For us it is better to regard the figure as an international, and often anti-national, character who exists in all nations, and who, even in a belligerent country like our own, can often contrive to be neutral and worse than neutral. A prosperous bully with the white waistcoat and coarse, heavily cuffed hands, with which such prosperity very frequently clothes itself, is represented as thrusting food in the starved face of an evicted Belgian and saying: “Eat and hold your tongue.”
The situation is worthy of such record, if only because it emphasises an element in the general German plot against the world which is often forgotten in phrases about fire and sword. The Prussianised person is not only a military tyrant; he is equally and more often a mercantile tyrant. And what is in this respect true of the German is as true or truer of the Pro-German.
The cosmopolitan agent of Prussia is a commercial agent, and works by those modern methods of bribing and sacking, of boycott and blackmail, which are not only meaner, but often more cruel, than militarism. For anyone who realises the power of such international combinations, there is the more credit due to the artists and men of letters who, like Raemaekers himself, have decisively chosen their side while the issue was very doubtful. And among the Belgian confrères there must certainly have been many who showed as much courage as any soldier, when they decided not to eat and be silent, but to starve and to speak.
G. K. CHESTERTON
The Dutch Journalist to his Belgian Confrère: “Eat and hold your tongue.”
A Bored Critic
From Homeric warfare to subterranean conflict of modern trenches is a far cry, and Ares, God of Battles, may well yawn at the entertainment with which the Demon of War is providing him. But the spectator of this grim “revue” lacks something of the patience of its creator, and our Mephistopheles, marking the god’s protest, will doubtless hurry the scene and diversify it with new devilries to restore his interest. Indeed, that has happened since Raemaekers made his picture.
The etiquette of butchery has become more complicated since Troy fell, yet it has been so far preserved till now that the fiend measures Ares with his eyes and speculates as to how far the martial god may be expected to tolerate his novel engines. Will asphyxiating gas, and destruction of non-combatants and neutrals on land and sea, trouble him? Or will he demand the rules of the game, and decline to applaud this satire on civilisation, although mounted and produced regardless of cost and reckoning?
As the devil’s own entertainment consists in watching the effects of his masterpiece on this warlike spectator, so it may be that those who “staged” the greatest war in mankind’s history derive some bitter instruction from its reception by mankind. They know now that it is condemned by every civilised nation on earth; and before these lines are published their uncivilised catspaws will have ample reason to condemn it also. Neutrals there must be, but impartials none.