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Title: Kultur in Cartoons - With accompanying notes by well-known English writers
Author: Raemaekers, Louis
Language: English
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KULTUR IN CARTOONS
KULTUR
IN
CARTOONS
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._
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1917
Copyright, 1917, by
THE CENTURY CO.
_Published October 1917_
_Publishers’ Announcement_
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.
_Foreword_
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.”
_List of Cartoons_
PAGE
THE ZEPPELIN RAIDER 2
THE EXHUMATION OF THE MARTYRS OF AERSCHOT 4
THE OLD SERB 6
THE “LUSITANIA” NIGHTMARE 8
“FANCY, HOW NICE!” 10
THE LAODICEANS 12
“A PITIFUL EXODUS” 14
“DEATH THE FRIEND” 16
A HIGHER PILE 18
PEACE REIGNS AT DINANT 20
HUMANITY _vs._ KULTUR 22
THE BILL 24
“YOU NEED NOT STORM THIS PLACE” 26
HOHENZOLLERN MADNESS 28
“MY MASTER ASKS YOU TO LOOK AFTER THESE DOVES” 30
FAMINE IN BELGIUM 32
POOR OLD THING 34
GERMANY AND THE NEUTRALS 36
THOSE HORRIBLE BRITONS 38
DR. KUYPER TO GERMANY 40
THE KAISER’S DIPLOMACY 42
CAIN 44
THE COUNTER-ATTACK AT DOUAUMONT 46
THE MORNING PAPER 48
“AND SUCH A BRAVE ZEPP HE WAS” 50
FLYING OVER HOLLAND 52
“IF THEY DON’T INCREASE THEIR ARMY” 54
RELIGION AND PATRIOTISM 56
THE PRISONERS 58
“WELL, MY FRIEND” 60
“HOW QUIET IT MUST BE IN THE ENGLISH HARBORS BLOCKADED BY OUR FLEET” 62
THE BRIGANDS 64
IT LOOKS SO IN SERBIA 66
VICTORY BY IMPOSTURE 68
SHELL-MAKING 70
ANOTHER AUSTRALIAN SUCCESS 72
THE SEA THE PATH OF VICTORY 74
BALAAM AND HIS ASS 76
A GENUINE DUTCHMAN 78
ANOTHER VICTORY FOR THE GERMANS 80
SUBMARINE “BAGS” 82
WITHIN THE PINCERS 84
GERMAN POISON 86
THE ORGANIZATION OF VICTORY BY IMPOSTURE 88
WITTENBERG 90
THE BROKEN ALLIANCE 92
THE SHOWER-BATH 94
THE ANNIVERSARY BOUQUET 96
THE STRANDED SUBMARINE 98
HEROD’S NIGHTMARE 100
“MY BELOVED PEOPLE” 102
ON THEIR WAY TO VERDUN 104
BETHMANN-HOLLWEG’S PEACE SONG 106
A GERMAN “VICTORY” 108
“WAITING” 110
THE KAISER AS A DIPLOMATIST 112
HUN HYPOCRISY 114
THE PRUSSIAN GUARD 116
GREEK TREACHERY 118
THE WORLD’S JUDGMENT SEAT 120
THE KAISER’S CRY FOR PEACE 122
TIT FOR TAT 124
FORCED LABOR IN GERMANY 126
THE FALL OF THE CHILD-SLAYER 128
THE CLIMBER 130
CULTURE AT WITTENBERG 132
THE “CIVILIANS” 134
TWO PEALS OF THUNDER 136
A UNIVERSAL CONSCIENCE 138
JOAN OF ARC AND ST. GEORGE 140
THE BRINGERS OF HAPPINESS 142
THE OLD POILU 144
HUMANITY TORPEDOED 146
THE SUPER-HOOLIGANS 148
BEFORE THE FALL 150
THE SHIRKERS 152
FOR MERIT 154
DUTY _vs._ MILITARISM 156
THE TROUBADOUR 158
SEE THE CONQUERING HERO COMES 160
BELGIUM 162
THE GIANT’S TASK 164
“I MUST HAVE SOMETHING FOR MY TROUBLE” 166
“CINEMA CHOCOLATE” 168
THE DOCTRINE OF EXPEDIENCY 170
MURDER ON THE HIGH SEAS 172
POUNDING AUSTRIA 174
DURCHHALTEN--“HOLD OUT” 176
THE SATYR OF THE SEA 178
WAR COUNCIL WITH FERDINAND AND ENVER PASHA 180
THE BURIAL OF PRIVATE WALKER 182
THE SUPREME EFFORT 184
“WER REITET SO SPÄT DURCH NACHT UND WIND?
