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Title: Raemaekers' Cartoons
With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers
Author: Louis Raemaekers
Contributor: H. H. Asquith
Illustrator: Louis Raemaekers
Release Date: August 26, 2006 [EBook #19126]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAEMAEKERS' CARTOONS ***
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RAEMAEKERS' CARTOONS
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[Illustration:
(Transcriber's note: a signed Portrait of Louis Raemaekers)
Photograph by Miss D. Compton Collier]
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RAEMAEKERS' CARTOONS
WITH ACCOMPANYING NOTES BY
WELL-KNOWN ENGLISH WRITERS
WITH AN APPRECIATION FROM H. H. ASQUITH,
PRIME MINISTER OF ENGLAND
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1916
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Copyright, 1916, by
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign
languages, including the Scandinavian.
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LIST OF CARTOONS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE NOTES
PAGE
PORTRAIT OF LOUIS RAEMAEKERS
INTRODUCTION Francis Stopford
AN APPRECIATION FROM THE PRIME MINISTER H. H. Asquith
CHRISTENDOM AFTER TWENTY CENTURIES Francis Stopford 8
A STABLE PEACE Eden Phillpotts 10
THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS E. Charles Vivian 12
BERNHARDIISM Hilaire Belloc 14
FROM LIÈGE TO AIX-LA-CHAPELLE Francis Stopford 16
SPOILS FOR THE VICTORS Hilaire Belloc 18
THE VERY STONES CRY OUT Bernard Vaughan, S. J. 20
SATAN'S PARTNER G. K. Chesterton 22
THROWN TO THE SWINE The Dean of St. Paul's 24
THE LAND MINE Herbert Warren 26
"FOR YOUR MOTHERLAND" Eden Phillpotts 28
THE GERMAN LOAN E. Charles Vivian 30
EUROPE, 1916 G. K. Chesterton 32
THE NEXT TO BE KICKED OUT--DUMBA'S MASTER Arthur Pollen 34
THE FRIENDLY VISITOR H. DeVere Stacpoole 36
"TO YOUR HEALTH, CIVILIZATION!" The Dean of St. Paul's 38
FOX TIRPITZ PREACHING TO THE GEESE Herbert Warren 40
THE PRISONERS Eden Phillpotts 42
IT'S UNBELIEVABLE Hilaire Belloc 44
KREUZLAND, KREUZLAND ÜBER ALLES The Dean of St. Paul's 38
THE EX-CONVICT Hilaire Belloc 48
MISS CAVELL G. K. Chesterton 50
THE HOSTAGES John Oxenham 52
KING ALBERT'S ANSWER TO THE POPE E. Charles Vivian 54
THE GAS FIEND Eden Phillpotts 56
THE GERMAN TANGO John Buchan 58
THE ZEPPELIN TRIUMPH W. L. Courtney 60
KEEPING OUT THE ENEMY H. DeVere Stacpoole 62
THE GERMAN OFFER Hilaire Belloc 64
THE WOLF TRAP Herbert Warren 66
AHASUERUS II John Buchan 68
OUR CANDID FRIEND The Dean of St. Paul's 70
PEACE AND INTERVENTION Boyd Cable 72
LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD H. DeVere Stacpoole 74
THE SEA MINE Arthur Pollen 76
"SEDUCTION" G. K. Chesterton 78
MURDER ON THE HIGH SEAS Arthur Pollen 80
AD FINEM John Oxenham 82
"U'S" Arthur Pollen 84
MATER DOLOROSA Eden Phillpotts 86
"GOTT STRAFE ITALIEN!" Ralph D. Blumenfeld 88
SERBIA Sir Sidney Lee 90
"JUST A MOMENT--I'M COMING" Boyd Cable 92
THE HOLY WAR Boyd Cable 94
"GOTT MIT UNS" Eden Phillpotts 96
THE WIDOWS OF BELGIUM The Dean of St. Paul's 98
THE HARVEST IS RIPE William Mitchell Ramsay 100
"UNMASKED" Boyd Cable 102
THE GREAT SURPRISE G. K. Chesterton 104
THOU ART THE MAN! John Oxenham 106
SYMPATHY Ralph D. Blumenfeld 108
THE REFUGEES Joseph Thorp 110
"THE JUNKER" Clive Holland 112
"AU MILIEU DE FANTÔMES TRISTES ET SANS NOMBRE" Alice Meynell 114
BLUEBEARD'S CHAMBER William Mitchell Ramsay 116
THE RAID Arthur Pollen 118
BETTER A LIVING DOG THAN A DEAD LION Arthur Shadwell 120
"THE BURDEN OF THE INTOLERABLE DAY" William Mitchell Ramsay 122
EAGLE IN HEN-RUN Boyd Cable 124
THE FUTURE Sidney Lee 126
CHRIST OR ODIN? Bernard Vaughan 128
FERDINAND Edmund Gosse 130
JUGGERNAUT John Oxenham 132
MICHAEL AND THE MARKS W. M. J. Williams 134
THEIR BERESINA John Oxenham 136
NEW PEACE OFFERS W. L. Courtney 138
THE SHIELDS OF ROSSELAERE William Mitchell Ramsay 140
THE OBSTINACY OF NICHOLAS Joseph Thorp 142
THE ORDER OF MERIT Ralph D. Blumenfeld 144
THE MARSHES OF PINSK Alice Meynell 146
GOD WITH US John Buchan 148
FERDINAND THE CHAMELEON G. K. Chesterton 150
THE LATIN SISTERS Horace Annesley Vachell 152
MISUNDERSTOOD Joseph Thorp 154
PROSPERITY REIGNS IN FLANDERS Cecil Chesterton 156
THE LAST HOHENZOLLERN E. Charles Vivian 158
PIRACY Arthur Pollen 160
"WEEPING, SHE HATH WEPT" Father Bernard Vaughan 162
MILITARY NECESSITY Eden Phillpotts 164
LIBERTÉ! LIBERTÉ, CHÉRIE! John Oxenham 166
I--"A KNAVISH PIECE OF WORK" George Birdwood 168
II--"SISYPHUS,--HIS STONE" George Birdwood 170
CONCRETE FOUNDATIONS A. Shadwell 172
PALLAS ATHENE Herbert Warner 174
THE WONDERS OF CULTURE Clive Holland 176
FOLK WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND THEM Bernard Vaughan 178
ON THE WAY TO CALAIS Eden Phillpotts 180
VON BETHMANN-HOLLWEG AND TRUTH Herbert Warren 182
VAN TROMP AND DE RUYTER Arthur Pollen 184
WAR AND CHRIST Cecil Chesterton 186
BARBED WIRE E. Charles Vivian 188
THE HIGHER POLITICS Boyd Cable 190
THE LOAN GAME W. M. J. Williams 192
A WAR OF RAPINE E. Charles Vivian 194
THE DUTCH JUNKERS A. Shadwell 196
THE WAR MAKERS John Oxenham 198
THE CHRISTMAS OF KULTUR A. Shadwell 200
SERBIA Horace Annesley Vachell 202
THE LAST OF THE RACE Arthur Pollen 204
THE CURRICULUM W. M. J. Williams 206
THE DUTCH JOURNALIST TO HIS BELGIAN CONFRÈRE G. K. Chesterton 208
A BORED CRITIC Eden Phillpotts 210
"THE PEACE WOMAN" Clive Holland 212
THE SELF-SATISFIED BURGHER W. L. Courtney 214
THE DECADENT John Oxenham 216
LIQUID FIRE Clive Holland 218
NISH AND PARIS Sidney Lee 220
GOTT STRAFE ENGLAND! Cecil Chesterton 222
THE PACIFICIST KAISER Sidney Lee 224
DINANT W. R. Inge 226
"HESPERIA" (WOUNDED FIRST) H. DeVere Stacpoole 228
GALLIPOLI G. K. Chesterton 230
THE BEGINNING OF THE EXPIATION G. K. Chesterton 232
THE SHIRKERS Sidney Lee 234
ONE OF THE KAISER'S MANY MISTAKES John Oxenham 236
BELGIUM IN HOLLAND Edmund Gosse 238
SERBIA William Mitchell Ramsay 240
JACKALS IN THE POLITICAL FIELD Herbert Warren 242
A LETTER FROM THE GERMAN TRENCHES Cecil Chesterton 244
HIS MASTER'S VOICE A. Shadwell 246
HUN GENEROSITY Horace Annesley Vachell 248
EASTER, 1915 G. K. Chesterton 250
PAN GERMANICUS AS PEACE MAKER Alfred Stead 252
GOTT MIT UNS Cecil Chesterton 254
OUR LADY OF ANTWERP W. L. Courtney 256
DEPORTATION Cecil Chesterton 258
THE GERMAN BAND John Oxenham 260
ARCADES AMBO Horace Annesley Vachell 262
"IS IT YOU, MOTHER?" Sidney Lee 264
THE FATE OF FLEMISH ART AT THE HANDS OF KULTUR
Arthur Morrison 266
THE GRAVES OF ALL HIS HOPES H. DeVere Stacpoole 268
"MY SIXTH SON IS NOW LYING HERE--WHERE ARE YOURS?"
