KULTUR IN CARTOONS
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KULTUR
IN
CARTOONS
BY
LOUIS RAEMAEKERS
WITH ACCOMPANYING NOTES BY
WELL-KNOWN ENGLISH WRITERS
A Companion Volume to “Raemaekers’ Cartoons”
Published 1916, and now issued by
The Century Co.
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1917
Copyright, 1917, by
THE CENTURY CO.
——
Published October 1917
Publishers’ Announcement
Purchasers of “Kultur in Cartoons” may be interested to know that this present work is a companion volume to “Raemaekers’ Cartoons,” issued in 1916. “Raemaekers’ Cartoons” includes many of the artist’s earlier work, dealing particularly with the Belgian inferno. The two volumes are alike in size and form, and together constitute a thoroughly representative collection of Raemaekers’ drawings.
The Century Co.
Foreword
BY
J. Murray Allison
A year has passed since the first volume of Raemaekers’ work (“Raemaekers’ Cartoons,” Century Co.), was published in the United States.
At that time Raemaekers was practically unknown in this country, just as he was unknown in England and France until January, 1916, when his work was first exhibited in the British Capital.
The story of Raemaekers’ reception in London and Paris has been written in the introduction to “Raemaekers’ Cartoons.”
When his cartoons began to reach America toward the end of 1916 this country was neutral. It is with peculiar satisfaction, therefore, that I base this brief foreword upon press extracts published prior to America’s participation in the war.
If it were possible to discover to-day an individual who was entirely ignorant as to the causes and conduct of the war, he would, after an inspection of a hundred or more of these cartoons, probably utter his conviction somewhat as follows: “I do not believe that these drawings have the slightest relation to the truth; I do not believe that it is possible for such things to happen in the twentieth century.” He would be quite justified, in his ignorance of what has happened in Europe, in expressing such an opinion, just as any of us, with the possible exception of the disciples of Bernhardi himself, would have been justified in expressing a similar view in July, 1914.
What is the view of all informed people to-day? “To Raemaekers the war is not a topic, or a subject for charity. It is a vivid heartrending reality,” says the New York “Evening Post,” “and you come away from the rooms where his cartoons now hang so aware of what war is that mental neutrality is for you a horror. If you have slackened in your determination to find out, these cartoons are a slap in the face. Raemaekers drives home a universal point that concerns not merely Germans, but every country where royal decrees have supreme power. Shall one man ever be given the power to seek his ends, using the people as his pawns? We cannot look at the cartoons and remain in ignorance of exactly what is the basis of truth on which they are built.”
The “Philadelphia American” likens Raemaekers to a sensitized plate upon which the spirit which brought on the war has imprinted itself forever, and adds: “What he gives out on that subject is as pitilessly true as a photograph. They look down upon us in their naked truth, those pictures which are to be, before the judgment-seat of history, the last indictment of the German nation. Of all impressions, there is one which will hold you in its inexorable grip: it is that Louis Raemaekers has told you the truth.”
This aspect of his appeal is insisted upon by “Vanity Fair,” thus: “That each cartoon is a grim, merciless portrayal of the truth will be apparent to even the meanest intelligence.” The same journal refers to the almost uncanny power of prophecy suggested by many of the pictures. “That they are conceived in a mighty brain and drawn by a skilled hand will be recognized by a sophisticated minority. But only those capable of deeper probing will see that each one is in itself an elemental drama of compelling significance and power, heightened in many cases by prophecy and suggestion.”
The “Philadelphia Public Ledger” refers particularly to Raemaekers’ prophetic instinct. “Here, indeed, is revealed the work not only of one who has the artistic imagination to pictorialize the savagery of the Kaiser and his obedient servants, and to caricature in a manner that leaves nothing unsaid in the way of sinister presentation of evil things, but the work of one who is distinctly a seer. Moreover, the cartoons have been verified by subsequent events, though they seemed to some at the time to be the bitter and ironical casual comment on things most believed could never happen to modern civilization, and have that insight that only a special inspiration and inner illumination could give.”
It is this obvious sincerity, this conviction on the part of the beholder that Raemaekers is telling the simple truth and telling it simply that gives his work its greatest value as a revelation of the German purpose, and as an indictment of German methods of warfare and the German practice of statecraft.
The “Louisville Herald” finds it “impossible to do justice to these remarkable drawings, this terrific gallery, impossible to estimate at this distance the power and pressure of the indictment,” while the “Baltimore Sun” goes so far as to claim that “no orator in any tongue has so stirred the human soul to unspeakable pity and implacable wrath as this Dutch artist in the universal language which his pencil knows how to speak. Those who have forgotten the Lusitania and the innumerable tragedies in Belgium should avoid Raemaekers. They who look at his work can never forget, can never wholly forgive.”
The “Washington Star” thinks that his cartoons should not be taken merely as dealing with events of the conflict, “but with principles.” The writer proceeds: “To Germany and to Austria is upheld a mirror in which are reflected those crimes for which neither will be able to make full redress. There is no touch of vulgarity or hatred in his work, save that which comes from righteous indignation against foul crimes and the vulgarity of the thing itself.”
