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KULTUR IN CARTOONS
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BY
LOUIS RAEMAEKERS
WITH ACCOMPANYING NOTES BY
WELL-KNOWN ENGLISH WRITERS
A Companion Volume to “Raemaekers’ Cartoons”
Published 1916, and now issued by
The Century Co.
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1917
Copyright, 1917, by
THE CENTURY CO.
——
Published October 1917
Purchasers of “Kultur in Cartoons” may be interested to know that this present work is a companion volume to “Raemaekers’ Cartoons,” issued in 1916. “Raemaekers’ Cartoons” includes many of the artist’s earlier work, dealing particularly with the Belgian inferno. The two volumes are alike in size and form, and together constitute a thoroughly representative collection of Raemaekers’ drawings.
The Century Co.
BY
J. Murray Allison
A year has passed since the first volume of Raemaekers’ work (“Raemaekers’ Cartoons,” Century Co.), was published in the United States.
At that time Raemaekers was practically unknown in this country, just as he was unknown in England and France until January, 1916, when his work was first exhibited in the British Capital.
The story of Raemaekers’ reception in London and Paris has been written in the introduction to “Raemaekers’ Cartoons.”
When his cartoons began to reach America toward the end of 1916 this country was neutral. It is with peculiar satisfaction, therefore, that I base this brief foreword upon press extracts published prior to America’s participation in the war.
If it were possible to discover to-day an individual who was entirely ignorant as to the causes and conduct of the war, he would, after an inspection of a hundred or more of these cartoons, probably utter his conviction somewhat as follows: “I do not believe that these drawings have the slightest relation to the truth; I do not believe that it is possible for such things to happen in the twentieth century.” He would be quite justified, in his ignorance of what has happened in Europe, in expressing such an opinion, just as any of us, with the possible exception of the disciples of Bernhardi himself, would have been justified in expressing a similar view in July, 1914.
What is the view of all informed people to-day? “To Raemaekers the war is not a topic, or a subject for charity. It is a vivid heartrending reality,” says the New York “Evening Post,” “and you come away from the rooms where his cartoons now hang so aware of what war is that mental neutrality is for you a horror. If you have slackened in your determination to find out, these cartoons are a slap in the face. Raemaekers drives home a universal point that concerns not merely Germans, but every country where royal decrees have supreme power. Shall one man ever be given the power to seek his ends, using the people as his pawns? We cannot look at the cartoons and remain in ignorance of exactly what is the basis of truth on which they are built.”
The “Philadelphia American” likens Raemaekers to a sensitized plate upon which the spirit which brought on the war has imprinted itself forever, and adds: “What he gives out on that subject is as pitilessly true as a photograph. They look down upon us in their naked truth, those pictures which are to be, before the judgment-seat of history, the last indictment of the German nation. Of all impressions, there is one which will hold you in its inexorable grip: it is that Louis Raemaekers has told you the truth.”
This aspect of his appeal is insisted upon by “Vanity Fair,” thus: “That each cartoon is a grim, merciless portrayal of the truth will be apparent to even the meanest intelligence.” The same journal refers to the almost uncanny power of prophecy suggested by many of the pictures. “That they are conceived in a mighty brain and drawn by a skilled hand will be recognized by a sophisticated minority. But only those capable of deeper probing will see that each one is in itself an elemental drama of compelling significance and power, heightened in many cases by prophecy and suggestion.”
The “Philadelphia Public Ledger” refers particularly to Raemaekers’ prophetic instinct. “Here, indeed, is revealed the work not only of one who has the artistic imagination to pictorialize the savagery of the Kaiser and his obedient servants, and to caricature in a manner that leaves nothing unsaid in the way of sinister presentation of evil things, but the work of one who is distinctly a seer. Moreover, the cartoons have been verified by subsequent events, though they seemed to some at the time to be the bitter and ironical casual comment on things most believed could never happen to modern civilization, and have that insight that only a special inspiration and inner illumination could give.”
It is this obvious sincerity, this conviction on the part of the beholder that Raemaekers is telling the simple truth and telling it simply that gives his work its greatest value as a revelation of the German purpose, and as an indictment of German methods of warfare and the German practice of statecraft.
The “Louisville Herald” finds it “impossible to do justice to these remarkable drawings, this terrific gallery, impossible to estimate at this distance the power and pressure of the indictment,” while the “Baltimore Sun” goes so far as to claim that “no orator in any tongue has so stirred the human soul to unspeakable pity and implacable wrath as this Dutch artist in the universal language which his pencil knows how to speak. Those who have forgotten the Lusitania and the innumerable tragedies in Belgium should avoid Raemaekers. They who look at his work can never forget, can never wholly forgive.”
The “Washington Star” thinks that his cartoons should not be taken merely as dealing with events of the conflict, “but with principles.” The writer proceeds: “To Germany and to Austria is upheld a mirror in which are reflected those crimes for which neither will be able to make full redress. There is no touch of vulgarity or hatred in his work, save that which comes from righteous indignation against foul crimes and the vulgarity of the thing itself.”
In appraising the value of Raemaekers’ cartoons purely as political documents, as historic records of crimes and barbarities which the civilized world must not be permitted to forget lest the horrors of the past three years descend upon us again, their purely artistic appeal is frequently ignored or forgotten, but not always. “Raemaekers is an artist,” says the “Boston Globe.” “He tells his story simply, eliminates all unnecessary detail, knows the dramatic value of light and shade, and draws a single figure cartoon with as much impressive suggestiveness as he does a crowd.” The “Providence Journal” acclaims him as a great artist to whose hand has been given the touch of immortality. “Like many geniuses,” continues the “Journal,” “this Dutch artist awaited the occasion in human affairs to awaken the power which he may not even have been aware of possessing. It took a titanic force to stir his conscience and that conscience, once stirred, leaped into aspiring activity to the service of mankind.” Particular stress is laid by the “Boston Transcript” on the artistic merit of the drawings. Comparing him to Honoré Daumier, the great French cartoonist of the Franco-Prussian War, the “Post” is of opinion that Raemaekers is the one artistic personality whose genius has been developed by the stimulus of the war. “If the measure of the influence wielded by a cartoonist is the extent and intensity of emotion aroused by his work, then possibly there has never been a cartoonist in the history of the world who can have compared with Raemaekers. The inspiration of his pictorial polemics is a hearty and profound and righteous indignation, a motive which is of first-rate artistic worth, and which is shared by all the civilized world. What strikes the mind in looking upon these cartoons is the Dantesque quality of the artist’s passion and imagination.” The “Transcript” concludes a remarkable appreciation of the cartoons with the following words: “He guides the spirit and the conscience of the world to-day through an inferno of wrong.”
Kultur in Cartoons
THIS cartoon is not in the least allegorical, and it is far less terrible than the reality. For the simple reason is that children torn to pieces by high explosives are far more horrible to look at than children with their throats cut.
Had these blood cartoons of Raemaekers been published in the spring of 1914, the artist would have been considered a maniac.
But in the spring of 1916 we know him to be a man portraying the truth, giving us the doings of the German Emperor and his satellites in colored pictures, and a very mild interpretation of them at that. For it is a fact that no man could bear to look at or consider the real truth of what William of Germany has done through the hands of others, of the horrors that he has committed against women who cannot here accuse him, against children of whose very names he knows nothing.
But their accusations are heard and their names remembered by those whose eternal business it is to hear and record, and the silence of those civilized nations who have said nothing before the doings of the infamous One has spoken where silence is heard as well as speech.
Just as St. Paul stood by in silence at the martyrdom of St. Stephen, so have they stood at the martyrdom of these Innocents, and just as he uttered that lamentable cry in the Temple of Jerusalem, so will they cry in his very words, but without his justification of holiness:
“I stood by and consented.”
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.
READ here a few sentences from the sworn and sifted testimony of witnesses who saw what happened at Aerschot in August, 1914.
“When the war broke out a German whom I knew well by sight had been living at Aerschot some three years. He had no apparent occupation, but lived on his means in a small house. Occasionally he was away for some time. On the outbreak of war he was expelled from Belgium. He came back with the German troops and pointed out to them all houses and other property belonging to the burgomaster, and the Germans destroyed it all. Many civilians in Aerschot were killed by the Germans. I myself saw some forty dead bodies, including three women. They had been shot.... In one house the wife of a man whom I know well was burned alive. Her husband broke both legs while attempting to rescue her.... The Germans with their rifles prevented anyone going to help this man, and he had to drag himself along the street, with his legs broken, as best he could....”
“I saw some German infantry soldiers kill with bayonets two women who were standing on their doorsteps....”
“There we saw a whole street burning.... We heard children and beasts crying in the flames.”
“The Germans deliberately fired beyond us at four women, a child of 11 or 12 years of age, an infant of six months (about) and four other children who were clinging to their mothers’ skirts. The infant was in its mother’s arms, and was riddled with shot, which passed through it into the mother’s body. While she was trying to crawl into safety on her knees the Germans still fired at her until she died.”
“I saw the body of a little boy about 6½ or 7 years of age, with four bayonet wounds in it. It was stiff and propped against a wall.”
“The first thing we saw was the body of a young girl of about 18 to 20, absolutely naked, with her abdomen cut open. Her body was also covered with bruises.... About a kilometer farther on I saw the body of a little boy, aged 8 or 9, with his head completely cut off. The head was some distance from the trunk.”
These simple phrases, and hundreds more like them, plain to read in the book of evidence, make a better commentary than any I could write on this drawing. There are, indeed, many passages more terrible, such as the tale of the unspeakable treatment of the priest, dragged into Aerschot from the neighboring village of Gelrode. And I turn from reading such things to an English newspaper, wherein is the report of the speech of a person at a great gathering of people interested in coöperative trading—a person who hopes, after the war, to “take by the hand” the creatures guilty of these infamies. It has been my experience to know many sad blackguards in the worst parts of London, but I cannot remember one who could fall as low as that. To find such we must search the smuggeries and the priggeries and the Fellowships of Reconciliation.
ARTHUR MORRISON.
THE calculated brutality of German and Austrian “frightfulness,” its cowardice and cold-blooded evil, are already familiar to all impartial students of Teutonic warfare. But a Nation that has consented to its own slavery cannot value freedom, or be supposed to respect the life or liberty of the innocent and weak. With her neck under Prussia’s heel, tamed Germany strives in word and deed to reflect the spirit of her masters, and so far succeeds that she can contemplate the atrocities of this war with satisfaction, and from pulpit, school, and press applaud each new manifestation in turn. Blind obedience to command has brought the Germans to a state where even their thinking is done for them; they grovel before the brute power that drives them and kiss and sanctify the bloody hands that hold the whip.
Luther said the justification of liberty was that man could only truly serve God and his fellow-man if freedom of choice of means were permitted to him. The German of to-day relinquishes that freedom and is content to be herded under a political system that denies him his independent manhood. He sacrifices responsibility and liberty alike to a race which he still suffers to inherit the privilege of directing his State; he prostitutes his own reasoning faculties and ignores the evolution of morals by applauding Prussia’s reactionary ideals at the expense of every modern movement for the progress of humanity. He knows the right and does the wrong—a willing slave to an archaic autocracy. Thus servile obedience to physical power is the noblest principle that United Germany has yet attained, and the consequences permeate the people in a spiritual indifference to elementary honor displayed alike on her battlefields and in her council chambers.
The lie is accepted as her first diplomatic weapon; “frightfulness” is developed as an invaluable ally of conquest; cruelty and treachery are praised by the scholar and pastor, practised as a matter of course by the soldier and politician. None sees what dishonor is thus heaped upon his country and how her history has been defiled by this generation on the precepts of the last.
Ignoring, as she always does, every contact with other cultures, Germany, out of a congenital megalomania, has evolved her own; and in her eyes it is no doubt as beautiful and precious as the ugly treasure of the child in the perambulator, who discards the most delightful modern toys for its own battered and hideous doll.
In this regard she is indeed still a child; but a study of comparative cultures, following upon the destruction of her present rulers and their doctrine of force, should create a larger-minded nation wherein the civilized concepts of older States shall find recognition.
“Until that final consummation,” as Francis Stopford has well said, “Europe dare not rest secure, and the horrors of Belgium and Serbia will be repeated for the next generation if Germany be left the freedom to reëstablish her might and to reorganize the life of her peoples with the sole object of crushing her neighbors at the first favorable opportunity.”
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
THOUGH a year and more has passed since the great tragedy of the Lusitania, and many evil things have been done since that day by the enemy who strikes at rooted principles of civilization, yet by reason of its magnitude and its utter disregard of the elementary principles of humanity the memory of this deed is still alive in the minds of men. This “nightmare” that Raemaekers pictures was no dream fancy, but a reality; men and women walked along the rows of corpses laid out in the sheds, searching for that which they dreaded to find....
“There is no right but might,” said Germany in that act, “and there is no law in the exercise of might.” Men, women, and children alike of this perverted nation were bidden to rejoice over the sinking of the vessel—the fact cannot be too often stated or too fully kept in mind, more especially now that the fabric whence that doctrine of unguided force has emanated is crumbling under the blows of the Allied armies. For in the day of peace will be found many who will merit Achan’s fate through following Achan’s way, careless of the rows of little corpses that lay out for indentification after the sinking of the Lusitania—careless of all but the material aspect of the settlement that must be made when the military power of this present Germany is crushed.
If it be not crushed beyond the possibility of rising again—if there be any way left by which those who own no law but necessity and expedience may repeat the experiment of these years of war, then these lives that ended off the Old Head of Kinsale ended in vain, and their memory is dishonored. With that which caused this nightmare there must be no compromise.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
THE ethics of war are difficult to reduce to consistent principles. At first sight it does not seem more cruel to asphyxiate your enemy than to blow him to pieces with a land-mine or to turn a machine-gun upon him. Nevertheless, two facts are certain. One is that this very invention was offered to our War Office years ago, and was rejected as unworthy of a civilized nation. The other is that it is forbidden by The Hague Convention in a clause accepted by Germany herself.
The adoption, without warning, of poisonous gas is perhaps the most shameless of all the treacherous violations of international law which Germany has committed. It is now known that Germany had determined, before hostilities began, to violate all the laws of war. In the Official German War Book these conventions are referred to only with contempt. To disregard them is what the Germans call “absolute war”; and they claim that absolute war is the only logical kind of war.
In adopting this theory Germany has fallen far behind barbarism; for, cruel as the barbarian often is, there are always some things which he will not do to his enemy, some conventions which he will observe, either from the chivalry which belongs to the character of the genuine fighting man or from fear of Divine anger, or from a vague sense of what is due to human beings even when they are enemies. The notion that all moral principles are in abeyance during war is the most revolting doctrine that can be proclaimed. It is disgusting to find that it is openly defended by many of the religious guides of the German people, who profess to speak in the name of Christianity.
Such moral obliquity, one thinks, can only exist in a nation which does not play games. But perhaps the reason why games are discouraged in Germany is that they encourage a “foolish” sense of honor and chivalry in the serious business of life.
W. R. INGE,
Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
“THOU art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold or hot.... Because thou sayest, I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing.... I counsel thee ... anoint thine eyes with eye-salve, that thou mayest see.”
Raemaekers has patience with most things, but with neutrality he would scorn to be patient. He refuses to parley with it, even when it waves the colors of his own country in its hand—if it ever does anything so sturdy as to wave colors. These old women are dreadful, they are almost as terrifying as his Prussian monsters. The persuasive old fanatic in the foreground arguing the divinity of lukewarmness is dreadful in herself, and more dreadful still because we all know that she exists, in belligerent as in neutral countries. And worse, far worse, is the granite female with her stone brooch in her marble collar behind her. The others are surprised, doubtful, not yet entirely won over to the specious argument; but the woman behind is a very Gibraltar of neutrality.
Seldom, very seldom, does Raemaekers draw dreadful women. His Germania is a symbol, not a woman. I can only remember one other cartoon, a merciless drawing of the Kaiser and the Kaiserin, in which a woman stands for evil. He likes to picture pity and mercy and nobility in the form of women, and when he wishes to paint sorrow and endurance he gives us such cartoons as those of the mothers and widows of Belgium. And this makes it the more likely that in these gossiping, selfish, silly, wicked creatures he is drawing a type of mind rather than a type of female. In every country there are “old women”; but they are not always females.
H. PEARL ADAM.
THIS is one of Raemaekers’ crowds. He is fond of depicting crowds, and he is right. He has the art of making them singularly effective. He catches wonderfully both the general impression and the value of a face or figure here and there not violently obtruded but individually appealing.
And these crowds are so effective because they are so true. This is a war of crowds. The nations have fought in crowds, they have suffered in crowds. “Multitudes—multitudes in the valley of decision” might be said to be its text.
And Antwerp was ever a place of crowds; though not, of course, like this. Who does not know Antwerp as she was before the war? A great, buzzing, thriving hive on the water’s edge, filled with a jolly, comfortable, busy bourgeoisie; mediæval and modern at once, with her churches and her quays, her florid “Rubenses” her Van Dycks, her Teniers, her Maison Plantin, and all the rest of her past; her world commerce, her fortifications of to-day, deemed impregnable!
She had been besieged and fallen before. To-day she fell with scarcely a siege.
Who was responsible for this fiasco—for the defense which was no defense, the relief which was no relief? Why was the Naval Brigade sent there? Perhaps we shall know some day, when Raemaekers’ country is free to set them also free again.
What we can know is graphically and terribly told by Mr. John Buchan and the witnesses he cites.
The highways were black with the panting crowds: ladies of fashion, white-haired men and women, wounded soldiers, priests old and young, nuns, mothers, daughters, children. So it was described by one who saw it.
More than a quarter of a million of inhabitants left Antwerp in one day. The world has never before seen such an emptying of a great city. “Some day,” Mr. Buchan ends, “when its imagination has grown quicker, it will find the essence of war not in gallant charges and heroic stands, but in the pale women dragging their pitiful belongings through the Belgian fields in the raw October night.”
If anything could further quicken the world’s imagination it would be this picture. Rubens devised the famous “pomps” for the entry of Ferdinand of Austria. The German entry had no Rubens. But this miserable pomp, this “pitiful exodus,” has found its realistic Rubens in Raemaekers.
HERBERT WARREN.
WHEN the white horse rode out to war with the clever, handsome mountebank in the shining armor astride it (ignore for the moment the duller fact of an anxious, field-gray man in a Benz limousine) the demigod made, let us admit it, a brave show.
’Tis credibly reported that in his company rode his august familiar, “our old God” in a new mood and a brand new uniform, “wearing,” in fact, in the words of a dithyrambic Teuton, “the Death’s Head cap of the German Hussars and carrying a white banner.”
What that Other may be assumed to have made of Dixmude, Termonde, and the ineffable rest of it is for the curious to conjecture: as also at what exact stage of the swift journeyings back and forth of the tired white horse there came into a mind fed on rich, fat phrases and meaty metaphors, and the flattery of astute, strong men and the dazzling reflections of the imperial cheval glass, the first doubt as to whether the high approval of that Other were indeed an objective reality, or merely a figment of the imagination of an overwrought overman. In any case, there must soon have dawned an aching wonder as to how the devil the banner could be white.
And when was it that in place of that Other Rider in the hussar’s cap there seemed to be something queer and sinister astride behind him on his battle-weary steed? Was it then that he began to whistle so vigorously (vide German Press passim) to keep up his spirits? And will there come a time (has it already come?) when that caressing touch on the shoulder will seem indeed the caress of a friend, and that gaunt index point to the only peace he will ever know?
JOSEPH THORP.
THE mere human criminal will cover his crime with disguises; but it may truly be said that the Prussian has buried even his crime in the evidences of it. He has made massacre itself monotonous; and made us weary of condemning what he was never weary of carrying out.
It is said that General Von der Goltz, on receiving complaints of the scarcely human parade of cruelty which accompanied the first entrance into Belgium, declared that such first bad impressions of the Prussian would wear off after his victory in the real campaign; and that, as he expressed it, “Glory will efface all.” That sort of glory, however, was itself effaced from the German prospects as early as the battle of the Marne; and we shall never know whether humanity is capable of so vile a forgiveness; or whether glory will efface all.
But there is a real sense in which we may say that infamy has effaced all. In the first stage of the war Prussia conducted assassination upon the same scale as grand strategy; and it is as difficult to recall every woman or child whose death was in itself a breach of all international understandings as it is to recall every poor fellow in uniform who has fallen in the open fighting which everyone understands.
The pen becomes impotent when it attempts to give life to statistics; and I do not know that anything can come closer to it than the pencil, when it draws what the artist has drawn here—merely one quiet soldier, in the corner of one quiet town; and beyond only the corner of a heap of figures, which are yet more quiet.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
ONE of the most marked features of Raemaekers’ art is his intense feeling of patriotism. He is proud of his country and of her past history, and he is resolute to be true to the fame of the Netherlands in the past and to preserve the freedom which is the heritage of her people. Another characteristic is his abhorrence of the prospect of German tyranny over his country. He hates that danger, which must ever be present to the mind of a patriotic Dutchman. It has been the pressing danger of the country for many years, and the danger increases and becomes more imminent year by year. He hates that thought, both because it would put an end to the freedom of his country and because he detests the character of Germany, and many of his cartoons express this abhorrence in the extremest form. He loathes the nature and the effects of German “Kultur.”