H. DeVere Stacpoole 270
BUNKERED W. R. Inge 272
GOTT STRAFE VERDUN W. R. Inge 274
THE LAST THROW E. Charles Vivian 276
THE ZEPPELIN BAG Clive Holland 278
"COME IN, MICHAEL, I HAVE HAD A LONG SLEEP" Horace Annesley Vachell 280
FIVE ON A BENCH G. K. Chesterton 282
WHAT ABOUT PEACE, LADS? W. R. Inge 284
THE LIBERATORS Joseph Thorp 286
TOM THUMB AND THE GIANT E. Charles Vivian 288
"WE HAVE FINISHED OFF THE RUSSIANS" E. Charles Vivian 290
MUDDLE THROUGH Clive Holland 292
MY ENEMY IS MY BEST FRIEND William Mitchell Ramsay 294
HOW I DEAL WITH THE SMALL FRY Clive Holland 296
THE TWO EAGLES A. Shadwell 298
LONDON INSIDE THE SAVOY E. Charles Vivian 300
LONDON OUTSIDE THE SAVOY E. Charles Vivian 302
THE INVOCATION A. Shadwell 304
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INTRODUCTION
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, civilization will regard the war largely through these wonderful
drawings.
* * * * *
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 realize 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 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. 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. A Teuton paper has declared that Raemaekers' cartoons are
worth at least two Army Corps to the Allies.
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.
* * * * *
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.
Empire House, FRANCIS STOPFORD,
Kingsway, London. Editor, _Land and Water_.
February, 1916.
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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 civilization, 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.
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CHRISTENDOM AFTER TWENTY CENTURIES
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 realize
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]
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A STABLE PEACE
Were I privileged to have a hand at the Peace Conference, my cooperation
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."]
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THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS
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
visualize 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 visualize, too, the men thrust back
another way, to wait _their_ fate at the hands of these apostles of a
civilization of force.
Yet even then full realization 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."]
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BERNHARDIISM
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, outnumbering 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 some one else might."]
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FROM LIÈGE TO AIX-LA-CHAPELLE
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]
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SPOILS FOR THE VICTORS
The feature that will stamp Prussian War forever, 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 Prussianized--which will kill us or which we shall kill--soldier
is no high thing, nor is their 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."]
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THE VERY STONES CRY OUT
If the highly organized 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 civilized 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.
Prussianized Germany has the monopoly of "frightfulness." When not
"frightful," Prussian 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 civilization. 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 civilize
them?
The very stones cry out against them.
BERNARD VAUGHAN, S.J.
[Illustration: THE VERY STONES CRY OUT]
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SATAN'S PARTNER
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. Any one 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, lends 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."]
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THROWN TO THE SWINE
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]
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THE LAND MINE
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 retort 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 free-born 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!"]
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THE GERMAN LOAN
The bubble is very nicely balanced, for German "kultur," which is in
reality but another word for "system" or "organization," 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 civilizations 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."]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
EUROPE, 1916
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 civilized?"
G. K. CHESTERTON.
[Illustration: EUROPE, 1916
"Am I not yet sufficiently civilized?"]
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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 temporize 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 wholehearted
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]
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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."]
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"TO YOUR HEALTH, CIVILIZATION!"
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 Civilization.
Death has never enjoyed such a carnival of slaughter before, and it is
Civilization 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 civilization 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, CIVILIZATION!"]
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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 watchdogs, 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 forever. 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]
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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 some one 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."]
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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?"]
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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 civilized 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 civilized 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 one's self. 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
civilization 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."]
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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 organized
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?"]
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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 civilization 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."]
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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 paralyzing 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 has 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 Civilization.
As an arm, poison gas cannot be considered conspicuously successful,
since it is easily encountered; 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]
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THE GERMAN TANGO
A blond 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!"]
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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 civilization, 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?"]
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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!"]
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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
civilization 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 purpose
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."]
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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 foedera 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."]
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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 Bagdad. 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 gradeur'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"]
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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 hypnotized
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, colonization, 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."]
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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 realize 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."]
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LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD
If you wish to see the position of Holland look at the map of Europe as
it was before August 4, 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 toward
him.
He has been in ambush for forty years.
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.
[Illustration: LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD
Germany lying in wait for Holland.]
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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 Jacob'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]
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"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
realize 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?"]
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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 paralyzed by the
threat.
ARTHUR POLLEN.
[Illustration: MURDER ON THE HIGH SEAS
"Well, have you nearly done?"]
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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 by-word and reproach in all the lands
He repined.... 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."]
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"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'
drawing 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, Tripitz, you've sunk a great many?"
TIRPITZ: "Yes, sire, here is another 'U' coming down."]
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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]
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"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 21, 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 1, 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!"]
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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.]
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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."]
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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 realize 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
sportmanship, 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 realize the greatness, so in the fullness of time must
William come to realize 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."]
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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 _débâcle_ 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"]
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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]
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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]
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"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 civilized 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.]
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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.]
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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: THOU ART THE MAN
"We wage war on Divine principles."]