In appraising the value of Raemaekers’ cartoons purely as political documents, as historic records of crimes and barbarities which the civilized world must not be permitted to forget lest the horrors of the past three years descend upon us again, their purely artistic appeal is frequently ignored or forgotten, but not always. “Raemaekers is an artist,” says the “Boston Globe.” “He tells his story simply, eliminates all unnecessary detail, knows the dramatic value of light and shade, and draws a single figure cartoon with as much impressive suggestiveness as he does a crowd.” The “Providence Journal” acclaims him as a great artist to whose hand has been given the touch of immortality. “Like many geniuses,” continues the “Journal,” “this Dutch artist awaited the occasion in human affairs to awaken the power which he may not even have been aware of possessing. It took a titanic force to stir his conscience and that conscience, once stirred, leaped into aspiring activity to the service of mankind.” Particular stress is laid by the “Boston Transcript” on the artistic merit of the drawings. Comparing him to Honoré Daumier, the great French cartoonist of the Franco-Prussian War, the “Post” is of opinion that Raemaekers is the one artistic personality whose genius has been developed by the stimulus of the war. “If the measure of the influence wielded by a cartoonist is the extent and intensity of emotion aroused by his work, then possibly there has never been a cartoonist in the history of the world who can have compared with Raemaekers. The inspiration of his pictorial polemics is a hearty and profound and righteous indignation, a motive which is of first-rate artistic worth, and which is shared by all the civilized world. What strikes the mind in looking upon these cartoons is the Dantesque quality of the artist’s passion and imagination.” The “Transcript” concludes a remarkable appreciation of the cartoons with the following words: “He guides the spirit and the conscience of the world to-day through an inferno of wrong.”
List of Cartoons
Kultur in Cartoons
The Zeppelin Raider
THIS cartoon is not in the least allegorical, and it is far less terrible than the reality. For the simple reason is that children torn to pieces by high explosives are far more horrible to look at than children with their throats cut.
Had these blood cartoons of Raemaekers been published in the spring of 1914, the artist would have been considered a maniac.
But in the spring of 1916 we know him to be a man portraying the truth, giving us the doings of the German Emperor and his satellites in colored pictures, and a very mild interpretation of them at that. For it is a fact that no man could bear to look at or consider the real truth of what William of Germany has done through the hands of others, of the horrors that he has committed against women who cannot here accuse him, against children of whose very names he knows nothing.
But their accusations are heard and their names remembered by those whose eternal business it is to hear and record, and the silence of those civilized nations who have said nothing before the doings of the infamous One has spoken where silence is heard as well as speech.
Just as St. Paul stood by in silence at the martyrdom of St. Stephen, so have they stood at the martyrdom of these Innocents, and just as he uttered that lamentable cry in the Temple of Jerusalem, so will they cry in his very words, but without his justification of holiness:
“I stood by and consented.”
The Exhumation of the Martyrs of Aerschot
READ here a few sentences from the sworn and sifted testimony of witnesses who saw what happened at Aerschot in August, 1914.
“When the war broke out a German whom I knew well by sight had been living at Aerschot some three years. He had no apparent occupation, but lived on his means in a small house. Occasionally he was away for some time. On the outbreak of war he was expelled from Belgium. He came back with the German troops and pointed out to them all houses and other property belonging to the burgomaster, and the Germans destroyed it all. Many civilians in Aerschot were killed by the Germans. I myself saw some forty dead bodies, including three women. They had been shot.... In one house the wife of a man whom I know well was burned alive. Her husband broke both legs while attempting to rescue her.... The Germans with their rifles prevented anyone going to help this man, and he had to drag himself along the street, with his legs broken, as best he could....”
“I saw some German infantry soldiers kill with bayonets two women who were standing on their doorsteps....”
“There we saw a whole street burning.... We heard children and beasts crying in the flames.”
“The Germans deliberately fired beyond us at four women, a child of 11 or 12 years of age, an infant of six months (about) and four other children who were clinging to their mothers’ skirts. The infant was in its mother’s arms, and was riddled with shot, which passed through it into the mother’s body. While she was trying to crawl into safety on her knees the Germans still fired at her until she died.”
“I saw the body of a little boy about 6½ or 7 years of age, with four bayonet wounds in it. It was stiff and propped against a wall.”
“The first thing we saw was the body of a young girl of about 18 to 20, absolutely naked, with her abdomen cut open. Her body was also covered with bruises.... About a kilometer farther on I saw the body of a little boy, aged 8 or 9, with his head completely cut off. The head was some distance from the trunk.”
These simple phrases, and hundreds more like them, plain to read in the book of evidence, make a better commentary than any I could write on this drawing. There are, indeed, many passages more terrible, such as the tale of the unspeakable treatment of the priest, dragged into Aerschot from the neighboring village of Gelrode. And I turn from reading such things to an English newspaper, wherein is the report of the speech of a person at a great gathering of people interested in coöperative trading—a person who hopes, after the war, to “take by the hand” the creatures guilty of these infamies. It has been my experience to know many sad blackguards in the worst parts of London, but I cannot remember one who could fall as low as that. To find such we must search the smuggeries and the priggeries and the Fellowships of Reconciliation.
The Old Serb
THE calculated brutality of German and Austrian “frightfulness,” its cowardice and cold-blooded evil, are already familiar to all impartial students of Teutonic warfare. But a Nation that has consented to its own slavery cannot value freedom, or be supposed to respect the life or liberty of the innocent and weak. With her neck under Prussia’s heel, tamed Germany strives in word and deed to reflect the spirit of her masters, and so far succeeds that she can contemplate the atrocities of this war with satisfaction, and from pulpit, school, and press applaud each new manifestation in turn. Blind obedience to command has brought the Germans to a state where even their thinking is done for them; they grovel before the brute power that drives them and kiss and sanctify the bloody hands that hold the whip.
Luther said the justification of liberty was that man could only truly serve God and his fellow-man if freedom of choice of means were permitted to him. The German of to-day relinquishes that freedom and is content to be herded under a political system that denies him his independent manhood. He sacrifices responsibility and liberty alike to a race which he still suffers to inherit the privilege of directing his State; he prostitutes his own reasoning faculties and ignores the evolution of morals by applauding Prussia’s reactionary ideals at the expense of every modern movement for the progress of humanity. He knows the right and does the wrong—a willing slave to an archaic autocracy. Thus servile obedience to physical power is the noblest principle that United Germany has yet attained, and the consequences permeate the people in a spiritual indifference to elementary honor displayed alike on her battlefields and in her council chambers.
