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.
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.