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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 Vise,
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."]
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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 realizing 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 civilization till the men responsible for such things
are brought to realize 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.]
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"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."]
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"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 every one 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 appeal, 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."]
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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.]
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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."]
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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."]
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"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 realizes 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."]
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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 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 visualize 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."]
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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, 1911, 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]
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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."]
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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 salt s'il reviendra.
(Old French song adapted.)]
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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]
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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?"]
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THEIR BERESINA
_"Is it still a long way to the Beresina?"_
The whole civilized 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 soul in the world who is.
When the First--the real--Napoleon entered Russia, on June 24, 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 demoralization. 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 forever 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?"]
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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 every one
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."]
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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 open 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]
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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
demoralized.
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."]
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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 besides 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?"]
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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!]
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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 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."]
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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 humanized 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."]
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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
Civilization, everything which has served to humanize 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 feeling 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"]
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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 civilization. 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."]
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PROSPERITY REIGNS IN FLANDERS
Wherever Prussia rules she has only one method of ruling--that of
terror. Wherever she finds civilization and the wealth which
civilization 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 _ideologies 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 forever destroyed, can bring nothing but that slavery which
the Prussians have themselves accepted and which they would now impose
upon the whole civilization 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.]
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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, systematized 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."]
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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 civilization and brought
the whole temple down. But has she not destroyed herself utterly amid
the ruins? Her industry is paralyzed, 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]
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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]
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MILITARY NECESSITY
It may be asserted that the plea of "Frightfulness" will not be
recognized a "military necessity" when Germany is judged, and that this
enemy of civilization, 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 civilization, Germany's heart recognized 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.
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.
[Footnote A: English translation. Heinemann.]
[Illustration: ON TICKET-OF-LEAVE
CONVICT: "The next time I'll wear a German helmet and plead 'military
necessity.'"]
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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 forever 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
likely 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 immortalizes
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 conies, 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!]
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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 civilization.
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.]
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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 forevermore
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]
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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?"]
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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 Jack-boots," 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?"]
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THE WONDERS OF CULTURE
Of all forms of "Kultur" or "frightfulness" that which materializes in
the "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 sympathize 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 realize 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 realizing 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]
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"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 redhanded 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-Christianize, de-civilize, and even de-humanize 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 BEAUTES DE LA GUERRE
Folk who do not understand them.]
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ON THE WAY TO CALAIS
They are coming, like a tempest, in their endless ranks of gray,
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."]
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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."]
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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.]
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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 agonized 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]
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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]
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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 civilized 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."]
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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
"civilization" 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 realize 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 THIS 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 richer.]
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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.]
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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."]
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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."]
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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!"]
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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]
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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 demoralized 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 civilized 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 emphasizes.
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."]
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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 naïvely 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!"]
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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 emphasizes an
element in the general German plot against the world which is often
forgotten in phrases about fire and sword. The Prussianized 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
any one who realizes 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."]
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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 civilization, 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 civilized nation on earth; and before these lines are
published their uncivilized 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."]
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"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 realized 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 civilization 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."]
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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 principal 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?"]
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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)]
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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
civilization and moral human conduct, one was made to realize that the
Allied Powers were opposed to an enemy whose resources were only
equalled by his utter negation of the rules of civilized 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 savagery, 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]
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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 overconfidence, 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."]
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GOTT STRAFE ENGLAND!
In these sombre times one is grateful for a touch of humour, and it
would perhaps be impossible to conceive in all created nature a
spectacle so exquisitely ludicrous as the appearance of the Prussian in
the guise of a Wronged Man. For, of course, it is the very foundation of
the Prussian theory that there can be no such thing as a wronged man.
Might is right. That which physical force has determined and shall
determine is the only possible test of justice. That was the diabolic
but at least coherent philosophy upon which the Kingdom of Prussia was
originally based and upon which the German Empire created by Prussia
always reposed.
Nor was that philosophy--which among other things dictated this
war--ever questioned, much less abandoned, by the Germans so long as it
seemed probable to the world and certain to them that they were destined
to win. Now that it has begun to penetrate even into their mind that
they are probably going to lose, we find them suddenly blossoming out as
pacifists and humanitarians.
Especially are they indignant at the "cruelty" of the blockade. It is
not necessary to examine seriously a contention so obviously absurd. Any
one acquainted with the history of war knows the blockade of an enemy's
ports is a thing as old as war itself. Every one acquainted with the
records of the last half-century knows that Prussia owes half her
prestige to the reduction of Paris in 1871--effected solely by the
starvation of its civilian inhabitants.
But the irony goes deeper than that. Look at the face of the Prussian in
"Raemaekers' Cartoons" and you will understand why Germans in America,
Holland, and other neutral countries are now talking pacifism and
exuding humanitarian sentiment. You will understand why the German
Chancellor says that in spite of the victorious march of Germany from
victory to victory his tender heart cannot but plead for the dreadful
sufferings of the unhappy, though criminal, Allies. Then you will laugh;
which is good in days like these.
CECIL CHESTERTON.
[Illustration: GOTT STRAFE ENGLAND!
"Now she prevents my sending goods by the Holland route!"]
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THE PACIFICIST KAISER (THE CONFEDERATES)
From time to time of late the Kaiser has posed as the champion of peace.
His official spokesman, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, has announced the
Imperial readiness to stay the war--on his master's own terms, which he
disdains to define precisely.
The Emperor and his advisers are involved in a tangle of miscalculations
which infest the conduct of the war alike in the field of battle and the
council-chamber. But no wild imaginings could encourage a solid hope
that the Chancellor's peaceful professions would be taken seriously by
anybody save his own satellites. Loudly the compliant Minister vaunted
in the Reichstag his country's military successes, but he could point to
no signs either of any faltering in military preparations on the part of
the Allies, or of their willingness to entertain humiliating conditions
of peace.
Even in Germany clear visions acknowledge that Time is fighting
valiantly on the side of Germany's foes, and that peace can only come
when the Central Powers beg for it on their knees.
It is improbable that the Kaiser and his Chancellor now harbour many
real illusions about the future, although they may well be anxious to
disguise even to themselves the ultimate issues at stake in the war.
Their home and foreign policy seems to be conceived in the desperate
spirit of the gambler. They appear to be recklessly speculating on the
chances of a pacificist rôle conciliating the sympathy of neutrals. They
count on the odds that they may convert the public opinion of
non-combatant nations to the erroneous belief that Germany is the
conqueror, and that further resistance to her is futile. But so far the
game has miscarried. The recent German professions of zeal for peace
fell in neutral countries on deaf or impatient ears. The braggart
bulletins of the German Press Bureau have been valued at their true
worth. Neutral critics have found in Bethmann-Hollweg's cry for peace
mere wasted breath
The Chancellor and his master are perilously near losing among neutrals
the last shreds of reputation for political sagacity.
SIDNEY LEE.
[Illustration: THE CONFEDERATES
"Did they believe that peace story in the Reichstag, Bethmann?"
"Yes, but the Allies didn't."]