DAS IST DER VATER MIT SEINEM KIND” 186
THE VOICES OF THE GUNS 188
THE DEATH’S-HEAD HUSSAR 190
THE “FRANC-TIREUR” EXCUSE 192
THE ENTRY INTO CONSTANTINOPLE 194
“COME AWAY, MY DEAR!” 196
THE “HARMLESS” GERMAN 198
THE PROPAGANDIST IN HOLLAND 200
TETANUS 202
SHAKSPERE’S TERCENTENARY 204
NOBODY SEES ME 206
THE ORIENT EXPRESS 208
THE BLOOMERSDYK 210
THE “U” BOATS OFF THE AMERICAN COAST 212
TO THE PEACE WOMAN 214
THE WOLF BLEATS 216
STRICT NEUTRALITY 218
_Kultur in Cartoons_
_The Zeppelin Raider_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Exhumation of the Martyrs of Aerschot_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Old Serb_
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.
[Illustration]
_The “Lusitania” Nightmare_
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.
[Illustration]
_“Fancy, How Nice....”_
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_.
[Illustration]
_The Laodiceans_
“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.
[Illustration]
_“A Pitiful Exodus”_
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.
[Illustration]
_“Death the Friend”_
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.
[Illustration]
_A Higher Pile_
Full half a million men, yet not enough
To break this township on a winding stream;
More yet must fall, and more, ere the red stuff
That built a nation’s manhood may redeem
The Highest’s hopes and fructify his dream.
They pave the way to Verdun; on their dust
The Hohenzollern mount and, hand in hand,
Gaze haggard south; for yet another thrust,
And higher hills must heap, ere they shall stand
To feed their eyes upon the promised land.
One barrow, borne of women, lifts them high,
Piled up of many a thousand human dead.
Nursed in their mothers’ bosoms, now they lie--
A Golgotha, all shattered, torn and sped,
A mountain for these royal feet to tread.
A Golgotha, upon whose carrion clay
Justice of myriad men, still in the womb,
Shall heave two crosses; crucify and flay
Two memories accurs’d; then in the tomb
Of world-wide execration give them room.
Verdun! Thy name is holy evermore;
In thine heroic ruin the nations see
A monument, upon whose living shore
In vain the evil breaks; we bend the knee,
Thou symbol of all human liberty.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
[Illustration]
_Peace Reigns at Dinant_
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.
[Illustration]
_Humanity v. Kultur_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Bill_
Even a dragon’s teeth decay
And then there comes a painful time
When morsels won’t be made away:
Hence spring this picture and this rhyme
Of dragons rather past their prime.
A varied menu spread before
The hungry Kaiser and his son,
From which the royal epicure
With other courses chose this one--
Paris to follow when ’twas done.
A dainty dish the waiter thought
To set before a king, or clown;
Yet though they gulped and chewed and fought
Not sire nor son could get it down--
This little, sturdy, ancient town.
And, what is more, their appetites,
That yesterday were sharp and keen,
This wretched dish of Verdun blights:
Its toughness they had not foreseen;
The cooking’s bad, the inn unclean.
“My son, I think we’ll try elsewhere.”
“Right O! dear father, so we will.
I’m spoiling for a change of air.
Don’t let this trifle make you ill:
Our cannon fodder pay the bill!”
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
[Illustration]
“_You need not storm this place_”
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.
[Illustration]
_Hohenzollern Madness_
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.
[Illustration]
“_My master asks you to look after these peace doves_”
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.
[Illustration]
_Famine in Belgium_
“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.
[Illustration]
_Poor Old Thing_
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.
[Illustration]
_Germany and the Neutrals_
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.
[Illustration]
_Those Horrible Britons_
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.
[Illustration]
_Dr. Kuyper to Germany_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Kaiser’s Diplomacy_
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.
[Illustration]
_Cain_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Counter-Attack at Douaumont_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Morning Paper_
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.
[Illustration]
_“And such a brave Zepp he was”_
Aestatem increpitans seram _Zepyrosque_ morantes.