Both these characteristics are expressed in this cartoon. The Netherlands is represented as a young Dutch girl in the national costume, a working woman wearing apron and cap and big wooden shoes. She has taken off one of the shoes, holding it ready to strike, while in a threatening attitude and with flashing eye she faces a hideous hag in dirty, slovenly attire, who represents the great enemy. The artist’s cartoons vie with one another in the ugliness which is imparted, sometimes in one way, sometimes in another, to the enemy, but there is none which represents Prussia in a more detestable form than this. Prussia is a drunken woman, who is just coming out from a public-house, and is leaning against the door, hardly able to stagger on. The sign at the door is inscribed in German: “Bierhaus zur Deutschen Kultur.” Prussia shrinks back from the assault which Holland is threatening. Yet the assault is not an armed one; it is the assault of criticism and righteous indignation, as uttered in the press and through art. The crown of the empire, with the iron cross hanging from the apex, is tumbling off the head of the drunken woman. The right hand, which she holds up in deprecation, is dripping with blood. The neck of a large bottle protrudes from a pocket in her dirty and ragged apron on which the bloody mark of a child’s hand is imprinted. But with her bloodstained hand Prussia deprecates the attacks of criticism by the protest: “A real lady like me does not do such a thing”—forgetting in her drunken mind that she bears the marks of guilt on her person. She has been indulging in “Kultur” until she is in the last stage of intoxication, barely able to stand upright, and quite unable to preserve the crown of empire. Another characteristic of Raemaekers is evident: the perfect, absolute assurance of victory. There can be no question what the future will be; the issue of conflict, either in discussion or in other ways, between this stalwart young woman and the broken, drunken wretch cannot be doubted for a moment. The crown is already slipping away, and no gesture, no support, will be in time to keep it in its place.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY.
THE magnificent imagery of Isaiah is alone adequate to interpret the artist’s picture. The German Kaiser is at the entrance to hell, on the gloomy portals of which is written the motto: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” The devil, with a Mephistophelian irony, tells his captive: “You need not storm this place.” Hell is only too ready to house the great malefactors who have sinned against light and are doomed to torment.
It is inevitable to recall the great oracles of Isaiah on the King of Babylon—that enemy of his race who had enslaved the Jewish people, persecuted God’s elect and led them into captivity. “Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?... How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cast down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”
But the King of Babylon was received with greater ceremony than falls to the lot of the German Kaiser. To welcome the former the old kings rise from their thrones. Wilhelm is led by the devil alone, and no pomp or circumstance of war surrounds him. His sin is as the sin of those who have believed in their transcendent power and are the victims of megalomania. He, too, said in his heart: “I will ascend into Heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will be like the Most High.” Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.
And the sentence passed on such enemies of the human race is the same which Isaiah uttered thousands of years ago. “Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; that made the world as a wilderness and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners?” The very catalogue of offenses is the same. And the penalty is that no such posthumous glory as encircles the monarchs of the past will come to him. He goes down to the stones of the pit, cast out from all honorable burial, as “a carcass trodden underfoot.”
Never did Raemaekers dip his pen in bitterer gall than when he limned this appalling picture of the fate which awaits a merciless and bloodthirsty tyrant.
W. L. COURTNEY.
MAYBE the French poet of genius is already born who will sing the Epic of Verdun. One thinks of him staring into his mother’s face, and blinking a pair of wondrous brown eyes at the summer sun. France is too near, too careful and troubled about the present, too deeply plunged in grief and pain to tell that story with the majestic isolation of genius, or fling her inspiration wide enough, as yet, to catch the significance of this supreme event.
Marble and bronze will record it, and imperishable verse—of that we may be sure; for the nation that has defended Verdun against the might of Germany holds the seeds of magistral art. Art must spring quickened, enlarged, and ennobled from these furnace fires; and it will happen, as of old, that a people great enough to do great deeds lack not for children of genius to record their immortality in achievements themselves immortal.
That follows in fullness of time; for at this moment, while cannon thunder and men die happy, with the light of coming victory for a crown, we may well think of such men alone and pay our homage to the heroes who have saved Verdun at the cost of their lives.
But what of Germany’s sons? What of the thousands who have fallen in fruitless attempts to take the hill of Dead Men?
It may be ere long that these armies, driven by whip and revolver from behind, will wake to the futility of their continued destruction and begin to measure the worth of the royal command still hurling them to death, that its own wounded vanity and strategical and political incompetence shall find a salve in their sacrifice.
Raemaekers imagines nothing here, for his picture is a transcript of familiar truth. Death welcomes to its bony bosom the pride of a kingdom, while the rulers of that kingdom flog their subjects on to the annihilation that awaits them. Such forlorn tactics are all that remain to the beggared tyrant and his son. But men are not as corn or the beasts of the field: this harvest cannot be renewed by the passage of a year; and when Death has fed full, he must wait for another such meal until the boyhood of Germany has come to man’s estate. May the youthful Teutons with their manhood win sanity also, and escape forever the slavery that has driven more than half a million of their fathers to fruitless destruction before Verdun.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
RAEMAEKERS in this excellent cartoon is not less direct, although he is at the same time more subtle, than in some others. Holland, typified by the seated figure, has an expression of amazement and suspicion, if not actual fear, upon her face. The Boche is not content with merely offering the basket of spurious doves, but has thrust it upon Holland’s lap. The bearer who, in the name of his master, asks the latter to look after the “doves” is obviously trying to look agreeable as well as innocent, but the battered helmet and the leer upon his face serve to betray him.
Holland, says her great artist in this picture, has no use for “peace doves,” or, at least, for those of the breed that wear the spiked helmets of the Prussians. One may suspect, as the artist and Holland herself apparently do, that the “doves,” symbolic of peace, may prove the stormy petrels of war. They may be said to typify the propagandists who, having settled in Holland from the early days of the war, have carried on a crafty campaign of misrepresentation and calumny not alone against the Allies, but against the country which has hitherto preserved neutrality and sacrificed so much in works of benevolence in regard to Belgian and other refugees, and the British airmen and seamen which the accidents and tides of war have brought to or thrown upon her shores.
The “doves of peace,” and there are many Germans now resident in Holland, have probably all of them “Mannlichers” as well as spiked helmets for use if needed.
In regard to all transactions with the Huns or their master, Holland will do well to remember Virgil’s oft-quoted line: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”
Every “dove,” whether in the guise of propagandist, commercial representative, official, or agent for the purchase of foodstuffs, and whether bringing a cage of “peace doves” or bags of gold, is a potential enemy to the peace and independence of Holland. The triumph of the Central Empires means the subjugation of the Dutch people, and the “peace doves” within her borders would soon quit their cooing and be transformed into the “Prussian Eagle’s brood.”
CLIVE HOLLAND.
“WHEN the German conquers Belgium and Poland the first thing he does is to raise agriculture, commerce, and industry to a state of immediate prosperity. Gain and comfort for the new subjects cling to the soles of his feet.”
Thus the Rev. Gerhard Tolzien preaching in Schwerin Cathedral last autumn at the harvest festival held on the 19th Sunday after Trinity. We must suppose he believed it. One of the stock attributes of Kultur, proclaimed by its apostles and obediently repeated by their pupils, is the beneficent influence it sheds on other lands. It showers gratuitous benefits on all, but only those fortunate enough to be brought under German sway reap the full harvest of its blessings. So the domination of the world by Germany is justified. It is for the people’s good; it would be the millennium.
Raemaekers shows it to us at work in Belgium. We see the Germans who have conquered the land carrying out those beneficent functions described by the German preacher. Having brought agriculture, commerce, and industry to a state of unprecedented prosperity, they are watching, with benevolent satisfaction, the signs of gain and comfort among the inhabitants. If the emaciated peasants, leaving their roofless cottage, limping down the empty street with the few odds and ends of rubbish not worth looting which they still possess, or stopping to poke about in the gutter for a scrap of food—if they seem to be at the last extremity of misery, that is, no doubt, because they are too dull to appreciate the blessings of Kultur.
Truly this is a terrible picture, a veritable nightmare. There is nothing more poignant in the whole series. It would be a relief to be able to believe Herr Tolzien’s account, but we fear that the ghastly contrast drawn by the neutral artist is only too well founded on fact.
A. SHADWELL.
AN old English proverb, disdaining to be cramped by so feeble and academic a thing as grammar, tells us that “courtesy is cumbersome to him that kens it not.” It is one of the essential signs of breeding that courtesy is natural and not cumbersome; and if we may take the saying of the German naval officer as true, that the English will always be fools and the Germans will never be gentlemen (though it is true that the maker of such a saying must be a gentleman himself), we shall be able to understand much about the Central Powers that is otherwise puzzling. Despite their aristocracies and their history, and this applies especially to Austria, those Powers have a streak of cheapness running through them. They are cads. They snarl and bicker with each other like a grocer’s family in a back parlor. Unlike Lamb’s “party in a parlor,” they are not all silent; possibly the rest of the sentence holds true. Where was Wilhelm? Why doesn’t Franz Joseph do better? But for him we’d have done such and such. Why didn’t the fellow do better?
They growl about each other to all the winds of heaven. Some of their griefs are legitimate. Between allies of different race there must always be grounds of difference and even of acute divergence of opinion. For generations the Austrians have disliked the Germans with a hearty and vigorous dislike. If ten years ago you called a German an Austrian, he corrected you with superciliousness; if you called an Austrian a German, he corrected you with fury. Germans called Austrians “stuck-up”; Austrians called Germans merely “those Germans.” And now that they are fighting side by side for their existence, now that their whole history and homogeneity as European Powers are at stake, they carp and snap like fretful sick puppies.
We—the Allies—are Latin and Slav and Saxon and Celt, and we shall never understand each other really well. The friendship of England with France is new, and has been grafted on centuries of clean warfare and honorable hostility; but on the many points on which we think differently, do we reproach each other? We have all retreated since the war began, and in each case our Allies have hurried up to tell us that our retreat was a masterpiece, as honorable as a victory. Why?
Because: Noblesse oblige.
H. PEARL ADAM.
THERE are some points in Germany’s attitude toward the neutrals which are ambiguous. Others are only too tragically clear. If we consider in its general character the German submarine crusade, we find that its original intention—to damage not only ships of war but the merchantmen of Great Britain, including passenger boats—involves also a studied neglect of the rights of neutral ships. Everything that might conceivably help Great Britain, either in respect to food-stuffs, commerce, or international trade, or the voyage of harmless tourists on the seas, was, from the point of view of Berlin, to be exposed to the fury of submarine attacks without any nice discrimination between enemies and neutrals. Clearly at one stage of the war the submarine commanders had their orders to stop and overhaul whatever they met on the seas, to give very inadequate time for the crews to escape, and to refuse all assistance to the victims struggling in the water.
The crisis of this submarine crusade was reached in the sinking of the “Lusitania.” Thereupon the American Government took action, and the Notes interchanged between President Wilson and the Wilhelmstrasse eventually, after much correspondence, brought about a temporary cessation of the more violent methods of the Teuton pirates. For it became clear that the patience of President Wilson was almost exhausted, and the possibility of a rupture of diplomatic relations gave some pause to the German Higher Command. The leading principles, however, of the enemy’s crusade have never been altered. Indeed, many observers have foreseen the recrudescence of submarine attacks, with the aid of newer and more formidable vessels with a wider range of action and a stronger armament.
The Berlin contention is that Great Britain, through her preponderance of naval power, is a despot on the seas, infringing the liberties of other nations. To restore freedom by limiting the activity of British vessels has been a constant parrot-cry of the Teutonic enemy. The real truth, of course, is that the blockade is having such serious effects on Germany that she is almost bound to initiate new movements, if only to shake off the fatal grasp of the British ships of war.
Probably the neutrals understand the position quite as well as we do, but for various reasons it is difficult for them to make an effective protest. Meanwhile the innate brutality of submarine warfare is as obvious as ever it was, and in Raemaekers’ cartoon the hideous gorilla which represents the Teuton power is gloating over its victims and breathing out defiance against all who attempt to curb it in its reckless cruelty. The legend “Gott mit Uns” adds a biting irony to the picture.
W. L. COURTNEY.
THE English have always been misunderstood by foreign peoples, and I think one of the most beneficial effects of this war will be the better understanding of John Bull by the Slavs, by the Gauls—and by the Teutons.
The Slavs up to this time have not known us at all. In France till very recently the Englishman has been the Englishman of the old Palais Royal farces, a creature with red whiskers, front teeth like the double blank in dominoes, shepherd’s plaid trousers, and a disengaging manner. Read Daudet, read Hugo, read Loti and you will see that even the highest intelligences in France have failed to appreciate John Bull at his true worth, failed even to understand him.
Germany, who understands everything but humanity, has been even more backward than France. To Germany John has figured as a robber grown fat on plunder, soft, flabby, and only waiting to be plundered. To Germany and to the Kaiser John has not figured as a power, simply because he has not figured as a military power. They believed him effete.
The first seven divisions cut into this comfortable belief in a cruel manner. The handful of English who drove the Hun hordes back from Calais did not put balm on the wound. Slowly and by degrees the Kaiser has seen his last hopes broken by the English.
“Those Horrible Britons.”
Raemaekers, as always, has touched the truth.
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.
OF benevolent neutrality we have all heard; and of the existence of the malevolent kind, too, we are quite frequently reminded. The Allied countries failed to perceive the benevolence of the Vatican’s utterance that the violation of Belgium “happened in the time of my predecessor,” and so apparently called for no comment from the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Since that interview the inaction of the Vatican, which had till then been almost complete, and has since been troubled by one or two tentative mentions of olive branches and no more, has appeared in more than a dubious light to the Allied nations. In France, where the opening of the war brought about something like a religious revival, the Pope’s inaction and the Pope’s speech caused a cold Gulf Stream of suspicion and disappointment to flow steadily Romeward. The spectacle of a Protestant premier of a two thirds Protestant country favoring a mission to the Vatican is one which would in any case have troubled Protestants, and in this case does not even please Roman Catholics. Then who does it please? Raemaekers knows.
Alas for the days when we associated screens with “little French milliners”; what a Lady Teazle have we here! And what a school of something worse than scandal holds its classes in the seminaries of war-politics! Dr. Kuyper, “the snowy-breasted pearl” of the drawing, is, perhaps, guilty of hoping a thing he does not avow; of working for it; but at least even Raemaekers, a stern critic, admits that without being a villain (we know the mark Raemaekers sets on the brow of his villains) he may be still quite pleased with himself. But the two behind the screen are furtive, are anxious, are unable to enjoy even an act that should further their plans; they are pleased, but their pleasure is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of a thought which turns ever more eagerly to the future, and turns back ever more anxiously to the present.
H. PEARL ADAM.
THE true story of what happened in Montenegro, when the Austrians reported that the country had submitted to superior force and accepted the domination of the Central Powers, and that it was abandoning the hopeless task of resisting their united strength, will perhaps be revealed in the future. At present it is unknown. Probably it will turn out to have been a great personal disappointment to the Kaiser and another instance where his diplomacy failed. It would have been a triumph to induce Montenegro to submit peaceably, and to have King Nicholas accept the position of a client king at Berlin. But the resistance of Montenegro was not wholly overcome. The king and the people who had fought for freedom with success against all the forces of Turkey and afterward of Austria during so many years could not submit to being deluded by the blandishments of Hadji Wilhelm.
Here the artist shows Nicholas with his bag packed for the journey to France, and labelled “Lyon,” turning away from the Kaiser, who looks toward him with seductive entreaty, and presses his hands in a gesture of petition. He is making a last attempt to induce the king to submit to fate and to himself; to come to Berlin, and to be received with royal honors and enrolled alongside the many princely families of Germany.
The Kaiser set great store by success in this negotiation. It would have been the beginning, as he hoped, of the breaking up of the alliance among his foes. Even though it was only the small and poor Montenegro that abandoned the Allied cause, still it was to be the first stage of a general break-up, which would have been hailed with triumph as the beginning of the end. The Kaiser wanted Nicholas badly, but Nicholas was not going alone to Berlin, and his last word is that “we will all come later.” Raemaekers, with his unfailing confidence in a final victory, looked forward then, when the cause of the Allies seemed to be at its lowest ebb, to the victory of the future, and to the victorious entrance of the united Allies into Berlin. The artist judged by faith, and not by sight. He was not a mere calculator of chances, and an estimator of military power; for those neutrals who judged on such principles were apparently all so profoundly impressed with the overwhelming military strength of Germany, that their moral judgment was warped. Raemaekers had lived too close to Germany to be ignorant of her enormous strength; but he judges as a prophet, who bears witness to the moral quality of the world, despite of the apparent balance of probabilities.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY.
GERMANY’s practical attitude to small countries has always given the lie to her expressed benevolence. Her proposal at the beginning of the war to localize conflict and leave Austria’s sixty millions to settle with the four millions of Serbia will be remembered. Then, after solemn assurance that her neutrality would be respected, “necessity” demanded Germany’s broken oaths and unspeakable outrage upon an innocent nation. It was merely a choice between Belgium and Switzerland; and convenience decided for Belgium. Abroad we have seen the treatment of uncivilized races and observed with what thanksgiving the indigenous peoples of West Africa, East Africa, and the Cameroons have welcomed Germany’s downfall as the first step to restoration of liberty and recognition of human rights. Those fiends—Prince Arenberg, Carl Peters, Chancellor Leist—are not forgotten, nor the Herero massacres.
Belgium has been sacrificed by the Cain of nations. He, who has talked most loudly about the rights of small kingdoms and his unbreakable resolution to protect them against the threat of the mighty and the tyranny of the strong; he, who desired to be his brother’s keeper, has Belgium murdered on her pyre. Within two days of the promise to leave her inviolate, she lay battered and bleeding under the club of the oath-breaker. But the smoke of the burning is beaten back into the assassin’s eyes. Even from the tribal god of the Huns this sacrifice has won no smiles.
It has been left for a Christian emperor in the twentieth century to emulate the neolith barely emancipated from brutedom, and set an example that the stone men of old might have hesitated to copy.
We have so long grown accustomed to the spectacle of martyred Belgium, and are so familiar with the whole story of her rape and massacre by this royal savage of Prussia, that the grief is like to be deadened and the pang grown dull; but let no such narcotic drift over our spirits until the war is won. Not the onset of poison gas would be more fatal than any emotion of indifference, or inclination to accept the situation now achieved by treachery, falsehood, surprise, and villainy beyond example, as a basis whereon to build any sort of peace. Let the word be anathema while the Hun still sucks the blood of his sacrifice and while Belgium and Serbia fester at the touch of his feet; let none breathe it until the Allies alone, without enemy question or neutral interference, are in a position to impose a peace commensurate with their victory.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
THE fortress of Verdun will stand forever, a bastion cut against the sky, and behind and above, like a flaming cresset, will burn Douaumont.
Verdun in March of 1916 was the name of a fortress and a town; to-day it is no longer a name. It has become a word lifted among the star words common to all languages and all times. Valor, splendor, devotion, endurance, patriotism,—how grand are these words! Yet Verdun is the grandest of them all, for it includes them all.
It is the word that France has flung to the world not from her fleshly lips, but from the lips of her soul.
To the cringing neutrals; to Swiss waiters, and Dutch hucksters and English sedition-mongers, and Irish hole-and-corner men, and Swedish marketmen. To the hordes of the Beast and the powers of darkness France has flung the light of that one burning word, just as the Spartans, four hundred and eighty years before the birth of Christ, flung to us the light of the word Thermopylæ.
The old heroic times seemed dead, littleness seemed everywhere, till the light of this war showed the soul of man great as in the days of Alexander.
The counter-attack at Douaumont is but an incident, a crystallized moment out of the endless battle on the Meuse.
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.
THE Kaiser said “his heart bled” when the Allies raided Carlsruhe from the air. The hemorrhage was not serious, but it had a value as tending to show that the heart was there. Or was it that the Allies had performed the classic feat of drawing blood from a stone? It was more than his own airmen could do when they killed children and women in London and Paris.
Perhaps some day a poet will arise who will be able to write for us the epic of the Morning Paper during this war. It used to lie under doors till wanted, and then Father had it, and Mother didn’t want it till after lunch, and George got it after Father, and Arthur must therefore buy an “evening” paper at the station where he caught the 9:19 to the City. And it really didn’t matter much, after all, except that it was something to talk about, and the Other Side was taking the country to the dogs (a trip on which it has been entering any time these last five hundred years), and one must know the latest entries for the Thousand Guineas, anyway, and yesterday’s goals.
And now! “Hasn’t the paper come yet? Where’s the paper? Is there any news? What are We doing? Have the French advanced? What about Verdun? Why’s the paper late? How’s Russia this morning? Read it out, Father, or else order a copy each!” The holy, classical, breakfast gloom of the British family is shattered by machine-gun fire of questions, of anxiety, of hope, of anguish, of pride, of horror, of hope again. Those folded sheets of printing, less clear than it used to be, on paper less good than it was, have even eclipsed that domestic Mercury, the postman! Letters lie unopened till the news has been scanned. That alone represents a revolution in British family life, and the same thing obtains in all the Allied western countries.
