art or
weapons of precision.
ARTHUR MORRISON
[Illustration: THE BRAGGART
“It was I who opened fire on Rheims.”]
Corn and Cattle
Cattle are skittish at times, and generally the skittishness is
associated with heat. Corn and Cattle do not suggest anything fierce,
unless hunger intervene, and then the cattle may become, not skittish,
but fierce, and even furious. Are the cattle and the corn once again
made to speak a language not their own?
Depicted is an incident of this revealing bloody time. The Austrian
Francis Joseph has been brought into subjection by Wilhelm of Potsdam,
second of that name overlord of Germany. But, you say, Wilhelm is not
overlord of Francis Joseph of Schönbrunn! Facts are as they are. Do
you see that spiked helmet crowning the head of intolerance, moustache
challenging heaven, and outstretched finger dropping ultimata! The
earth is the Kaiser’s, and the cattle thereof. “If you won’t let me
have your corn, I will not let you have my cattle”--though the cattle
came from Denmark they are “my cattle.” True, there is the other
“Kaiser” opposite; but that is another story. We are told it is risky
work going hunting with a tiger; and methinks aged Francis Joseph
will confess that it is even so. His grey hairs have not saved him
personally, his “ramshackle Empire” has been, time and again, over-run,
his territory has been offered as sops by his younger brother and
master of Potsdam. The only wonder in the legend below is “your corn”;
above the artist depicts a raging tyrant whose is all, to dispose as
the laws of Kultur may please.
Honour among thieves! That is only when they are in the retail trade.
The appetite grows as it is fed, and masterly never becomes master-ful.
Austria-Hungary is reputed already as satiated with war’s losses, not
repentant, and her people in dire need. But her partner in iniquity is
a master: and Austria’s need is an opportunity to bargain, and to make
subject; hence the shrinking, cringing Hapsburg before the challenging
moustache, strident voice, accusing finger of young Hohenzollern, lean
and worn! Before the world, here is the fact, these Kaisers, like
foot-pads quarrelling--and there are the two privates, so lean and
abject, while the “swag” is in question.
W. M. J. WILLIAMS
[Illustration: “If you won’t let me have your corn, I will not let you
have my cattle.”]
His Master’s Voice
The manipulation of the Press is one of the weapons which Bismarck
taught German Imperialism to use. Like others it has been developed by
his successors into an instrument which the master himself would hardly
have recognised. It is one of the most potent means of that “peaceful
penetration” of all other countries which was nothing but a preparation
for war. And it has been used in the war with a purposefulness of aim
and a versatility of method that betoken long and systematic study. It
is a ubiquitous influence and the most subtle of all. Yet the Press
is held in greater contempt by official and other ruling circles in
Germany than in any other country. They despise the tool, while tacitly
acknowledging its utility by unsparing use.
This curious state of things is the fault of the Press. What has
rendered it such a pliant tool in the hands of German Imperialism is
either credulity or venality; and both are contemptible qualities.
Credulity is probably the more prevalent, at least in this country,
where shoals of newspapers, blinded by their own prejudices, were the
dupes of German duplicity. But there has been venality, too, both
crude and subtle. The case of the “Vlaamsche Stem,” here satirised by
Raemaekers, is exceptional. So crude and gross a method of influencing
the Press as bribing the proprietor of a newspaper (probably with
the aid of threats) to hand it over with its staff and good-will
could hardly be practised where any independence survived. It was not
practised with success even in conquered Flanders, for the staff, to
their eternal credit, refused to listen to the new master’s voice.
But there are journalists who, less intelligent than the terrier,
faithfully accept the voice from the _Pickelhaube_ and wag their little
tails when they hear it. To them is offered the parable which shows
their relation to their master.
A. SHADWELL
[Illustration: HIS MASTER’S VOICE
The _Vlaamsche Stem_ (Flemish Voice), a Flemish paper, was bought
by the Germans, whereupon the whole staff resigned, as it no longer
represented its title.]
Hun Generosity
The All-Highest, so we are told, loves a joke at another’s expense, a
trait in his character essentially barbaric. Raemaekers reproduces the
twinkle in the Imperial eye as William of Potsdam offers to a quondam
ally the foot which belongs to his senile and helpless brother of
Hapsburg. The roar of anguish from the prostrate octogenarian provokes,
as we see, not pity but a grim smile. Italy’s monarch, we may imagine,
is muttering to himself:--
_Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes._
The bribe, wrenched from another, was, of course, indignantly rejected,
but one wonders what the secret feelings of the Hapsburgs may be
towards the Hohenzollerns. We know that the Turk cherishes no love
for the Hun who has beguiled him, but we cannot gauge as yet the real
strength or weakness of the bond between the Huns on the one hand and
the Austrians and Hungarians on the other. Raemaekers has pourtrayed
Franz Josef flat on his back. In the language of the ring he is “down
and out.” Possibly it may have been so from the beginning. At any rate,
in this country, there is an amiable disposition to regard Franz Josef
as a victim rather than an accomplice, a weakling writhing beneath the
jack-boot of Prussia, impotent to hold his own. It may not be so. Time
alone will reveal the truth.
But this much is reasonably certain. When peace is declared, the
sincere friendship which once existed between ourselves and the Dual
Monarchy may be re-established, but many years must pass before we
forgive or forget the Huns. They are boasting to-day that as a nation
they are self-sufficing and self-supporting. Amen! Most of us desire
nothing better than to leave them alone till they have mended their
manners and purged themselves of a colossal and unendurable conceit.
I cannot envisage Huns playing tennis at Wimbledon, or English girls
studying music at Leipzig. The grass in the streets of Homburg will
not, for many years, be trodden out by English feet; the harpies of
hotel keepers throughout the Happy Fatherland will prey, it may be
presumed, upon their fellow Huns. Then they will fall to “strafing”
each other instead of England. And then, as now, their mouthings will
provoke inextinguishable laughter.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL
[Illustration: “HAVE ANOTHER PIECE?”]
Easter, 1915
Ever since with the beginning of Christendom a new soul entered the
body of exhausted Europe, it is true to say that we have not only had
a certain idea but been haunted by it, as by a ghost. It is the idea
crystallised in legends like those of St. Christopher and St. Martin.
But it is equally apparent in the most modern ethics and eloquence, as,
for instance, when a French atheist orator urged the reconsideration
of a criminal case by pointing at the pictured Crucifixion which hangs
in a French Law Court and saying: “Voilà la chose jugée.” It is the
idea that when oppressing the lowest we may actually be oppressing the
highest, and that not even impersonally, but personally. We may be,
as it were, the victims of a divine masquerade; and discover that the
greatest of kings can travel incognito.
