“We must despoil Belgium if only to make room for our own culture.”
If the highly organised enemy with whom we are at grips in a life-and-death struggle would only play the war game in accordance with the rules drawn up by civilised peoples, he would, indeed, command our admiration no less than our respect. Never on this earth was there such a splendid fighting machine as that “made in Germany.” The armies against us are the last word in discipline, fitness, and equipment; and are led by men who, born in barracks, weaned on munitions, have but one aim and end in view—“World-Dominion or Downfall.”
As a matter of fact, instead of winning our admiration they have drawn our detestation. Not content with brushing aside all international laws of warfare, they have trampled upon every law, human and divine, standing in their way of conquest. Indeed, Germany’s method of fighting would disgrace the savages of Central Africa.
Prussianised Germany has the monopoly of “frightfulness.” When not “frightful,” Prussians troopers are not living down to the instructions of their War-lords to leave the conquered with nothing but eyes to weep with. Not content to crucify Canadians, murder priests, violate nuns, mishandle women, and bayonet children, the enemy torpedoes civilian-carrying liners, and bombs Red Cross hospitals. More, sinning against posterity as well as antiquity, Germans stand charged before man and God with reducing to ashes some of the finest artistic output of Christian civilisation. When accused of crimes such as these, Germany answers through her generals: “The commonest, ugliest stone put to mark the burial-place of a German grenadier is a more glorious and venerable monument than all the cathedrals of Europe put together” (General von Disfurth in Hamburger Nachrichten). “Thus is fulfilled the well-known prophecy of Heine: ‘When once that restraining talisman, the Cross, is broken ... Thor, with his colossal hammer, will leap up, and with it shatter into fragments the Gothic cathedrals’” (Religion and Philosophy in Germany in the Nineteenth Century).
What, I ask, can you do with such people but either crush or civilise them?
The very stones cry out against them.
BERNARD VAUGHAN, S.J.
THE VERY STONES CRY OUT
The cartoon bears the quotation from Bernhardi “War is as divine as eating and drinking.” Yes; and German war is as divine as German eating and drinking. Anyone who has been in a German restaurant during that mammoth midday meal which generally precedes a sleep akin to a hibernation, will understand how the same strange barbarous solemnity has ruined all the real romance of war. There is no way of conveying the distinction, except by saying vaguely that there is a way of doing things, and that butchering is not necessary to a good army any more than gobbling is necessary to a good dinner. In our own insular shorthand it can be, insufficiently and narrowly but not unprofitably, expressed by saying that it is possible both to fight and to eat like a gentleman. It is therefore highly significant that Mr. Raemaekers has in this cartoon conceived the devil primarily as a kind of ogre. It is a matter of great interest that this Dutch man of genius, like that other genius whose pencil war has turned into a sword, Will Dyson, tends in the presence of Prussia (which has been for many moderns their first glimpse of absolute or positive evil) to depriving the devil of all that moonshine of dignity which sentimental sceptics have given him. Evil does not mean dignity, any more than it means any other good thing. The stronger caricaturists have, in a sense, fallen back on the medieval devil; not because he is more mystical, but because he is more material. The face of Raemaekers’ Satan, with its lifted jowl and bared teeth, has less of the half-truth of cynicism than of mere ignominious greed. The armies are spread out for him as a banquet; and the war which he praises, and which was really spread for him in Flanders, is not a Crusade but a cannibal feast.