And what it represents is the change of focus in our minds. We are all living more or less intensely in an impersonal and selfless atmosphere, where what others are doing matters more than what our friends are doing, and where we are blatantly, flagrantly, despite all our national traditions, sure of an Ideal. We can even talk about it! I believe this cartoon by Raemaekers has a special appeal to the British for this reason; that the morning paper has come to mean so much to us, and now rouses in us such large, splendid feelings, such a magnificence of pain, such a glory of anxiety, such a pride of suffering—has made possible to us expression of so much which we thought it right and decent to hide in our hearts before—that this spectacle of the Kaiser and his dame gloating over innocent deaths has a force and a drive which the British are bound to recognize in a special degree. And the faces of the maniac and his senile wife, glowering at their “good news,” cannot help but recall to us Father’s look when he read that we had taken La Boisselle, Mother’s face when she heard that casualties were “comparatively” light. The paper is something more than paper and ink nowadays.
H. PEARL ADAM.
This is rather the attitude we should have expected of the all-highest, whom, of course, the seasons ought to obey. It is hard on him that we should have had such a late summer, and that his “Zeppers” should have had to wait so long and, after all, done so little.
For the “gentle Zeppers” from the east to-day, like those from the west of old, come with fair weather and serene skies. They may find an exceptional night in winter when “the moon is hid,” for, like all evil-doers, “they love darkness rather than light,” and “the night is still,” but it is in the calm of summer and autumn that they look to make their best harvest and their boldest onslaughts. Equinoctial gales, sleet and snow do not suit them, so brave are they. They are not keen to face either the battle or the breeze, so brave are they.
It would be unfair to deny bravery altogether to the Boches. They have shown it in their own “book of arithmetic” way on land, on sea, and in the air. (H)immelmann, as the Tommies of course called him, certainly showed himself “at ’ome in his native (h)element, as bold as a ’awk,” though brought down by a half-fledged eagle at the finish. But he was an aviator and took risks. The brave “Zepps” have not taken many; we do not blame them. There is no reason why they should, and every reason why they should not. They are delicate and expensive birds to rear. When they are on the wing there are a good many “marks over,” and when the anti-aircraft gun finds those “marks,” light currency though they be, they fall even faster than on the Exchange.
Formidable, no doubt, the Zepps are. It is our good luck more than our good management that they have not done more damage. But brave, as bravery goes in this war, hardly that, so far. We should have expected the Kaiser to curse them and the weather, not to weep. Weeping? Kaisers and Kaiserins and Count Zeppelins should be made of sterner stuff. We do not hear that Herod and Herodias were seen weeping because the attack on Rachel cost them an assassin or two. Yet that is the picture Raemaekers gives us here, scathingly, sarcastically, graphic as ever.
“They were brave.” “They fought against odds unnumbered” (of women and children and men 10,000 feet below them). “They fell with their tails to the foe.” Yes, the Zepps are very brave. They’ll have to be braver still before they’re done!
HERBERT WARREN.
P.S.—This was written before September 2. Yes, they’ll have to take more risks, and they and their friends will have to be braver yet.
H. W.
HOLLAND has acted a rather more than neutral part in this war. Cocoa and bacon, butter and potatoes, lard and oil, beef, fish, sugar, and rice—the amount she has eaten of these has been truly astounding. She has eaten so much and slept so soundly that she has not heard the Zeppelins flying over her, bound for England.
Should aeroplanes fly over her, bound for Germany, would she wake up?
She has also eaten rubber and dry-goods, and so many other indigestible things that if she doesn’t sulfer from somnolence, for decency’s sake and as a proof that she still belongs to the human family, she ought to pretend to suffer from it—when the aeroplanes fly over her, bound for Germany.
One wonders what her opinions are on this cartoon presented to her by her most illustrious son.
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.
WE were inclined at the beginning of this war to be a little unreasonable in our demands on the sympathy of the neutral nations. This was particularly the case with Holland, whose geographical position with regard to Belgium and to ourselves is a most delicate one. We did not always consider sufficiently what too lively an expression of opinion friendly to the Allies might cost the Dutch. They saw themselves, three years ago, watched through the peep-holes of their eastern frontier by a neighbor without pity, without scruple, and without decency. To have given the Germans an opportunity of attacking them unawares would have been to see the tulips of Haarlem trampled into mud and the church-windows of Gouda smashed; to let the libraries of Leyden be pillaged and the art-treasures of The Hague be carried off to Berlin; to find the cathedral tower of Utrecht used as a target for cannon, and the canals of Amsterdam choked with the corpses of Dutch women and children. What Belgium has endured would be poured out in fourfold horror upon Holland. No wonder that the Dutch are prudent in their language, circumspect in their actions.
Moreover, till the autumn of 1914, Holland had cultivated a pacific spirit. She did not believe in military danger, and through the masses of the people there ran a kind of resentment against the army, as a body of men paid out of the taxes for doing nothing. In all this Holland was wittingly the opposite of her ferocious and gigantic neighbor. But all this is over now. Raemaekers shows us the sturdy Dutch soldier, with his back turned to wheedling German whisperers, guarding the long eastern frontier beyond the Maas. Holland has been roused out of her opiate dream of non-resistance, and she vibrates with heroic echoes from Ypres and from Dixmude. She is fully aware that she is called upon to be the arbiter of her own destiny, and that she must meet force with force. Holland is safe so long as she prepares her own defense, for Germany never attacks unless she believes herself to be sure of victory. She knows that the Dutch have “increased their army,” and that the hour of “easy” and insolent conquest is over.
EDMUND GOSSE.
THIS horrible war that has been sprung upon us has taught the Empire many useful lessons. It has been a revelation in character value. In the long piping time of peace, before grim-visaged war broke in upon us, we were much too self-centered. Colonials and others returning from our overseas dominions to the “Old Country” did not hesitate to say how appalled they were by the wealth and how shocked they were by the uses to which it was being put in England.
It seemed to them, coming home from the simple life to the lap of luxury, that men and women in England were living to pile up colossal wealth and to bask in the sunshine of newspaper notoriety. I might continue in this strain for pages more, but that is not my purpose. What I do want to say is that, as soon as the tocsin of war was heard across the silver sea, and the bugle-call of duty was sounded, these same club-loungers and society-loafers rolled up, rallying to the flag as though they had been born for nothing else. In the story of England’s life only will the headline “Five Millions of Volunteers to the Colors” be read, topping the chapter telling of this European war to our children’s children.
Not only have those on the highest rung of the social ladder responded to the King’s call for service, but those on the lowest rung also—never was there such a fellowship in arms by land and on sea.
But if England with her overseas peoples stands out in such fine relief against the dark war background, we must not forget that our Allies have shone out as conspicuously as ourselves as fighting patriots, resolved to do or die.
Chaplains, too, have done fine work for country as well as for religion. Conspicuous among all Churchmen rises the lithe, imposing, ascetic figure of His Eminence Cardinal Mercier. If ever there was a follower of the Good Shepherd, ready to lay down his life for his sheep, it is the Cardinal Archbishop of Malines. “The Good Shepherd giveth his life for his sheep.” Nothing could have pleased the Cardinal better than to have escaped the sights forced upon him by sacrificing his own life for his flock. But it was not to be; his life has been spared that all the world might find in this good shepherd its object lesson in true religion and in true patriotism.
BERNARD VAUGHAN.
AMONG the suggestions for treating our German prisoners, the public has misunderstood that emanating from the Government. To utter the word “reprisals,” when we know right well that the whole sense and tradition of this country would rise in rebellion against any such system, is to speak in vain. Moreover, other and juster lines of action are within our reach. It has been suggested that we should treat our prisoners exactly as Germany treats hers; but since her system is beneath the accepted standards of humanity, and such as no civilized country could practise without loss of self-respect, that course remains unjustified. A worthier way would seem to be that those responsible for the crime are made to suffer, and that, instead of doing injustice now by punishing men not to blame for our enemy’s cruelties, we exact justice after the war is ended and then look to it that all—chiefs and subordinates alike—who have tortured and starved the Allied prisoners, in military or internment camps, should be brought to pay the penalty for their cowardly villainies. That will lie within our power; and did Germany clearly understand the intention, it is reasonable to hope she might take steps to save herself from the consequences of her brutality. Moreover, the threat is no mere thunder, for though the country is still in ignorance, still buoyed by false news and fatuous communiqués, those at the helm know well enough the Central Empires are on a lee shore of ultimate defeat.
With some truth these boys, spectacled students and stunted human failures swept into the net of France’s prisoners, may echo their “all-highest” and say: “We did not want to do it.” They, indeed, did not, and who can feel for them much more than pity? Such men are not even good cannon fodder; and no more striking comment on the passes to which Germany is coming in her efforts to fill the failing lines need be sought than in the material our prisoners often reveal. She has, indeed, many thousands more of the cream of her manhood to destroy before the end; but to offer such feeble stuff as this to the combustion of war cannot long delay the final need.
Señor Gomez Garrillo, writing as a neutral in the “Gaulois,” has told us how the British, though fully realizing the hatred of the German people, do not echo it; for they see in their prisoners only unhappy men, to be treated with compassion and respect. That is not a spirit that will be found on the losing side of the World War.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
THIS picture represents two men whom the accidents of diplomacy and intrigue have placed upon the thrones of two small nations of southeastern Europe. The peoples whom they respectively rule have every conceivable reason for desiring the triumph of that principle of international right for which the Allies stand in this war, and which is the only possible defense of small nationalities. They have also special obligations toward those who are to-day championing that principle, for the Bulgarians owe their liberation from Turkish tyranny primarily to Russia, while the Greeks owe the restoration of their national independence to that very combination of Great Britain, France and Russia which at Navarino nearly a century ago half-foreshadowed the present Great Alliance.
But of these men one is an intriguer of mean origin, vile antecedents, and corruptly personal aims, while the other is the husband of a Hohenzollern. Therefore, in the one case the intriguer sells his people to the enemy, while in the other the semi-German princeling deserts not only his natural allies, but those to whom he is pledged by treaty. Of the Balkan States, Serbia alone is faithful to the cause of nationality; and it is not unimportant to note that of these states Serbia alone possesses a native dynasty. It is to be hoped that after the war princes will no longer figure among the exports of the German Empire.
CECIL CHESTERTON.
RAEMAEKERS has here selected two typical naval officers, and has placed them on the quay in Kiel Harbor, pacing along in sight of the water and some of the ships of the High Seas Fleet lying at anchor.
The expressions on the two faces are worth careful study. On that of the taller and nearer man one has a cleverly caught and underlying indication of doubt. He seems to say: “Of course, we are blockading the British Fleet, which has taken shelter from our invincible warships in the Thames Estuary. And, of course, since the Battle of Jutland, we have swept the seas and wrested the trident from the grasp of Britain. But....” At the back of his mind is evidently at all events the germ of a question. “Why, if this be so, do our ships lie at anchor, and our people go short of the imported necessities of life?” And in the mind of that type of man no amount of inspired press accounts of fictitious victories, and no thanks of the Kaiser and profusion in the decoration of “naval heroes,” can lull to rest the suspicion that all is not as it should be.
The second type depicted is a more common one in the German Navy. He carries his chin up, while his companion carries his down. He says: “Of course, we have driven the British Battle Fleet to its harbors, and, of course, we won a notable victory off Jutland, and, equally of course, when we bombarded Scarborough and other seaside pleasure resorts we actually destroyed immensely strong fortifications, and did enormous and material damage to military and naval bases.” This type of man could believe anything. And he does! He has assimilated greedily all the mental pabulum that is designed to teach that Germany cannot be beaten because she is Germany, and that the Germans are superior to every other race. He swallowed it as greedily as a small boy, a collegian, or a naval cadet, and it has become part of him. He neither can know, will know, nor wishes to know the truth. There is something pathetic as well as stupid in his blindness and imperviousness to facts. He is of the type which will believe Germany invincible long after she has been beaten. He is of the type that will prolong the war by continuing to celebrate phantom victories even when the fleets of the Allies are hammering at the gates of the Kiel Canal. In this cartoon Raemaekers’ satire is gentler than its wont, but not less effective on that account.
CLIVE HOLLAND.
AH, No! Not brigands! Not pirates! They belong to the good days of youth, the “Boys’ Own Annual,” Stevenson, Henty, Kingston, when there were words of pure magic that wrought spells. Is there a boy with soul so dead who never to himself hath said “Sallee Rovers,” “High Barbary,” “Masked Men on Maidenhead Thicket,” “A Toby Man on a Black Horse,” for the sheer pleasure of evoking the little shiver that goes with Romance? Has the deep villainy of Long John Silver anything in common with Tirpitz? Long John would never have allowed the right of Tirpitz to fly the Jolly Roger. Would Claude Duval have taken the Kaiser’s hand? Never!
The skull and crossbones have fallen on evil days, the black flag has had its sable purity rent and torn; no boy is going to stick his nose into a book about the Kaiser and Willie in future days, in order to snuff up sensuously the very smell of such a jolly good tale. Ah, these others were a merry company, and they swung very rightly on creaking gallows, or walked the plank into glittering foreign seas, for crimes which would show saintly white upon the Potsdam flag. They were bad men, but witless, too; they did such petty sins, imagined such small crimes. If they bullied a little boy, we thought them already damnable rascals! One little boy! Anybody could count him on their fingers; but we need the higher mathematics to compute the wrong of Potsdam. It is like weighing Saturn, or measuring Lucifer; we must go outside our world to do either.
Better the lonely gibbet on the heath than the stalled ox of Potsdam; let us walk the plank like the honest murderers we are, and go to the perdition that suits with our knaveries and cruelties and black crimes; but let us from creaking chain and blanched sea-sand enter a protest against having the Berlin brood fathered on us; nay, sirs, must even the good fat swine in his filth be compared with such as these?
H. PEARL ADAM.
IT emphatically does not look so in Serbia. No artist dare portray the infamous truth of it. I have found something of that in the report of an inquiry conducted by Dr. Reiss, of the Lausanne University, in such of the devastated districts as were not left in the actual occupation of the enemy. “Belgium was a mothers’ meeting to it,” as some phrase-maker put it. All that was worst in a nation, of whom a tolerant general opinion held that it was unfortunate rather than unkindly, came out in that second version of the “punitive expedition” of which the first ended so ingloriously.
It is an attribute of chivalry to respect courage, and of civilization to hold under control the passions that blaze up in the furnace of war. Austria has eternally forfeited her reputation for chivalry and culture. She has chosen to range herself with her allies: with the Germans of Aerschot, Termonde, Dixmude; with the Turks of the Armenian holocausts; with that glorious squadron of Bulgarian cavalry that charged and sabred a square of defenseless prisoners.
The first Austrian legions, underestimating their enemy, broke ignominiously against the intrepid mountaineers. They came back in overwhelming force and wreaked their vengeance for their former defeat with a more than German frightfulness.
One dare not take the responsibility of referring readers to Dr. Reiss’s book. Its cold precision, its scientific tabulation, its sickening photographs, make up a nightmare horror which should be thrust upon no one who can avoid it.
But if there be a recording angel——
JOSEPH THORP.
THE peacemaker, Ford, is sailing away in a boat, with the flag of the United States at the stern, leaving behind him the four Germanic Powers. On their alliance is inscribed: “Victory! Victory! Colossal victory!”; but the alliance is only a life-buoy, and the Powers are struggling in the sea of fate, and are in imminent danger of drowning. They strive by loud words to maintain to the world their pretense of victory; but it is all sham, and they know that their lives are at stake. The whole fabric of the German alliance is to this artist a morally gigantic imposture, and rests on an elaborate system for duping the surrounding world. Austria, Bulgaria, and Turkey have enough to do to hold on to the life-buoy and save themselves from death. Turkey has a bad grip, and looks as if he could hardly cling on. Bulgaria is, if possible, worse situated; Ferdinand holds with one hand and with his chin. The Emperor of Austria has his shoulder well over the life-saving buoy, but although the hold is good, his physical strength is failing. The Kaiser alone has a firm hold and plenty of strength left, but he has already been under water, for his helmet is dripping; and his cry for help is addressed to the retreating peacemaker. The boasting words inscribed on the alliance are addressed to the surrounding world, but the word that comes from his heart is a cry for peace.
When this cartoon was published, Germany was apparently going on from victory to victory. Many people feared that the Prussian victory was assured, but Raemaekers never doubted. His confidence in the victory of truth and justice never failed for an instant. In his cartoons he sees, like a prophet or a poet, right into the heart of the great movements in history. It is not that he conveys the impression of mere blind, unreasoning confidence in the victory of any particular nation which he admires, or in which he believes, or which he considers to be most wealthy and most capable of paying the expenses and supplying the “silver bullets” in unceasing abundance. His sublime assurance is based on moral issues; he hates the cruel and the deceitful nation and man, because among other things they are an outrage on nature, a blotch disfiguring the fair face of the world, and he knows that a cause which is based on disregard of international obligations, and buttressed by a policy of “frightfulness” and a general system of imposture and deception, must fail. The world of men will not endure it; the divine order of things has rejected it. He can no more doubt about the issue than could one of the old Hebrew prophets. He has seen, and he knows.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY.
SHELLS! Shells! In the name of the Prophet, shells! Shells for Britain and Belgium, for France and Russia and Italy, for Serbia and Roumania! Shells, shells, and ever more shells! It is a cry with which we are familiar now, terribly familiar. We remember—though events crowd on so fast that we forget much—how a year or two ago it was yet more terrible, for it was a cry unanswered and unanswerable.
Our little army—so little, but so great in heart—“our dauntless army, scattered and so small,” sans machine-guns, sans howitzers, sans shells, sans masks, sans everything, still snatched for us, if not victory, yet time, time for everything. To-day it has grown from hundreds to thousands, and thousands to millions, and its munitions have grown faster still. What were Mr. Montagu’s figures the other day? They were incredible. Britain’s output of “heavy shell” has been multiplied ninety-four, wellnigh one hundred, times. The tale of shells it took a whole weary year to make in 1914 can now be made in four days!
How has it been brought about? Largely by the enthusiasm, the faith and fire, of one man and many women,—by Mr. Lloyd George and the workers who have rallied to his call.
This picture show’s the process. It is a picture truly striking, graphic, beautiful, gladdening yet saddening.
These countless, shapely, well-knit figures bending over their task eagerly, earnestly; the power-bands revolving, the lathes turning unceasingly, the tools biting, polishing, finishing; creation in full swing!
All the rare gifts of womanhood are here, but how strangely used! What a pathetic paradox! It is women’s privilege to be the mothers, the nurses, the ministers, the angels of life. But these are mothers and angels of death. They know what they are doing. It is for their men, their babes, their honor, they transform themselves. All the woman’s love and passion, her enthusiasm, her neat and delicate hand, her docility are here, making, moulding these shining shells, multitudinous as their namesakes of the ocean; and like them each is fashioned nicely to pattern, voluted, enamelled, burnished, with their strange knobs and grooves the product of long evolution, exact and right, and then stacked gross by gross, and thousand by thousand, canned earthquakes, bottled death, to be broken and to break to-morrow in the storms and on the ridges of war.
Dux femina facti! What work to-day is not woman’s?
Shells, shells, ever more shells!
HERBERT WARREN.
A LONDON snapshot in lighter mood and a pretty compliment to the Australians, who are cutting out Jack, Tommy, and even Sandy in bonnet and kilt, under the shadow of Nelson’s lions. Well, none but the brave deserve the fair, and no one grudges them their success.
But the picture may be read in a different sense. After all, whose is the success here? If there were one Australian and two girls, now, that would be something like success. Too much success, indeed! He might say: “How happy could I be with either!” The girl does not say that; no girl ever does. She wants them both and apparently she has got them. The success is hers, and other girls will certainly grudge it to her, particularly, one fancies, those in Australia, who may have their own reasons for a qualified approval of conquests in Trafalgar Square. So Britannia’s sons may be cut out, but Britannia’s daughter carries off the honors and redresses the balance.
This snapshot, by the way, was evidently taken before London was laid in ruins by Zeppelins (see the Wolff Bureau and German papers passim).
A. SHADWELL.
THE Kaiser and the Prussian people doubtless encourage themselves by remembering the tremendous struggle which Frederick, so-called the Great, waged against an almost overwhelming coalition of the neighboring peoples, but they carefully and intentionally forget that Prussia had as its ally throughout that desperate struggle of the Seven Years’ War the power of England, which it hates. It deliberately forgets that the sea was always open then, that its friends could come and go, and that supplies of every kind could be brought in over a friendly “German Ocean.” It has often been said that the Kaiser, when he fixed the date for the beginning of the war, had forgotten to take counsel with the naval command, but there seems no reason to doubt that at least he took counsel with Tirpitz, the responsible head of the navy.
Tirpitz was not a man to be ignored, but neither was he a man whose opinion about naval strategy was to be trusted. He has shown himself a typical German organizer, marvellously excellent in the building of a fleet of ships, but his ignorance of the real principles of naval warfare and of naval power has proved itself to be colossal and truly Germanic. It would surprise no one if history should hereafter disclose that Tirpitz, through some quaint perversion of reasoning power, had come to the conclusion that the time for the war had arrived at the end of July, 1914. The true principle of naval power manifests itself steadily in the course of history, and the artist in this cartoon expresses it through the figure of the hydraulic press, under which the Kaiser is being slowly crushed. Beneath the irresistible weight of its descent his sword is bending and useless; it will soon break. The figure of the hydraulic press is more apt than the phrase which was applied to the Russian armies at the beginning of the war by the English press. The “steam-roller” has proved itself a singularly unsuitable figure to express the strength of the Russian armies, for it is totally unlike the lightning strategy of Brussilof or the enduring blows of the Grand Duke.