Such a picture, therefore, as the cartoonist has drawn here can be
found in all ages of Christian history as a comment on contemporary
oppression. But while the central figure remains always the same, the
types of the tyrant and the mocker hold our temporary attention; for
they are sketched from life and with a living exactitude. Upon one of
them especially it would be easy to say a great deal; the grinning
Prussian youth with the spectacles and the monkey face, who is using a
Prussian helmet instead of the crown of thorns.
Such a scientific gutter-snipe is the real and visible fruit of
organised German education; he is a much truer type than any gory and
hairy Hun. In the face of that young atheist there is everything that
can come from the congestion of the pagan with the _parvenu_; all the
knowingness that is the cessation of knowledge; and that something
which always accompanies _real_ atheism--arrested development.
G. K. CHESTERTON
[Illustration: EASTER, 1915
“And they bowed the knee before Him.”]
Duty--and Safety
A large number of the Belgians are said to have been in German pay,
and their support contributed to put the country helpless under German
power. Does this cartoon show Belgians of that class, or only the
ordinary selfish and pleasure-seeking element of society, too weak to
be even worth purchase by the enemy? The scene is a café at The Hague.
In the background the band is making music with all its heart and all
its power. Two Belgians going out enveloped in greatcoats with capes to
face the stormy weather stop for a moment to speak to an acquaintance,
one of a party who are enjoying themselves at ease. They are joining
the army.
The party is evidently not interested in such a trifle as their
country and its fate: they are well out of Belgium, which must be an
uncomfortable place to live in at present, and they are not going back
till Belgium is a fit home for the butterflies of fashion. The fifth
of the party, down in the right-hand corner, has the vacuous face of
an imbecile. Two of the others wear a foolish grin, as the word passes
between one of them, a lady, and the more capable-looking man seated
next her: “Fancy, they’re off to fight.” What fools to think of duty
and country, when it means leaving comfort and the life of society, and
facing the storm, with the risk of death!
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY
[Illustration: AT THE HAGUE
“Fancy, they’re off to fight!”
Many Belgians live at ease in Holland.]
The New Dutch Oil Line
Whether the artist’s eye be turned to Germany or to Holland, he gives
proof that his vision is clear and his sense of propriety and humour
keen. But the “new oil line” is Dutch, and here the humour is more
genial, the satire less sharp and biting. In the foreground, drawn with
great force and dignity, is the Lion of England, in blandest mood, who
with his back to the German, astride the cask in strikingly complacent
smiles, holds the dish to the tap in England, pouring out oil which is
carried by an ingenious use of the Lion’s tail to the German’s cask.
Over the great Lion, and held by the Lion, is the umbrella, inscribed
N.O.T. [the Netherlands Oversea Trust], under cover of which the oil
is thus cleverly carried to the smiling German. The artist touches
safely and surely a delicate subject which a journalist could not treat
without rousing anger; but in result a situation is shown which is
sure to prove, and is proving, a trying one both to the Dutch and to
the British people. However, there can be little question but that the
edge of his wit is turned upon his “ain countrie” by this formidable
artist-commentator.
The cunning and brutality of a German debased by the worship of Kultur,
of force, are almost wholly absent here; and instead the artist treats
the question of Neutrality, and smiles in line and colour at both
Holland and Britain. Poor “human nature” is held up to the mirror;
foibles, failings, and futility reflected. That the Lion should
think that N.O.T. umbrella shelters him from trickery only shows his
vanity: that the oil goes to the “enemy” shows the artist’s views of
some Dutchmen; that N.O.T. may also suggest that the German’s need is
supplied even by the Lion’s tail of pride. Is there a further satire of
men in war? While men are mown down on the field by death’s improved
tools, some men will always find it “good business” to deal in “oil,”
or something else at the expense of a belligerent. If the Dutchman
does the business, and the German, broadly pleased, has his sore need
supplied, there is the generous Lion, ’neath an umbrella which he
upholds himself, made to oil an enemy, the German of the age of Kultur!
_Canto virginibus puerisque._
W. M. J. WILLIAMS
[Illustration: THE NEW DUTCH OIL LINE]
Pan Germanicus as Peace Maker
Imagine the feelings of the hindlegs of a stage elephant on being told
that the performance is to be a continuous one and you will have some
inkling of the dismay of the Kaiser and his henchman, concealed in the
plumage of the War Eagle and the Dove of Peace respectively. The one
bird is as useless as the other in bringing the war to the end desired
in Berlin. The stage eagle is daily losing its plumage, and is rapidly
becoming but a moulty apology for the king of birds. As for the dove,
it has been used so often, with constantly changing olive branch in
its beak, that it now makes its appearance shamefacedly and absolutely
without heart.
Imperial eagle mask with half-mad military quasi-deity inside and
dove of peace, on the German model, with calculating miscalculating
statesman, you rang the curtain up, you cannot ring it down, either
to the music of the Hymn of Hate or the Te Deum for peace--the eagle
can no longer look boldly straight into the sun, looking for his place
in it; the dove has taken permanent quarters in the German ark as
it whirls round and round in the whirlpool of impotent effort, ever
drawing nearer to the final crash. When the Dove of Peace does come,
it will be a real bird of good omen, not a German reserve officer
masquerading as one.
ALFRED STEAD
[Illustration: PAN GERMANICUS AS PEACE MAKER
THE DOVE: “They say they do not want peace, as they have time enough.”
THE EAGLE: “Alas! That is just what we haven’t got.”]
Gott Mit Uns
This picture is a perfectly accurate symbolic study of the German
Empire. Therefore, naturally, it is one of the most dreadful that
were ever drawn. In all the gruesome “Dances of Death” in which the
fifteenth century took so grim a pleasure, no artist ever conceived the
horrible idea of a fat skeleton. But we have not only conceived the
thought, we have seen the thing--“a terror in the sunshine.” We know
that chest, puffed up with a wind of pride, and that stomach heavy with
slaughter and rich living; and above them the Death’s Head. We have
seen it. We have felt its foul breath. Its name is Prussia.
Look at a portrait of Frederick the Great, the “onlie true begetter” of
this abortion. It oddly suggests what Raemaekers has set down here; the
face a skull, the staring eyes those of a lost soul. But the skeleton
has grown fat since Frederick’s day--fat on the blood and plunder
of nations. Only there is no living flesh on its bones, nothing of
humanity about it.
“Can these dry bones live?” was the question asked of the prophet. It
might have been asked of Frederick: “Can this nation live, created
of your foul witchcraft, without honour, without charity, without
human brotherhood or fellowship, without all that which is the flesh
and blood of mankind?” The answer must have been that it could live,
though with a life coming from below and essentially infernal. It could
live--for a time. It could even have great power because its time was
short.