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DINANT
During the joint expedition to Peking, all the other contingents were
horrified at the cruelty of the German troops. I have heard how on one
occasion a number of Chinese women were watching a German regiment at
drill, when suddenly the commanding officer ordered his men to open fire
upon them. When remonstrated with, he replied that terrorism was humane
in the end, because it made the enemy desire peace. For some reason,
these atrocities were not very widely known in England; and no one
dreamed that such infernal crimes would ever be perpetrated in European
war. But such are indeed the calculated methods of Germany; and her
officers began to order them as soon as her troops crossed the Belgian
frontier. The German military authorities advise that terrorism should
be used sparingly when there is danger of reprisals. Accordingly, though
many abominable things have been done to civilians in France and Russia,
and to ourselves when opportunity offered, the worst atrocities were
committed in Belgium, because Belgium is a small country, which had
dispensed with universal military service in reliance on the
international guarantee of her security. These events of the first month
of the war are in danger of being forgotten, now that Germany is
contending on equal terms against the great nations of Europe. But they
must not be forgotten. We are fighting against a nation which thinks it
good policy to massacre non-combatants, provided only that the sons and
brothers of the victims are not in a position to retaliate.
W. R. INGE.
[Illustration: DINANT--I SEE FATHER.]
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"HESPERIA" (WOUNDED FIRST)
Sailors of all nationality except German have from time immemorial
looked upon themselves as the guardians and protectors of land folk at
sea.
That is why every sailor in the world, outside the doggeries of Hamburg,
felt his calling spat upon and his personal pride injured by the sinking
of the _Lusitania_--by a sailor.
It seemed that nothing could be worse than that, and then came the
sinking of the _Hesperia_, a ship filled with wounded soldiers and
Hospital nurses.
Raemaekers brings the fact home to us in this cartoon, not the fact of
the English nurses' heroism, which goes without saying, but of German
low-down common infamy. The fact has become so commonplace, so
accustomed, so everyday that pictures of burning cathedrals, murdered
children, and terrified women no longer move us as they did, but this
artist, whose command of language seems as infinite and varied as the
crimes of the criminals whom God sent him to scourge, has always some
stroke in reserve, something to add to what he has said, if need be. In
the case of this picture it is the medicine bottle, glass, and spoon
flying off the shelf, flung to the floor by the bursting charge of
Tri-nitro-toluine that adds the last touch as distinctive as the
artist's signature.
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.
[Illustration: Another kind of heroism--the sinking of the Hospital Ship
_Hesperia_ (Wounded First)]
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GALLIPOLI
It is a fine touch, or a fortunate accident, in this sketch of
Raemaekers' that it depicts the officer who has made the mistake as
exhibiting the spruceness of a Prussian, and the officer who has found
out the mistake as having the comparatively battered look of an old
Turk. The moustaches of the Young Turk are modelled on the Kaiser's,
spikes pointing to heaven like spires; while those of his justly
incensed superior officer hang loose like those of a human being. The
difference is in any case symbolic; for the sort of instinctive and
instantaneous self-laudation satirized in this cartoon is much more one
of the vices of the new Germany than of the antiquated Islam. That
spirit is not easy to define; and it is easy to confuse it with much
more pardonable things. Every people can be jingo and vainglorious; it
is the mark of this spirit that the instinct to be so acts before any
other instinct can act, even those of surprise or anger. Every people
emphasizes and exaggerates its victories more than its defeats. But this
spirit emphasizes its defeats as victories. Every national calamity has
its consolations; and a nation naturally turns to them as soon as it
reasonably can. But it is the stamp of this spirit that it always thinks
of the consolation _before_ it even thinks of the calamity. It abounds
throughout the whole press of the German Empire. But it is most shortly
shown in this figure of the young officer, who makes a hero of himself
before he has even fully realized that he has made a fool of himself.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
[Illustration: GALLIPOLI
TURKISH GENERAL: "What are you firing at? The British evacuated the
place twenty-four hours ago!"
"Sorry, sir--but what a glorious victory!]
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THE BEGINNING OF THE EXPIATION
It is sometimes an unpleasant necessity to insult a man, in order to
make him understand that he is being insulted. Indeed, most strenuous
and successful appeals to an oppressed populace have involved something
of this paradox. We talk of the demagogue flattering the mob; but the
most successful demagogue generally abuses it. The men of the crowd rise
in revolt, not when they are addressed as "Citizens!" but when they are
addressed as "Slaves!"
If this be true even of men daily disturbed by material discomfort and
discontent, it is much truer of those cases, not uncommon in history, in
which the slave has been soothed with all the external pomp and luxury
of a lord. So prophets have denounced the wanton in a palace or the
puppet on a throne; and so the Dutch caricaturist denounces the gilded
captivity of the Austrian Monarchy, of which the golden trappings are
golden chains.
But for such a purpose a caricaturist is better than a prophet, and
comic pictures better than poetical phrases. It is very vital and
wholesome, even for his own sake, to insult the Austrian. He ought to be
insulted because he is so much more respectable than the Prussian, who
ought not to be insulted, but only kicked. If Austria feels no shame in
letting the Holy Roman Empire become the petty province of an Unholy
Barbarian Empire, if such high historic symbols no longer affect her, we
can only tell her, in as ugly a picture as possible, that she is a
lackey carrying luggage.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
[Illustration: THE BEGINNING OF THE EXPIATION]
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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]
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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
Phoenix 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."]
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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: THE PROMISE
"We shall never sheath the sword until Belgium recovers all, and more
than all that she has sacrificed."--Mr. Asquith, 9th November, 1914.]
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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
"civilization." Let it always 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."]
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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.
Raemakers 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."]
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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."]
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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 recognized. 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 Sten," here satirized 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 goodwill 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.]
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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 toward
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 portrayed 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 reëstablished, 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?"]
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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
crystallized 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 when
that 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
organized 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."]
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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]
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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
realized 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]
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DEPORTATION
Nothing, when one analyzes 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 civilized 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.]
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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 organized 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 Prussianized 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 civilized 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?"]
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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."]
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"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?"]
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THE FATE OF FLEMISH ART AT THE HANDS OF KULTUR
It will not be possible to estimate the injury suffered by the monuments
of art wherein Belgium was so rich till the war is ended and the ruins
examined. Much of the irreparable loss we know, as in the cases of
Louvain and Ypres. In general we may fairly conjecture that whatever is
portable behind the German lines is stolen, or will be, and the rest
destroyed. What is portable is stolen for its cash value, just as are
money, furniture, clothes, and watches. So much of respect for works of
art we may expect from the Prussians--the measure of respect for the
cash shewn by the Prussian general at Termonde who robbed a helpless
civilian of the 5,000 francs he had drawn to pay his workmen's wages,
and then called earth and heaven to witness his exalted virtue in not
also murdering his victim. But what cannot be carried--a cathedral, a
monument, an ancient window--that is destroyed with an apish zest. Even
a picture in time or place, inconvenient for removal, that also will be
defiled, slashed to rags, burnt. And indeed why not? For the best use of
a work of art as understood among the Prussian pundits is to make it the
peg whereon to hang some ridiculous breach of statistics, some monstrous
disquisition of bedevilled theory; and for such purposes a work no
longer existing so as good as any--even better.
