Transcriber’s Notes
Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-clicking them and selecting an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping and/or stretching them.
Cover image created by Transcriber, using an illustration from the original book, and placed into the Public Domain.
Other notes will be found at the [end] of this eBook.
The original book did not have a Table of Contents. The one just below was added by the Transcriber.
[Introduction]
[An Appreciation from the Prime Minister]
[Christendom After Twenty Centuries]
[A Stable Peace]
[The Massacre of the Innocents]
[Bernhardiism]
[From Liège to Aix-la-chapelle]
[Spoils For the Victors]
[The Very Stones Cry Out]
[Satan’s Partner]
[Thrown to the Swine]
[The Land Mine]
[For Your Motherland]
[The German Loan]
[Europe, 1916]
[The Next to be Kicked Out—Dumba’s Master]
[The Friendly Visitor]
[To Your Health, Civilisation!]
[Fox Tirpitz Preaching to the Geese]
[The Prisoners]
[It’s Unbelievable]
[Kreuzland, Kreuzland über Alles]
[The Ex-Convict]
[Miss Cavell]
[The Hostages]
[King Albert’s Answer to the Pope]
[The Gas Fiend]
[The German Tango]
[The Zeppelin Triumph]
[Keeping Out the Enemy]
[The German Offer]
[The Wolf Trap]
[Ahasuerus II.]
[Our Candid Friend]
[Peace and Intervention]
[Little Red Riding Hood]
[The Sea Mine]
[Seduction]
[Murder on the High Seas]
[Ad Finem]
[U’s]
[Mater Dolorosa]
[Gott strafe Italien!]
[Serbia]
[Just a moment—I’m coming]
[The Holy War]
[Gott mit Uns]
[The Widows of Belgium]
[The Harvest is Ripe]
[Unmasked]
[The Great Surprise]
[Thou art the Man!]
[Sympathy]
[The Refugees]
[The Junker]
[Au milieu de fantômes tristes et sans nombre]
[Bluebeard’s Chamber]
[The Raid]
[Better a Living Dog than a Dead Lion]
[The Burden of the Intolerable Day]
[Eagle in Hen-run]
[The Future]
[Christ or Odin?]
[Ferdinand]
[Juggernaut]
[Michael and the Marks]
[Their Beresina]
[New Peace Offers]
[The Shields of Rosselaere.]
[The Obstinacy of Nicholas]
[Bundles of Four]
[The Order of Merit]
[The Marshes of Pinsk]
[God with Us]
[Ferdinand the Chameleon]
[The Latin Sisters]
[Misunderstood]
[Prosperity Reigns in Flanders]
[The Last Hohenzollern]
[Piracy]
[Weeping, She hath Wept]
[Military Necessity]
[Liberté! Liberté, Chérie!]
[I—A Knavish Piece of Work]
[II—Sisyphus,—his Stone]
[Concrete Foundations]
[Pallas Athene]
[The Wonders of Culture]
[Folk Who Do Not Understand Them]
[On the Way to Calais]
[Von Bethmann-Hollweg and Truth]
[Van Tromp and De Ruyter]
[War and Christ.]