But now it has waxed fat--and kicked. And its end is near.
CECIL CHESTERTON
[Illustration: IT’S FATTENING WORK]
Idyllic Neutrality
In the picture opposite the best elements of the great cartoonist’s
genius have full scope. One has the biting satire, the humour and the
extraordinary gift of representing facial expressions with an economy
of line reminding one of some of the best work of the late Phil May,
that prince of humorous British caricaturists.
Raemaekers does not spare even his own countrymen when he discovers a
situation inimical to the welfare of the Allied cause, or one which
involves an obvious absurdity.
Here we have such a situation. In the early days of the War of far
greater frequency than at present, thanks to the ever tightening
“strangle hold” of the British Fleet. There can be no doubt that for
many months Holland (greatly to her material gain) turned herself into
a conduit pipe for the supply of contraband of War to the Central
Empires and more especially to Germany. Daily there were scenes such as
that depicted, though possibly veiled with some thin veneer either of
legality or subterfuge.
Dutch peasants (as well as the agents of the rich merchants and the
resident German smugglers) of all ages and grades flocked to the
frontier figuratively if not literally to drop their bags of contraband
over the slenderly marked line which divides Holland from Germany.
On the faces of the smugglers one sees the grin of satisfaction and
the smug recognition of the truth of the ancient saw, “It’s an ill
wind that blows nobody any good.” They are all doing their little
bit--though strictly neutral, of course--to keep the Huns alive, to
provide the means of killing the soldiers of the Allies, and--at the
same time are adding to that “nest egg” which is so dear to the Dutch
heart.
At the frontier line are two soldiers. The Dutch guard with a stolid
appearance in his back, and with a look of detachment and bland
unconsciousness of what is going on behind it, discoverable even on the
small portion of his face that is visible. On the other side of the
frontier stands the Hun guard smiling sardonically at the Dutch ideas
of neutrality, and the eagerness with which the people of the land he
covets, and hoped to take, play his game.
CLIVE HOLLAND
[Illustration: IDYLLIC NEUTRALITY
A daily smuggling scene on the Dutch Belgian frontier.]
Alcoholism
In this cartoon the Dutch artist pays a high compliment to the British
working man. The hideous figure of Alcoholism dressed in rags, with
large bony hands at the end of her thin bony arms, with the glaring
eyes, the distorted face and the dishevelled hair of a raging mad
woman, approaches the workman, offering bottles of whisky which he
has struck from her hand. Two of them lie smashed on the ground,
the third is falling. The workman’s choice is made voluntarily. He
will be neither the slave of drink, on the one hand, nor the slave
of prohibitory law on the other. He will judge for himself, and
his decision is expressed in this cartoon. He knows the nature of
Alcoholism which assails him, and he looks at her with anger and
contempt as he points to the answer which he has expressed in the
bottles falling or broken.
It contains also the answer which this artist of a foreign and neutral
country makes to the charges of drunkenness that were a year ago hurled
against the British workman. He was said to be endangering the country
by his self-indulgence. While there are exceptions, unfortunately, to
the picture that Raemaekers here shows us, there need be no hesitation
in believing that the workman’s attitude, as the artist sees it, is the
attitude of the overwhelming majority. It is not often that a higher
compliment has been paid to the workman than in this cartoon. It is the
ideal truth; and the more widely it is seen and appreciated, the more
it will make the ideal into the actual truth. It does not enter into
the artist’s purpose to show the serious loss caused by the alcoholism
of even a small minority, but this point of view must not be forgotten
in real life.
Copies of this cartoon should be widely spread through the country.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY
[Illustration: ALCOHOLISM--BRITONS NEVER WILL BE SLAVES]
Political and Economic Rapprochement
A German business firm never lets go of a customer once it seizes him.
Of course that is an extreme statement, for customers die or change
their country, or even revolt against the importunities of the German
bagman. Still, it may be taken as a fact that Germany exhibits a
pertinacity in trade that rivals her pertinacity in war.
Now Foreign Trade in the conception of Germany does not mean, though it
includes, the selling of goods; it means the destruction of all other
than German interests. Politics and economics are convertible terms in
the mind of the Fatherland. To absorb and make German the world--that
is the idea woven in invisible thread in the fabrics she sells, written
in invisible ink in her contracts, stamped in invisible letters on her
metal goods.
Before the war she was fast reducing great free nations to economic
serfdom, so that to buy a rat-trap they had to turn to Germany, who
sold them, with a certain grim humour, even the very guns to fight her
in, what she considered to be, an already won war.
She paralysed England, Russia, and France economically and politically,
just as a snake paralyses its victims, and she was about to swallow
them one after the other, and would have swallowed them only that she
opened her mouth too soon.
Consider then the fate of a little nation entering into a political and
economic rapprochement with this cormorant people who have so nearly
devoured England:
The fate of the rabbit in the jaws that could swallow an ox.
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE
[Illustration: A POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC RAPPROCHEMENT
GERMANY: “You must cut your throat with this knife, otherwise I shall
have to use force to you.”]
Why They Were Taken
I remember very early in the war a distinguished neutral saying to
me: “Germany hopes for swift and wide conquests, not so much that she
believes that she can retain all she seizes as that she hopes in the
end to have much to bargain with. Her policy, should she fail in her
world conquest, will be analogous to that of a thief who seeks to
purchase liberty and immunity from punishment for a crime with the
money he has stolen.” It is an aspect of Germany’s policy that will
repay watching. When peace terms come to be discussed, the Allies must
not accept stolen goods even in part settlement for German crimes and
aggression.
Raemaekers here suggests, what has been present in many other minds,
the idea that the capture of Dutch ships was stage-managed to enable
the new Ambassador at The Hague to “create a good impression” in his
favour by a release of the ships.
The action may have impressed shipping circles, and have avoided
“strained relations” between the two Governments of The Hague and of
Berlin; but the Dutch must indeed be a simple folk and blind if they
did not on this occasion “look the gift horse in the mouth” with a view
to ascertaining its exact value.
To clumsy diplomacy Germany has more than once added a lack of humour
of an astonishing degree of obtuseness in dealing with neutral nations,
of which this incident of the Dutch ships is an excellent example.
CLIVE HOLLAND
[Illustration: WHY THEY WERE TAKEN
THE NEW AMBASSADOR: “I am empowered by my Government to restore
them--(_sotto voce_) that will create a good impression in my favour.”
The new German Ambassador at the Hague at once restored the captured
ships.]