To Raemaekers the hydraulic press becomes a sort of compendium of naval power; and a quaint resemblance to the turrets and protruding guns of a fleet of battleships is imparted by the artist to the upper parts of the engine. The sea is the friend of Britain. The sea expresses its friendship in many ways. It is the friend of the Netherlands to save that country from German invasion, and it is the instrument through which Great Britain crushes down the armies of Prussia.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY.
WE know the story of the oracles of Balaam as narrated in chapters XXII and XXIII of “Numbers.” Balaam is sent for by Balak, king of the Moabites, in order that he might curse the children of Israel whose invasion threatened Moab with dire peril. Balaam first refuses to journey to Balak; then, subsequently, he is induced to change his mind. Riding on his ass the prophet accompanies the princes of Moab, and on his way is confronted by the angel of the Lord. The ass, much wiser than his master, dares not pass. Balaam, who could not see the obstacle in the path, struck his ass three times. Thereupon his eyes were opened, and the ass, speaking with the mouth of a man, rebuked the prophet for his senselessness and his brutality. In the sequel, though Balaam meets with Balak, he is not permitted to curse; he can only bless the children of the Lord.
This is the story which is in Raemaekers’ mind in his spirited cartoon. Balaam is, of course, the German emperor; his ass is the long-suffering German people, forced by threats to advance over millions of strewn corpses and rotting skulls, and the angel in the path bears on its shield the words Justice, Liberty, Humanity.
Unlike the prototype whom Raemaekers has selected, the German emperor refuses to recognize that his real opponent in the tremendous war is the civilized conscience of mankind. But the German people is beginning to understand and realize at what appalling cost it is being sent to the shambles. Perhaps in time the eyes of the Kaiser himself may be opened, and when that day of enlightenment comes he will discover that no amount of iron crosses or lying telegrams will induce the German fatherland to fight any longer against the ordinances of God.
Far away on the horizon are to be observed the funeral crosses which reveal so eloquently the history of the war. For, indeed, the best and bravest youth of most of the nations of Europe is being sacrificed to suit the truculent ambition of a blind and reckless autocrat.
W. L. COURTNEY.
EVER since the great poet, Willem Bilderdijk, more than a hundred years ago, finding the intellectual life of his country submerged in Teutonic sentimentality, turned the German doves out of the temple of the Dutch Muses, Holland has followed the intellectual example of France more than that of any other country. The Dutch have a passion for individualism which carries them in a direction exactly opposite to the moral and artistic tyranny of Prussian Kultur, and gives a totally different coloring to their respect for mental distinction. But the insidious propaganda of Berlin had of late done fresh mischief, and when the war broke out a considerable portion of the Dutch clergy and a small but violently militant university clique of professors showed themselves surprisingly bitter against the Allies, and particularly against France. There was a reflection of this in the ruling class, while the conduct of the Government, although perfectly correct in regard to the Entente Powers, was not considered by the mass of the Dutch people to protect the nation vigilantly enough against the coarse propaganda of Germany.
In Raemaekers’ cartoon we see this propaganda in action. A corpulent journalist, boche of the boches, fitted out with plenty of money and a suit of Dutch peasant clothes provided by Wilhelmstrasse, struts about in Holland, and being now “a genuine Dutchman,” will start a newspaper in the German interest. But the real Dutch see through him and laugh at his pretensions.
The fall of Mr. Trub, the eminent statesman whose sympathies were openly with the Allies, was considered in Germany to be a triumph for Teutonic intrigue in Holland. The success of Mr. Cort van der Linden seemed to confirm this impression. But the corpulent and bearded boche, in whom Raemaekers symbolizes the secret journalistic work of Germany in Holland, acted too insolently and went too far. He awakened the Vaderlandsche Club, or Club of Patriots, which has been formed specifically to guard Dutch interests and to oppose with vigor the advances of Germany. The response with which this association has been greeted in all parts of the country; the discomfiture of the “Toekomst,” the newspaper mainly financed by our stout friend in the baggy breeches; and the sustained prosperity of the “Telegraaf,” the patriotic journal which Germany attempted first to purchase and then to suppress, show that Holland can distinguish a travestied Prussian from “a genuine Dutchman.”
EDMUND GOSSE.
THERE is not much laughter in this war, but when Raemaekers chooses he can recall to us for a little while the hearty, lung-filling delight of other days. And here we have it. A Kaiser so prayerfully, passionately ridiculous, a Tirpitz so stupendously, monumentally coy, and a cause for rejoicing so very slender, must tickle even a hyphenated sense of humor. Since the Battle of Jutland, of course, the joke is better still. But even before that the German Navy was the one item in the German array which could legitimately be found amusing, rather than painful.
Did not the Germans, bottled up in Kiel, announce that they were roving the seas looking for the British Navy, which at the same time, they said, was cowering in its East Coast harbors? And did not our official report of the Battle of the Bight begin with that sublimely unselfconscious phrase, “Starting from a point near Heligoland, a squadron of our fleet,” etc., etc.? Look at Heligoland on the map, for every time one looks at it it is really farther from England and nearer Germany than one had remembered; farther from our East Coast havens, and nearer to that corked bottle of German fizz, the Kiel Canal. Those first six words are a naval victory in themselves.
So we can enjoy with special zest the idea of the Kaiser, bold and noble baron, violating the modesty of village-maiden Tirpie with his ardent embraces, because she has played Una so beautifully that even the lion did not know she was there!
H. PEARL ADAM.
MOST of the horrors committed in civilized societies are the work of men or women who loathe the things they do, but would rather do the thing they loathe than endure some other evil that seems intolerable. The wretched Crippen poisons his wife, not because he hates her, or takes any pleasure in killing her, but because her continued existence makes the kind of life he wishes to lead impossible. But crime—and particularly murder—seems to have a fascination of its own. It is a truth preserved to us in the popular phrase, “tasting blood.” Those who come under the spell grow into maniacs, fiends in human shape, who, having plotted their first murder to gain some end that seems irresistibly desirable, find an unexpected and terrible excitement in it, and go on to the second from an irresistible desire to taste that dreadful pleasure again. These men are the legendary figures of horror—Bluebeard of the nursery, Jack the Ripper of history.
When Germany resolved to assault the civilization of the centuries and conquer the western world before that world grew too strong to be conquered, having no other motive than to annex the territories and steal the wealth of neighboring nations who had done her no harm, she embarked upon a course of crime on so vast and appalling a scale that she was doomed to exemplify in her own monstrous person the whole psychology of crime. It is quite likely that the first murders committed in Belgium were done not for the love of killing, but with the excellent (?) military purpose of terrorizing a conquered population, and so lessening the necessity for a garrison to keep them in order. The first murders of English men, women, and children, perpetrated at the bombardment of Yarmouth, Scarborough, and Whitby, may have been intended merely as a demonstration that Germany could strike even at an island that was impregnable. The first use of the submarine against a merchant ship may have been made in the hope that a mere demonstration of frightfulness would save her from the necessity of repeating it, by frightening every trading ship off the sea. But indulgence in blood brought upon our enemy the cruellest of all punishments. It brought an insatiable appetite, until the killing of old men and boys, but particularly of women and small children, has become a thing necessary to the men that do it and to the nation that sends them on their mission of murder.
ARTHUR POLLEN.
RAEMAEKERS is a citizen of a small neutral nation, and it is a great part of his European significance that he has perceived that such nations cannot really remain neutral in an ultimate and spiritual sense in a conflict like the present one. Whether they shall remain neutral in a purely political sense is a matter for them and for them alone to decide; and the Allies—in marked contrast to the consistent policy of Prussia—have made many sacrifices in this war rather than violate justice by attempting to interfere with their liberty of decision.
The fact remains that there is no small, free State in Europe which does not know that the victory of Prussia would be the end of its freedom. Were so abominable a conclusion to this war still thinkable, it is certain that the independent self-governing thing called Holland would exist no more. Her fate would, indeed, be ultimately worse than that of the martyred and ravaged Belgian nation; for she would not even be able to point to a heroic legend of resistance such as has always presaged the resurrection of murdered nationalities. She would simply be a part of the Prussian Empire. No Dutchman, with the memory of the great historic achievements of his race before his eyes, desires her to become that.
Indeed, it is the whole condemnation of Prussia that no human being outside the limits of her direct control could possibly desire such a fate for his own people. Yet that is unquestionably the fate that would have befallen every free people in Europe had the conspiracy, so long matured by Prussia, and so nearly successful, accomplished what its promoters hoped.
CECIL CHESTERTON.
“NOW’S our chance; he’s asleep.” Mr. Raemaekers is, it must be remembered, a Dutchman, and a certain percentage of his “picture sermons” is addressed especially to the “congregation of faithful Dutch people” and meant first and foremost to be understood, and taken to heart, by them. This is one. A German officer, whose spurs act as a sort of cloven hoof and betray his real character, is posing as a Dutch pastor, or Predikant. He wears the preacher’s gown and the white bands of his sacred office, and holds before his face an elaborate and ingenious mask, representing the fat and foolish face, the snowy whiskers and innocent “goggles” of a pastor, surmounted by his professional tall hat, which it will be noticed is only the front half of the “cylinder.” The contrast of the real face behind the mask, with its grin of low cunning, is very clever.
Armed with this disguise, he has crept up to a Dutch fisherman, a Vollendammer or some one of this sort, in his fur cap, and broad-beamed breeches, peacefully sleeping on the shores of the Zuyder Zee, and, like Hamlet’s treacherous stepfather, “stealing upon his secure hour” pours into his ear from a phial the “leperous distilment” of falsehood, which, if it is not to take his life, is to poison his mind and whole being.
For the Dutch, doubtless, there is some special allusion, and perhaps the mask may suggest a portrait. But for all men everywhere the meaning is patent enough. Poison gas and poisoned wells are not the only poisoned weapons the German has used against the Allies—including our Dutch compatriots in Southwest Africa—or against neutrals the world over. The moral air we breathe, the wells of truth—he has sought to poison these also, and has not hesitated to enlist either the Catholic priest or the Lutheran pastor in his sinister service.
HERBERT WARREN.
THE professorial pedant who directs the internal administration of the Prussian autocracy has created a system which justly rouses the admiration of all who study the methods of cleverness and ingenuity. The last ounce of food is weighed out, the last egg is counted and distributed, and the last pfennig is taken from the safe of the private individual for the use of the State and replaced by the paper of War Loans. It is an astonishing triumph of economy and skill, but to Raemaekers it is all imposture. Such achievements of mere cleverness mean nothing to him; he knows that this is not the truth of the world, for he cannot hear in it any trace of the harmony and the divine music of the universe; and here he points the real fact that lies under and behind this whole pretentious sham. The very ham which lies on the table is merely wood, painted to look like a ham, while the safe is labelled in Dutch with the words: “All is gold that glitters in here.” The wisdom of experience struck out the proverb “All is not gold that glitters,” but the official direction of the German Empire will have it that everything that glitters in the German bureau is gold. The future will reveal whether that proverb or the new professorial dictum is correct. The Dutch artist has no doubt about it.
The official who is now putting on his coat is going to button it over a great cushion of imposture, which will give him the appearance of good feeding and good condition of body. He has arranged his wares to deceive the people and to make them think that they have everything, when they have only the barest minimum. What more should they require? Everything that is needed is at their disposal, whether it be food or wood. What more could they want? The world wants a good deal more, but the docile German is content—up to a certain point.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY.
THE “Black Hole of Calcutta” and the “Well of Cawnpore,” those dark spots on the history of India, stand out in their blackness against fairly light surroundings. Wittenberg, as dark in its way as either, scarcely stands out in the History of Brutality which is the history of the German conduct of the great war.
The terrible thing about Germany is the fact that she seems to have taken out letters patent for vileness; that vileness has become her right and prerogative, and that the neutral nations have accepted the fact as a natural one.
A very mean man, once he gets a reputation for meanness, can commit mean acts without raising much adverse comment.
In the same way Germany, by a system of uniform brutality, can commit “Wittenbergs” without creating any great excitement in the minds of neutral onlookers.
If England were to starve her German prisoners and set dogs on them and thrash them, and force them to labor after the fashion of Germany, the howl of outraged neutrals would be heard through the two Americas and the Scandinavias.
Germany does these things and worse, and there is no excitement over the business. It is the German method.
But, thank God, the future of humanity is not in the hands of the neutrals, and the men whose part it will be to punish crimes will remember Wittenberg. If not, Raemaekers will remind them.
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.
THE birth of Italy as a national unity was one of the great events of Europe, and nowhere was this struggle of a people toward freedom and a right to decide the future destiny of Italy more sympathetically encouraged, more warmly applauded, than in England. Then were laid and firmly set the foundations of friendship which were later to bring Italy and England into close and lasting alliance. Italian freedom was, however, long hampered by the yoke of forced subservience to the Central European Powers.
Germany, more positive in her policy than Great Britain, lost no time in riveting on Italy’s wrists the fetters of financial, industrial, and commercial thraldom. Englishmen, who could have prevented this, did nothing, and the new country, without developed resources, fell an easy prey to the barbarous German and the bullying Austrian. In this cartoon Raemaekers has succeeded in typifying the dominant feature of Austrian rule. The face of Austria is that of the bullying, brutal, and bestial police official, who sought to drive Italy as he has been accustomed to drive the unfortunate races which a series of cold-blooded and calculating international conferences and agreements have put under his heel.
The German type, the bland Hun, we are familiar with; the Austrian is new. He stands, kourbash in hand, baffled and snarling at the thought of freedom—for to him freedom is anathema. It is true that nothing was more certain than that Italy would break her manacles. Strong in the virile force of a people sentient with national purpose and every day more truly finding themselves, no greater blow has been struck at the military despots of Berlin than the breaking free of Italy. The war has brought into being the real, new Italy—serious of purpose and ardent of aspiration—who till now has been unable to show herself, cramped and fettered by the medieval military chains of Germany and Austria.
ALFRED STEAD.
PRESIDENT Wilson lends himself to caricature and the art of the cartoonist almost as readily as does the Kaiser himself. We fancy that the war will be over ere the average British mind grasps either the magnitude of the task of the President of the United States or the underlying principles which have actuated him throughout.
It has been the custom with many people (and this has been as marked in the United States as in Great Britain) to condemn the President for “kid glove” diplomacy, weakness, and indecision. And upon the surface one is bound to admit that there appear to be grounds for both criticism and disappointment. One would need to have the archives of the Foreign Office at one’s disposal to form a just and perfectly informed judgment concerning President Wilson’s “line of least resistance.”
Perhaps an American has put the matter as succinctly as anyone. “It needs a really strong man,” he said, “to keep one’s fingers out of a pie like the European War. A free people do not see another free people, and a weak nation at that, trampled, murdered, and destroyed, at least for the time being, by the greatest fighting machine in Europe without wanting to cut in. But I guess the best day’s work America and Wilson have done for the Allies has been to keep out of it. Some day you’ll see that we were cutting ice for you all the time.”
Time will perhaps make clear what some of us only suspect.
Whatever shortcomings President Wilson may appear to us to have as an active champion of right and civilization against hideous wrong and barbarism, he is a past-master in the art of the diplomatic shower-bath, as the Kaiser and his unscrupulous minions in the United States have discovered more than once. Every attempt to lead him into hostile acts toward the Allies, every skilful diplomatic ruse which was engendered with the object of involving America in hostilities, has been quietly but effectively countered by the President. He appears to have had the chain of the shower-bath ever in his hand. And the verbal “douches” administered, though couched in the unemotional phraseology of diplomacy, have always been effective. The officials of the Wilhelmstrasse must have abandoned hope long ago. And, in the words of an American friend, “they must turn up their collars and get out umbrellas and prepare for some rain when a diplomatic note arrives from Wilson.”
CLIVE HOLLAND.
THERE remain yet a few people who state that, in beginning this world war, Germany did not anticipate such slaughter as she has had to compass; but these are the people who have not studied the apostle of war whom Raemaekers portrays as presenting this bouquet of babies’ heads. This cartoon was first published in August, 1915, and was commemorative of the results of one year of war. It gained in significance during the second year, for to Belgium must be added Serbia, scene of unspeakable crimes against the civilian populace, and Armenia, of which the full horrors will never be told, since none of the victims remain to tell them.
In these later days, when the whole world can see that Germany is fighting a losing fight, one might admire the grim way in which the victors are made to pay for every step of the path they have yet to tread; if their hands were clean one might call magnificent the dogged courage of the fighting men who resist our own. But the list of slaughtered women and children is too long, the violation of the laws of humanity is too complete. This grinning barbarian with his bouquet is the German that the world will remember, not those exceptions to his kind who, by humanity in the presence of wounded enemies, have made themselves noteworthy—merely by their rarity.
In the last phase of the war, that in which approaching defeat is plainly evident, the German fights well—and so does a rat when it is cornered. Raemaekers’ symbol of the bouquet is not less to be kept in mind, nor would there be any hope of justice in the settlement if the victors, in generosity to a beaten foe, should forget it.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
THE circumstances of the incident depicted in this cartoon are well known. A British submarine was stranded, helpless, on the Danish coast. Its men were lined up—as men once lined up on the Birkenhead—and stood at attention while German guns poured shell on them and their craft. Further, this happened in Danish territorial waters, where, by all the laws of humanity, and by the law of nations as well, the crew of the submarine were entitled to consider themselves immune. Had there been any respect for international law on the part of their aggressors, they would have been immune.
Now, if one observes the faces of the two German naval officers in the cartoon, it is easy to understand why such outrages as this have come about. Raemaekers knows his German, and, whether he is portraying officer or man, emperor or soldier, he takes care in each case to bring out the fact that the man represented belongs to a nation that has either lost, or has not yet found, a soul. These two who stand above the guns are two of the world’s materialists, men who understand only that the end must be accomplished, no matter what the means may be.
From their soulless philosophy has arisen not only incidents like these, but the manufacture of a German God, such as the speeches of the Kaiser describe. There has arisen, too, the denial of Western Christianity altogether in a certain patronage of Islam, designed to placate Turkish opinion, a patronage that is inconsistent even with the worship of the German God. It is all means to the one end, world domination. Germany has set out to gain the whole world, and has lost what soul she had. Striving to set herself above the law, she has merely placed herself outside the law, and for this her punishment is at hand.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
CERTAIN publications in neutral countries, notably in America, have given room in their pages during the course of the war to little sketches—obviously part of the German system of propaganda—designed to show that the Allied estimate of German barbarities is at the very least a huge exaggeration, and is possibly altogether fabricated. The term “undue sentimentality” is frequently used; travelers in the occupied territories are represented as seeing the inhabitants quite contented under German rule and surprised at the mention of atrocities. Their conquerors are quite good people, necessarily subjecting them to strict discipline, but in no way unjust. There may have been atrocities somewhere, at some time, but these travellers cannot get any reliable accounts of them.
Many of the papers that publish this sort of thing are probably quite ignorant of its source; others, of course, do so with full knowledge of the merits of the case and of the reason for its publication. Evidence collected on oath from sufferers is ignored, and so cleverly are these little sketches done that one is inclined to believe the German is not so black as he has been painted.
But not one of these sketches ever ventures near the subject of the Lusitania, the Arabic, the Scarborough bombardment, or Louvain—or any other of those horrors that are established beyond question in the minds of men. And wherever these German efforts at lulling the world’s conscience by sophistries appear, there should this cartoon appear also, as a corrective. Throughout half the world these murdered children lie under earth and water, and to forget them in the day when Germany fears to add more to their number would be to share this modern Herod’s infamy.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
THE old emperor of Austria was said to have very vague ideas about the present war. According to one fairly well authenticated story, he sometimes fancied himself in 1866, and hoped that his troops were killing a great many of those infernal Prussians. But Ferdinand of Bulgaria is no imbecile. He is not a very able man, though certain journalists have extolled his talents; he is merely cunning and ambitious. His subjects do not love him. He is very extravagant, and preferred, even before the war, to spend some eight months of the year in other countries, where the opportunities for amusement are greater than at Sofia. He is also a great stickler for etiquette, which his subjects despise, and his court is a queer mixture of complicated ceremony and bohemian license.
The Bulgarians have always disliked him, and his policy in involving them in a war with Russia is not likely to stimulate their loyalty. We cannot wonder that he feels safer in a neutral country, such as Switzerland. Bulgaria is a classic land of political assassination; every year several unpopular politicians are “removed,” and no one thinks much about it. Ferdinand’s chances of dying in his bed are not favorable, unless he decides to say good-bye to his “beloved people.” In that case, he may find distraction at Monte Carlo, which knows him well; and the sturdy peasants of Bulgaria, who have many good qualities, will be well rid of a knave.
W. R. INGE, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
SOME time ago Louis Raemaekers drew a cartoon entitled “On Their Way to Calais,” representing German corpses floating toward the sea. It will be remembered that the Belgians let water into their dykes and so flooded great tracts of the northern country. The inundation was one of the obstacles—added to the determination of the Allies-which balked the second great ambition of the Kaiser. If he failed in winning Paris, he thought that at least he might win Calais.
The present picture portrays another of the German failures. The road to Verdun is blocked not only by the gallant resistance of the French, but by the heaps of German slain, amounting, we are told, to at least five hundred thousand men. In six months the enemy gained only a mile or so of country, and though the furious attacks continue, there is no reason for thinking they will be more successful than those which have broken down in the past.