The lie is accepted as her first diplomatic weapon; “frightfulness” is developed as an invaluable ally of conquest; cruelty and treachery are praised by the scholar and pastor, practised as a matter of course by the soldier and politician. None sees what dishonor is thus heaped upon his country and how her history has been defiled by this generation on the precepts of the last.
Ignoring, as she always does, every contact with other cultures, Germany, out of a congenital megalomania, has evolved her own; and in her eyes it is no doubt as beautiful and precious as the ugly treasure of the child in the perambulator, who discards the most delightful modern toys for its own battered and hideous doll.
In this regard she is indeed still a child; but a study of comparative cultures, following upon the destruction of her present rulers and their doctrine of force, should create a larger-minded nation wherein the civilized concepts of older States shall find recognition.
“Until that final consummation,” as Francis Stopford has well said, “Europe dare not rest secure, and the horrors of Belgium and Serbia will be repeated for the next generation if Germany be left the freedom to reëstablish her might and to reorganize the life of her peoples with the sole object of crushing her neighbors at the first favorable opportunity.”
The “Lusitania” Nightmare
THOUGH a year and more has passed since the great tragedy of the Lusitania, and many evil things have been done since that day by the enemy who strikes at rooted principles of civilization, yet by reason of its magnitude and its utter disregard of the elementary principles of humanity the memory of this deed is still alive in the minds of men. This “nightmare” that Raemaekers pictures was no dream fancy, but a reality; men and women walked along the rows of corpses laid out in the sheds, searching for that which they dreaded to find....
“There is no right but might,” said Germany in that act, “and there is no law in the exercise of might.” Men, women, and children alike of this perverted nation were bidden to rejoice over the sinking of the vessel—the fact cannot be too often stated or too fully kept in mind, more especially now that the fabric whence that doctrine of unguided force has emanated is crumbling under the blows of the Allied armies. For in the day of peace will be found many who will merit Achan’s fate through following Achan’s way, careless of the rows of little corpses that lay out for indentification after the sinking of the Lusitania—careless of all but the material aspect of the settlement that must be made when the military power of this present Germany is crushed.
If it be not crushed beyond the possibility of rising again—if there be any way left by which those who own no law but necessity and expedience may repeat the experiment of these years of war, then these lives that ended off the Old Head of Kinsale ended in vain, and their memory is dishonored. With that which caused this nightmare there must be no compromise.
“Fancy, How Nice....”
THE ethics of war are difficult to reduce to consistent principles. At first sight it does not seem more cruel to asphyxiate your enemy than to blow him to pieces with a land-mine or to turn a machine-gun upon him. Nevertheless, two facts are certain. One is that this very invention was offered to our War Office years ago, and was rejected as unworthy of a civilized nation. The other is that it is forbidden by The Hague Convention in a clause accepted by Germany herself.
The adoption, without warning, of poisonous gas is perhaps the most shameless of all the treacherous violations of international law which Germany has committed. It is now known that Germany had determined, before hostilities began, to violate all the laws of war. In the Official German War Book these conventions are referred to only with contempt. To disregard them is what the Germans call “absolute war”; and they claim that absolute war is the only logical kind of war.
In adopting this theory Germany has fallen far behind barbarism; for, cruel as the barbarian often is, there are always some things which he will not do to his enemy, some conventions which he will observe, either from the chivalry which belongs to the character of the genuine fighting man or from fear of Divine anger, or from a vague sense of what is due to human beings even when they are enemies. The notion that all moral principles are in abeyance during war is the most revolting doctrine that can be proclaimed. It is disgusting to find that it is openly defended by many of the religious guides of the German people, who profess to speak in the name of Christianity.
Such moral obliquity, one thinks, can only exist in a nation which does not play games. But perhaps the reason why games are discouraged in Germany is that they encourage a “foolish” sense of honor and chivalry in the serious business of life.
W. R. INGE,
Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The Laodiceans
“THOU art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold or hot.... Because thou sayest, I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing.... I counsel thee ... anoint thine eyes with eye-salve, that thou mayest see.”
Raemaekers has patience with most things, but with neutrality he would scorn to be patient. He refuses to parley with it, even when it waves the colors of his own country in its hand—if it ever does anything so sturdy as to wave colors. These old women are dreadful, they are almost as terrifying as his Prussian monsters. The persuasive old fanatic in the foreground arguing the divinity of lukewarmness is dreadful in herself, and more dreadful still because we all know that she exists, in belligerent as in neutral countries. And worse, far worse, is the granite female with her stone brooch in her marble collar behind her. The others are surprised, doubtful, not yet entirely won over to the specious argument; but the woman behind is a very Gibraltar of neutrality.
Seldom, very seldom, does Raemaekers draw dreadful women. His Germania is a symbol, not a woman. I can only remember one other cartoon, a merciless drawing of the Kaiser and the Kaiserin, in which a woman stands for evil. He likes to picture pity and mercy and nobility in the form of women, and when he wishes to paint sorrow and endurance he gives us such cartoons as those of the mothers and widows of Belgium. And this makes it the more likely that in these gossiping, selfish, silly, wicked creatures he is drawing a type of mind rather than a type of female. In every country there are “old women”; but they are not always females.
“A Pitiful Exodus”
THIS is one of Raemaekers’ crowds. He is fond of depicting crowds, and he is right. He has the art of making them singularly effective. He catches wonderfully both the general impression and the value of a face or figure here and there not violently obtruded but individually appealing.
And these crowds are so effective because they are so true. This is a war of crowds. The nations have fought in crowds, they have suffered in crowds. “Multitudes—multitudes in the valley of decision” might be said to be its text.