Mon Fils, Belgium, 1914
Raemaekers’ terrible picture represents a scene of frequent occurrence
in Belgium during the earlier months of the war. The tragedy depicted
requires no comment; it is sufficiently explicit in the cynical smile
of the German soldier, the agony of the Belgian mother, and the heap of
corpses before her amongst which she is to find her son.
German military ethics have been the wonder and the detestation of
the whole world. But they have been practised and carried out by the
present army in accordance with principles laid down long ago by German
military writers, especially by Clausewitz. It was Clausewitz above
all who enunciated the axiom that in times of war every elementary
consideration of humanity must be postponed in pursuit of victory.
Prince Bismarck adopted the doctrines of Clausewitz and often blamed
the German soldiers for the leniency with which they at times treated
the French in the war of 1870. It was not enough, so Bismarck thought,
to slay the actual combatants. “It will come to this,” he said, “that
we will shoot down every male inhabitant.”
It is especially interesting to see what attitude the Teuton savages
assumed towards the efforts of those who were anxious to mitigate the
horrors of war. In a handbook published in 1902 by the German General
Staff, we observe the ruthless effrontery with which all the efforts
of the men who negotiated The Hague, Geneva and Brussels conventions
were swept away. It was laid down with absolute frankness that “German
military authorities do not recognise the validity of any international
conventions dealing with the laws of war.”
Thus the scenes which have so shocked us in the present campaign are
not inconsistent with, are, indeed, the logical outcome of, principles
long since accepted by Berlin. War must be carried to its extreme,
even against a peaceful population, because in this way the strongest
inducements will be brought to bear upon them to admit conquest and
therefore to accept the ultimate conclusion of peace. We know from
recent reports of the French Government and other authorities that the
murder of prisoners and wounded men has been of frequent occurrence,
and that not once but many times orders have been issued to give no
quarter. Hostages, also, have been terrorised. Taken in order to serve
as securities for the good conduct of the civil population, they have
not only been put in the forefront of danger but frequently killed in
order to execute the decrees of “Terrorism.”
What in point of fact is the German idea of waging war? Inasmuch as
the duty of a nation at war is to conquer, all measures, however
indefensible in time of peace, are justified. Moreover, if any
engagements have been entered into during the pre-war period, they
become cancelled when war has begun.
Is it not absolutely necessary that a nation which adopts, principles
like these should be so weakened in military strength as to render it
impotent for mischief for at least half a century?
W. L. COURTNEY
[Illustration: MON FILS, BELGIUM, 1914
“Ah! was your boy among the twelve this morning? Then you’ll find him
among this lot.”]
Holland to Belgium
Raemaekers knows far more about the real feelings of his own countrymen
than a foreigner can do. We have seen that the Dutch people are full of
sympathy for the Belgian refugees, and that they have helped them with
great generosity. English fugitives from the war zone have also been
kindly treated in Holland. But from what I have heard myself, I fear
that there are many Dutchmen who do not realise that the existence of
their country as an independent nation is bound up with the success of
the Allies.
All the corrupt and malign influences which Germany has been sedulously
and treacherously exercising in neutral countries have been exerted in
their worst forms in Holland. The country is honeycombed with German
intrigues, and half-strangled in a network of commercial interests and
obligations. The Press is practically not free, and a numbing sense of
terror is spread over the population.
In the long run the fate of Belgium, terrible as it has been, may be
preferable to that of Holland, unless the countrymen of De Reuter and
Van Tromp have the resolution to strike a blow for their honour and
freedom, while there is yet time. They are in danger of becoming the
vassals of a Power which has no more sympathy with the ideals of a free
commonwealth than Philip II., and which has shown that it can surpass
the Duke of Alva in cruelty.
W. R. INGE
_Dean of St. Paul’s_
[Illustration: HOLLAND TO BELGIUM
“Outwardly, I must be neutral; inwardly, I am full of pity and
sympathy.”]
A Conflict of Testimony
Just so!
The Huns pay the price of lies by being constrained “to lie on still.”
But, sooner or later--sooner, perhaps, than they think--their lies
will come home to roost. The great gullible Hun public, the slaves of
an iron discipline, will learn the truth. No people in the history
of the world has been so consummately befooled, so systematically
humbugged. One wonders what the awakening will be like? The army, if we
may credit the testimony of some prisoners, is just beginning to ask
questions; the women of Hunland are on the ragged edge of revolt. The
Junkers, it is true, sit heavily upon public opinion, the safety-valve
of every nation. Meanwhile, hidden forces are accumulating strength. A
cataclysmic explosion must take place. And then the savage instincts of
the great blonde beast, instincts fostered by an intelligence perverted
to evil, will glut themselves to satiety. La Carmagnole will be danced
in Berlin.
As with individuals, so with nations--the most terrible humiliations
come from within.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL
[Illustration: A CONFLICT OF TESTIMONY
“Sire, it’s quite easy: for every witness who swears we’ve murdered
innocent people we will produce two who will swear they did not see
it.”]
The Ferocious Bellicose Party
Mynheer van Ploomp, Frau van Ploomp, and Fräulein van Ploomp sitting
censoriously on the newspaper, _may_ be raging for their country to
come into the war, but they certainly don’t look like it.
One can never judge, of course, by outside appearances, but the casual
observer might reasonably infer from the surface look of things that
Mynheer had not done so very badly by keeping out of the scrap.
As “Patriot”--“Nederlander,” etc., he _may_ write ferocious epistles to
the papers demanding a firm stand by his country on the side of right.
But the compression of his left optic belies the supposition.
Mynheer’s “neutrality” has very comfortably lined his own nest and
his own inside. And yet he knows--none better that, should the tiger
take it into his head, he would be gobbled up at a mouthful. Knows
moreover that, if by any fatal chance the tiger won the game, he would
inevitably be the next morsel to be gobbled.
When Germany is at last on the run, the ferocious bellicose party will
probably come in on the side of the winners. It is not a lofty game.
But it probably pays.
JOHN OXENHAM
[Illustration: ONE OF THE FEROCIOUS BELLICOSE PARTY
There existed a considerable party in Holland who were held up to
derision for wishing their country to come into the war.]
Holland and Militarism
Louis Raemakers knows his own countrymen better than we can, and this
satire at the expense of the peace at any price brigade is doubtless
well deserved. The attitude might have been pardoned two years ago,
but it is merely insane to-day. And none knows that fact better than
Holland. Like America, she is taking care of herself; indeed, no nation
has better reason to do so with a neighbour at her elbow unamenable to
reason and uncontrolled by conscience.