[Barbed Wire]
[The Higher Politics]
[The Loan Game]
[A War of Rapine]
[The Dutch Junkers]
[The War-makers]
[The Christmas of Kultur, A.D. 1915]
[Serbia]
[The Last of the Race]
[The Curriculum]
[The Dutch Journalist to his Belgian Confrère]
[A Bored Critic]
[The Peace Woman]
[The Self-satisfied Burgher]
[The Decadent]
[Liquid Fire]
[Nish and Paris]
[The Fire Fiend]
[The German Oculist]
[Willy-Nilly]
[The Shirkers]
[Lager Beer for Tripoli]
[The German Anti-Bellicist]
[One of the Kaiser’s Many Mistakes]
[The German Spy]
[Belgium in Holland]
[Serbia]
[Slow Asphyxiation]
[The German Propagandist]
[Jackals in the Political Field]
[The Sacrifice]
[Lusitania Amok]
[A Letter from the German Trenches]
[It was I who opened fire on Rheims]
[Corn and Cattle]
[His Master’s Voice]
[Hun Generosity]
[Easter, 1915]
[Duty—and Safety]
[The New Dutch Oil Line]
[Pan Germanicus as Peace Maker]
[Gott Mit Uns]
[Idyllic Neutrality]
[Alcoholism]
[Political and Economic Rapprochement]
[Why They Were Taken]
[Mon Fils, Belgium, 1914]
[Holland to Belgium]
[A Conflict of Testimony]
[The Ferocious Bellicose Party]
[Holland and Militarism]
[Our Lady of Antwerp]
[Deportation]
[The Envoy to Her Majesty]
[The German Band]
[A Fact]
[The Free Sea]
[Belgian Refugee to His Dutch Brother]
[The Falaba]
[The Katwyk]
[Arcades Ambo]
[Neuve Chapelle]
[Atrocities]
[Is it You, Mother?]
[Germany’s Dummy]
THE “LAND & WATER” EDITION OF
RAEMAEKERS’
CARTOONS
Published by “Land & Water,”
EMPIRE HOUSE, KINGSWAY, W.C.
Copyright in all Countries.
INTRODUCTION
By the Editor of Land and Water
Louis Raemaekers will stand out for all time as one of the supreme figures which the Great War has called into being. His genius has been enlisted in the service of mankind, and his work, being entirely sincere and untouched by racial or national prejudice, will endure; indeed, it promises to gain strength as the years advance. When the intense passions, which have been awakened by this world struggle, have faded away, civilisation will regard the war largely through these wonderful drawings. By them, not only the methods of German warfare will be judged, but the resolution will surely be begotten and nurtured that never again, so far as it is humanly possible, shall a recurrence of Teuton inhumanity and barbarism be permitted.
* * * * *
Before the war had been in progress many weeks the cartoons in the Amsterdam Telegraaf attracted attention in the capitals of Europe, many leading newspapers reproducing them. The German authorities, quick to realise their full significance, did all in their power to suppress them. Through German intrigue Raemaekers has been charged in the Dutch Courts with endangering the neutrality of Holland—and acquitted. A price has been set on his head, should he ever venture over the border.
When only a week or two ago he crossed to England, his wife received anonymous post-cards, warning her that his ship would certainly be torpedoed in the North Sea. The Cologne Gazette, in a leading article on Holland, threatens that country that “after the War Germany will settle accounts with Holland, and for each calumny, for each cartoon of Raemaekers, she will demand payment with the interest that is due to her.” Not since Saul and the men of Israel were in the valley of Elah fighting with the Philistines has so unexpected a champion arisen. With brush and pencil this Dutch painter will do even as David did with the smooth stone out of the brook; he will destroy the braggart Goliath, who, strong in his own might, defies the forces of the living God.
When Mr. Raemaekers came to London in December, he was received by the Prime Minister, and was entertained at a complimentary luncheon by the Journalists of the British capital. Similar honour was conferred on him on his second visit. He was the guest of honour at the Savage Club; the Royal Society of Miniature Painters elected him an Honorary Member. But it has been left to France to pay the most fitting recognition to his genius and to his services in the cause of freedom and truth. The Cross of the Legion of Honour has been presented to him, and on his visit to Paris this month a special reception is to be held in his honour at La Sorbonne, which is the highest purely intellectual reward Europe can confer on any man.
* * * * *
The great Dutch cartoonist is now in his forty-seventh year. He was born in Holland, his father, who is dead, having been the editor of a provincial newspaper. His mother, who is still alive and exceedingly proud of her son’s fame, is a German by birth, but rejoices that she married a Dutchman and thus escaped from the debasing influences of her native land. Mr. Raemaekers, who is short, fair, and of a ruddy countenance, looks at least ten years younger than his age. He took up painting and drawing when quite young and learnt his art in Holland and in Brussels. All his life he has lived in his own country, but with frequent visits to Belgium and Germany, where, through his mother, he has many relations. Thus he knows by experience the nature of the peoples whom he depicts.
