Imagine the feelings of the hindlegs of a stage elephant on being told that the performance is to be a continuous one and you will have some inkling of the dismay of the Kaiser and his henchman, concealed in the plumage of the War Eagle and the Dove of Peace respectively. The one bird is as useless as the other in bringing the war to the end desired in Berlin. The stage eagle is daily losing its plumage, and is rapidly becoming but a moulty apology for the king of birds. As for the dove, it has been used so often, with constantly changing olive branch in its beak, that it now makes its appearance shamefacedly and absolutely without heart.
Imperial eagle mask with half-mad military quasi-deity inside and dove of peace, on the German model, with calculating miscalculating statesman, you rang the curtain up, you cannot ring it down, either to the music of the Hymn of Hate or the Te Deum for peace—the eagle can no longer look boldly straight into the sun, looking for his place in it; the dove has taken permanent quarters in the German ark as it whirls round and round in the whirlpool of impotent effort, ever drawing nearer to the final crash. When the Dove of Peace does come, it will be a real bird of good omen, not a German reserve officer masquerading as one.
ALFRED STEAD
PAN GERMANICUS AS PEACE MAKER
The Dove: “They say they do not want peace, as they have time enough.”
The Eagle: “Alas! That is just what we haven’t got.”
Gott Mit Uns
This picture is a perfectly accurate symbolic study of the German Empire. Therefore, naturally, it is one of the most dreadful that were ever drawn. In all the gruesome “Dances of Death” in which the fifteenth century took so grim a pleasure, no artist ever conceived the horrible idea of a fat skeleton. But we have not only conceived the thought, we have seen the thing—“a terror in the sunshine.” We know that chest, puffed up with a wind of pride, and that stomach heavy with slaughter and rich living; and above them the Death’s Head. We have seen it. We have felt its foul breath. Its name is Prussia.
Look at a portrait of Frederick the Great, the “onlie true begetter” of this abortion. It oddly suggests what Raemaekers has set down here; the face a skull, the staring eyes those of a lost soul. But the skeleton has grown fat since Frederick’s day—fat on the blood and plunder of nations. Only there is no living flesh on its bones, nothing of humanity about it.