Historians to come, however, will argue that our blindness was
unpardonable, and our surprise and unpreparedness before the advent
of war must cast a heavy slur on the future credit of our past
diplomacy. For what could be clearer than Germany’s attitude or
brighter than the beacons which had directed and were still directing
her course? Bernhardi tells us all there is to know; Frederick the
Great established the Prussian tradition on a basis of fraud and
force; Bismarck sustained it and William II. has striven to reap the
harvest of their sowing. It has needed the united might of Europe to
prevent him from doing so. But to cry out against Teutonic principle
and practice, as though it were a thing of yesterday sprung upon us in
these wars, is absurd. Every politician worthy the name had the pages
of history open for his perusal. Frederick pointed out that alliances
in which each contracting party has different interests must never hold
good under all conditions, or represent a permanent political system.
He declared that no alliance or agreement in the world can be effective
after the bond of common and reciprocal interest is broken.
Why then marvel at the Belgian “Scrap of paper,” or any number of them?
It was a political commonplace with the German Chancellor and his
Master that oaths should be broken at the moment it became inconvenient
to keep them. Bernhardi himself says that political agreements must
always be concluded with a tacit reservation and can only hold as long
as the interests of both contracting parties are satisfied.
“La guerre,” said Mirabeau, “est l’industrie nationale de la Prusse.”
She came into existence by that industry and no other; and until
civilisation can crush that industry, peace terms with Prussia must not
depend upon her promise to fulfil them but upon our power to make her
do so. To cry “Down with militarism!” therefore is emphatically to play
the German game, and she will always support that cry in other mouths,
just as she applauds our “Free Trade” and other traditions that have
played into her hands so long.
Holland at least is alive to danger, and since the artist drew this
picture we have learned by _communiqué_ from Dutch General Headquarters
that the army is equipped in every possible respect, and able to
face the prospect of war with confidence. The nation as a whole has
supported Parliament with enthusiasm, and the preparations have been
directed and inspired by the spectacle of modern warfare and its
highest needs.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
[Illustration: THE DUTCHMAN: “Down with militarism.”
THE GERMAN: “That’s right. So much the sooner you will be ours.”]
Our Lady of Antwerp
“Here I and sorrows sit. This is my throne, bid Kings come worship
it.” Such seems to be an appropriate legend for Raemaekers’ beautiful
triptych which he has entitled “Our Lady of Antwerp.” Full of
compassion and sympathy for all the sufferings of her people, she sits
with the Cathedral outlined behind her, her heart pierced with many
agonies. On the left is one of the many widows who have lost their
all in this war. On the right is a soldier stricken to death, who has
done his utmost service for his country and brings the record of his
gallantry to the feet of Our Lady of Antwerp.
Antwerp, as we know, was at the height of its prosperity in the
sixteenth century. We have been told that no fewer than five hundred
ships used to enter her port in the course of a day, while more than
two thousand could be seen lying in her harbour at one time. Her people
numbered as many as one million, her fairs attracted merchants from all
parts of Europe, and at least five hundred million guilders were put
into circulation every year. We know what followed. Its very prosperity
proved a bait to the conqueror. In 1576 the city was captured by the
Spaniards, who pillaged it for three days. Nine years later the Duke
of Parma conquered it, and about the time when Queen Elizabeth was
resisting the might of Spain Antwerp’s glory had departed and its trade
was ruined. At the close of the Napoleonic wars the city was handed
over to the Belgians.
A place of many memories, whose geographical position was well
calculated to arouse the cupidity of the Germans, was bound to be
gallantly defended by the little nation to which it now belonged.
Whether earlier help by the British might or might not have altered
the course of history we cannot tell. Perhaps it was not soon enough
realised how important it was to keep the Hun invader from the sacred
soil. At all events we do not look back on the British Expedition in
aid of Antwerp in 1914 with any satisfaction, because the assistance
rendered was either not ample enough or else it was belated, or both.
So that Our Lady of Antwerp has still to bewail the ruthless tyranny of
Berlin, though perhaps she looks forward to the time when, once more
in possession of her own cities, Belgium may enter upon a new course
of prosperity. We are pledged to restore Belgium, doubly and trebly
pledged, by the words of the Prime Minister, and justice will not be
done until the great act of liberation is accomplished.
W. L. COURTNEY
[Illustration: OUR LADY OF ANTWERP]
Deportation
Nothing, when one analyses it, could be imagined more thoroughly
characteristic of Prussia than the particular stroke of policy by
which a large proportion of the male population of Belgium--as also
in a somewhat lesser degree of Northern France--was separated from
its family ties and hurried away into exile in Germany, there to be
compelled to work for the profit of enemies.
It had all the marks of Prussianism.
Firstly, it was a violation of the civilised and Christian tradition
of European arms. By the rules of such warfare the non-combatant was
spared, wherever possible; not only his life but his property and
liberty were secure so long as he did not abuse his position.
Secondly, it was an affront to decent human sentiment quite apart from
technical rules; the man, guilty of no offence save that of belonging
to a country which Prussia had invaded without justice and ravaged
without mercy, was torn from his family, who were left to the mercy of
their opponents. We all know what that mercy was like.
Thirdly, it was an insult to the human soul, for the unfortunate
victims were not only to be exiled from their country, but to be driven
by force and terror to serve against it.
Fourthly, and finally, like all the worst Prussian crimes, it was a
stupid blunder. Prussia has paid already a very high price for any
advantage she may have gained from the mutinous and unwilling labour
of these men, and for the swelling of her official return for the
edification of her own people and of neutrals by the inclusion of
“prisoners of war” of this description. To-day, when she knows not
where to turn for men, she is obliged to keep a huge garrison tied up
in Belgium to guard her line of retreat. And when the retreat itself
comes, the price will rise even higher, and the nemesis will be both
just and terrible.
CECIL CHESTERTON
[Illustration: HUSBANDS AND FATHERS
Belgian workmen were forcibly deported to Germany.]
The Envoy to Her Majesty
A certain number of Raemaekers’ cartoons concern the politics and
the people of his own country in such a way that comment on them by
one who is not fully conversant with the situation in Holland is an
impertinence, but in this case the artist’s satire is patent to all.
The contempt of the Queen at this bald rendering of Germany’s many
veiled offers is fully apparent; every line of the figure is expressive
of disdain, and the figure in the background appeals without result.
It is that figure in the background which has most interest, however;
it is yet another expression of the truth that these cartoons have made
so vividly evident, that Germany will stop short of nothing to gain her
ends. This envoy is the German as we knew him before the war, deferent,
somewhat waiter-ish, and at the same time suggestive of the German
commercial traveller--the very worst kind of commercial traveller, for
whom the word “business” covers such underhand dealings as accompanied
the furtherance of German plans in all countries--a spy in disguise.