For many years he was a landscape painter and a portrait painter, and made money and local reputation. Six or seven years ago he turned his attention to political work, and became a cartoonist and caricaturist on the staff of the Amsterdam Telegraaf, thus opening the way to a fame which is not only world-wide but which will endure as long as the memory of the Great War lasts. His ideas come to him naturally and without effort. Suggestions do not assist him; they hinder him when he endeavours to act on them. He is an artist to his finger-tips and throws the whole force of his being into his work. Some years ago he married a Dutch lady, who is devoted to music, and they have three children, two girls and a boy (the youngest); the eldest is now twelve. Very happy in his home, Mr. Raemaekers has no ambitions outside it, except to go on with his work and to continue the fight against the German Evil. A Teuton paper has declared that Raemaekers’ cartoons are worth at least two Army Corps to the Allies. This saying has pleased him greatly; he only wishes they were worth four Army Corps.
The strong religious tendency which so often distinguishes his work makes one instinctively ask to what Church does the artist belong. He replies that he belongs to none, but was brought up a Catholic, and his wife a Protestant, and the differences which in later life severed each from their early teaching caused them to meet on common ground. But the intense Christian feeling of these drawings is beyond cavil or dispute: they again and again bring home to the heart the vital truths of the Faith with irresistible force, and the artist ever expresses the Christianity, not perhaps of the theologian, but of the honest and kindly man of the world.
Praise has been bestowed upon his work by several German papers—qualified praise. The Leipziger Volkszeitung has declared that Raemaekers’ cartoons show unimpeachable art and great power of execution, but that they all lack one thing. They have no wit, no spirit. Which is true—in a sense. They do lack wit—German wit; they do lack spirit—German spirit. And what German wit and German spirit may be one can comprehend by a study of Raemaekers’ cartoons.
* * * * *
The cartoons by Louis Raemaekers properly need no introduction, since they explain themselves in every line. But it might be usefully pointed out that, so far, our Fleet has saved us from actual sight of Germany’s war methods. What shells and bombs we know have arrived from the blue, lacking the personality of the despatchers. Raemaekers lives on the other side of an electrified wire within a very short distance of the slaughter-houses at work. He has dealt with people still bloody, sweating, and dusty from their flight. He knows, or he knows friends who know men and women dead or dishonoured, or in present peril of murder or rape. He understands, as well as all his countrymen, that Belgium is being vivisected on Holland’s doorstep, that Holland may take warning. He is more than any resident in Great Britain of that tragedy. His evidence then is as unimpeachable as his art.
Raemaekers also realises in his presentments what we do not—that the German foulness in war is an integral part of the German philosophy of life, and when the armies give themselves up to their reasoned abominations, it is no more than Germany going joyously to the realisation of the depraved dreams which have been instilled into its mind in peace. He does not lose his temper over the fact. His line cuts as deeply as possible because he knows not only the visible act, but the life-tendency which made the act inevitable. We do not. We still keep the idea that certain things “are not done.” Our geographical position prevents us feeling the pressure that keeps the neutral nations quiet and useful to Germany. Our caricaturists only see the outside of things. So it happens that we who would be most affected by defeat are the least affected now in our own minds.
* * * * *
The abomination of frightfulness in Belgium recalls the sufferings and degradations which English women and children endured nearly sixty years ago when a section of the Indian army rebelled, and the mutineers, being joined by certain disaffected Indian princes and landowners, overcame small and isolated British communities and perpetrated identically the same barbarities as have been deliberately practised by the German troops during the present war. It was then that Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the distinguished American essayist, gave utterance to the following opinion in the Atlantic Monthly; it is now embodied in his well-known work “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.” Although the official voice of the United States has uttered no such protest, there is reason to believe that these words written by an American pen nine-and-fifty years ago do still represent the reasoned opinion of the bulk of American men and women:
Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with the higher? No matter who he was. Now look at what is going on in India—a white, superior “Caucasian” race, against a dark-skinned, inferior, but still “Caucasian” race—and where are English and American sympathies? We can’t stop to settle all the doubtful questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure to come out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general law that the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as it does the same nature in the inferior animals—tame it, or crush it. The Indian mail brings stories of women and children outraged and murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers. England takes down the Map of the World, which she has girdled with empire, and makes a correction thus: Delhi, Dele! The civilised world says, Amen.