Why the Germans elected to make their desperate assault on Verdun is another matter. Probably many motives entered into the decision. The German higher staff clearly underrated the fighting value of the French. After the much-advertised determination to smash the Russians on the Eastern frontier, and perhaps to press forward and capture Petrograd, it seemed necessary to gain some triumph in order to satisfy the wishes of Berlin and impress the Allies with the invincible character of the Teuton hosts. Supposing the enemy succeeded in taking Verdun, it would at all events be a spectacular victory, even though the military advantages might not be great. If the attack failed, at all events it might succeed in one of its objects—to destroy the French morale. Therefore the Crown Prince, whose susceptibilities were also to be considered, was set to work to destroy the French salient, and he has sacrificed division after division to accomplish his purpose.
The Crown Prince has not obtained much distinction in the present war, and if the object was to crown him with laurels of victory, the result has been disastrous. To lose as many as five hundred thousand men, when the question of man-power is becoming serious for the Central Empires, is a reckless policy which could only be justified, if justified at all, by a colossal success. As we know, in six months’ fighting the positions remained very much the same—attack and counter-attack, loss and gain, masses of Germans driven up to slaughter and the French still holding the much-coveted positions. Both east and west of the Meuse the story has been the same.
Mr. Raemaekers’ picture remains as true to the facts as ever it was. “On Their Way to Verdun” is a history of enormous massacre and little triumph for the Germans, to whom Verdun appeared originally an easy prey.
W. L. COURTNEY.
ONE felt interested in the “Campaign for Honorable Peace,” until it was learned that the propagandists designed to proceed on Herr Bethmann-Hollweg’s formula. But the map to which the German Chancellor referred has already altered since he offered it as a basis for negotiation, and before the German speakers have stumped the Fatherland it may happen that still deeper modifications will appear on the existent lines. The “honorable peace” at present in the minds of Prince Wedel and his committee bears a suspicious resemblance to a very respectable victory for Germany, and it is only the continued, carefully fostered ignorance of that country that can make the forthcoming campaign less ridiculous to the German man-in-the-street than it appears to ourselves. The Kaiser’s sham door is still stuffed with high explosives, and Herr Bethmann-Hollweg’s tears will help to water no olive branch.
Consider the only possible conditions of peace that do not involve a treasonable attitude of mind in England and the Allies, and then observe Germany’s attitude to those conditions.
We may reduce the vital points to three, with M. Gustave Hervé; and in taking his terms, be it remembered that we speak with the lips of a great man and a great pacifist.
He recognizes the awful need to destroy the domination of the Central Powers and crush German militarism for the sake of his own ideals; and, that done, dreams of the only possible peace and sees it based on a triple foundation. The first and obvious need is that which the Union of Democratic Control and those who think in its terms seem unable to perceive as the most vital: a defeated Germany. Germany is the obstacle that militates against any sort of future safety for great or small States. It follows, therefore, that until we can impose our peace ideal upon her, no Allied peace worthy the name is possible; and since our terms must be profoundly distasteful to Germany and her first accomplice, it is vain to present them until her power to decline them has been destroyed.
Only from a vanquished Germany may the remaining vital conditions of peace follow. With her defeat she must be called upon to scrap the fatal poisons that led to her insanity, and take her daily food no more from the hands of war lords, hireling professors, and publicists. She must be cleansed, freed of her seven devils, and taught that the only sovereign power human progress can henceforth recognize is the sovereignty of a people’s will. For the fighting kingdoms know now at this bitter cost one eternal truth: that not nations, but their rulers will wars and make them.
If ideals of internationalism falter before this condition, and M. Hervé’s peace will increase the enthusiasm of nationality, his far-reaching view sees greater hopes beyond. For his third stipulation allows no subject peoples. He would have Europe found a practical and living system of justice upon these ruins—a system sprung of honor and honesty, and based on international physical strength.
From such a system federation must sooner or later spring, and the peace ideals of nationalist and internationalist alike grow from dreams into realities.
The victory that can win such terms will in truth be “a victory of industry, commerce, the arts, and humanity.”
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
ALTHOUGH this manifestation of the German spirit is new, and belongs to this war only, yet the spirit itself is as old as Prussian power. That spirit was evident in 1813, in the Napoleonic wars; it was evident in the campaign of Sadowa, and again in the Franco-German war of 1870, when the murder of women and children was proved to be the Prussian form of retaliation for perfectly legitimate acts of war. This cartoon, which first appeared after one of the earlier Zeppelin raids on England, gives another result of the Prussian belief in terrorism as an aid to war; the result is new, but the policy behind it is old.
Because that policy is old, and is a deep-rooted principle of Prussianism, any talk of “peace terms” is futile, and the “honorable peace” of which German deputies talk in their gatherings is an impossibility. There can be no terms for the nation that does these things, no bargaining with it, and the world that has wakened to the real nature of the thing which has attacked civilization will take care that the thing itself has no power to impose “terms” in the day when peace returns.
It is worth noting that Germany alone among the nations has built Zeppelins, and worthy of note, too, that these machines have served no useful military purpose in the decisive actions of the war. Along the battle fronts they do not appear, for they are too fragile to be risked in purely military work. In the great naval battle of Jutland they served no useful purpose, and the war has proved them instruments of murder, safe only in darkness and undefended areas. And in saying that Germany alone has built them in fleets, one says that Germany alone has pinned faith to terrorism and a policy of murder, which is steadily winning its just reward.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
IMPERIAL utterances are, or were till lately, treated with great respect in Germany. What the “all-highest” says must surely be true. But a modern oracle, if he wishes to keep his credit, should avoid prediction. He may falsify the past and misread the present with impunity; but he will be wise to leave the future alone. The Kaiser has been imprudent. He began by telling his troops to walk over the “contemptible little British army,” the finest and most experienced professional soldiers in the world; next he informed them that they would all be at home again “at the fall of the leaf,” in 1914; then he hazarded the statement that Russia was done for, and the Allies generally at the end of their resources; and lastly the carefully prepared thrust, which, he declared, was to give France the coup de grâce, has missed its aim.
It is impolite to treat an emperor in this way; he is not used to it and does not like it. It is the business of his subjects to see that his reign is a blaze of triumph. A breakdown after so many years of rehearsals! It is really too bad; there must have been gross mismanagement somewhere.
W. R. INGE, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
TO many people, and especially to all Germans, the attitude of the South African Boers in the Great War has been one of its most surprising features. It was not a surprise to Raemaekers, and here, in this cartoon, he states his reason, as the plain homely figure of the old President Kruger expresses it to General Christian de Wet, who took the wrong side. Kruger does not forget how the Kaiser led him on by telegrams and secret messages of sympathy, and after all, when the war broke out in South Africa, this same Kaiser made no attempt to implement his promises. Some time later all the world learned the facts from the Kaiser’s own lips, when he boasted of having been the friend of the British and of having helped them during the South African War, by communicating to General Roberts a strategic plan for crushing the Dutch. There is certainly no reason to suppose that Roberts or Kitchener made any use of the Kaiser’s plan, because they won the victory. If they had used the plan, the result would have been different.
In this cartoon the Kaiser is the ingenious diplomatist once more. Though he deceived the Dutch formerly, he is now trying to induce them to join him against Britain; and he did succeed in perverting the judgment of de Wet. But the solid, homely sense of the Dutch came to the right conclusion. The man who has once deliberately deceived a people is not likely to succeed in deceiving them a second time.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY.
WHEN the history of this war is written with a sense of detachment which only time can give—written, moreover, by an impartial neutral, with the insight and intelligence of a Motley or a Hume—it will be interesting and instructive to read the chapters which deal with the conviction obsessing an entire nation that England for some mysterious purposes of her own brought about hostilities, and that Germany, very reluctantly, was forced to draw the sword in defense of the fatherland. No reasonable man can doubt that this conviction is sincere upon the part of a large majority of our enemies. From first-hand evidence it is equally indisputable that the few, the Court Party, for example, and certain writers, have frankly admitted the Teuton aims and ambitions, crystallized into the famous phrase—“Weltmacht oder Niedergang.” The amazing thing—perhaps the most amazing fact of the war—is the moral Atlantic which heaves between the few who know and the many who do not. And the bridging of this illimitable ocean, the future enlightenment of at least sixty million persons, must be, for the moment, the problem which is perplexing and tormenting the minds of the Great General Staff.
Sooner or later—sooner, possibly, than we think—the truth must out. What will happen then? Conjecture is simply paralyzed at the issues involved. Briefly, it comes to this: these sixty millions have been humbugged to an extent unparalleled in history. During three years they have been gorged with lies, swallowed always with avidity and with increasing appetite. The credulity of the ignorant may be taken for granted; in this case it is the credulity of the wise, the so-called intellectuals of Germany, which clamors to Heaven for explanation. Are these schoolmasters, publicists, theologians, and scientists hypocrites? That is the question which our cartoonist puts to us here. That is the question which the impartial historian will be called upon to answer.
Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, have answered that question already. We believe firmly that the informed Huns deliberately befooled their uninformed fellow-countrymen. The few were honest and sincere in the Jesuitical faith that the end, world dominion, justified the means. They scrapped ruthlessly all principles which stood between themselves and an insensate ambition. Had they won through to Paris and London, a nation drunk with victory would have acclaimed their policy. But they have not won through, and the reckoning has to be met.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.
THE German army has fought in this war with the Allies in front of it and behind it the German press.
Never has a war been accompanied by such ink-shed and such wholesale massacre of truth. The Allies have done their bit in this direction, but their bit has been as a mole-hill to Everest compared with the work of the Central Powers.
The fighting men resent it. They don’t like to be told that their foe is a fool, even if they are getting the better of him. When they are getting the worse the statement is a more peculiarly exasperating insult.
They don’t like to be told that their victories are defeats, but they like even less to be told that their defeats are victories. In the one case they feel that the press men are fools, in the other they feel that the press men have made fools of them.
There is a whole lot of common sense in human nature, even in German human nature, and an army hit in its common sense receives a blow.
This is why, perhaps, Hindenburg has been issuing reports lately approaching the truth.
There is a lot of common sense in the old Marshal.
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.
RAEMAEKERS is a keen prophetic politician as well as satirist, and not seldom his pencil has pointed to future events as yet unanticipated by our “sufficient for the day” diplomacy.
One would have thought, however, that the tergiversation of the King of Greece had made it sufficiently clear no good thing could come out of his country while he continued to rule it.
Yet justice must be done to him. To Serbia, indeed, he proved false, borrowing the “scrap of paper” doctrine from his masters; but to the Allies he has preserved an unchanging front, and the logical action of those Powers who affirmed his throne should long ago have been to remove him from it, when he proceeded to abuse the constitution and deprive Venizelos of the power the nation had put into that minister’s hands. Hesitancy and delay have divided a Greece that was united when Venizelos fell, and the sleepless activity of Germany bears the present fruits—so poisonous for us. It passes the wit of the man-in-the-street to understand what secret influence permitted the deadlock; but it seems hard to believe that difficulties connected with Greece’s future have not arisen in the councils of the Allies. Soon the hand that is willing to wound, but afraid to strike, may be powerless to do so, for the situation develops very swiftly and the attitude of the French Admiral du Fournet has left no doubt of the Allied determination.
As we write, after needless bloodshed, Greece gives way, the fighting is at an end and her batteries of mountain guns are about to be surrendered. We are told, also, that the refusal of the Government was not inspired by the King, but by the military, who have formed a secret league with the reservists.
The exasperating problem of Greece has delayed progress very seriously and, indeed, may be seen to have modified the whole course of the war in the Balkans; for had we enjoyed her confidence and insisted on the recognition of Venizelos from the first, the country must long since have become an ally. With her aid, instead of the withdrawal from Gallipoli, there might have been recorded a triumphant campaign with radical results.
But to cry over spilt milk is no business of the present. Concerning the modern Greek it may be written that “unstable as water, he shall not excel”; but we can yet hope that with our adequate recognition and support of the only Greek who counts, his power will triumph and his great spirit fortify a feeble people. His marvellous patience has been worthy of our utmost admiration, and those who would withhold absolute support from him at this critical juncture are certainly not the friends of Greece. That a country of such majestic tradition—a nation that has played her paramount part in the philosophy and art of the world—should be extinguished in this conflagration would not be the least of the tragedies our eyes may yet see; but the danger still exists, unless a sterner and more comprehensive attitude be taken to save Greece from herself and the ruler who is still permitted to occupy her throne.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
THE former German Chancellor was well known to be neither a Pan-German nor a lover of war. He did his best to propitiate the war party by the truculence of his harangues against England; but Reventlow and his friends were notoriously dissatisfied with him. He probably belongs to a large class of moderate-minded Germans who were brought over to the war party by appeals to their fears. The militarists dinned into their ears the ominous facts that Russia was reorganizing and increasing her army, and planning strategic railways; that France was doing the same; that everything pointed to a concerted attack upon Germany, say in 1917. “It is absolutely necessary,” they said, “to strike now, before our enemies are ready.”
This large class probably included the emperor, and without its concurrence the war could hardly have been launched. It is natural for such men to protest that they had no aggressive designs, and that they only wished to protect themselves against attack. It may be true, as far as they are concerned; but it is not true of the soldiers who frightened them for their own ends. Behind the Chancellor, in this picture, hides a ruffian in uniform.
It is also true that Germany has conducted the war in such a manner that that nation is really fighting with a rope round its neck. The moderate party would now welcome peace. But on what terms? These have been divulged; but the Allies do not seem to have thought them worth serious consideration. As long as the military caste is the director of German policy it does not seem likely that any statesmanlike proposal will come from Berlin. Meanwhile, Justice holds the scales and waits in vain for some offer to make reparation for outrages unparalleled in civilized warfare.
W. R. INGE.
A DROWNING man catches at straws. The Kaiser, when the rising waters threaten to overwhelm his bark, looks for salvation to the dove.
At fairly regular intervals through the length of the war the German Chancellor, speaking in his master’s name, has announced to an unsympathetic world—to the western as well as to the eastern hemisphere—that Germany is ready, nay is longing, for peace—for peace on her own terms. None can doubt the sincerity of the declaration. Her powerful preparations have yielded her, in the field and on the sea, successes of a kind, but they are successes which decide nothing. Her reiterated pleas for peace acknowledge that only the voluntary withdrawal of her foes from the fray can assure her a final triumph. The Kaiser and his friends profess from time to time that they are weary of war’s brutalities and are eager to enjoy its spoils unmolested. The fatuous cry rings very hollow in the ears of the Allies and neutral peoples alike, and humanity outside Germany and her impotent kinsfolk in America marvel at the Kaiser’s and his Chancellor’s waste of breath.
Mr. Raemaekers’ cartoon supplies the key to the situation. The tide, despite all local and temporary appearances to the contrary, is running against the Kaiser. His men and money are dwindling. Foolhardy exploits, which speciously look like victories, are straining his resources to the breaking point. The waves are buffeting him, and unless the dove, which he releases from his hand, brings back to him tidings of a falling flood—tidings beyond all rational hope, his doom is sure.
SIDNEY LEE.
THIS cartoon illustrates what is, perhaps, the fundamental principle which governs Kultur. The “Will to Conquer” has become such an obsession that it defies not only law, but also those instinctive and primitive compromises upon which law establishes itself. The Huns say: “I hold you to your obligations; I scrap mine.” A Hun can sell munitions to belligerents. During the Boer War they supplied England with anything she wanted. But it is monstrous, according to the Hun code, that Uncle Sam should munition the Allies. The Huns starved the women and children of France. But it is abominable that Hun women and children should be starved by England. One could cite a score of such instances. Raemaekers remembers the treatment accorded by the “All Highest” to Oom Paul. So does everybody—except, apparently, the “All Highest” himself. He and his expected the cordial coöperation of the South Africans whom they had flouted and abandoned.
To what can we attribute this singular expectation?
The answer may be found by the psychologist who has imagination enough to Prussianize himself, and to look, panoramically, at the world from the Prussian viewpoint. Prussia still believes in Weltmacht. A Prussian is self-constituted a superman. So convinced is he of world victory that he is amazed and exasperated with those—be they weak or powerful—who dare to question his future supremacy. That supremacy, as he admits candidly, must be established by force. He proposes to rule by fear. He is confounded when he discovers that there are men and women who do not fear him. In this cartoon Kruger puts a question which it may be instructive to attempt to answer.
Kruger: “You want my people to help you now, and yet when I came to ask you for help you chased me from your door like a dog.”
Kaiser: “Quite true. I had forgotten your little affair, which was essentially negligible then as now. Had I helped you, I might have embroiled myself with a Great Power with whom I was not ready to fight. To-day, I am ready. Behold in me, my friend, a World-Conqueror! I give you my All-Highest word that I shall win. What pains and perplexes me is that you don’t back a certain winner. Hoch dem Kaiser!”
That, in fine, is the Prussian point of view. Woe to those who do not realize that it “pays” to bow down before the juggernaut of might!
But there must be moments, ever-recurring moments, when the “All-Highest” mutters to his august self: “What will become of ME if I don’t win?”
And at such moments he may recall the vast and pathetic figure of Oom Paul, whom he chased from his door like a dog.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.
ENGLAND has always had the credit for hypocrisy. The historic commonplace, not wholly undeserved, was this, that with the advantages of Puritanism, we developed its odious features and, from the Commonwealth, began to thank God we were not as other men. The spirit then created proved anathema to the Latin nations, and their accusation, founded on truth, stuck to us.
But civilization may cede the distinction to Germany henceforth, for never until now has self-interest been practised and enforced under the name of God as by the fatherland. Their archaic deity is invoked daily, from the Kaiser to the last poor boy, whose bloodstained pocket-book is found upon his corpse, with penciled prayer that the cup may be taken from him.
Few things have more illuminated the spirit that actuates Germany’s higher command than the answer to America’s Note on the subject of the Belgian and French deportations.
America, as might have been expected, was peculiarly sensitive before a return to the principle of slavery. None has known and felt the meaning of that awful word; none has fought to expunge the fact from civilization as she did. But her Note met the fate of all her Notes. She was told that Germany, and not America, is Belgium’s true friend and that an all-wise and prevenient Government has torn out the remaining adult population of conquered territory into the bosom of the fatherland—for its own sake. Such transparent insults to the intelligence of a great nation were flung at America for two years; but one must rejoice that the day of reckoning has come.
Meantime the raided Belgians, of whom a hundred thousand have been swept into Germany, are working at the point of the bayonet for their conquerors, and this drawing is no cartoon, but a simple transcript of truth repeated in a thousand of the enemy’s munition factories to-day. The German lathe-worker joins the army, and his place is taken by the father of those he goes to slay.
And neutral nations still listen patiently, while this people proclaims itself the “Chosen of the High God.”
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
THIS is an artist’s fanciful version of the headlong fall of one of those inflated monsters on which the enemy had set such high hopes. Well, we have been inconvenienced not a little by them in our goings and comings by night, and no one need pretend that he likes bombs being dropped on his or his children’s heads out of a midnight sky. But in the old glorious volunteering days we never had such a recruiting sergeant, so that the military value of the Zeppelin need not be denied.
Apart from this manifest effect, there has transpired in this whole business little to disturb the verdict of our optimists that there was nothing to worry about. They venture only under cover of a darkness which prevents them hitting what they dimly see from their once safe heights, which is little, or seeing what they hit, which is much—England being a biggish mark.
And advertising their presence as burglars who knock over coal-scuttles, a boy in an aeroplane flies over them and their miles of aluminium and acres of silk make a Brock’s benefit for an awakened city to cheer. We should cheer less, thinking with some pity of the imprisoned crews, if the affair were conceived with less reckless vagueness, without such disproportion between aim and result. A blind ape with a ton of high explosives could do a good deal of damage in a city with ordinary luck.
But Raemaekers sees this in symbol: “a vulnerable gasbag,” he seems to say, “flaming, spectacular always, to destruction.”
JOSEPH THORP.
FRITZ, apart from the blood with which he stained every rung of his two ladders, climbed well, as these things go; unfortunately for him, he was not careful at the outset to see that his ladders were solidly based. Not only did he base them both in bad diplomacy, but he added to these bases a lack of understanding of the temper of the nations whom he opposed, and then again he added a scrupulous disregard for what are generally termed the humanities. He viewed mankind as subservient to the machinery that mankind should control, whether it be machinery of government, of war, of trade, or of thought and philosophy. Organization was of more moment to him than the spirit that should control organization, and for that he will pay the penalty.
One may observe, with a second glance at this cartoon, that though Fritz has reached very nearly to the tops of his two ladders, yet he will never get beyond the last rungs, even if he steadies himself and his supports sufficiently to get on to those rungs. For over his head there outthrusts a ledge. Could he surmount it, he might overlook the world, and one may call that ledge the universal conscience, which the artist has pictured elsewhere in different form. It is the last obstacle, and it is insurmountable. With his crimes and cruelties, it is unthinkable that Fritz should ever finish his climb, for the conscience of the world will not permit it.
And yet another point that the cartoon suggests. This climber, the typical German, is not the stuff of which successful climbers are made. Muscle is there, and a certain amount of brain, but success in an enterprise of such magnitude demands a soul, and for sign of that one may look in vain.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
ECCE Homo!