He says, in effect--“Yours is a very little country; in the day of our
world-dominance it will be well that you should have our protection.”
He wants the mouths of the Scheldt, and all that furtherance of German
naval plans which dominance over Holland would give, and he offers all
that Germany is prepared to offer to any ally or potential ally.
But the Queen has turned away.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN
[Illustration: THE ENVOY TO HER MAJESTY
“Madam, your soldiers will get splendid Prussian uniforms, and Your
Majesty will have a place of honour in the retinue of the Kaiser.”]
The German Band
The German Band, as we know it in this country, has never been noted
for harmonious music. Blatancy, stridency, false notes, and persistency
after the coppers, have been its chief characteristics.
And the same things prevail when it is at home.
Never since the world began has there been such a campaign of barefaced
humbug and lying as that organised by William, Hindenburg, Hollweg
and Co. for the deceiving and fleecing of the much-tried countries
temporarily under their sway.
But the money had to be got in by hook or by crook, and by hook and by
crook and in every nefarious way they have milked their unfortunate
peoples dry.
But there is another side to all this. In time, the veil of lies and
false intelligence of victories in the North Sea, and at Verdun, and,
indeed, wherever Germany has fought and failed, will be rent by the
spear of Truth.
Then will come the _débâcle_. And then, unless every scrap of grit
and backbone has been Prussianised out of the Teuton, the revulsion
of feeling will sweep the oppressors out of existence; and Germany,
released from the strangle-hold, may rise once more to take the place
among the civilised nations of the world which, by her foul doings of
the last two years, she has deliberately forfeited.
JOHN OXENHAM
[Illustration: WAR LOAN MUSIC
“Was blazen die Trompeten Moneten heraus?”]
A Fact
To understand the true inwardness of this cartoon, the reader must
be familiar with the writings of General von Hartmann, one of the
chief evangelists of German methods of warfare. The following gem
is extracted from an article by von Hartmann, published in 1877, on
“Military Necessities and Humanity”:--
“The warrior has need of passion. It must not, indeed, as the result
of opposition, be regarded as a necessary evil; nor condemned as a
regrettable consequence of physical contact; nor must we seek to
restrain and curb it as a savage and brutal force; for in causing a
powerful and exclusive concentration of individual energies it becomes
an indispensable agent of the consummation of conflict. Every warlike
exploit is before all things of a personal nature; it puts before all
else the affirmation of the individual character, and it demands, in
its agent, a release from the oppressive rule of the moderating laws of
everyday life.... _Violence_ and _passion_ are the two levers essential
to any warlike action, and, we say it advisedly, of all _military
greatness_.”
FRANCIS STOPFORD
[Illustration: A FACT
This brutalism by Major Tille of the German Army on a small boy of
Maastricht was vouched for by an eye-witness.]
The Free Sea
It is when Germany’s absence of morals is most blatant that her
presence of mind comes to the rescue. It is a strange and wonderful
mind that she reveals--a weird combination of childishness without
its innocence, of wickedness without its cunning. Yet somehow the
German mental process is sometimes convincing. It is really one of the
wonders of the world that it should be so. When a country that stole
Silesia, Poland, Schleswig, Alsace-Loraine, Belgium and Serbia solemnly
assures a shocked and startled world that its life-long object is to
protect the freedom of small nationalities; when a Government, that
kills peaceful passengers by the hundred and torpedoes neutral trading
ships, says it does so in the cause of the freedom of the seas; when a
frenzied Emperor, foiled in the effort to conquer Europe by a surprise
attack, vows that his only purpose is self-defence, one would think
that such talk could deceive nobody--not even the speaker. A child’s
lie embarrasses but does not mislead its elders. Why, then, does the
German lie mislead? Or is it that the bully only seems to be believed?
The feebler spirits of Holland would rather believe anything than be
forced into the turmoil of war. Germany, as a protector of the weak,
the champion of the small, they are willing to accept--rather than meet
Germany in arms. Nay, they--the descendants of the greatest seamen,
and to-day dependent on the sea for more than half the country’s
wealth--would prefer Germany’s guarantee of sea freedom than run the
risk of her land atrocities.
Raemaekers is the _enfant terrible_ of political argument. The German
contention is childish, the Dutch credulity is childish, and he meets
them with a child’s demonstration of what the truth would be. Three
great outlets of the sea are blocked by three brutal figures. We have
only to look at them to realise that here are dangerous playmates.
ARTHUR POLLEN
[Illustration: THE FREE SEA
Germany’s idea of what it would make of it for Holland.]
Belgian Refugee to His Dutch Brother
In this cartoon Raemaekers endeavours to bring home to his compatriots
one lesson of the War. That as human nature now is--and especially
German in-human nature--the only guarantee, not necessarily of peace
but of life, for the smaller nations on the borders of the German
Empire is the provision of a force sufficient to give pause to wanton
aggression.
A large and more efficient Army might not have saved Belgium. It would,
however, possibly have diverted the German advance to another quarter.
It would undoubtedly have gained much valuable time for the Allies in
their fight for the cause of freedom and the preservation of small
nations.
Of the importance of a large and efficient Army to Holland at the
present juncture there can be no question. Germany in retreat may
invade the territory of the gallant little nation of free people,
whose history is a glorious and eloquent plea for their continued
existence as a separate nation, unless they are prepared to offer
effective resistance. Often the dying throes of a wild beast involve an
unexpectedly wide area in destruction. And if Germany wins, Holland may
make up its mind to becoming an appendage of the Hunnish Empire.
That this is realised by the more thoughtful and prescient Dutch no one
who knows them doubts; but the wave of prosperity in war time which
Holland has experienced may serve to dull the apprehension of the less
suspicious and far-sighted of her people.
With the case of the Belgian refugees before their eyes one may hope
that the lesson may strike home. Indeed, we cannot believe that the
wrongs of Belgium will be readily forgotten.
The central figure of the cartoon is not less eloquent because the
despair that is written upon the face is less emotional than that of
the girl and woman, or even the little boy. But it grips. Wisdom, too
often, alas! is purchased only with the bitter coin of experience.
CLIVE HOLLAND
[Illustration: THE BELGIAN REFUGEE TO HIS DUTCH BROTHER
“I, too, always voted against any increase of my Army.”]
The “Falaba”
Amongst my most treasured possessions is a photograph taken on board
the lost _Invincible_ after the battle of the Falkland Islands was
over. Three-quarters of a mile away _Inflexible_ is silhouetted against
the evening sky, and between the two ships lies the flotsam of the
_Gneisenau_, with 200 or more German sailors clinging to wreckage or
swimming for their lives. A few steam pinnaces and cutters are picking
up these poor drowning fellows as fast as they can. The fighting navy,
having conquered its foe, is engaged upon the task, always dear to it,
of saving life. It is an added pleasure to befriend those who have
fought gallantly.