* * * * *
Dele! Destroy utterly! Wipe off the face of the world—not Germany, or the German capital, or the German people, but the German philosophy of life as it has been expounded by its chief evangels, Treitschke, Bernhardi, and others. Dele! That should be the motto of each one of us. It is the message which Louis Raemaekers speaks with the whole strength of his genius. It has to be accomplished by the individual in his own sphere; it is a duty which cannot be deputised. Germany has proclaimed: “War is war; no treaty too sacred, no human right too divine, no woman too weak, no babe too tender to escape from the blind, brutal violence of war.” We must fight to the death. Either German philosophy is to be established, and freedom of body, mind, and soul crushed beneath the iron heel of Prussian Kultur, or else, at whatever the cost, this fearful menace to the peace and liberty of nations and individuals has to be destroyed root and branch. “I came not to send peace but a sword,” said the Saviour. Are we, who boast ourselves Christians and have heretofore rejoiced in Christianity, too weak or too fearful in this day of battle to take up the Saviour’s sword and to war for the eternal principles and ideals of right, justice, mercy, and loving-kindness?
This struggle is not merely a matter for the fighting men. It has to be carried into our counting-houses, our shops, our schools, and, if need be, our homes. Wherever we encounter the insidious presence of Germany and German ideas, there must they be overthrown, no matter how costly, difficult, or disagreeable the work may prove personally. The German has been taught that duty to his own State outweighs the laws of God and man. To betray hospitality, to be false to both written and spoken word, to be full of deceit, lying, and treachery—these are esteemed honourable actions even in times of peace where German interests are concerned by all her people from the Kaiser downwards. And the reverse is equally true. They who are not Germans, and who refuse to subscribe to the canons of Kultur, are reckoned beyond the pale of civilisation.
* * * * *
Nothing has been stated here which cannot be proved by independent testimony. The literature of the war and of the events antecedent to the war has grown apace, and this short prefatory note is not the place to review it. But attention may be profitably drawn to the testimony, borne by another neutral, to German methods. Dr. Anton Nyström, one of the most distinguished sons of Sweden, a historian of high repute, who has travelled widely throughout Europe, in his book “Before, During, and After 1914,” written only last summer, establishes that public feeling has been deliberately created in Germany during the last fifty years that that country should assume the mastery of all nations related to Germany without regard to material and historical factors. And wherever this mastery has been assumed, whether in Schleswig-Holstein, Poland, or Alsace and Lorraine, a systematic and ruthless suppression of the mother-tongue has been attempted, and the peoples have been persecuted for any tokens of affection for their own nationality. As it has been, so it will be again, if Germany triumphs. Furthermore, we know well to-day that the mastery of the Germanic peoples was intended only to be the beginning of the mastery of the world.
* * * * *
When complete these portfolios of Louis Raemaekers’ cartoons will constitute the most marvellous record of the horrible realities of this vast world-struggle, and will have a historical value which will grow greater with time. Already the originals have been purchased, and their present owners, in most instances, would not part with them for ten times the price they have paid. It has been well said that no man living amidst these surging seas of blood and tears has come nearer to the rôle of Peacemaker than Raemaekers. The peace which he works for is not a matter of arrangement between diplomatists and politicians: it is the peace which the intelligence and the soul of the Western world shall insist on in the years to be. God grant it be not long delayed, but it can only come when the enemy is entirely overthrown and the victory is overwhelming and complete.
FRANCIS STOPFORD,
Editor, Land and Water.
Empire House,
Kingsway, London.
February, 1916.
Photograph by Miss D. Compton Collier.
Louis Raemaekers