And so the marvels of the centuries go up in dust and flames, and the
memorials of Memling and Matsijs, Van Eyck, and Rubens are treated as
the masters' own bodies would have been treated, had fate delayed their
time till the coming of the Boche.
ARTHUR MORRISON.
[Illustration: THE FATE OF FLEMISH ART AT THE HANDS OF KULTUR]
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THE GRAVES OF ALL HIS HOPES
"Look at the map," says the German Chancellor. Look at the map, and mark
with a cross every German disappointment and you will have a history of
the war more illuminating than many books on the subject. The Marne,
Ypres, South Africa, West Africa, Egypt, Bagdad, India, Tripoli, Verdun.
Look at the map indeed. The map of the world that Germany set out to
conquer. Consider the vapouring and vainglory that marked each of these
"successes" in political or military trickery and the fact that of the
military crosses each upbears above a mountain of losses the refrain of
the old German song Verdorben--Gestorben--Ruined--Dead.
It is a wonderful map to consider, this map of the world in 1916. A
wonderful map to be studied by the mothers of the Fatherland who have
suckled their children to manure the crops of the future, to feed the
crematoriums and blast furnaces of Belgium, to fill the mad houses,
blind asylums, and homes for incurables, when the frosts of Russia and
the guns of the Allies have done with them.
And every cross marks the grave of a hope.
Paris
Regrets eternels.
That wonderful inscription was the first to be cut. Galliene was the
mason. Verdun was the last and will not be the least. But, whatever may
come to be written on stone, on the heart of the mourner when he comes
to die only one inscription will be found: "Calais." If he has a heart
large enough to have even these six letters.
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.
[Illustration: THE GRAVES OF ALL HIS HOPES]
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"MY SIXTH SON IS NOW LYING HERE--WHERE ARE YOURS?"
There is a picture in Brussels that the Kaiser ought to study on one of
his visits to the Belgian capital. It is Wertz's picture of Napoleon in
Hades.
Wertz was a madman, he knew something of the horrors of war, but he
knew, also, something of the grandeur and nobility of Napoleon.
Napoleon is surrounded by women holding up the mutilated remains of
sons, lovers, and fathers, and still he remains Napoleon, the child of
Destiny, the Inscrutable, the Calm, and, if one may say so, the
Gentleman.
Women knew, at least, that their dead had fallen before the armies or at
the will of a great man in those Napoleonic days; there was something of
Fate in the business.
But to-day the widow or the mourning mother, whilst knowing that her son
or her husband has fallen in defending Humanity from the Beast can find
no quarter in their hearts for the form or the shape of manhood that
stands, in the words of Swinburne:
"Curse consecrated, crowned with crime and flame!"
No taunt could be too bitter for their lips and none more bitter than
the words of Raemaekers:
"My sons are lying here--where are yours?"
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.
[Illustration: "MY SIXTH SON IS NOW LYING HERE--WHERE ARE YOURS?"]
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BUNKERED
The Crown Prince is in a very awkward predicament. He has driven his
ball into a deep sand-pit from which a very clever professional golfer
might perhaps extricate himself by a powerful stroke with a niblick. But
young William is not a professional, and indeed knows nothing about the
game. So he takes his driver and his other wooden clubs, and smashes
them all, with much bad language, while he whacks at the ball, which
only buries itself deeper in the sand. He is pondering what to do next.
There is, however, only one thing to do. He must take up his ball and
lose the hole. The real players on his side must be disgusted at being
saddled with such a partner. But what is to be done when a fool is born
a war-lord by right of primogeniture? In a few years, in the course of
nature, this fortunate youth will be the Supreme War-Lord himself; it
will be his business to "stand in shining armour" by some luckless ally
who has been selected to pick a quarrel for Germany's benefit, and to
shake a "mailed fist" in the face of a trembling world. That will be a
spectacle for gods and men. But perhaps something will happen instead.
W. R. INGE.
[Illustration: BUNKERED]
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GOTT STRAFE VERDUN
An impartial military verdict on the German strategy and tactics at
Verdun has not yet been delivered. After the failure of the Allies to
break through last year, the German higher command issued a paper, which
has been printed in American newspapers, advocating "nibbling" tactics,
instead of attempts to carry a strongly fortified line by a coup _de
main_. The Germans have buoyed up their hopes by assuring each other
that their troops have been making a slow but methodical progress toward
the "fortress," according to program. But even if we grant that the
disproportion in casualties is probably not so great as some of our
critics have supposed, it is difficult to believe that the enemy was
prepared for such resistance as he has met with. To all appearance, the
Germans expected to break through in a few days, and hoped that this
success would rehabilitate the credit of the paltry young prince whom we
here see entangled in barbed wire, his uniform in rags, and despair
depicted on his haggard face. Another confessed failure would finish the
career of the Crown Prince; and yet there are limits to the endurance of
any troops, and these limits have now been reached. There is nothing
left to young William but useless imprecations. He swaggered into this
war, for which he is partly responsible, expecting to win the reputation
of a general; he will sneak out of it with the reputation of a burglar.
W. R. INGE.
[Illustration: GOTT STRAFE VERDUN
"If only I knew whether it is less dangerous to advance or to retire."]
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THE LAST THROW
The first throw, of course, was that great rush which was stayed at the
Marne by the Genius of Joffre; then there was the throw of the great
attack on Russia, that which laid waste Serbia, and that which would
have thrust men down from the Alps on to the Italian plain. In each of
these Raemaekers' symbolism is applicable, for in each case death threw
higher than either Germany or Austria could afford.
But in none is the symbolism so terribly fitting as in this case of
Verdun, where the fighting men went forward in waves and died in
waves--here death threw higher in every attack than Germany could throw,
and to such heights was the slaughter pushed that it was, in truth, the
last throw of which these war-makers were capable. It is significant,
now that Germany can no longer afford such reckless sacrifices as were
made before Verdun, that the German press contains allusions to heavy
sacrifices on the part of the Allies, and tries to point to folly in
allied policy. Surely, in the matter of sacrifice of life, no nation is
so well qualified to speak from experience as Germany.
There is clumsy anxiety expressed in every line of the figure that holds
the dice box, and in every line of the figure in the background is
nervous fear for the result of the throw--fear that is fully justified.
But Death, master of the game, waits complacently to mark the score,
knowing that these two gamblers are the losers--and that the loser pays.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
[Illustration: THE LAST THROW]
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THE ZEPPELIN BAG
Here the artist has depicted the Kaiser in one of his favourite rôles,
that of a sportsman. In pre-war times it was one of "The All Highest's"
chief ambitions to be taken for an English sportsman! We believe there
were people in those now seemingly remote days who took him at his own
valuation in this regard. Our picture papers were full of photographs of
him shooting at this or that nobleman's estate, lunching after the
morning's battue, in the act of shooting, inspecting the day's "bag,"
etc.; and other pictures were reproduced from the German papers from
time to time of a similar character showing him as a sportsman in his
native land.