I do not know whether Raemaekers has ever seen this photograph,
but this drawing shows the drowning people, the wreckage, exactly
reproduced. But here the only boat has itself been smashed by a shot,
so that the last hope of safety of those in the water has been taken
from them. And the ship that sinks is not a fighting ship, and the poor
souls struggling for their lives are not fighting men. Can these men in
the foreground be the sailors of a fighting navy?
For the officer of this submarine is not content to warn the _Falaba_
and give its people a chance to save themselves before sinking her.
He has, indeed, warned her, but, with a refinement of cruelty, has
torpedoed the ship while the women and children were being hastily got
off; and, not content with this, has fired on and sunk the boats in
which his terrified victims hoped to escape.
There is here no artistic exaggeration. The picture is horrible just
because it is photographically accurate.
It is a hideous negation of all that the word “navy” has stood for in
every country that has ever possessed one. In nothing does Raemaekers
show his Dutch blood more than in his savage anger at this gruesome
perversion of the sea tradition. For the Dutch have a great naval
history and know the meaning of a seaman’s honour.
The true sailor is great in his bravery because he is still greater in
his chivalry. What will history say of these debauched brutes who revel
in their hangman’s task?
ARTHUR POLLEN
[Illustration: “We have better luck with passenger boats than with war
ships, for they cannot shoot.”]
The “Katwyk”
In this one picture is the whole story of German submarine war, which
heeds the presence of neither women nor children, but strikes swiftly,
secretly, and without giving its victim the opportunity of defence. Not
that in war it is demanded that the opponent should be given chance
of a fight on equal terms; for in sea war the whole object of a naval
commander is to concentrate an overwhelming superiority of fire on his
enemy, and to destroy.
It remained for Germany, however, to apply this doctrine of destruction
to mercantile craft and to neutral shipping, and to conduct war on
the principle that war justifies _any_ means, any barbarity, even the
indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatants. This assassin striking from
behind has called the British blockade barbarous; but that blockade at
least gives the nation against whom it is exercised a choice between
evils, so much so in fact that all nations recognise it, and for ages
have recognised it, as part of the procedure of war--no accusation of
barbarity was made against Germany in 1871 for the starvation of the
civilian population of Paris. But this sea-murder is a different thing,
a thing that does not advance the end of the war, and a sign of a claim
on the part of its authors that civilisation cannot allow. It is as if
they questioned: “Since we have a certain power of destruction, shall
we not use it as pleases us?”
And the answer? There were, after the sinking of the _Lusitania_, rows
of bodies of women and children laid out for identification; there were
many other instances, almost equally tragic, and the answers that they
afford are eloquent enough. May they be well remembered in the day of
settlement.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN
[Illustration: THE “KATWYK” MURDER
(A Dutch ship of this name was torpedoed by the Germans.)]
Arcades Ambo
Looking at this cartoon one can understand why Raemaekers is not
_persona grata_ in the Happy Fatherland. With half a dozen touches he
has changed Satan from the magnificent Prince of Evil whom Gustave
Doré portrayed into a--Hun. Henceforth we shall envisage Satan as a
Hun, talking the obscene tongue--now almost the universal language in
Hades--and hailed by right-thinking Huns as the All Highest War Lord.
Willy senior must be jealous.
With the learned Professor, the cartoonist not only produces a
composite portrait of all the _Herren Professoren_, but also drives
home the point of his amazing pencil into what is perhaps the most
instructive lesson of this monstrous war--the perversion to evil uses
of powers originally designed, nourished, and expanded to benefit
mankind. When the _Furor Teutonicus_ has finally expended itself, we do
not envy the feelings of the illustrious chemists who perfected poison
gas and liquid fire! Will they, when their hour comes, find it easy
to obey the poet’s injunction, and, wrapping the mantle of their past
about them, “lie down to pleasant dreams”?
We are assured that these professors have not exhausted their powers of
frightfulness. It may be so. This is certain: Such frightfulness will
ultimately exhaust them. With this reflection, we may leave them, grist
to be ground by the mills of God.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL
[Illustration: ARCADES AMBO
THE PROFESSOR: “I have discovered a new mixture which will blind them
in half an hour.”
SATAN: “You are in very truth my master.”]
Neuve Chapelle
Nothing could be more thoroughly characteristic of the Prussian mind
than its utter misunderstanding of England. It exhibits all the
characteristics which we are accustomed to associate with “German
Thought,” and especially the combination of enormous industry in the
accumulation of facts with an utter inability to appreciate such facts
as cannot be catalogued and an amazing stupidity in passing judgment
even upon the facts which are recognised.
Thus, before the outbreak of war, the Prussians, knowing that we were
in the main a commercial people, immediately deduced the conclusion
that we should never fight for any other purpose than that of
making money. They found themselves in error. Similarly, after our
intervention, they looked up their documents and, discovering that
we had never had a very large army, concluded that we were not to be
reckoned with seriously in the field of military operations. Our naval
power they allowed for, for they could count the ships and had them all
duly docketed. But our army was “contemptible,” and would certainly
remain so.
That a nation, not originally military, could transform itself into a
nation in arms by the mere action of patriotic enthusiasm and anger
was a thing altogether undreamed of in the Prussian philosophy. The
revelation that the thing was so has produced first, incredulity, and
then a sort of bewilderment, as if all the foundations of “scientific
thought,” as the Germans understand it, had collapsed--as, indeed, they
had.
The thing that has not collapsed is the eternal strength which belongs
to a nation utterly convinced with the justice of its cause. The thing
is not possible to Prussians; but it is possible to Englishmen, as the
Prussians are already beginning to know.
CECIL CHESTERTON
[Illustration: NEUVE CHAPELLE
ORDER OF THE CROWN PRINCE OF BAVARIA: “You must give those English
heavy blows.”
TOMMY (_to prisoners after Neuve Chapelle_): “Weren’t they heavy?”]
Atrocities
The lecturer, with true German casuistry, minimises the rhinoceros and
magnifies the fly, so that there is “very little difference” between
them, as far as his arguments are concerned. Fortunately for the cause
of the Allies, casuistry is not a military asset; had it been one,
Germany would long since have won the war, and that not only on this
count, for the saying that “the wish is father to the thought” is
nowhere more true than in Germany.
