The artist spreads before you a view such as you would have on the great wheat-growing plains of Hungary, or on the level plateau of Asiatic Turkey—the vast, unending, monotonous, undivided field of corn. In the background the view is interrupted by two villages from which great clouds of flame and smoke are rising—they are both on fire—and as you look closer at the harvest you see that, instead of wheat, it consists of endless regiments of marching soldiers.
“The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few”: here is only one, but he is quite sufficient—“the reaper whose name is Death,” a skeleton over whose bones the peasant’s dress—a shirt and a pair of ragged trousers—hangs loose. The shirt-sleeves of the skeleton are turned well up, as if for more active exertion, as he grasps the two holds of the huge scythe with which he is sweeping down the harvest.
This is not war of the old type, with its opportunities for chivalry, its glories, and its pride of manly strength. The German development of war has made it into a mere exercise in killing, a business of slaughter. Which side can kill most, and itself outlast the other? When one reads the calculations by which careful statisticians demonstrate that in the first seventeen months of the War Germany alone lost over a million of men killed in battle, one feels that this cartoon is not exaggerated. It is the bare truth.
The ease with which the giant figure of Death mows down the harvest of tiny men corresponds, in fact, to the million of German dead, probably as many among the Russians, to which must be added the losses among the Austrians, the French, the British, the Belgians, Italians, Serbs, Turks, and Montenegrins. The appalling total is this vast harvest which covers the plain.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY
THE HARVEST IS RIPE
“Unmasked”
“The Yellow Book,” it may be remembered, was the official publication of some of the details of atrocities committed by the Huns on the defenceless women and children of ravished Belgium. It told in cold and unimpassioned sentences, in plain and simple words more terrible than the most fervid outpourings of patriot or humanitarian, the tale of brutalities, of cold-blooded crimes, of murders and rape and mental and physical tortures beyond the capabilities or the imaginings of savages, possible only in their refinements of cruelty to the civilised apostles of Kultur. There are many men in the trenches of the Allies to-day who will say that the German soldier is a brave man, that he must be brave to advance to the slaughter of the massed attack, to hold to his trenches under the horrible punishment of heavy artillery fire.
As a nation we are always ready to admit and to admire physical courage, and if Germany had fought a “clean fight,” had “played the game,” starkly and straightly, against our fighting men, we could—and our fighting men especially could, and I believe would—have helped her to her feet and shaken hands honestly with her after she was beaten. But with such a brute beast as the unmasking of the Yellow Book has revealed Germany to be we can never feel friendship, admiration, or respect.