The wonder is not that women went mad, but that there are left any sane civilians of the ravished districts of Belgium after all those infamies perpetrated under orders by the German troops after the first infuriating check of Liége and before the final turning of the German line at the battle of the Marne. We have supped full of horrors since, and by an insensible process grown something callous. But we never came near to realising the Belgian agony, and Raemaekers does us service by helping to make us see it mirrored in the eyes of this poor raving girl. This indeed is a later incident, but will serve for reminder of the earlier worse.
It is really not well to forget. These were not the inevitable horrors of war, but a deliberately calculated effect. There seems no hope of the future of European civilisation till the men responsible for such things are brought to realise that, to put it crudely and at its lowest, they don’t pay.
What the attitude of Germany now is may be guessed from the blank refusal even of her bishops to sanction the investigation which Cardinal Mercier asks for. It is still the gentle wolf’s theory that the truculent lamb was entirely to blame.
JOSEPH THORP
THE REFUGEES FROM GHEEL
Gheel has a model asylum for the insane. On the fall of Antwerp the inmates were conveyed across the frontier. The cartoon illustrates an incident where a woman, while wheeling a lunatic, herself developed insanity from the scenes she witnessed.
“The Junker”
There were few things that Junkerdom feared so much in modern Germany as the growth and effects of Socialism; and it is certain that the possible attitude of the German Socialists—who were thought by some writers to number somewhere in the neighbourhood of two million—in regard to the War at its outset greatly exercised the minds of Junkerdom and the Chancellor. A few days after the declaration of War a well-known English Socialist said to us, “I believe that the Socialists will be strong enough greatly to handicap Germany in the carrying on of the War, and possibly, if she meets with reverses in the early stages, to bring about Peace before Christmas.”
That was in August, 1914, and we are now well on in the Spring of 1916. We reminded the speaker that on a previous occasion, when Peace still hung in the balance, he had declared with equal conviction that there would be no War because “the Socialists are now too strong in Germany not to exercise a preponderating restraining influence.” He has proved wrong in both opinions. And one can well imagine that the Junker class admires Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg for the astute manner in which he has succeeded in shepherding the German Socialist sheep for the slaughter, and in muzzling their representatives in the Reichstag.