In the hideous record of what took place at Wittenberg, the fact which to me, personally, stands out in grotesque salience is the cowardice of the Hun doctors, who lied, incontinent, from the ravages of the pestilence which their negligence had provoked. In England, before the war, Hun doctors were exalted above our own. That we owe much to their indefatigable patience and research cannot be denied. To belittle their achievements, especially in bacteriology, would be fatuous. And it would be as fatuous to indict the courage of the many because we hold indisputable evidence of the cowardice of the few. Nevertheless, the facts of Wittenberg remain, an indelible stain upon the Herren Professoren, and Raemaekers, in this cartoon, indicates unerringly the cause which brought about so ignominious a retreat.
They had turned their faces from that ineffable Face which looks down in sorrow and pity upon the sufferings of Mankind.
However we may regard that Face, whether as a precious symbol of the Love which redeemed the world or as a Real and Divine Presence, this much is certain. What It stands for in the history of civilization cannot be ignored. It sustained the early martyrs and countless myriads since during bitter hours of suffering and torment; It has illumined all battlefields; It shines most steadfastly in storm and stress; It loses its incomparable splendor only in the sunshine of a too smug prosperity.
The doctors of Wittenberg may have glimpsed It, and glimpsing It reviled It! Even to them that Face, divested by them of divine attributes, must possess a material significance, inasmuch as none can escape sorrow and pain. The cartoonist portrays the “All-Highest” hiding behind the colossal image of Culture, the culture which has sprung to life at his touch, the machine which has mastered its monarch, the machine which defies God!
Cowering behind that machine, aghast at the power he is unable to control, we may leave the “All-Highest,” who boasts that he is God’s vice-regent upon earth.
Culture at Wittenberg!
Culture bolting from Wittenberg!
Perhaps Raemaekers will give us a cartoon showing the back of Culture. We behold her in this cartoon crowned: we should like to see her uncrowned.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.
HERE, with a vengeance, is majesty shorn of its externals. Although in this cartoon we get Raemaekers in lighter vein, yet the irony and force of the artist are as fully expressed as in those grimmer studies from which he who runs may read the fate of Belgium, of Serbia, and of the many non-combatants who have found death at sea through Germany’s mad dream of conquest.
The elder Willie, obviously, does not like the set of his coat, after the glory of his many uniforms; the younger Willie, apparently, has finished his trying on, and from his expression the result is as much as he could expect, and no more. In both there is that suggestion of posturing, of playing to the gallery and being determined that the clothes shall be suited to the part, for which William Hohenzollern was noted before ever this war showed him as the most infamous ruler of modern time.
There is a certain bitter correctness in Raemaekers’ estimate of these exalted personages. Shorn of their uniforms, posturing before a mirror in a slightly Parisian (using the adjective in the pre-war, foppish sense) garb, they show as very little men—rather contemptible, in fact, as, of course, they are. For it is open to any man to dream of ruling the world, and of setting nations by the throat for the sake of an ambition that civilization cannot tolerate; it is open to any head of a government to set the machinery in motion which might gratify that ambition—but it is open only to a man, in the very best of that one syllable, to bring his ambition to fruition, and even then only by strict adherence to natural law. And these two, posturing as Raemaekers makes them posture here, have ignored law; they had the wit to dream, but not the brain to make reality of dream, nor the moral sense through which they might have made the world acknowledge the dream as worth while translating into actualities. Probably, if they were set in a St. Helena of to-day, they would fold their arms and try on cocked hats, as once they tried on uniforms. But though the clothes declare the man, they cannot make of him other than he is, and these two are mere posturers, whatever may be their attitudes.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
HERE the artist has depicted the Kaiser as a modern Ajax, not defying the lightning but afraid of it. The arch Hun sees the neutral Powers one by one abandoning their neutrality and entering the lists against him and his gospel of force and world-power for Germany. Italy, after slow progress and positive and seemingly disastrous set-backs, has emerged to the fullness of a success which has proved invaluable to her Allies as a whole. In Rumania’s dark hour there is yet a gleam of hope and the indications of a dawn which shall see her triumphant and reaping where she has sown, and ultimately honored among the nations for the part she has determined to play in the struggle for freedom and for international integrity. The reward of high courage and faith is often not at the moment, but is none the less certain for all that. Truly the keenest of all edges is upon the sword drawn in the cause of freedom. Rumania has drawn that sword, and it will not be sheathed until freedom from tyranny has been won, not alone for her but for the nations of Europe as a whole.
CLIVE HOLLAND.
NOTHING should have more utterly “staggered humanity” in the conduct and prosecution of a war that has been from first to last an exhibition of Hunnish ferocity than the elasticity of the Hun “conscience.” The Prussian, indeed, seems to have assembled in his person all the most ignoble qualities of the untutored savage, and the most despicable vices of the political and moral Chadband and Stiggins of common quotation. Deeds which should have served to bring the whole neutral world actively upon the side of the Allies, which should have called forth protests that could not be misunderstood by the offenders, have been made even more revolting and unforgivable by reason of the horrible association by the Kaiser and his myrmidons of the Divine Being with them.
“Gott mit Uns” has not merely been adopted as a motto by a people who have been guilty of atrocities which rank with those of Nero and Attila, but has been used as a cloak for deeds of diabolism which have caused a shudder to run through the civilized world. And in this cartoon the artist has sought to depict an outraged conscience pointing the finger of accusation at the world which has looked on, contenting itself with mild protests. Grasped in the hand of this accusing figure is the Hun; a dripping dagger, which has been used to assassinate innocent women, children, and civilians is in one hand, and a bomb containing poison gas in the other. A Hun with his favorite motto inscribed upon his belt. Surely a sight to make angels weep, and the Recording Angel to seek to veil her face.
The Hun at bay has added to the list of crimes to be ultimately laid at his door that of slave-raider. And the tears of women and girls, and the blood of the men who resisted the slave-raiders, cry aloud to Heaven from the stricken land of Belgium and the conquered Provinces of France.
And the slave-raider’s cry is, “Gott mit Uns,” accompanied by the crack of rifle, the agonized cry of mothers and daughters separated from their men folk, and the wail of little children left to starve and die.
There is an old saying, “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” That madness, productive of diabolical wickedness, is eating into the very brain and vitals of Germany. And like a mad dog she must, in the persons of her responsible leaders, be destroyed utterly.
CLIVE HOLLAND.
NOT only those who are fighting the battle of tyranny and defending force against the arms of civilization have failed to see this dazzling white light in which they stand. Many who now support the Central Kingdoms, to the extent of desiring an indecisive peace, are similarly blind to the pure ray which bathes these allegorical figures. The foulness of the shadowed protagonists comes from within. It belongs to their spirits; and yet those who desire peace can survey facts and, in the name of righteousness, wish that no humility or indignity should fall upon them. The hearts of men are being searched out and by their deeds shall men be judged. Vain, then, to beg that Germany be not thrust beyond the pale of nations, for who put her there? Vain to pray that no humiliation or indignity fall to her lot when peace returns, for who have brought them upon her? She has outraged herself and stands humiliated before her own conscience. “Let no wound fall upon her inviolate land,” cry the peacemakers. As well might they pray that a man shall escape the harvest he has sown. Not Belgium, not Serbia, not Armenia stream with innocent blood and lie polluted under the filthiness of these premeditated crimes; but Germany, Austria, Turkey reek to the hearts of their capitals. Their kingdoms are defiled, their streets shadowed and stained by their own abominations; the unnumbered ghosts of murdered women and children haunt their homes.
Let us hear no more cant that Germany is a great and noble nation, that the Turk is an honorable, clean fighter and a good friend. We cannot see one or other of them for the blood and tears of their defenseless victims; nor do we desire to see them, nor breathe the same air with them until the lustral waters have washed and the cleansing fires have purged. We must know with whom we are called to make peace before the word can touch our lips; for shall honest kingdoms be ordered to treat with this horned murderer, or the leprous reptile crawling away from the light into familiar darkness? Let the defeated nations cast out the devils that have led them into their present degradation before they dare to call upon the sacred name of Peace.
A distinguished Academician, Mr. Nicholas Butler, President of Columbia University, has very effectively voiced the situation in a recent utterance. He holds that “no greater opportunity for an act of constructive and far-reaching statesmanship has ever presented itself in modern history than that now presented to the Governments of the Allied Powers.”
May we be found equal to this tremendous task when the way to humanity’s triumph has been flung open by the spirits of Joan of Arc and St. George, who typify our united arms.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
“WE will bring happiness to the conquered country after the war.”
Pomposity, ponderosity, machine-like movement, ruthless, cold, and calculating logic, which sticks at nothing, not even the lowest of low cunning, want of sense of humor, the absence of anything like sportsmanship or chivalry—these are qualities which the average Englishman does not admire, and finds it difficult even to understand. He cannot help reading his own characteristics, which are for good and bad so different, into other men and creatures. He cannot understand their entire absence, and it is difficult for him to believe that men so differently constituted can exist.
Mr. Raemaekers wants to make us realize the fact, to present it embodied. The legitimate emphasis of his caricature has this for its object.
Ponderous, pompous, pachydermatous, self-satisfied, fat, successful and comfortable; but without feeling for the comfort of others. We have here the type of German military domination. Submit to Germany and you will be happy, in the German way, which is the best way, because it is German. If you don’t like that, you must lump it. That is the message of this speaking likeness.
HERBERT WARREN.
OF all Raemaekers’ cartoons this is the one that pleases me most. It is the French Army.
The Grand Army that tramped away into the night after the bugles of 1812-15 left behind it more than a sentiment and a story. It was the spirit of that army that broke the Germans at the Marne and held them at Verdun, and it is the same spirit that is holding them now on the Somme.
Here is the fighting face of France, recalling the baggage carts of the Beresina no less than the guns of Austerlitz. The old soldier of the Emperor, the old soldier of the Republic. Cambronne no less than Joffre. It is the face that has seen the snows of Russia and the sunlight on the Pyramids, victory and defeat, the heights and the depths, and always, across all and through all, the fair land of France.
The secret is in the eyes. Look at them!
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.
THAT really is the essence of the matter, the summing up of the World War in an illuminating phrase. The Machine versus the Man! Before the outbreak of war, in those far-off days when we talked so glibly of human progress and civilization, the machinery which controlled and coördinated life seemed to be a bigger thing than life itself. The Machine in politics, in our myriad industries, in our moments of relaxation was scrapping men relentlessly. The very few perceived this and protested vigorously, but quite in vain. Even in religion, using the word in its highest sense, the Machine held human souls in its grip and ground them out to an approved pattern.
Was the war inflicted upon a generation of fools to teach them wisdom? It may well be so.
Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas!
Juvenal’s well-worn tag echoes down the centuries. We ask ourselves once more the eternal question: What makes life worth the living? None of us, to-day, dares to answer that question lightly, but all—even our enemies in the field—know by bitterest experience that Man is greater than the Machine, that he soars high above it and may be crushed but not killed by it. Humanity may be torpedoed, but it remains immortal.
Our beloved dead still live.
And what message do they send us?
Surely the gospel of kindness, which has always triumphed gloriously over cruelty. Indeed, the supreme lesson of the war would appear to be this, and this only: that kindness is the supreme virtue and cruelty the supreme vice.
If our enemies could be made to realize so fundamental a truth, if the men who control the destinies of the Allies could make it plain to the Central Powers that we are fighting against the Machine in life and not against men, the Dove of Peace might begin to preen its wings for flight.
Humanity has been torpedoed, but we look for its resurrection. Petard must be hoisted by petard; that, for the moment, is inevitable. A patched-up peace is unthinkable. Such a conclusion, most happily, has become almost universal.
And afterward?
If the hopes and aspirations of to-day bear fruit to-morrow, may we not envisage a brighter future during these dark hours?
To think otherwise, to maintain, with whatever specious argument, that Force must dominate mankind, is not merely a negation of Christianity, but a negation of Humanity. Such is the creed of the Hun. By it he has been judged and found wanting.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.
THE suggestion of this caricature is perhaps not so obvious to Englishmen as might be wished, for it represents the Kaiser, and the forces behind him, as more broken down than we have reason to think they were, or at any rate, than they appeared to us at the time this cartoon first appeared. It may be that to the neutrals their cause seemed less hopeful, and more out-at-elbows, as here depicted. The continuous fall of the mark in neutral countries may mean this.
The figure of President Wilson is at any rate exceedingly clever. Detached, professorial, contemplative, slightly academic, not to say donnish, he contemplates “Mr. Turveydrop” and “Bill Sykes,” for such characters they appear to be, with pensive, amused speculation. He certainly cannot expect more than swagger and sham gentility, scarcely disguising brutal ruffianism, from such figures. But is not the reality more serious and murderous?
The Kaiser is doubtless an actor, but not quite such a shabby-genteel third-rater as this, and his bullies are no doubt burglars and ruffians, but not of the old-fashioned, bludgeon type; rather the smart, modern operators, armed with automatic revolvers, oxygen blowpipes, swift motors, and other appliances of up-to-date science. “Super-Hooligans” both doubtless are, but unfortunately not to be despised as enemies. This, however, would be less easy to present in caricature, and perhaps less telling.
The point is the folly of expecting any true “gentleness,” or anything but a veneer of gentility, from Germany.
HERBERT WARREN.
WHEN, in August of 1914, the German hosts set out on their way to victory and yet greater victory, they had in their minds a figure which, for them, had been girdled round with dignities almost sacred. Whatever their secret thoughts regarding this figure might have been, it was ostensibly something very nearly sacred; to the rest of the world it was an imperial figure, portrayed in many attitudes, but in practically every attitude there was the suggestion of illimitable pride. The world that is not Germany had laughed at this figure a little: over certain telegrams, over the assumption of genius in certain artistic fields, and over a versatility that was almost Neronic. There was not wanting, among free peoples, a certain amount of contempt for this figure.
Here you have the figure in a new attitude, and though at the time this cartoon was published the triumphs in Rumania were still to come, and the German lines of defense were apparently as strong as ever, yet the cartoon expressed a truth, as do all these cartoons of Raemaekers. As insecurely as is pictured here stood this man who aped Napoleon and Alexander, at whose bidding women and children were fed into the furnace of war, through whose senseless ambition countless homes were made places of mourning for the men who would return no more. More than three years of suffering, and the face of the world changed, the progress of the world arrested—for this!
Beneath him is the gulf; he has hurled millions into it, and here postures no more as second only to omnipotence, but waits the inevitable fall. Thank God that it is inevitable.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
IT is inevitable that there should be in every country degenerates who decline to play the game. England has her disreputable leaven of shirkers; France, whose heroism beggars description, has to reckon with her embusqués. The serene cheerfulness with which the bitterest sacrifices are faced daily by the mass of the nations engaged in the terrible conflict, bring into powerful relief the obliquity and depravity of the handful of men who seek to escape the heavy burden that lies upon all. There is no possibility of exaggerating the mean infamy of the men who seek their own safety by skulking behind the broad backs of the defenders of their country, when every call of duty and right demands their presence in the fighting-line. It is very difficult to distinguish between the sinfulness of shirking at a crisis like the present and the crime of overt treachery. No injustice would be done if every shirker were made to understand that he is liable to the traitor’s penalty if he persist in his offense.
The repetition of conscientious objections to war, at a time when a nation is committed to a strife in which any slackening spells for it practical annihilation, causes graver and graver perplexity. It is doubtful whether any healthy mind can now plead a conscientious objection without provoking suspicion of his powers of coherent reasoning. A condition of things has arisen in which private sentiment, however honestly cherished, is bound to yield to public needs. It is a tradition of the country in normal times to treat the conscientious objector with tenderness. As far as public safety allows, it is even now a proper function of Government to discriminate between an honest delusion, however anti-social, and a wilful defiance, from contemptible motives of selfishness or cowardice, of right principle. A very formidable danger clearly lurks in any continuance of the lax toleration which is often extended to the conscientious objector, by virtue of the opportunity such considerate treatment offers the shirker of indulging his evil propensities.
SIDNEY LEE.
THERE is no doubt a certain unfairness in the inevitable wartime method of laying the burden of the crimes of war upon this or that pair of shoulders. Princes in particular must pay this penalty attached to their august station. And few can have less just reason to complain than this slim heir of the Hohenzollerns who so thirsted for the glory of war. He has found out by now that it is a less glorious affair than it seemed when set forth in heady, unwise speech (after unwise dining) from the box of a Danzig theater.
Deprived of his expected bays by the idiotic obstinacy of the so utterly decadent French, his fond parent bestows on him the Order pour le Mérite with oak leaves. It is not quite easy to see why. Surely there cannot have been any obscure sardonic reference to tanning.
But if, as the artist suggests, and the plainest reading of the facts of the fruitless Verdun assault seems to confirm, lives of men were squandered in a reckless attempt to save the princeling’s face (which was, in fact, beyond saving), then does he richly deserve the grim decoration with which in the name of infamy he is here invested—the Order of Butchery, with knives. And you may view the crosses upon the pathetic mounds before Verdun as so many entries in the Recording Angel’s ledger.
JOSEPH THORP.
SAME here!
Same, I suppose, in every country.
The final necessity has put to the proof that which goes to the making of a man and of a nation.
The man who is prepared to lay down his life for his country simply regards it as a duty, and does it regardless of everything. And Duty is a noble leader.
The man who is not prepared to give up his usual pleasures and dissipations, even though his country be in extremity, looks askance at the call, labels it militarism, and will have none of it.
Every age and every nation has its shirkers, who have been only too willing to let any but themselves bear their burdens so that their own personal comfort might not be interfered with. And shirkers such as these have the deserved contempt of every honest man.
But, in strictest justice to the few—like the Friends, and those who believe with them that force is no remedy—while one cannot but wonder what would have become of the world if evil were to be allowed to ravage it at will, and while one finds it difficult to view matters from their standpoint, it must be acknowledged that the military coercion of genuine conscience in these days is an anachronism which galls one’s feelings.
The one thing we have now to guard against in this free land of ours is lest in breaking by force the unspeakable tyranny of Prussian militarism we lay our own necks under an equal yoke.
JOHN OXENHAM.
GERMANIA loved music and so the troubadour sang to her.
Gaily the troubadour sang of glory and empire, and the good German sword.
And he sang a song of Kultur, a pocketful of loot.
And a song of tears, the tears of widows and orphans in other lands, widows of foolish men who had denied her omnipotent will; and of foolish reluctant virgins to whom was given the shining compensation of bearing sons to her flushed warriors.
And if he sang of her own sons that lay before Liége, and by the Yser, and on the high road to Paris and to Calais, and Petrograd, it was still a song of glory in a minor but triumphant key.
For also he sang a song of an all-highest promise that, wreathed with the splendid bays of victory, her sons should return before the next ripening of the harvest. But the harvest was gathered and they came not.
And then he sang a song of the sea with the moan of the winds in it, and the cries of little children—which for a sea-song was not a pleasant song.
And thereafter with a fine operatic vehemence he broke into a song of glorious hate.
And again he sang (in a queer mocking voice) of the promise. But another harvest was garnered (and eaten) and still her sons returned not.
And she began to be afraid.
So (for he had a pretty wit) he sang again a song of glory and feasting, and there was laughter in his voice.
And at the last a song of thanks most indubitably sincere.
And she turned and looked upon the troubadour and found that he was Death—in the high boots of a German Hussar.
And she stopped her ears, not to mute his singing, but to shut out the thunder of the guns that came down all the winds.
JOSEPH THORP.
A BITTER satire on the moral and intellectual claims of Germany. The conquering hero of the twentieth century and the bearer of Kultur is no mere Hun. He is a “throw-back” to an ancestral type far more remote than Attila, who was a comparatively polished person. He is primitive Man, not Rousseau’s imaginary l’homme naturel, but the Urmensch, a veritable monster, gross, bloated, abominable, compact of evil, and more repulsive than the wild beasts he has tamed to do his hideous will. They are monstrous creatures too, but dull and brutish. They are incapable of moral judgment; they follow their instincts and know no better. But he knows. He is Man, to whom has been given understanding and lordship over all the beasts. He is their master by reason of his superior brain, and that superiority is the measure of his depravity. By choosing these savage creatures to be his companions and to do his pleasure he proclaims himself far lower than they, because he might have chosen otherwise.
We know those favorite satellites of his. One flies overhead—a vulture with gore dripping from beak and claws. Two others walk behind their master in docile servitude and ape his bearing as well as their dull senses and uncouth forms allow. One is a gorilla, with bared fangs and the glare of senseless destructiveness in his eyes; the other is a whiskered wolf, sly, murderous and ruthless. They bear the hero’s train and wear the marks of approbation he has bestowed upon them for the services they have rendered by the exercise of the qualities proper to their kind.
And there is one other. Ever as he goes, there wriggles along by his side a snake—that old serpent, the devil and the father of lies.
So accompanied and swelling with pride the conquering hero swaggers on over the bleached bones that bear witness to his triumph. He has decked his repulsive form with the incongruous trappings of civilization, and his foul visage wears an air of ineffable self-satisfaction and arrogant disdain. In his own conceit he cuts a splendid figure and is the object of universal admiration. From his girdle hang the heads of his latest victims and in his right hand he carries, delicately poised as a scepter and sign of sovereignty, a cudgel tipped with the hand of a child hacked off at the wrist. This is his title of honor. The savage beasts that accompany him cannot aspire to such majesty; they do not prey on their own kind.