There is still, thank God, something clean about British sport and
sportsmen of which the Kaiser never caught the inwardness and spirit. It
has come out on the battlefields to-day as it has on those of past
generations. It has taught the British soldier to fight clean, and even
chivalrously though the foe may be a past master in "knavish tricks,"
and steeped in unspeakable methods of cruelty in warfare.
How thin the veneer of a sportsmanship was upon the Kaiser, which is
after all but symbolic of the higher and sterner virtues, all the world
has had a chance of judging. And in this remarkable and arresting
drawing the genius of the artist has taken and used a sporting incident
with telling and even horrifying effect.
In the old days it was pheasants, partridges, grouse, hares, rabbits,
and other feathered game, with the nobler stags and boars that formed
"the Butcher of Potsdam's 'bag.'" To-day he has his battues by proxy on
sea, land, and from the air. Thousands of victims, as innocent as the
feathered folk he slaughtered of yore; and women and little children
form the chief items of the bag; and especially is this true of the
"fruit of the Zeppelin raids."
He counts the bag and rewards the slayers of the innocent as he
doubtless did the beaters, huntsmen, and keepers of the estates over
which he formerly shot. It has been his ambition to make Europe one vast
Kaiserdom estate. But the sands are running out, and each "bag," whether
by Zeppelin or submarine, serves but to stiffen the backs of the Allies
and horrify neutral nations. Some day the accumulated horrors of the
Kaiser's ideas of sportsmanship will have taught the latter the lesson
that Kaiserdom with Europe as a Kaiser estate means the death of
liberty, the extinction of the smaller nations, and the setting up of a
despotism as cruel as that of Attila and his Huns--the self-accepted and
preached examples of William II of Germany.
CLIVE HOLLAND.
[Illustration: THE ZEPPELIN BAG]
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"COME IN, MICHAEL, I HAVE HAD A LONG SLEEP"
Yes--a long and rejuvenating sleep! The expression upon John's face
indicates an amazing determination and alertness. It is told of certain
remarkable men--De Lesseps amongst the number--that they had the faculty
of sleeping for several days and nights and then remaining wide awake
and at full tension for an equally long period of time. We may
confidently predict that John has this faculty. He is not likely to
slumber again till his work is done, and done thoroughly. Michael's
expression, I regret to note, is not quite so pleasing as John's. It
gives "furiously to think," as our gallant and beautiful France puts it,
that when Michael climbs through the window of the Happy Fatherland, he
may, perchance, inspire terror in the heart of the Hun, who doubtless
expects that his enemies, if they do invade the sacred soil, will
display those Christian qualities of Mercy and Forbearance which have
been so conspicuous, by their absence, in the treatment of unfortunate
prisoners upon whom they inflicted the extreme rigour of "Kultur."
Our cartoonist, it will be noticed, has placed sledge hammers in the
hands of both John and Michael, rather primitive weapons, but most
admirably adapted for "crushing." And nothing short of crushing will
satisfy the Allies, despite the futile wiles and whines of Messrs.
Trevelyan, Ponsonby, Morel, and Macdonald. Crushed they will and must be
to fine powder. The hammer strokes are falling now with a persistence
and force which, at long last, reverberates in the cafés and beer
gardens of Munich and Berlin. The Teuton tongue--a hideous concatenation
of noise at its best--must be almost inarticulate to-day in its guttural
chokings and splutterings. "Frightfulness" is coming home to roost.
With all our hearts we hold out the glad hand to Michael.
Come in, and stay in--bless you!
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.
[Illustration: "COME IN, MICHAEL, I THINK I'M AWAKE NOW."]
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FIVE ON A BENCH
All visions and poems of justice have been full of the refrain of
_deposuit potentes de sede_; but the bracing reality of such a
revolution is lost by certain effects of antiquity, by the mists which
make the past somewhat monochrome, and by the exalted equality of death.
To say that Belisarius became a beggar means little to us when it seems
only the difference between a rich and a tattered toga. We do not
picture Belisarius in a patched pair of trousers: but then we have no
reason to be angry with Belisarius. But whenever real tyranny and honest
wrath are reborn among men, there will always be an instant necessity to
represent the great reversal in the graphic colours of contemporary
fact. Raemaekers' cartoon, representing the tyrants of Europe reduced to
that very hopeless modern beggary to which they have driven many
thousands of very much better men, is perhaps of all his pictures the
most grim, or what would be called vindictive. I think that such revenge
is in truth merely realization. The victims of the war have to sit on
such real benches in such real rags. And being one of the fiercest, it
is also one of the most delicate of the Dutch artist's studies. Nothing
could be truer than the insolent and swollen decay of the Jew Ferdinant;
or the more effeminate collapse of the Kaiser, the very spike on whose
helmet droops with sentiment.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
[Illustration: FIVE ON A BENCH
In a year and a half.]
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WHAT ABOUT PEACE, LADS?
War--so certain of their own prophets have said--is a "national industry
of Germany." Here we see a German _chevalier d' industrie_ attempting to
escape with his swag. Never in modern times has a nation gone to war
with a more cynical and shameless determination to make the campaign pay
for itself by the plunder of private property. Quite recently an order
was found on the body of a German, enjoining all officers to assist in
the "patriotic duty" of "draining financially the occupied territories."
We are dealing, not with an honourable and civilized nation, but with a
band of murdering brigands. The keepers of the national conscience have
devised a monstrous and barbarous code of ethics, in which "patriotism"
is the sole duty, and the tribal god the only arbiter of right and
wrong. As in Roman law, the property of an enemy is for a German _res
nullius_--it has no owner. And now the prospect of any further loot on a
large scale seems remote. The speculation has turned out badly, and the
robber would be glad to cut his losses. The guardians of the law are at
his heels, and do not mean to let him escape. But will they be able to
make him disgorge? That will not be easy; and what atonement can be made
for the innocent blood which drops from those pitiful spoils?
W. R. INGE.
[Illustration: WHAT ABOUT PEACE, LADS?]
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THE LIBERATORS
This is one of those cartoons in which the neutral in Raemaekers speaks
with peculiar force. Such a picture by a Britisher would reasonably be
discounted as unduly prejudiced, for it is none too easy for us in our
present stresses to see the other fellow's point of view--in this
difficult business of the blockade for an instance.
That friendly championing of the rights of neutrals suffering under the
outrageous tyranny of the British Navy is a thing to which only the
detached humour of a neutral can do justice. He can testify to the way
in which the giant strength of that navy, whether in peace or war, has
been used in the main not in the giants' tyrannous way; he can make
allowance for the exigencies which have caused occasional arbitrariness
under the stress of war or even in some untactful moment of peace; he
can contrast the two main opposing navy's notions of justice, courtesy,
seamanship--which is sportsmanship.
He can recall that no single right whether of combatant or neutral, of
state or individual, guaranteed by international law, which the Germans
have found it convenient or "necessary" to violate has been left
unviolated; that there is no single method or practice of war condemned
by the common consent of civilization but has been employed by men who
even have the candour to declare that they stand above laws and
guarantees.