Chiding the lateness of the summer still
And “Zeppers” all too tardy for his will.
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.
[Illustration]
_Flying Over Holland_
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.
[Illustration]
_“If they don’t increase their Army”_
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.
[Illustration]
_Religion and Patriotism_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Prisoners_
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.
[Illustration]
_Well, My Friend!_
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.
[Illustration]
_“How quiet it must be in the English harbors blockaded by our fleet”_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Brigands_
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.
[Illustration]
_It Looks So in Serbia_
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.
[Illustration]
_Victory by Imposture_
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.
[Illustration]
_Shell-Making_
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.
[Illustration]
_Another Australian Success_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Sea the Path of Victory_
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.
[Illustration]
_Balaam and his Ass_
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.
[Illustration]
_A Genuine Dutchman_
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.
[Illustration]
_Another Victory for the Germans_
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.
[Illustration]
_Submarine “Bags”_
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.
[Illustration]
_Within the Pincers_
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.
[Illustration]
_German Poison_
“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.
[Illustration]
_The Organization of Victory by Imposture_
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.
[Illustration]
_Wittenberg_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Broken Alliance_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Shower-Bath_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Anniversary Bouquet_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Stranded Submarine_
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.
[Illustration]
_Herod’s Nightmare_
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.
[Illustration]
_“My Beloved People”_
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_.
[Illustration]
_On Their Way to Verdun_
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.
[Illustration]
_Bethmann-Hollweg’s Peace Song_
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.
[Illustration]
_A German “Victory”_
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.
[Illustration]
_“Waiting”_
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_.
[Illustration]
_The Kaiser as a Diplomatist_
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.
[Illustration]
_Hun Hypocrisy_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Prussian Guard_
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.
[Illustration]
_Greek Treachery_
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.
[Illustration]
_The World’s Judgment Seat_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Kaiser’s Cry for Peace_
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.
[Illustration]
_Tit for Tat_
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.
[Illustration]
_Forced Labor in Germany_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Fall of the Child-Slayer_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Climber_
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.
[Illustration]
_Culture at Wittenberg_
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.
[Illustration]
_The “Civilians”_
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.
[Illustration]
_Two Peals of Thunder_
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.
[Illustration]
_A Universal Conscience_
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.
[Illustration]
_Joan of Arc and St. George_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Bringers of Happiness_
“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.
[Illustration]
_The Old Poilu_
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.
[Illustration]
_Humanity Torpedoed_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Super-Hooligans_
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.
[Illustration]
_Before the Fall_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Shirkers_
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.
[Illustration]
_For Merit_
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.
[Illustration]
_Duty v. Militarism_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Troubadour_
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.
[Illustration]
_See the Conquering Hero Comes_
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.
[Illustration]
_Belgium_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Giant’s Task_
“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.
[Illustration]
“_I Must Have Something for My Trouble_”
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.
[Illustration]
“_Cinema Chocolate_”
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.
[Illustration]
_The Doctrine of Expediency_
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.
[Illustration]
_Murder on the High Seas_
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.
[Illustration]
_Pounding Austria_
“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.
[Illustration]
_Durchhalten--“Hold Out”_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Satyr of the Sea_
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.
[Illustration]
_War Council with Ferdinand and Enver Pasha_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Burial of Private Walker_
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.”
Who, tell me, oh silent field,
Who lies buried here? Here?
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_.
[Illustration]
_The Supreme Effort_
“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.
[Illustration]
“_Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Dass ist der Vater mit seinem
Kind_” (_Erlkönig_)
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.
[Illustration]
_The Voices of the Guns_
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
[Illustration]
_The Death’s-Head Hussar_
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.
[Illustration]
_The “Franc-tireur” Excuse_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Entry Into Constantinople_
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.
[Illustration]
_Come Away, My Dear!_
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.
[Illustration]
_The “Harmless” German_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Propagandist in Holland_
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.
[Illustration]
_Tetanus_
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.
[Illustration]
_Shakspere’s Tercentenary_
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.
[Illustration]
_Nobody Sees Me_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Orient Express_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Bloomersdijk_
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.
[Illustration]
_The “U” Boats off the American Coast_
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.
[Illustration]
_To the Peace Woman_
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.
[Illustration]
_The Wolf Bleats_
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.
[Illustration]
_Strict Neutrality_
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.
[Illustration]
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