And that is how a neutral sees the German hero.
ARTHUR SHADWELL.
IT appears to me that Raemaekers’ wonderful cartoons more often than not fall naturally into two main classes: the subtle and the direct. In both methods of appeal he is a past-master, and his message never fails to drive itself home, either through the medium of one’s intellect or one’s heart. Here we have a good and vivid example of the direct method of gaining our sympathy. An appeal to the emotional rather than to the intellectual within us.
The woes of devastated Belgium, of its starving population, of its desolate homes, of its orphaned children, may be said by some to be an “oft told tale.” But surely none looking upon this most poignant drawing can fail to understand much of the tragedy and misery brought about by the German occupation of Belgian soil and the methods of Kultur which for a period of three years now have held sway in that unhappy land.
Those of us who know the facts—the things which do not always get into the papers, as the phrase is—the wilful starvation of the poor by their relentless conquerors, can best understand and appreciate the artist’s message.
What a pathetic picture this is! The starved woman—all the roundness and beauty of womanhood and motherhood brutally stamped out of her face and figure by the state of things brought about by the rule of the Hun; the child clinging to her mother with the terror and amazement which is the most piteous of all expressions that can come into and be graven upon the face of childhood. Both bear in their faces and forms the cruel marks of starvation and suffering.
And yet there are those abroad in the land who can talk and write of “saving Germany from too much humiliation.” Too much humiliation! For one, I say that if Germany can be dragged in the dust; if her rulers can be made to eat the bread of humiliation; if her bestial-minded military officials, who have deported women and girls from Belgium and France to God only knows where and to what end, can be brought to adequate punishment, then there is still some justice left in this warring world and some hope for poor, struggling, vexed, and fearful humanity. Unless Germany is conquered and humiliated, unless the wrongs of Belgium and the other devastated territories are avenged, we and the millions of our Allies will have suffered, fought, and died for the greatest cause the world has ever known—and in vain.
From the welter of battle, after the shouts of the fighting men have died away, must emerge a new basis of society and a set of new ideals in international conduct. And it is up to all of us to see to it that this comes about.
CLIVE HOLLAND.
“I SEE you can hold them up, but——”
The whole world sees that Germany can hold them up. Strength is concentrated first on one side, and then on the other, and at the time this cartoon was first published the little figure sitting up on the Western side watched, unmoved alike by German promises and German threats. It watched while the days of the Marne went by and proved that German efforts in the West would be confined to “holding up”—that the capture of Paris and of Calais were mere dreams that must pass unfulfilled. It watched the steady thrusting back of Russia, the apparent success in building an Eastern defense that could be held up indefinitely. Then it added its weight to the Western boulder, and the holding up process went on.
Neither boulder has yet fallen; the strong man is not yet exhausted, but the whole world knows what the end must be. Germany could not afford a mere defensive war—from the outset she knew that decision must be won in the first months, and that the alternative to this was defeat. This grim figure, bent on “holding up” the two main fronts, is typical of Germany to-day, a raging barbarian, wearying under the impossible task. For such a task there was needed not only physical strength, but spiritual strength, ideals as well as machinery, and soul as well as brain. By his methods of war this soulless barbarian has added to the weights that he must hold up; he has misinterpreted the meaning of civilization, misunderstood the aims common to humanity outside Germany. The weight that he must hold up and away is not merely that of Britain, Russia, France, and the rest of the Allies; it is the weight of all men who understand freedom rightly, steadily crushing freedom’s antithesis.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
YOU shall, Germany, you shall!
You shall have even more than ever you expected—but not after the manner of your expectation.
Even the burglar who, after long and arduous and risky training in his profession, and careful plotting and planning, and detailed hard work with jimmies and blowpipes and center-bits, has collared the swag and been caught in the act, does not whine like this. If he is a wise man he surrenders at discretion, puts a philosophic face on it, and plans more artistic work while in confinement. If he is a hothead, he puts up a fight and gets it in the neck.
But he never whines for recompense for the nefarious trouble he has gone to.
Germany has not yet learned her lesson. She has burglariously and treacherously broken into her neighbors’ houses and seized them and their contents.
The cost to herself, in life, money—and, more than all, in the estimation of the world at large—is as yet hidden from her. When the bill is presented and her bloodshot eyes are opened to it, it will astound her.
For—somehow or other—it will have to be paid—to the last farthing. And while she is in confinement for her diabolical misdeeds, the world, it is to be fervently hoped, will see to it that all further power for mischief will be taken from her forever.
This burglar has intrenched himself among his plunder. He would negotiate with the besieging police to be allowed to keep something at all events for all his trouble.
He shall. He shall keep what he has earned—the loathing and contempt of every honest man under the sun.
JOHN OXENHAM.
IT seems to be the irony of fate that Germany possesses everything good in an inverted, it may perhaps be said a “perverted,” form.
We all know the charms of the “Chocolate Soldier,” who originated, if we remember rightly, like the best flavored chocolate, in France.
Here we have a “Chocolate Soldier” of a very different kind. A young officer, of the familiar decadent Lothario type, is presenting a handsome stick of chocolate to a little Belgian or French girl.
At the side is an old man, evidently got up as a stage property, his face exceedingly cross as though he disliked the job, but his attitude rather ambiguous.
In the distance is the official military “filmer,” smug and grinning, waiting to turn the handle in order to obtain a “moving” picture for the German “movies.”
Mr. Raemaekers’ satire is most strongly displayed in the child’s face and clenched fists, fully visible to the spectator, but which will not appear in the film. It appears also, though less obviously, in the cross old gentleman who will come out there as a benevolent pastor blessing the whole proceeding.
It is another instance of the systematic deception practised on the German people and the neutrals.
Monsieur Forain, the French Raemaekers, has something like it in his “Haltez-la, et souriez.” It is not quite the same, but suggests that both cartoons are based on fact, as doubtless they are.
HERBERT WARREN.
AT the beginning of his reign Ferdinand was, or pretended to be, an ardent Russophile. Then something happened which made him think that he had been backing the wrong horse. Perhaps it was the result of the Russo-Japanese War; perhaps it was because little Prince Boris did not receive the usual decoration from St. Petersburg when he was made honorary colonel of the Russian Regiment of Minsk. We may be sure, at any rate, that the motive was not affection for Germany or the German Empire. That great nation has not the gift of inspiring affection, least of all in small peoples within reach of her claws.
Ferdinand was bribed, and bribed heavily, we may be certain; and, like the rulers of other Balkan States, he and his advisers thought for a time that the Central Powers were going to win. He thought he saw his way to an increase of territory at the expense of Serbia, perhaps also of Greece. Some say that he dreamed of reigning at Constantinople. These hopes must be wearing rather thin now. The time has not yet come for turning his coat; but if, or when, it seems to him safe and expedient to leave the Kaiser in the lurch, he will do it without the slightest scruple.
Meanwhile, there was no danger in making the Emperor of Austria his confidant; the poor old gentleman, if he understood what was said to him, probably thought the idea a very sensible one, and wished heartily that he had come to terms with Russia.
W. R. INGE.
GERMANY stands convicted of such bestial crime upon land and sea that one can only come to the conclusion her offence results not from passing aberration or the ebriety of war, but indicates an infection deep-seated and chronic. Her recent Imperial Government statistics of crime before the war indicated very surely that some deep, moral distemper was conquering the German character and running like a plague through her spiritual and sociological life.
It has been said that the problem is one for the anthropologist rather than the lawyer; yet even if the Prussian be not a Teuton, but a Tatar, his indifference to every human instinct would still remain inexplicable. For others of the Tatar stock are amenable to the evolution that time brings, and now pursue the business of war under modern conditions that embrace respect for prisoners and wounded, non-combatants, women and children.
Among the numberless instances of murder and piracy on the high seas space permits here but to dwell upon one, which has by no means received the attention it deserves. International problems involved by the destruction of American citizens have tended to focus public opinion on the “Lusitania” and “Essex” murders; but consider again a crime in the Black Sea and the depraved temper it implies.
On the thirtieth day of March, while lying motionless off Cape Fathia, the Russian hospital ship “Portugal” was destroyed in broad daylight by a submarine, despite the fact that she bore all necessary marks demanded by the Geneva Convention and Hague Covenant.
There perished fourteen ladies of the Red Cross; fifty surgeons and physicians; many male and female nurses; many Russian and French sailors. But for the fact that a Russian destroyer was in the vicinity, the fatalities must have been larger. A great hospital equipment was also lost to humanity.
Well might the Russian Government declare this outrage a flagrant infraction of the rights of man and an act of common piracy, while asking the judgment of all civilized countries on such barbarism.
The people that perpetrated and applauded this act denies civilization, and one may fairly argue that the national conscience, not only of her fighting forces, but of those behind them, will soon reach a pitch where disintegration must follow. The evolution of morals alone must break them, for human nature cannot suffer this reaction.
Meantime we wait in vain for the Allies’ Note informing Germany of our intention with respect to her shipping. Did she know that we designed an eye for an eye, a ton for a ton, she might yet hesitate upon a course that promised to deplete her merchant marine after the war in the ratio of her destruction. The point is equally vital to the weak maritime neutrals, who see their merchant fleets dwindle and their protests ignored by a nation that respects nothing on earth but force.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
“I WONDER how long my dear friend and ally will be able to stand this?”
So “Wilhelm” is made to remark, as he peers over from behind his parapet, safely guarded with barbed wire, and sees the aged Francis Joseph receiving blow after blow, on the one side from the Italians, on the other from the Rumanians. The caricature, it must be admitted, is not quite up-to-date in one respect, for Wilhelm has certainly done his best, and so far only too successfully, to tear off the smaller of these foes. But it is more than up-to-date in another, for the ancient “Dual Monarch” has already succumbed to his years and his enemies. And for reasons best known to himself, “Wilhelm” has run away from his funeral, and thinks he will consult his delicate health and his no less delicate dignity, by sending the Crown Prince instead, that young man being no longer wanted imperatively or imperially on the French front. How young Wilhelm will get on with young Carl remains to be seen. The experience may have dangers of its own. Mr. Raemaekers might look out for a further opportunity in this new situation.
HERBERT WARREN.
THE Roman Emperor Tiberius, that gloomy tyrant, is said to have remarked that governing the Roman people was like holding a wolf by the ears. Here the position is reversed. The patient, obedient, and faithful German people, for such, however infatuated, we must allow it has been, is represented as by no means like a wolf, but more like the traditional opposite, a sheep. But even the sheep may turn if driven beyond measure. Meanwhile, this caricature may help to bring home to it the true position.
The Kaiser, stout, with all his heavy, comfortable clothes, his military cloak, his helmet, and boots and spurs, one of which he digs into his beast of burden, rides comfortably on the back of “German Michael,” the common soldier, and cheerfully bids him “hold out” and struggle up the toilsome hill of victory, with its shifting, clogging soil.
The desperate agony and pain of the poor victim, the drops of sweat falling from his brow, his eyes starting from his head, are well depicted, and also the complacency of the emperor, blended with senile vanity and self-glorification. His aspiration not long ago was to be the “Young Man of the Sea.” Here he is depicted as the “Old Man” of that element.
HERBERT WARREN.
IT is always difficult, after a series of catastrophic events, to go back to one’s mental outlook of the time before they happened. But if the civilized world could recapture its pre-war view, I believe it would realize the most startling of all the results of Armageddon to be that we now take Germany’s outrages on neutrals for granted. At first the bulk of us simply could not believe the tale of the horrors inflicted on non-combatant men, women, and children of innocent and neutral Belgium. But Germany had at any rate made Belgium a belligerent, before beginning them. Now that similar horrors should fall on men, women, and children of Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and America, surprises no more: it has become a mere matter of course.
It is the business of the prophet, the seer, and the poet to awaken the world when it is worshipping false gods, when from fear, or self-interest, or sheer bewilderment, it fails to see the things that are in their naked horror and their awful shame. But prophet, seer, and poet can speak only through the printed word, and in the maze and mass of conflicting appeals the words of truth are lost and ineffective. But if the ear be deaf and the mind numb, the eyes of all retain their childlike curiosity. It is Raemaekers’ secret that he can present his own clear vision of the truth in figures that pierce instantly to the conscience of the dullest. To kill a child at all for a political purpose, is the sin of Herod. To kill the children of those with whom you have no nominal quarrel, stipulates just that negation of soul which we call beastly. The truth about Tirpitz, and all that that accursed name stands for, is personified in the loathsome Satyr of the Sea portrayed in this cartoon.
ARTHUR POLLEN.
RAEMAEKERS is not merely a clever draftsman and a keen observer, but also a deep and careful student of modern history and diplomacy. He knows the by-paths, the coulisses, and the intrigues of the diplomatic world, which are eternally going on behind the almost impenetrable curtain with which the chancelleries of Europe seek to veil their proceedings.
Everyone knows, of course, that it was not merely affection or esteem that has ranged Ferdinand of Bulgaria and Enver Pasha upon the side of the Central Empires. In the case of the first, greed had not a little to do with the final decision to which he came. He was not unwilling to be persuaded by the blandishments of his “dear brother the Kaiser,” always provided it was made worth his while at the time as well as in futuro. In the case of the second, ambition played its part, backed up by years of “ground baiting” of the kind in which German diplomacy excels.
It has been left to the pencil of this great artist and satirist to bring home to the mind of the man-in-the-street a knowledge of the actual situation that has been created, and of the methods by which it was brought about. In this cartoon we have the Kaiser in shop-walker attitude, an oily smile upon his lips, bending forward and washing his hands with invisible soap, while he exclaims, “I hope you have been well served and are satisfied.” His dupes are shown bound hand and foot, with an expression of their doubts as to the ultimate genuineness and benefit of the bargain which they have struck shown upon the face of the one and the back of the other. Bound hand and foot they stand in the presence of this “artful dodger” among crowned heads, and in that of the decrepit Franz Joseph, in whose figure the artist has succeeded in so cleverly conveying an idea of the unstable and effete nature of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The “dear friends and allies” show neither the feeling of comfort nor confidence about which their imperial taskmaster speaks and inquires so glibly.
Bound thus to the wheels of the car of Germany’s destiny, they begin evidently to question the wisdom of their choice. Already Ferdinand’s doubts must have commenced to take definite shape, for the luck of “the great game” has begun to run against him at Monastir, and “crushed and destroyed” Serbia is once more in fighting trim and eager to expel the invader.
CLIVE HOLLAND.
ON September 9, 1914, Joseph Walker enlisted for the duration of the war; on January 11, 1916, the sea bore his dead body to the dyke at West Capelle. Usually a body washed ashore in this neighborhood is buried at the foot of the dunes, without coffin, without ceremony. But not this time. This afternoon, at 1 P.M., while the northwest wind whistled over Walcheren, the English soldier was buried in the churchyard of West Capelle. Behind the walls of the tower where we sought protection from the gale the burial service was read.
First the vice-consul in the name of England spread the British flag over him who for England had sacrificed his young life. Four men of West Capelle carried the coffin outside and placed it at the foot of the tower, that old gray giant, which has witnessed so much world’s woe, here opposite the sea. The Reverend Mr. Fraser, the English clergyman at Kortryk, himself an exile, said we were gathered to pay the last homage to a Briton who had died for his country. It was a simple, but touching ceremony.
“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live.... He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down.” Thus spoke the voice of the minister and the wind carried his words, and the wind played with the flag of England, the flag that flies over all seas, in Flanders, in France, in the Balkans, in Egypt, as the symbol of threatened freedom—the flag whose folds here covered a fallen warrior. Deeply were we moved when the clergyman in his prayer asked for a “message of comfort to his home.”
Yes, who is Walker, No. 16092, Private Joseph Walker, Bedfordshire regiment? Who, in loving thoughts, thinks of him with hope even now when we, strangers to them, stand near to him in death? Where is his home? We know it not, but in our inmost hearts we pray for a “message of comfort and consolation” for his people.
And in the roaring storm we went our way. There was he carried, the soldier come to rest, and the flag fluttered in the wind and wrapped itself round that son of England. Then the coffin sank into the ground and the hearts of us, the departing witnesses, were sore. Earth fell on it, and the preacher said: “Earth to earth, dust to dust.”—From the Amsterdam “Telegraaf,” January, 1916.
“THE Religion of Valor”—that new creed for which Germany now claims to be fighting—will call for many martyrs behind the fighting lines, and we may suppose that the middle classes of the fatherland as little like the sacrifices demanded from them as any other members of the community, whose savings are the result of their own energy and enterprise. That Germany is subscribing to her loans with generosity and self-denial we have no reason to doubt; but since there is no free press, the nation as a whole remains under delusion as to the value of its securities. The dust, however, cannot be in every eye much longer, and before another spring is spent, Germany’s people will know that she is powerless to keep her paper promises.
For the one hope that a victorious trade war would instantly break out upon the arrival of peace is destined to be disappointed.
As Mr. Kitson recently and very effectively showed, economic power is the basis of political power, the root from which all national power, which can be interpreted into force, must spring. “Trade warfare is therefore a struggle for economic power, for the control of men and of all factors of wealth production.”
The British Empire seems to be grasping this fact for the first time in her national history; and though we have far to go, and the panacea of free trade will doubtless be vended again after the war—by those who, before it, knew so well that Germany would never fight—a growing conviction is none the less apparent that only by a direct and strenuous offensive shall we win the war after the war.
Let us banish inter-tariffs, as Germany did, and unite the nation in a closer economic understanding; and let us not leave our frontiers open to the legions of German and Austrian bagmen, who only await peace to swarm over them.
It depends largely upon us whether the gentleman in the picture will get his money back.
The grand total of the fatherland’s indebtedness, were war to go on until last April, has been calculated in Germany to represent £4,500,000,000, which would demand in annual interest a sum near £800,000,000.
One does not desire to be vindictive, but let no man forget the barefaced villainy and devilish brutality with which the Central Nations prosecuted war. It is not for us to forward the peaceful penetration of such a people through the length and breadth of our empire if we desire to preserve that empire as an entity.
Let Germany redeem her pledges if she can; it will be no part of our post-war activities to assist her task.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
NOT only the father and his sick child ride storm-foundered and lost through night, with the phantom king steadily gaining upon both: the frantic, over-driven brute they ride should also be conscious of approaching doom. But is it?
We may take their steed to be the nation of the royal fugitives, and wonder when Germany—a kingdom whose native qualities had won such ample recognition among her elder sisters on the road to civilization—will awaken into consciousness of her accursed load and perceive that the Hohenzollerns ride only to death. They started on their gallop when Bismarck fell, and now the end is in sight.
Great must be the subjugation before a practical people can reach this pass, or still fail to perceive, if on a material basis only, where the legend of world-power and world-trade has brought them. As sleepwalkers they pursued their dream and have not yet awakened to see where now they stand. Still they believe the issue undetermined; still is it hidden from them that their might is broken, that roughly half their foreign trade, which lay with the Allies, has vanished. Only ignorance and the tradition of servility postpone inevitable revolution.
Of Germany’s evil-genius and arch-enemy, now far advanced on the road that leads to his destruction, an illuminating picture has just been flashed to us. One who was long a publicist in the capitals of Europe has spoken of “Things I remember,” and he quotes a German author—a woman—who spoke thus of the “War Lord” before the war. None is a more shrewd and subtle student of character than a woman, when she holds an object worthy of her study.
“I can assure you that he extirpates, as of fell purpose, every independent character, root and branch. Think of the number of poor devils in prison for the crime of lèse majesté, not one instance of which he has ever pardoned; while there is not a case of a man having killed his opponent in a duel, however disgraceful might have been its cause, whom he has not pardoned, or at least remitted the sentence. Never has a monarch encouraged Byzantine servility to such a degree as this man. No sunbeam but it must radiate from him; no incense but it must fill his nostrils.”
May Germany use her waking hour to be rid forever of this archaic incubus; and if, at the end, she still cries for the domination of Prussia, then it is to be hoped that, when they have won the war, the Allies will save her from her own blindness and themselves perform the act of liberation.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
ONE may characterize the figures in this cartoon as not altogether imaginary. In the villages behind the lines of the Somme, and in the tumbled country north of Verdun, there must be many such little homes as that in which the old man is pictured, homes befouled and desecrated by the presence of these hard-faced men who look on contemptuously while the old man listens. He and his kind know the voices of the guns, for they have heard them before. What memories of ’70 and his own fighting days must come to him and to all his kind as they wait the coming of the guns that shall drive out this scourge of France—this vileness that for nearly half a century has poisoned the life of all Europe, and on France especially has set an abiding mark? What hopes must be his for the day when Prussianism shall be no more than a vague name, and the sons of those sons of his who fight to-day shall work content in the knowledge that their fathers have freed them from this Damoclean threat?
How these people in the conquered territories have endured, how they have waited and hoped, even when there seemed no ground for hope, in the darkest of the days, we shall perhaps know when peace comes again. Yet even then we in Britain can never know all, for there is given to us a shield that France has never known—our shield, and in a measure our danger. For no man in Britain sits and listens for the guns that shall free his house and his land, and in that fact is possible lack of comprehension and consequent great danger; as once it has been, so it may be again.
Yet it may be that, when the stories of these old men behind the enemy lines are told, they will waken the whole of the world, not only to the need for destruction of such a thing as the militarism of Prussia, but to the knowledge that only the strong man armed may keep his house. Had all realized this in time——
Meanwhile, as this third year of the war ends, the guns that speak freedom come nearer.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN
IN Greek mythology Nemesis personified the moral law which chastises arrogance and wanton excess by the inexorable consequences of their own wrong-doing. So none who had offended could escape her.