And therefore he can make grim, effective fun of the sinister bandit
with his foot planted on the shackled prisoner that lies between two
murdered victims fatuously taking in vain the name of freedom.
JOSEPH THORP.
[Illustration: "Freedom of the land is ours--why should we not have
freedom of the sea?"]
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TOM THUMB AND THE GIANT
The reference in this cartoon is to an incident which, at the time of
its occurrence, is said to have caused considerable indignation in
Germany. A Zeppelin, having been on a raiding expedition to England, was
hit on the return journey, and dropped into the North Sea. The crew,
clinging to the damaged airship, besought the captain of a British
trawler to take them off, but the captain, seeing that the Zeppelin crew
far outnumbered his own, declined to trust them, and left them to their
fate. Whether the trawler's captain actually "put his thumb unto his
nose and spread his fingers out" is a matter for conjecture, but under
the circumstances it is scarcely likely.
The whole point lies in the German view of the trawler's captain and his
inhuman conduct. He knew, perfectly well, that if he rescued the crew of
the Zeppelin, the probable reward for himself and crew would be a voyage
to the nearest German port and interment in a prison camp for the
remainder of the war--and plenty of reliable evidence is forthcoming as
to the treatment meted out to men in German prison camps. He knew, also,
that these men who besought his aid were returning from one of the
expeditions which have killed more women and children in England than
able-bodied men, that they had been sharing in work which could not be
described as even of indirect military value, but was more of the nature
of sheer murder. And Germany condemned his conduct by every adjective
that implied brutality and barbarity.
The unfortunate thing about the German viewpoint is that it takes into
consideration only such points as favour Germany, a fact of which this
incident affords striking evidence.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
[Illustration: TOM THUMB AND THE GIANT
"Come and save me. You know I am so fond of children."]
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"WE HAVE FINISHED OFF THE RUSSIANS"
Assuming that the statement with regard to finishing off the Russians
was actually written--and there is every reason to assume it--one may
conjecture what memories it recalled. The great battles of the Warsaw
salient, the drive that lasted for many months through the flats of
Poland, the struggles of the Vilna salient, and all the time the
knowledge that mechanism, the guns in which Germany put her trust, were
shattering Russian legions day after day. Then the gradual settling of
the eastern line, well into Russia, with all the industrial districts of
Poland firmly gripped in German hands, and the certainty that though
Russia had not been utterly broken and forced to a peace, yet so much
had been accomplished that there was no longer any eastern menace, but
both Germany and Austria might go about their business of conquest in
the west, having "finished off" in the east.
But that strong figure with the pistol pointed at the writer, that
implacable, threatening giant, is a true type of Russia the
unconquerable. It is a sign that the guns in which Germany put her trust
have failed her, that the line which was to hold firm during the
business of conquest in the west has broken--more, it is a sign of the
doom of the aggressor. The writing of that fat, complacent figure--sorry
imitator of the world's great conquerors--is arrested, and in place of
stolid self-conceit there shows fear.
Well-grounded fear. History can show no crimes to equal the rape of
Belgium and the desolation of Poland at the hands of Germany. The giant
with the pistol stands not only as a returned warrior, but also as an
avenger of unspeakable crimes.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
[Illustration: WE HAVE FINISHED OFF THE RUSSIANS
"Wait a moment."]
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MUDDLE THROUGH
Although this striking cartoon of Raemaekers may, since the consummation
of Lord Derby's Scheme and the raising of the new armies, be said to
have lost its sting it cannot be said no longer to have a lesson.
At the time of its first publication the sight of England assailed by
the central Empires bent on her destruction for having thrown the weight
of her trident and her sword into the scales on the side of Justice and
Right against Lawlessness and Might, failed to evoke in many of her sons
the spirit of patriotism which has since manifested itself in many
glorious and immortal deeds.
It was difficult for us to realize that we were at war. And at war not
merely to protect the weak and uphold ideals of national righteousness,
but for national existence itself. The doctrine of "muddle through" was
not confined to the War Office and other Government Departments, but
seemed to permeate the whole nation to a lamentable extent. In the
cartoon we have three typical men with that fatal "business (or
pleasure) as usual" expression on their faces. That Germany should seek
to wrest the trident and sovereignty of the seas from the hand of
Britain, or should have devastated Belgium and the North Eastern
Department of France was obviously no personal concern of theirs. Let
the other chaps fight if they would.
Happily for England and for her gallant Allies the point of the cartoon
has been blunted, if not entirely destroyed, by subsequent events. But
the lesson? It is not far to seek. Is it not that had "business as
usual" not been so gladly adopted as the national creed in the early
days of war, we might have been happy in the blessings of Peace by now,
or at least have had Peace much nearer.
We do not envy the men who might have gone but who stayed at home in
those early days, when their earlier presence on the field of battle
might have been the means not only of saving many thousands of valuable
lives, but of shortening the terrible carnage. It would have been a
thousand times better had the mind which conceived the phrase "business
as usual" been acute enough to foresee the possible and disastrous
misapplications of the phrase. Rather would it have been better had the
idea crystallized in "Do it now."
CLIVE HOLLAND.
[Illustration: MUDDLE THROUGH]
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MY ENEMY IS MY BEST FRIEND
These words of Emerson's express exactly the thought of this cartoon.
The Netherlands is a country that has been slowly won from the ocean;
the cruel sea has always been its enemy, at first completely triumphant,
then gradually resisted and driven forth by the enterprise and toil of
men; but it is always an enemy to be dreaded. Its inroads have to be
guarded against by great dykes and by the never-ceasing care and
industry of the nation. Now and again the floods come, and people barely
escape in boats from the waters. Yet time and again the enemy has been
the best friend of the Netherlands. This enemy has saved them from the
domination of Spain, and now, as the refugees on the floods of last
winter are escaping from the jaws of death they feel that the water
which is now an enemy (_vijand_), may to-morrow be a friend (_vriend_);
for an invasion by the Germans, that ever-dreaded danger to all
patriotic Dutchmen, can be guarded against only by the friendly help of
the ocean which can be invoked in case of need to save its own people.
It was only in the last resort that William the Silent consented to let
in the sea. He resisted the Spaniards as long as he could, and only when
all possible chance of further resistance was at an end did he have
recourse to the sea as the last friend. He saved the country by allowing
the German Ocean to destroy it. In this cartoon the people in the boats
regard the sea as their enemy; but an invasion by German armies could
not be resisted except with the help of the friendly sea, whose voice is
the voice of Freedom.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY.
[Illustration: The Floods in Holland--now a fiend, to-morrow a friend.]
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HOW I DEAL WITH THE SMALL FRY
Perhaps only those who have the opportunity of reading the papers
published in neutral countries, and have made a study of the mendacious
"news for neutrals" issued by the notorious Woolf Agency and German
Wireless Bureau, are able to grasp the powerful inner motive which
actuates Raemaekers in the persistence with which he seeks to drive home
the tragic stories of Belgium and Luxemburg. At this time of day it
might seem superfluous to issue a cartoon of this kind. But is it? With
neutral opinion apparently by no means convinced as yet of the sinister
designs of Prussianism upon the liberties of Europe and especially of
smaller nations a drawing of such poignancy and force cannot fail to
arrest the attention and bring home the lesson of that creed which has
for its gospel such phrases as "Necessity knows no law" and "Force shall
rule." It is inconceivable to the thinking mind that there can be a man
or woman who, with the story of the violation of Belgium and Luxemburg
before them, can possibly hesitate to brand the German nation with the
mark of Cain, and tremble at the mere possibility that might should
triumph over right.