There, the people are now firmly convinced that the war was forced on
them, thanks to the casuistry of their leaders; they honestly believe,
if professorial writings have any sincerity in them, that the invasion
of Belgium was justified by their need, and that scraps of paper are
only scraps of paper where they, the chosen nation for the spread
of culture, are concerned; they believe that Britain’s blockade is
barbarous and unjust, that France is an effete nation, that Russia is
peopled by a horde of savages, that the starvation of their civilian
prisoners instead of exchanging them is a just measure on their
part--and many other things which sane reasoning shows to be false.
They have, apparently, an endless credulity.
If one would question the cause for this, the answer lies in one
word--“Pan-Germanism,” that disease which has sapped away the moral
fibre of a nation and implanted colossal conceit in its place. No
statement is more true than that Germany is devoid of a sense of
humour, for this sense is in its essence that of proportion, and not
only in her methods of war and her dealings with the rest of the world
has Germany lost all sense of proportion, but also in her estimate
of herself and her place in the scheme of things. A proper sense of
proportion is incompatible with Pan-Germanism.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN
[Illustration: ATROCITIES
THE LECTURER: “From a comparison of the two subjects, gentlemen, you
will perceive that there is very little difference between Germany and
the Allies.”]
“Is it You, Mother?”
Since the opening of hostilities in the present war the Scottish
regiments have given repeated proofs of a valour which adds new lustre
to the great traditions of Scottish soldiership. Through all the early
operations--on the retreat from Mons and at the battles of the Marne
and the Aisne--the Royal Scots Guards, the Scots Greys, the Gordon,
the Seaforth and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the King’s
Own Scottish Borderers gained many fresh laurels by their heroism and
undaunted spirit. The London Scottish Territorials, too, have shown a
prowess as signal as that of the Scots of the Regular Army; while the
mettle of men of Scottish descent has made glorious contribution in
France and elsewhere to the fine records of the Overseas armies.
It is the inevitable corollary that death should levy a heavy toll
on Scottish soldiers in the field. Thousands of kilted youth have
suffered the fate which Raemaekers depicts in the accompanying cartoon.
It is not, of course, only the young Scot whose thought turns in the
moment of death to the hearth of his home with vivid memories of his
mother. But the word “home” and all that the word connotes often makes
a more urgent appeal to the Scot abroad than to the man of another
nationality. There is significance in the fact that, far as the Scots
are wont to wander over the world’s surface, they should, under every
sky and in every turning fortune, treasure as a national anthem the
song which has the refrain:--
“For it’s hame, an’ it’s hame, fain wad I be,
O! it’s hame, hame, hame, to my ain countrie!”
The German soldier in this war would seem to have lost well nigh all
touch of humanity. Yet the draughtsman here suggests that even the
German soldier on occasion yields to the pathos of the young Scot’s
death-cry for home and mother. There is grim irony in the dying man’s
blurred vision, which mistakes the hand of his mortal foe for that of
his mother.
Of such trying scenes is the drama of war composed.
SIDNEY LEE
[Illustration: “IS IT YOU, MOTHER?”]
Germany’s Dummy
England has without doubt been Germany’s favourite bug-a-boo for the
war. Once she threatened to exalt France to pride of place, but her
allegiance soon returned to John Bull, and she has left no trick of
hate untried to place him in the pillory before her own subjects and
neutral nations.
“Let shame,” said Herr Maximilian Harden, who, as a German-Jew, may
perhaps view the wider issues with some detachment and plead to his
adopted people for philosophy and self-control--“let shame spread a
thick veil over self-deification and enemy-bedevilment.” A futile
appeal must this be to a nation that knows no shame, from its Emperor
to his humblest slave. Self-deification is the marrow in German bones,
the oil in German joints; while as to bedevilment of the enemy, in this
they naturally excel, since supreme power of detraction is a complement
of envy and jealousy: the one involves the others.
Michael’s dummy “John Bull” was, however, very clearly made in Germany,
and Holland is not deceived. She adjoins Belgium--a circumstance
the man behind the scarecrow perhaps forgot--and they who have been
watching Germany at work in their neighbour’s country are not going
to be alarmed at this silly German “John Bull.” They know the real
John Bull at first hand, and his methods of conducting commerce and
practising war. It was not John Bull who torpedoed the _Tubantia_ and
committed a thousand other pirate and brigand acts against this neutral
power. It was not John Bull who in August of last year wrote to the
Burgomaster of little Wavre and demanded £120,000, failing which Wavre
would be set on fire and destroyed “without distinction of persons, the
innocent to suffer with the guilty.”
Holland is staunch, for she knows that Germany’s care for the weak
nations is the good wife’s love for the chickens and the butcher’s for
the lamb. Michael would like to thrust his revolver into John’s hand
and pretend afterwards that he had pulled the trigger; but the smiling
Dutch frontier guard is in no danger of being deceived.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
[Illustration: MICHAEL: “Boo-hoo!”
THE DUTCHMAN: “Come out from behind there, Michael, you can’t frighten
me.”]
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.,
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
SPECIAL NOTICE
:: TO PURCHASERS OF THE ::
“LAND AND WATER” EDITION OF
RAEMAEKERS’ CARTOONS
The “Land and Water” edition of Raemaekers’ Cartoons will be complete
in twenty-six parts.
Each part will contain Twelve Cartoons in colours and Twelve Chapters
by our most prominent writers. When complete there will be 312 Cartoons
and 312 Chapters.
These cartoons and articles will illustrate and describe every phase of
the war in a manner quite distinct from any other war publication, and
when complete, the parts of which this is the first, will constitute
a short, vivid and graphic history of the war, which will live and
be treasured long after the mass of literature now being produced is
forgotten. These parts are compiled so that when bound the stories
and illustrations will be continuous. The twenty-six parts will be
divided into two volumes, thirteen parts to one volume. Those who wish
to possess the work complete should order the whole of the twenty-six
parts immediately from their Newsagents, thereby making sure that no
one part is missing from the complete set.
Special Binding Cases, designed by Mr. Raemaekers, will be available in
due course.
“LAND & WATER,” EMPIRE HOUSE, KINGSWAY, LONDON, W.C.
_ORDER FORM TO YOUR USUAL NEWSAGENT._
_Kindly reserve for me regularly as they appear the twenty-six
fortnightly parts of the “Land and Water” Edition of RAEMAEKERS’
CARTOONS._
_Name________________________________________
_Address_____________________________________
_____________________________________________
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BRUNSWICK ST.,
STAMFORD ST., S.E., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
Transcriber’s Notes
Spelling inconsistencies were not changed, as several different people
wrote the commentaries.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
The “SPECIAL NOTICE” and order slip at the end of the book originally
were found between pages 48 and 49. The sheet of paper on which they
were printed appears to have been tipped into the book, not bound, and
was moved so as to not interrupt the flow of the rest of the book.
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