The Death’s-Head Hussars are a perfect example of that boastful pride and transgression of the bounds of due proportion which it is the function of Nemesis to punish. By their name and their device they make a mock of the most solemn tragedy—of Death itself. Whether their emblem threatens death to others or signifies their own contempt for death it is a wanton and arrogant jest. The skull and cross-bones were the traditional device of pirates, and it well became those grim outlaws who declared a ruthless war against all mankind. There was no jest about it, but a dreadful seriousness, and their proper end was the yard-arm. But the Death’s-Head Hussars are what is called a “crack” regiment, one officered by rich, aristocratic, and elegant young men, who have not set themselves against the world, but are very much of it. Nor are they any braver or more formidable than other regiments. The Death’s-Head business is a silly and boastful affectation.
Here is the just sentence of chastising Nemesis. The last of the Death’s-Head Hussars, its imperial colonel, is being shot over the head of his skeleton charger on to the heaped ranks of dead soldiers which ring him round. He has his fill of skulls and cross-bones now. The Crown Prince of Germany has confessed it to the world.
A. SHADWELL.
IT is well sometimes, despite all that has happened since, to turn back to Belgium and remember the rape, rapine, and arson of 1914. There will be plenty of time to let bygones be bygones when might and right are found on the same side and Justice, who is using her sword just now, resumes her impartial scales; but until the Central Nations experience a defeat of magnitude sufficient to penetrate to the hearts and heads of their people, we may continue to keep in the forefront of our minds the story of Belgium under Germany’s heel.
That tale of brutal tyranny is not even yet told, for, short of selling the deported Belgians as slaves, Germany would seem still to be doing all that Hun and Vandal ever accomplished. But Raemaekers gives us a glimpse from the past, when conquest was still in progress and the German obsession of franc-tireurs reached its height. How far they pretended this fear to excuse their own murder of the defenseless, or how far they really felt it, matters little; for it has been shown that the cry was deliberately excited—by fabrication and circulation through Germany of countless “fearful” falsehoods. Soldiery about to pass from the Fatherland to Belgium were inflamed, as with drink, by lies of the horrible treatment they must expect and endure from civil populations and non-combatants. They were warned by calculated propaganda at home that their eyes would be gouged out, their legs sawn off, their wounded men murdered, with fiendish details of suffering by the Belgians.
German valets of the type of Houston Chamberlain and Sven Hedin spread these stories; Pastor Conrad wrote a little book and sold it to the school children that they, too, might read about their fathers’ gouged-out eyes in Belgium.
The result was certain when German soldiers found themselves with a free hand among unarmed women and their little ones; for Germany in Belgium and Poland, and Austria in Serbia, have not been content to destroy the manhood of weak nations: they have striven to stamp out their virginity and their childhood also.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
NOWHERE has the caricaturist proved more effectively his command of caustic satire.
It is characteristic of the Kaiser and his family to claim Christian sanction for all his sinister schemes.
None of the many goals which the Kaiser confidently set out to win in this war has he yet secured. The triumphal progress through the capital city of Constantinople loomed large in his early programme. His vaulting ambition still seeks the hegemony of the Mahomedan world no less than of the Christian world.
The Kaiser habitually appeals to religious authority. He garbles Scripture to serve his turn. Nothing that the world regards as sacred is safe from his profanation. His miscalculations are so colossal, his hopes are so tangled, that the blasphemous dream which the artist depicts may well have visited the imperial couch. The pious Mahomedan might possibly find some specious compensation for submission to the Prussian yoke were the Kaiser to enter the Turkish capital at the head of his barbarian hordes flaunting in triumph the banner of the crescent, while Christ rode on an ass at the imperial side, in bonds and wearing the crown of thorns. It is a revolting piece of pictorial imagery, but it is a legitimate interpretation of the imperial megalomania, which enlists blasphemy in the service of the imperial propaganda.
SIDNEY LEE.
ONLY historic interest now attaches to the activities of German diplomacy which sought, by misplaced flattery, to prevent Italy from joining the Powers of the Entente in the Great War. Prince von Bülow for many months employed all his wiles to distract Italy from the pursuit of a hostile policy. He had some good cards in his hand, and, after the manner of all German diplomatists, he overestimated their strength, while he underrated the skill and enthusiasm of the players against him. The influences of German finance worked on his side, but characteristically he ignored the spiritual forces of the Italian national sentiment, on which bribes and blandishments could make no impression. Italy’s traditional hatred of Austria was only speciously held in check by the conventions of the old Triple Alliance. The perils which Austria invited by engaging in the present war were bound to set ancient memories fully aflame. It is a mangled unity of which Italy can boast so long as the Italian peoples of the Trentino and Dalmatia live under Austrian sway.
The cry of the Trentino for release from a foreign servitude overcame all those predilections for peace, which some material considerations fostered in Italy in the early stages of the war. Von Bülow undertook a thankless task when he sought by pretty speeches to deafen Italian ears to the piercing appeals of Italy’s compatriots under alien sway. He may cherish the delusion that he scored a minor success by postponing for a season Italy’s declaration of war on Germany. For a short while Italy was content with her defiance of Austria alone, but even this small triumph on the prince’s part proved a phantasm. To-day all the prince’s diplomatic adventures are seen to be empty mockeries and snares.
SIDNEY LEE.
WE may pause to wonder whether Germany ever considers her relations with the weak neutral nations after the war.
In the case of America, she preserves some show of explicit courtesy, while performing actions of implicit insult. Where it matters not, she conforms; where it does matter, she ignores; but she has no desire to quarrel openly with the United States and has long since found that she can do pretty much what she pleased without risking more than verbal remonstrances. In the case of Norway and Sweden, Denmark and Holland, she is not even at the pains to be civil; but treats them with her usual indifference to all things physically weak. Sometimes she will add insult to injury, as in the case of this cartoon, and needlessly pretend an innocence that would not deceive a child; more often, as in her pirate procedure against Holland, she cares nothing what the weak may have to say while her own strength is paramount.
But the war will end and what sort of relations will these insulted and outraged kingdoms seek with Germany when the bully is beaten? One might ask them another question. Is it beyond the power of the Northern neutrals to assume a more hortatory tone and courageous attitude? Might they not sensibly forward all rational hopes of civilization by taking a stronger line with the enemy of Europe? Whining and grumbling serve no good purpose; but a somewhat stronger and cleaner-cut expression of opinion before the insulting scorn poured upon their protests would increase general respect for Holland and the rest.
Why are they so frightened? Is it from force of habit? They might surely begin to perceive with sufficient distinctness that the Power that sank the “Tubantia” and “Blommersdijk” is on the way herself to be sunk. Why then this abject attitude? It is easy to guess.
Meantime Holland’s recent protest to America was hardly worth making. She may well ask what would have happened had the sinkings off Newport, on the American coast, occurred off Ymuiden, on her own. But she will receive no satisfactory reply to that question. Nor does it help civilization to hear Holland say, “Submarine warfare cannot go on any longer.” Germany laughs. She knows how much of her gold has crossed into Holland of late, and that our Dutch friends doubtless have more to gain in wealth than lose in honor by “taking it lying down.”
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
RAEMAEKERS is never more pungent in his satire than when he deals with the efforts of Germany to penetrate the conscience and persuade the will of Holland. In the cartoon opposite we see the typical German propagandist—half-professor, half-merchant, and wholly the servile ambassador of his Government—exhibiting to the equally typical Dutch peasant the recommendations and persuasions of Germany. These are printed in Dutch for his behoof, and they declare that it can be proved by the testimony of the Ninety-Three Intellectuals that all men who are not enthusiastic about German Kultur and all who are rash enough to accuse German statesmen of breaking their word or behaving like barbarians are worthless persons of no character. He tells the Dutchman that “We Germans are fighting for the liberty of the sea, guaranteed as Prussian.” Another belt of propaganda offers advice gratis to smugglers, and urges the Dutch, in exchange for aniline dyes, to supply the German Government with tin, oil, fat, leather, india-rubber, and other such “peaceful” articles. The lowest line assures the Dutchman that the book called “J’Accuse”—which is phonetically spelt “Sjakkuus” that the Dutchman may have no doubt about it—is a vulgar production. The “Toekomst”—a virulently pro-German newspaper, subventioned from Berlin—is a genuine expression of Dutch feeling.
Thus the fat missionary in spectacles volubly attempts to seduce the grave and rather sardonic Dutch peasant, whose face is a triumph of non-committal. He holds him long in conversation, while from behind steal up the German soldiers and sailors waiting for the attention of the peasant to be wholly absorbed in the propaganda, suddenly to capture and to bind him, beyond all power of self-release. Here the satire of Raemaekers is directed against the intrigues of German diplomacy at The Hague, and the rumors which have of late been rife concerning a party of politicians in the Dutch State who have been persuaded into recommending a studied neutrality now, indeed, but a secret agreement with Germany that shall not come into force until after the declaration of peace. The draftsman warns his countrymen that they are not, in their simplicity, capable of holding their own against a combination of Teutonic violence and Teutonic guile. It may be that these Dutch disciples of Wilhelmstrasse have not the naïveté which Raemaekers sees proper to attribute to them. Their attitude has something more ignoble than simple, and they remind us not a little of the particularists of the seventeenth century, whose selfish and senseless anti-Orange policy left the Dutch without a friend in Europe. But we can confidently believe that general public opinion in Holland to-day will be too wholesome and too intelligent to pursue the suicidal path which the “Toekomst” and its German inspirers indicate.
EDMUND GOSSE.
HERE Raemaekers draws aside from his fierce mood of indictment of the aggressor and, touched with a neutral’s pity, tries to express something of the agony that comes impartially to those who fight for and those who fight against the right. The candid critic must confess that this mood has not the interest of his satire and invective. But it is natural for the imaginative artist to be deeply moved by these, as it were, impartial horrors and good for us stay-at-homes to be helped to realize them.
In the early days of the war, waged as it was over the most intensively cultivated soil in Europe, the mortality from this dread horror, Tetanus, was very great. The skill of the bacteriologist and the surgeon has indefinitely reduced the mortality. And perhaps those of us who are bowed down by the thought of all the needless pain and incalculable waste may take a crumb of comfort from the thought that out of all the suffering and death grow knowledge and skill that will relieve suffering and prevent death in the future. So the eternal courage and resourcefulness of man always recapture the citadel he seems to have lost in the first onset.
JOSEPH THORP.
FOLLOWING out this truly Teutonic line of reasoning, there is no reason why Beethoven should not be claimed as English, and surely Christopher Columbus was Russian—or French, or Norwegian. A sense of humor would have saved Germany from this absurdity of claiming the whole world’s genius as her own, but that sense is the one thing that Germany lacks above all others, and from the deficiency has arisen this war and all its evils.
For a sense of humor—or a sense of proportion, which is precisely the same thing—would have given Germany to understand that in these days no nation may aspire to domination over other and different races; it would have given her to understand that there are other forms of culture besides her own Kultur, which, after all, is merely order and discipline, and not a finer perception or a greater development of intellect; it would have given her to understand that which the world’s history has failed to teach her, that aggression does not pay, and that essays in tyrannic dominance inevitably fail.
Raemaekers’ satire is unerring, for though no German has yet stated that Shakspere’s plays are based on the work of a poet who lived two centuries later, yet the professors and pedants of Kultur have attempted equal absurdities, even to showing Germany as a country of simple, kindly people, who abhor a war that has been forced on them. One is tempted to quote from the world-poet who, in this cartoon, faces his antithesis with such an air of gentle incredulity, but the temptation, if yielded to, would lead too far.
Germany has not only claimed Shakspere, but she has claimed control of all the Western world; one claim is as likely to be conceded as the other.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
THE Huns have hugged this conviction to their obscene souls. And it is not the least of a series of preposterous and ridiculous blunders. Throwing as rubbish to the void the Tables of the Law, they have cherished what they believe to be the last and greatest commandment: Thou shalt not be found out.
And “found out” they have been!
For the moment this fact does not oppress them too seriously. Indeed, to the commander of the submarine who sank the Lusitania the Iron Cross has been awarded. We wonder whether he will wear it, if he happens to find himself after the war at some great function in any neutral country?
To the psychologist this Hun attribute, shared with the ostrich, of hiding his head and believing that the rest of his person is unseen, provokes some interesting hypotheses. Inter alia, it serves to remind us that birds, however big, stand next to reptiles in the scale of creation. Hun methods are distinctively reptilian. The Hun, when fully gorged, becomes lethargic and stupid. In this cartoon, the Hun Eagle, appropriately emblazoned upon that portion of the Hun body of which we may confidently hope to see more and more in the near future, reminds me of that loathsome beast—the Turkey Buzzard. In California, where I first made his acquaintance, this horrible vulture would have been exterminated long ago had he not been protected by the law, which recognized his peculiar usefulness as a scavenger. Hungry, these buzzards are almost unapproachable; after a carrion meal a child can despatch them with a stone.
May we not assume that the Huns, however clever and cunning when hungry, become as boas and buzzards after a surfeit? To-day they are boasting of what they have absorbed on the map of Europe. Do they realize yet the dead weight of these temporary conquests? Germania, like some monstrous viper, has swallowed her own young. Unlike the viper, she cannot disgorge them alive.
Such reflections are not intended to minimize the task that still confronts the Allies. But what the Hun has done by land and air and sea will be the measure of his undoing.
Nobody sees me and I can always deny it.
Everybody sees him; and if his acts are enough to make angels weep, his denials of them move the world to inextinguishable laughter.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.
ONE of the objectives of the present war was to secure Germany’s command of the Near East. A railway from Berlin to Bagdad had long been treated as a primary article in that creed of German Welt-politik which the war was to make prevail. For a time the plan promised excellently. The Turkish alliance with the Central Empires seemed to bring Asia Minor securely under German sway. The railway route was saved.
The Kaiser and his advisers prematurely regarded Russia as an extinct volcano, which was incapable of thwarting their Oriental policy. Disillusionment came quickly. The German tourist who foresaw an unimpeded road through Prussia to Persia was suddenly confronted with an impassable barrier. The Russian Army of the Caucasus swept through Armenia and occupied the Turkish citadel of Erzerum, which commanded the line of travel at its most critical point. Small are the chances of retrieving the lost foothold. The whole design is doomed beyond recall.
It is the habit of our arch-foe to count his chickens before they are hatched.
SIDNEY LEE.
IN this cartoon the artist symbolizes with drastic irony the powerlessness of Holland to claim respect for her rights or to maintain her national prestige. If the fair Dutch flag stands in the way of the Teutonic bully, he just tears it down and tramples it underfoot. In the view of Germany the time is long past when a little community of human beings could sustain independent existence if its policy interfered in the smallest degree with the convenience of the great German tyranny. This is at once the humiliation of countries like Holland, and their claim on the active sympathy of the Allies. What can the nice little boy in the picture do to protect himself against the fists and the boots of the huge man in a Prussian helmet? Manifestly, nothing! His only chance is that his big brethren may succeed in thrashing the selfish, powerful brute as he deserves.
The attitude of Germany toward the little sovereign states of Europe was laid down two years ago, with ineffable assurance, by Herr von Jägow. He said: “In the transformation of Europe to the profit of the Teutonic Powers, the little surrounding States must no longer presume to lead the independent existence which at present feeds their vanity. They are all destined to disappear in the orbit of the German Empire.” In other words, as the rest of Germany has been subjugated by Prussia, so Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Montenegro, and Serbia must make up their minds to be melted into the Central Empire of Kultur. Not one of them is rich enough to maintain its existence. In the meantime, if Prussia finds it convenient to sink a Bloomersdijk, so much the worse for Holland, who would do well to swallow the injury in silence. And all that the civilized and cultured little countries can do is, through the tears of their exasperation, to cry aloud to God, “How long, O Lord, how long?”
EDMUND GOSSE.
THERE is a grim persistency with which Raemaekers pursues the power which, in the first terrible weeks of the war, he recognized as the enemy of European civilization. Time has not lessened the intensity of that vision, which came to him—a neutral—with no prepossessions in favor of England and her allies, and which is, indeed, the whole significance of the fine work he has done for our cause throughout the world. Less steadfast folk of our own blood begin to wonder if, after all, it be quite worth while, seeing that the burglar is so strong, to go on with our opposition to him; and whether it would not be better to hand our valuables—freedom, mercy, and other trifling gewgaws—into his safe keeping.
Raemaekers sees in this relatively mild adventure of German frightfulness, the torpedoing of unarmed ships in the American zone under cover of American warships which, by saving the jettisoned crews, were able to keep the pirate within the letter of his pledge—he sees this as what it is, an act of intolerable brigandage and insolence. The insolence, indeed, is so colossal as to be almost admirable. Officers of the fleet do not talk for publication; but it would be illuminating to hear the comments of the American naval messes on the retriever work to which they were set by our friend the enemy.
JOSEPH THORP.
THE cartoonist has devoted several of his drawings to the work of exhibiting to the world at large and the pacifist in particular the egregious folly of “peace talk” and “gentleness toward the Huns” while a world war is being waged, and as yet all the ideals for which we are fighting in company with our Allies hang in the balance.
How necessary such cartoons really are is shown by the mere fact that there can be found men and women who are anxious on every possible occasion to “mouth wordy platitudes concerning peace,” and even to sacrifice to the Moloch of Prussianism the ideals and the amenities of national conduct upon which the basis of happiness and peace in reality rests.
The old legend of St. George and the Dragon has been skilfully and effectively adapted by Raemaekers to the purposes of the lesson he would teach. The peace woman is shown on her knees before the dragon of Prussianism, not in terror at the fate which is impending for her, but obsessed by the idea that the dragon is not so bad as it has been painted and that it may be wicked to kill dragons. I confess that I have not been able to penetrate the labyrinth of distorted ideas which has produced the attitude of mind toward the Hun adopted by the pacifist, male and female. But the most charitable among us may be forgiven, perhaps, if we assume that this state of mind has been brought about by a wrong-headed conception of the facts and the Hun himself, rather than by any original liking for bloody deeds of rapine, the slaughter of innocents, and wholesale and wanton destruction of beautiful, holy, and gracious things.
There are many who believe that the peace woman, who will be more and more evident as the war drags along, is no imagined menace. It is well therefore that this cartoon should have been drawn and published and that its message, “to save the peace women despite themselves,” should be driven home.
The spirit of St. George of England and of the saints of God, who fought tyrants and died in past ages that the fragrant and essential truths should live, is not dead, and while this can be said there is hope for the world, for surely God Who had these in His keeping is yet in His heaven.
CLIVE HOLLAND.
THIS ranks as one of Raemaekers’ happiest cartoons. That wolf’s mask is a clever travesty of the “All-Highest’s” best studio face. Better still is the quip, “’Tis time all this bloodshed should cease,” as a summary of all the peace suggestions which with discreet persistence have been floated out from Berlin since the great game, as envisaged by the challengers, was seen to be up.
It would not readily occur to the German mind that the time when the shepherds were just coming over the hill with axe, bill, and bludgeon was the most appropriate time for the wolf to suggest that nothing should be said of the unfortunate mistakes of the past.
“See!” quoth the wolf, “there are already three corpses. Is that not enough to satisfy the most bloodthirsty? Why drag in a fourth? Surely even you who have not our advantages can see so plain an argument?” The answer is in the negative. But let no one ever again accuse the Teuton of not being a humorist.
It is worth noting that it is a bonneted Highlander that here wields the British club. Compensation at last to the sensitive Scot who so desperately hates being lumped in with the English!
JOSEPH THORP.
THE historian of the future will attempt, probably, to deal adequately with the complex questions which inform every line of this cartoon. It is, indeed, a passionate note of interrogation. In a stupendous fight upon the clearly defined issues of Right and Might, how comes it to pass that any self-respecting nation remains neutral? Why, for example, did not Uncle Sam sever diplomatic relations with the Huns the very moment that Belgium was invaded and outraged?
Americans, true citizens of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, have raised this question already and some have answered it. Other Americans have answered them cleverly and speciously. Time alone will decide upon the merits and demerits of all and sundry. We owe much to the States euphemistically styled “United.” They have supplied us in our hour of sorest need with a never-ceasing stream of munitions percolating everywhere; they have sent us money, sympathy, and advice. But the fact remains—Uncle Sam was too proud to fight! And yet, each day it is becoming more and more certain that every stout blow struck by the Allies, every gallant life that is sacrificed, is a contribution to the cause of Civilization and Christianity. We are fighting desperately for our own salvation, and that salvation includes the salvation of Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, and the United States. At the beginning of the war the Neutral Countries missed a tremendous opportunity. Together, acting under the ægis of Uncle Sam, with his hundred million children, they could have protested in no uncertain terms against Prussianism and the violation of every principle dear to and honored by them. Prompt action, upon the heels of such a protest, would have ended the war in three weeks. Germany, swollen with insolence and beer, has perpetrated blunders in strategy and policy of which she now is reaping the fruits, but with all her crass, pig-headed, brutal assurance she would not have fought a whole world in arms against her.
It is not for us to throw stones at others. We are far too busy hurling shells at our enemy. But the question will be answered some day:
“Why were the Neutrals too proud to fight?”
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.