Our wonderment is all the greater when we remember how the Kaiser and
his murderous hordes have made no secret of their methods. They may in
the end seek to deny them, to repudiate the deeds of blood and of unholy
sacrilege and violence which in the early days of war were avowed
concomitants of their policy, but such disavowal is not yet.
Beneath the Kaiser's heel in bloody reality lie at the present time
Belgium and unprotected Luxemburg every whit as much as is shown by the
powerful pencil of the artist.
The reign of lust, cruelty, and destruction is not yet done, though the
signs and portents of the end are not now a-wanting. The blood of men,
women, and little children shall not cease to cry aloud for vengeance
until the Prussian eagle is humbled in the dust, and its power for evil
is utterly destroyed. This is a good cartoon to bear in mind and look
upon should "War weariness" ever overtake one. It will be a good one to
have upon one's wall when peace talk is head in the land.
Thomas Moore may be said to have composed an epitaph for Prussianism
three-quarters of a century ago when he wrote the lines:
"Accursed is the march of that glory
Which treads o'er the hearts of the free."
A great statesman has declared "the Allies will not sheathe the sword
until Justice is vindicated." Let us add "and until reparation is
exacted to the uttermost farthing from these responsible for this bloody
conflict and its diabolical crimes, whether the perpetrators be high or
low."
CLIVE HOLLAND.
[Illustration: How I deal with the small fry.]
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THE TWO EAGLES
A double-edged satire on both political birds. Neither is a true eagle.
They have talons but nothing of the noble air proper to the king of
birds. The German bird is not an eagle but a vulture; and he is in a
sorry plight, with torn and ruffled feathers, dishevelled, dripping
blood. He is disappointed, angry, soured, and unhappy. Yet he is
straightforward about it. He makes no attempt to disguise his feelings,
but glares at the other with the indignation of one who has been
deceived written on his face and vibrating in his voice.
And his reproach gets home. The American bird, who is bigger and stands
on a bigger rock, is sleek enough except about the head which is a bit
ruffled. But he is more of a raven than an eagle in his sable plumes of
professional cut, and he is obviously not at ease. He does not look the
other in the face. He stares straight in front of him at nothing with a
forced, hard and fixed smile, obviously assumed because he has no reply
to make.
During the war many indiscreet phrases have dropped from the lips of
prominent persons who must bitterly regret them and wish them buried
deep in oblivion. But they stand on record, and history will not let
them die. "Too proud to fight" is the most unfortunate of all, and when
others are forgotten it will remain, because it has a general
application. Mr. Raemaekers exposes its foolishness here with a single
masterly touch and he puts the exposure in the right mouth. The cartoon
is an illuminating epitome of the interminable exchange of notes between
the two Powers on submarine warfare.
A. SHADWELL.
[Illustration: "I thought you said you were too proud to fight."]
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LONDON--INSIDE THE SAVOY
At first glance this cartoon would seem to imply that the people inside
the Savoy had little interest in the war, for the figures in evening
dress are well in the foreground; a count of heads, however, will show
six, and possibly seven men in uniform and only four in civilian attire,
and of the soldiers not one is dancing--they are lookers-on at these
strange beings who pursue the ordinary ways of life.
Of such beings, not many are left--certainly not this proportion of four
to six, or four to seven. Compulsion has thinned the ranks of the
shirkers down to an irreducible minimum, and a visit to the Savoy at any
time in the last six months of 1916 would show khaki entirely
preponderant, just as it is in the streets. These correctly dressed and
monocled young men have been put into the national machine, and moulded
into fighting material--their graves are thick in Flanders and along the
heights north of the Somme, and they have proved themselves equal and
superior to what had long been regarded as the finest fighting forces of
Europe.
It is in reality no far cry from the Somme fighting area to the light
and the music of the Savoy, and a man may dance one night and die under
a German bullet the next--many have already done so. Here the artist
shows the lighter side of British life to-day, but one has only to turn
to the companion cartoon to this, "Outside the Savoy," to see that he
realizes London as thoroughly in earnest about the war.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
[Illustration: LONDON--INSIDE THE SAVOY]
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LONDON--OUTSIDE THE SAVOY
The newsboy, under military age; one man, well over military age; three
women--and all the rest in uniform--even the top of the bus that shows
in the distance is filled with soldiers. Thus Raemaekers sees the
Strand, one of the principal thoroughfares of the heart of the British
Empire.
For the sake of contrast with the companion cartoon, "Inside the Savoy,"
there is a slight exaggeration in this view of London street life in
war-time--the proportion of civilians to soldiers is necessarily greater
than this, or the national life could not go on. A host of industries
are necessary to the prosecution of the war, and it falls to some men to
stay behind--many of them unwillingly.
There was a time, in the early days, when Britain suffered from an
under-estimate of the magnitude of this task of war--a time which the
cartoon "Inside the Savoy" typifies in its presentment of careless
enjoyment. But that attitude was soon dispelled, and it is significant
of the spirit of the nation that only when nine-tenths of the necessary
army had been raised by voluntary--indeed, this is a certainty, for not
until long after the cartoon was published did any conscripts appear in
the streets. Though, in the proportion of soldiers to civilians, the
cartoon may exaggerate, in its presentment of the spirit of the nation,
and of the determination of the nation with regard to the war, it is
true to life.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
[Illustration: LONDON--OUTSIDE THE SAVOY]
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THE INVOCATION
This drawing touches the highest level of the draughtsman's art and
demonstrates the unique power of the pencil in a master hand. So simple,
so true, so complete, so direct and so eloquent is the message that
words can add nothing to it. They can only pay a tribute of
appreciation.
Everybody can read the meaning at a glance; none can read it wholly
unmoved. For here is pure humanity, which none can escape, the primal
instinct without which man that is born of woman would not be. Before
this weak, bowed, and homely figure Knowledge is silent, Pride and
Passion are rebuked. Strength is shamed. Motherhood and mother-love
transcend them all.
There is here nothing of anger, no thought of hostility or revenge, no
trace of evil passion. Only a mother yearning after her son and pleading
to another mother, the Divine type of motherhood, the Mother of God. And
what she asks is so little, only to see him again. She has given him, as
the mother to whom she prays gave her Son, and she does not demand him
back. She reproaches no one, accuses no one, makes no complaint and no
claim for herself, but meekly pleads that she may be allowed to see him
again to still the longing in her breast. She is a woman of the people,
a simple peasant, but she personifies all mothers in every war, as she
bows her silvered head in humble prayer at the way-side shrine.
A. SHADWELL.
[Illustration: MON FILS--BELGIUM, 1914
"Let me see him again, Holy Virgin!"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
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