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.
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?