And Antwerp was ever a place of crowds; though not, of course, like this. Who does not know Antwerp as she was before the war? A great, buzzing, thriving hive on the water’s edge, filled with a jolly, comfortable, busy bourgeoisie; mediæval and modern at once, with her churches and her quays, her florid “Rubenses” her Van Dycks, her Teniers, her Maison Plantin, and all the rest of her past; her world commerce, her fortifications of to-day, deemed impregnable!
She had been besieged and fallen before. To-day she fell with scarcely a siege.
Who was responsible for this fiasco—for the defense which was no defense, the relief which was no relief? Why was the Naval Brigade sent there? Perhaps we shall know some day, when Raemaekers’ country is free to set them also free again.
What we can know is graphically and terribly told by Mr. John Buchan and the witnesses he cites.
The highways were black with the panting crowds: ladies of fashion, white-haired men and women, wounded soldiers, priests old and young, nuns, mothers, daughters, children. So it was described by one who saw it.
More than a quarter of a million of inhabitants left Antwerp in one day. The world has never before seen such an emptying of a great city. “Some day,” Mr. Buchan ends, “when its imagination has grown quicker, it will find the essence of war not in gallant charges and heroic stands, but in the pale women dragging their pitiful belongings through the Belgian fields in the raw October night.”
If anything could further quicken the world’s imagination it would be this picture. Rubens devised the famous “pomps” for the entry of Ferdinand of Austria. The German entry had no Rubens. But this miserable pomp, this “pitiful exodus,” has found its realistic Rubens in Raemaekers.
“Death the Friend”
WHEN the white horse rode out to war with the clever, handsome mountebank in the shining armor astride it (ignore for the moment the duller fact of an anxious, field-gray man in a Benz limousine) the demigod made, let us admit it, a brave show.
’Tis credibly reported that in his company rode his august familiar, “our old God” in a new mood and a brand new uniform, “wearing,” in fact, in the words of a dithyrambic Teuton, “the Death’s Head cap of the German Hussars and carrying a white banner.”
What that Other may be assumed to have made of Dixmude, Termonde, and the ineffable rest of it is for the curious to conjecture: as also at what exact stage of the swift journeyings back and forth of the tired white horse there came into a mind fed on rich, fat phrases and meaty metaphors, and the flattery of astute, strong men and the dazzling reflections of the imperial cheval glass, the first doubt as to whether the high approval of that Other were indeed an objective reality, or merely a figment of the imagination of an overwrought overman. In any case, there must soon have dawned an aching wonder as to how the devil the banner could be white.
And when was it that in place of that Other Rider in the hussar’s cap there seemed to be something queer and sinister astride behind him on his battle-weary steed? Was it then that he began to whistle so vigorously (vide German Press passim) to keep up his spirits? And will there come a time (has it already come?) when that caressing touch on the shoulder will seem indeed the caress of a friend, and that gaunt index point to the only peace he will ever know?
A Higher Pile
FULL half a million men, yet not enough
To break this township on a winding stream;
More yet must fall, and more, ere the red stuff
That built a nation’s manhood may redeem
The Highest’s hopes and fructify his dream.
They pave the way to Verdun; on their dust
The Hohenzollern mount and, hand in hand,
Gaze haggard south; for yet another thrust,
And higher hills must heap, ere they shall stand
To feed their eyes upon the promised land.
One barrow, borne of women, lifts them high,
Piled up of many a thousand human dead.
Nursed in their mothers’ bosoms, now they lie—
A Golgotha, all shattered, torn and sped,
A mountain for these royal feet to tread.
A Golgotha, upon whose carrion clay
Justice of myriad men, still in the womb,
Shall heave two crosses; crucify and flay
Two memories accurs’d; then in the tomb
Of world-wide execration give them room.
Verdun! Thy name is holy evermore;
In thine heroic ruin the nations see
A monument, upon whose living shore
In vain the evil breaks; we bend the knee,
Thou symbol of all human liberty.
Peace Reigns at Dinant
THE mere human criminal will cover his crime with disguises; but it may truly be said that the Prussian has buried even his crime in the evidences of it. He has made massacre itself monotonous; and made us weary of condemning what he was never weary of carrying out.
It is said that General Von der Goltz, on receiving complaints of the scarcely human parade of cruelty which accompanied the first entrance into Belgium, declared that such first bad impressions of the Prussian would wear off after his victory in the real campaign; and that, as he expressed it, “Glory will efface all.” That sort of glory, however, was itself effaced from the German prospects as early as the battle of the Marne; and we shall never know whether humanity is capable of so vile a forgiveness; or whether glory will efface all.
But there is a real sense in which we may say that infamy has effaced all. In the first stage of the war Prussia conducted assassination upon the same scale as grand strategy; and it is as difficult to recall every woman or child whose death was in itself a breach of all international understandings as it is to recall every poor fellow in uniform who has fallen in the open fighting which everyone understands.
The pen becomes impotent when it attempts to give life to statistics; and I do not know that anything can come closer to it than the pencil, when it draws what the artist has drawn here—merely one quiet soldier, in the corner of one quiet town; and beyond only the corner of a heap of figures, which are yet more quiet.
Humanity v. Kultur
ONE of the most marked features of Raemaekers’ art is his intense feeling of patriotism. He is proud of his country and of her past history, and he is resolute to be true to the fame of the Netherlands in the past and to preserve the freedom which is the heritage of her people. Another characteristic is his abhorrence of the prospect of German tyranny over his country. He hates that danger, which must ever be present to the mind of a patriotic Dutchman. It has been the pressing danger of the country for many years, and the danger increases and becomes more imminent year by year. He hates that thought, both because it would put an end to the freedom of his country and because he detests the character of Germany, and many of his cartoons express this abhorrence in the extremest form. He loathes the nature and the effects of German “Kultur.”
Both these characteristics are expressed in this cartoon. The Netherlands is represented as a young Dutch girl in the national costume, a working woman wearing apron and cap and big wooden shoes. She has taken off one of the shoes, holding it ready to strike, while in a threatening attitude and with flashing eye she faces a hideous hag in dirty, slovenly attire, who represents the great enemy. The artist’s cartoons vie with one another in the ugliness which is imparted, sometimes in one way, sometimes in another, to the enemy, but there is none which represents Prussia in a more detestable form than this. Prussia is a drunken woman, who is just coming out from a public-house, and is leaning against the door, hardly able to stagger on. The sign at the door is inscribed in German: “Bierhaus zur Deutschen Kultur.” Prussia shrinks back from the assault which Holland is threatening. Yet the assault is not an armed one; it is the assault of criticism and righteous indignation, as uttered in the press and through art. The crown of the empire, with the iron cross hanging from the apex, is tumbling off the head of the drunken woman. The right hand, which she holds up in deprecation, is dripping with blood. The neck of a large bottle protrudes from a pocket in her dirty and ragged apron on which the bloody mark of a child’s hand is imprinted. But with her bloodstained hand Prussia deprecates the attacks of criticism by the protest: “A real lady like me does not do such a thing”—forgetting in her drunken mind that she bears the marks of guilt on her person. She has been indulging in “Kultur” until she is in the last stage of intoxication, barely able to stand upright, and quite unable to preserve the crown of empire. Another characteristic of Raemaekers is evident: the perfect, absolute assurance of victory. There can be no question what the future will be; the issue of conflict, either in discussion or in other ways, between this stalwart young woman and the broken, drunken wretch cannot be doubted for a moment. The crown is already slipping away, and no gesture, no support, will be in time to keep it in its place.
The Bill
EVEN a dragon’s teeth decay
And then there comes a painful time
When morsels won’t be made away:
Hence spring this picture and this rhyme
Of dragons rather past their prime.
A varied menu spread before
The hungry Kaiser and his son,
From which the royal epicure
With other courses chose this one—
Paris to follow when ’twas done.
A dainty dish the waiter thought
To set before a king, or clown;
Yet though they gulped and chewed and fought
Not sire nor son could get it down—
This little, sturdy, ancient town.
And, what is more, their appetites,
That yesterday were sharp and keen,
This wretched dish of Verdun blights:
Its toughness they had not foreseen;
The cooking’s bad, the inn unclean.
“My son, I think we’ll try elsewhere.”
“Right O! dear father, so we will.
I’m spoiling for a change of air.
Don’t let this trifle make you ill:
Our cannon fodder pay the bill!”
“You need not storm this place”
THE magnificent imagery of Isaiah is alone adequate to interpret the artist’s picture. The German Kaiser is at the entrance to hell, on the gloomy portals of which is written the motto: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” The devil, with a Mephistophelian irony, tells his captive: “You need not storm this place.” Hell is only too ready to house the great malefactors who have sinned against light and are doomed to torment.
It is inevitable to recall the great oracles of Isaiah on the King of Babylon—that enemy of his race who had enslaved the Jewish people, persecuted God’s elect and led them into captivity. “Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?... How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cast down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”
But the King of Babylon was received with greater ceremony than falls to the lot of the German Kaiser. To welcome the former the old kings rise from their thrones. Wilhelm is led by the devil alone, and no pomp or circumstance of war surrounds him. His sin is as the sin of those who have believed in their transcendent power and are the victims of megalomania. He, too, said in his heart: “I will ascend into Heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will be like the Most High.” Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.
And the sentence passed on such enemies of the human race is the same which Isaiah uttered thousands of years ago. “Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; that made the world as a wilderness and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners?” The very catalogue of offenses is the same. And the penalty is that no such posthumous glory as encircles the monarchs of the past will come to him. He goes down to the stones of the pit, cast out from all honorable burial, as “a carcass trodden underfoot.”
Never did Raemaekers dip his pen in bitterer gall than when he limned this appalling picture of the fate which awaits a merciless and bloodthirsty tyrant.
Hohenzollern Madness
MAYBE the French poet of genius is already born who will sing the Epic of Verdun. One thinks of him staring into his mother’s face, and blinking a pair of wondrous brown eyes at the summer sun. France is too near, too careful and troubled about the present, too deeply plunged in grief and pain to tell that story with the majestic isolation of genius, or fling her inspiration wide enough, as yet, to catch the significance of this supreme event.
Marble and bronze will record it, and imperishable verse—of that we may be sure; for the nation that has defended Verdun against the might of Germany holds the seeds of magistral art. Art must spring quickened, enlarged, and ennobled from these furnace fires; and it will happen, as of old, that a people great enough to do great deeds lack not for children of genius to record their immortality in achievements themselves immortal.
That follows in fullness of time; for at this moment, while cannon thunder and men die happy, with the light of coming victory for a crown, we may well think of such men alone and pay our homage to the heroes who have saved Verdun at the cost of their lives.
But what of Germany’s sons? What of the thousands who have fallen in fruitless attempts to take the hill of Dead Men?
It may be ere long that these armies, driven by whip and revolver from behind, will wake to the futility of their continued destruction and begin to measure the worth of the royal command still hurling them to death, that its own wounded vanity and strategical and political incompetence shall find a salve in their sacrifice.
Raemaekers imagines nothing here, for his picture is a transcript of familiar truth. Death welcomes to its bony bosom the pride of a kingdom, while the rulers of that kingdom flog their subjects on to the annihilation that awaits them. Such forlorn tactics are all that remain to the beggared tyrant and his son. But men are not as corn or the beasts of the field: this harvest cannot be renewed by the passage of a year; and when Death has fed full, he must wait for another such meal until the boyhood of Germany has come to man’s estate. May the youthful Teutons with their manhood win sanity also, and escape forever the slavery that has driven more than half a million of their fathers to fruitless destruction before Verdun.
“My master asks you to look after these peace doves”
RAEMAEKERS in this excellent cartoon is not less direct, although he is at the same time more subtle, than in some others. Holland, typified by the seated figure, has an expression of amazement and suspicion, if not actual fear, upon her face. The Boche is not content with merely offering the basket of spurious doves, but has thrust it upon Holland’s lap. The bearer who, in the name of his master, asks the latter to look after the “doves” is obviously trying to look agreeable as well as innocent, but the battered helmet and the leer upon his face serve to betray him.
Holland, says her great artist in this picture, has no use for “peace doves,” or, at least, for those of the breed that wear the spiked helmets of the Prussians. One may suspect, as the artist and Holland herself apparently do, that the “doves,” symbolic of peace, may prove the stormy petrels of war. They may be said to typify the propagandists who, having settled in Holland from the early days of the war, have carried on a crafty campaign of misrepresentation and calumny not alone against the Allies, but against the country which has hitherto preserved neutrality and sacrificed so much in works of benevolence in regard to Belgian and other refugees, and the British airmen and seamen which the accidents and tides of war have brought to or thrown upon her shores.
The “doves of peace,” and there are many Germans now resident in Holland, have probably all of them “Mannlichers” as well as spiked helmets for use if needed.
In regard to all transactions with the Huns or their master, Holland will do well to remember Virgil’s oft-quoted line: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”
Every “dove,” whether in the guise of propagandist, commercial representative, official, or agent for the purchase of foodstuffs, and whether bringing a cage of “peace doves” or bags of gold, is a potential enemy to the peace and independence of Holland. The triumph of the Central Empires means the subjugation of the Dutch people, and the “peace doves” within her borders would soon quit their cooing and be transformed into the “Prussian Eagle’s brood.”
Famine in Belgium
“WHEN the German conquers Belgium and Poland the first thing he does is to raise agriculture, commerce, and industry to a state of immediate prosperity. Gain and comfort for the new subjects cling to the soles of his feet.”
Thus the Rev. Gerhard Tolzien preaching in Schwerin Cathedral last autumn at the harvest festival held on the 19th Sunday after Trinity. We must suppose he believed it. One of the stock attributes of Kultur, proclaimed by its apostles and obediently repeated by their pupils, is the beneficent influence it sheds on other lands. It showers gratuitous benefits on all, but only those fortunate enough to be brought under German sway reap the full harvest of its blessings. So the domination of the world by Germany is justified. It is for the people’s good; it would be the millennium.
Raemaekers shows it to us at work in Belgium. We see the Germans who have conquered the land carrying out those beneficent functions described by the German preacher. Having brought agriculture, commerce, and industry to a state of unprecedented prosperity, they are watching, with benevolent satisfaction, the signs of gain and comfort among the inhabitants. If the emaciated peasants, leaving their roofless cottage, limping down the empty street with the few odds and ends of rubbish not worth looting which they still possess, or stopping to poke about in the gutter for a scrap of food—if they seem to be at the last extremity of misery, that is, no doubt, because they are too dull to appreciate the blessings of Kultur.
Truly this is a terrible picture, a veritable nightmare. There is nothing more poignant in the whole series. It would be a relief to be able to believe Herr Tolzien’s account, but we fear that the ghastly contrast drawn by the neutral artist is only too well founded on fact.
Poor Old Thing
AN old English proverb, disdaining to be cramped by so feeble and academic a thing as grammar, tells us that “courtesy is cumbersome to him that kens it not.” It is one of the essential signs of breeding that courtesy is natural and not cumbersome; and if we may take the saying of the German naval officer as true, that the English will always be fools and the Germans will never be gentlemen (though it is true that the maker of such a saying must be a gentleman himself), we shall be able to understand much about the Central Powers that is otherwise puzzling. Despite their aristocracies and their history, and this applies especially to Austria, those Powers have a streak of cheapness running through them. They are cads. They snarl and bicker with each other like a grocer’s family in a back parlor. Unlike Lamb’s “party in a parlor,” they are not all silent; possibly the rest of the sentence holds true. Where was Wilhelm? Why doesn’t Franz Joseph do better? But for him we’d have done such and such. Why didn’t the fellow do better?
They growl about each other to all the winds of heaven. Some of their griefs are legitimate. Between allies of different race there must always be grounds of difference and even of acute divergence of opinion. For generations the Austrians have disliked the Germans with a hearty and vigorous dislike. If ten years ago you called a German an Austrian, he corrected you with superciliousness; if you called an Austrian a German, he corrected you with fury. Germans called Austrians “stuck-up”; Austrians called Germans merely “those Germans.” And now that they are fighting side by side for their existence, now that their whole history and homogeneity as European Powers are at stake, they carp and snap like fretful sick puppies.
We—the Allies—are Latin and Slav and Saxon and Celt, and we shall never understand each other really well. The friendship of England with France is new, and has been grafted on centuries of clean warfare and honorable hostility; but on the many points on which we think differently, do we reproach each other? We have all retreated since the war began, and in each case our Allies have hurried up to tell us that our retreat was a masterpiece, as honorable as a victory. Why?
Because: Noblesse oblige.
Germany and the Neutrals
THERE are some points in Germany’s attitude toward the neutrals which are ambiguous. Others are only too tragically clear. If we consider in its general character the German submarine crusade, we find that its original intention—to damage not only ships of war but the merchantmen of Great Britain, including passenger boats—involves also a studied neglect of the rights of neutral ships. Everything that might conceivably help Great Britain, either in respect to food-stuffs, commerce, or international trade, or the voyage of harmless tourists on the seas, was, from the point of view of Berlin, to be exposed to the fury of submarine attacks without any nice discrimination between enemies and neutrals. Clearly at one stage of the war the submarine commanders had their orders to stop and overhaul whatever they met on the seas, to give very inadequate time for the crews to escape, and to refuse all assistance to the victims struggling in the water.
The crisis of this submarine crusade was reached in the sinking of the “Lusitania.” Thereupon the American Government took action, and the Notes interchanged between President Wilson and the Wilhelmstrasse eventually, after much correspondence, brought about a temporary cessation of the more violent methods of the Teuton pirates. For it became clear that the patience of President Wilson was almost exhausted, and the possibility of a rupture of diplomatic relations gave some pause to the German Higher Command. The leading principles, however, of the enemy’s crusade have never been altered. Indeed, many observers have foreseen the recrudescence of submarine attacks, with the aid of newer and more formidable vessels with a wider range of action and a stronger armament.
The Berlin contention is that Great Britain, through her preponderance of naval power, is a despot on the seas, infringing the liberties of other nations. To restore freedom by limiting the activity of British vessels has been a constant parrot-cry of the Teutonic enemy. The real truth, of course, is that the blockade is having such serious effects on Germany that she is almost bound to initiate new movements, if only to shake off the fatal grasp of the British ships of war.
Probably the neutrals understand the position quite as well as we do, but for various reasons it is difficult for them to make an effective protest. Meanwhile the innate brutality of submarine warfare is as obvious as ever it was, and in Raemaekers’ cartoon the hideous gorilla which represents the Teuton power is gloating over its victims and breathing out defiance against all who attempt to curb it in its reckless cruelty. The legend “Gott mit Uns” adds a biting irony to the picture.
Those Horrible Britons
THE English have always been misunderstood by foreign peoples, and I think one of the most beneficial effects of this war will be the better understanding of John Bull by the Slavs, by the Gauls—and by the Teutons.
The Slavs up to this time have not known us at all. In France till very recently the Englishman has been the Englishman of the old Palais Royal farces, a creature with red whiskers, front teeth like the double blank in dominoes, shepherd’s plaid trousers, and a disengaging manner. Read Daudet, read Hugo, read Loti and you will see that even the highest intelligences in France have failed to appreciate John Bull at his true worth, failed even to understand him.
Germany, who understands everything but humanity, has been even more backward than France. To Germany John has figured as a robber grown fat on plunder, soft, flabby, and only waiting to be plundered. To Germany and to the Kaiser John has not figured as a power, simply because he has not figured as a military power. They believed him effete.
The first seven divisions cut into this comfortable belief in a cruel manner. The handful of English who drove the Hun hordes back from Calais did not put balm on the wound. Slowly and by degrees the Kaiser has seen his last hopes broken by the English.
“Those Horrible Britons.”
Raemaekers, as always, has touched the truth.
Dr. Kuyper to Germany
OF benevolent neutrality we have all heard; and of the existence of the malevolent kind, too, we are quite frequently reminded. The Allied countries failed to perceive the benevolence of the Vatican’s utterance that the violation of Belgium “happened in the time of my predecessor,” and so apparently called for no comment from the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Since that interview the inaction of the Vatican, which had till then been almost complete, and has since been troubled by one or two tentative mentions of olive branches and no more, has appeared in more than a dubious light to the Allied nations. In France, where the opening of the war brought about something like a religious revival, the Pope’s inaction and the Pope’s speech caused a cold Gulf Stream of suspicion and disappointment to flow steadily Romeward. The spectacle of a Protestant premier of a two thirds Protestant country favoring a mission to the Vatican is one which would in any case have troubled Protestants, and in this case does not even please Roman Catholics. Then who does it please? Raemaekers knows.
Alas for the days when we associated screens with “little French milliners”; what a Lady Teazle have we here! And what a school of something worse than scandal holds its classes in the seminaries of war-politics! Dr. Kuyper, “the snowy-breasted pearl” of the drawing, is, perhaps, guilty of hoping a thing he does not avow; of working for it; but at least even Raemaekers, a stern critic, admits that without being a villain (we know the mark Raemaekers sets on the brow of his villains) he may be still quite pleased with himself. But the two behind the screen are furtive, are anxious, are unable to enjoy even an act that should further their plans; they are pleased, but their pleasure is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of a thought which turns ever more eagerly to the future, and turns back ever more anxiously to the present.
The Kaiser’s Diplomacy
THE true story of what happened in Montenegro, when the Austrians reported that the country had submitted to superior force and accepted the domination of the Central Powers, and that it was abandoning the hopeless task of resisting their united strength, will perhaps be revealed in the future. At present it is unknown. Probably it will turn out to have been a great personal disappointment to the Kaiser and another instance where his diplomacy failed. It would have been a triumph to induce Montenegro to submit peaceably, and to have King Nicholas accept the position of a client king at Berlin. But the resistance of Montenegro was not wholly overcome. The king and the people who had fought for freedom with success against all the forces of Turkey and afterward of Austria during so many years could not submit to being deluded by the blandishments of Hadji Wilhelm.
Here the artist shows Nicholas with his bag packed for the journey to France, and labelled “Lyon,” turning away from the Kaiser, who looks toward him with seductive entreaty, and presses his hands in a gesture of petition. He is making a last attempt to induce the king to submit to fate and to himself; to come to Berlin, and to be received with royal honors and enrolled alongside the many princely families of Germany.
The Kaiser set great store by success in this negotiation. It would have been the beginning, as he hoped, of the breaking up of the alliance among his foes. Even though it was only the small and poor Montenegro that abandoned the Allied cause, still it was to be the first stage of a general break-up, which would have been hailed with triumph as the beginning of the end. The Kaiser wanted Nicholas badly, but Nicholas was not going alone to Berlin, and his last word is that “we will all come later.” Raemaekers, with his unfailing confidence in a final victory, looked forward then, when the cause of the Allies seemed to be at its lowest ebb, to the victory of the future, and to the victorious entrance of the united Allies into Berlin. The artist judged by faith, and not by sight. He was not a mere calculator of chances, and an estimator of military power; for those neutrals who judged on such principles were apparently all so profoundly impressed with the overwhelming military strength of Germany, that their moral judgment was warped. Raemaekers had lived too close to Germany to be ignorant of her enormous strength; but he judges as a prophet, who bears witness to the moral quality of the world, despite of the apparent balance of probabilities.
Cain
GERMANY’s practical attitude to small countries has always given the lie to her expressed benevolence. Her proposal at the beginning of the war to localize conflict and leave Austria’s sixty millions to settle with the four millions of Serbia will be remembered. Then, after solemn assurance that her neutrality would be respected, “necessity” demanded Germany’s broken oaths and unspeakable outrage upon an innocent nation. It was merely a choice between Belgium and Switzerland; and convenience decided for Belgium. Abroad we have seen the treatment of uncivilized races and observed with what thanksgiving the indigenous peoples of West Africa, East Africa, and the Cameroons have welcomed Germany’s downfall as the first step to restoration of liberty and recognition of human rights. Those fiends—Prince Arenberg, Carl Peters, Chancellor Leist—are not forgotten, nor the Herero massacres.
Belgium has been sacrificed by the Cain of nations. He, who has talked most loudly about the rights of small kingdoms and his unbreakable resolution to protect them against the threat of the mighty and the tyranny of the strong; he, who desired to be his brother’s keeper, has Belgium murdered on her pyre. Within two days of the promise to leave her inviolate, she lay battered and bleeding under the club of the oath-breaker. But the smoke of the burning is beaten back into the assassin’s eyes. Even from the tribal god of the Huns this sacrifice has won no smiles.
It has been left for a Christian emperor in the twentieth century to emulate the neolith barely emancipated from brutedom, and set an example that the stone men of old might have hesitated to copy.
We have so long grown accustomed to the spectacle of martyred Belgium, and are so familiar with the whole story of her rape and massacre by this royal savage of Prussia, that the grief is like to be deadened and the pang grown dull; but let no such narcotic drift over our spirits until the war is won. Not the onset of poison gas would be more fatal than any emotion of indifference, or inclination to accept the situation now achieved by treachery, falsehood, surprise, and villainy beyond example, as a basis whereon to build any sort of peace. Let the word be anathema while the Hun still sucks the blood of his sacrifice and while Belgium and Serbia fester at the touch of his feet; let none breathe it until the Allies alone, without enemy question or neutral interference, are in a position to impose a peace commensurate with their victory.
The Counter-Attack at Douaumont
THE fortress of Verdun will stand forever, a bastion cut against the sky, and behind and above, like a flaming cresset, will burn Douaumont.
Verdun in March of 1916 was the name of a fortress and a town; to-day it is no longer a name. It has become a word lifted among the star words common to all languages and all times. Valor, splendor, devotion, endurance, patriotism,—how grand are these words! Yet Verdun is the grandest of them all, for it includes them all.
It is the word that France has flung to the world not from her fleshly lips, but from the lips of her soul.
To the cringing neutrals; to Swiss waiters, and Dutch hucksters and English sedition-mongers, and Irish hole-and-corner men, and Swedish marketmen. To the hordes of the Beast and the powers of darkness France has flung the light of that one burning word, just as the Spartans, four hundred and eighty years before the birth of Christ, flung to us the light of the word Thermopylæ.
The old heroic times seemed dead, littleness seemed everywhere, till the light of this war showed the soul of man great as in the days of Alexander.
The counter-attack at Douaumont is but an incident, a crystallized moment out of the endless battle on the Meuse.
The Morning Paper
THE Kaiser said “his heart bled” when the Allies raided Carlsruhe from the air. The hemorrhage was not serious, but it had a value as tending to show that the heart was there. Or was it that the Allies had performed the classic feat of drawing blood from a stone? It was more than his own airmen could do when they killed children and women in London and Paris.
Perhaps some day a poet will arise who will be able to write for us the epic of the Morning Paper during this war. It used to lie under doors till wanted, and then Father had it, and Mother didn’t want it till after lunch, and George got it after Father, and Arthur must therefore buy an “evening” paper at the station where he caught the 9:19 to the City. And it really didn’t matter much, after all, except that it was something to talk about, and the Other Side was taking the country to the dogs (a trip on which it has been entering any time these last five hundred years), and one must know the latest entries for the Thousand Guineas, anyway, and yesterday’s goals.
And now! “Hasn’t the paper come yet? Where’s the paper? Is there any news? What are We doing? Have the French advanced? What about Verdun? Why’s the paper late? How’s Russia this morning? Read it out, Father, or else order a copy each!” The holy, classical, breakfast gloom of the British family is shattered by machine-gun fire of questions, of anxiety, of hope, of anguish, of pride, of horror, of hope again. Those folded sheets of printing, less clear than it used to be, on paper less good than it was, have even eclipsed that domestic Mercury, the postman! Letters lie unopened till the news has been scanned. That alone represents a revolution in British family life, and the same thing obtains in all the Allied western countries.
And what it represents is the change of focus in our minds. We are all living more or less intensely in an impersonal and selfless atmosphere, where what others are doing matters more than what our friends are doing, and where we are blatantly, flagrantly, despite all our national traditions, sure of an Ideal. We can even talk about it! I believe this cartoon by Raemaekers has a special appeal to the British for this reason; that the morning paper has come to mean so much to us, and now rouses in us such large, splendid feelings, such a magnificence of pain, such a glory of anxiety, such a pride of suffering—has made possible to us expression of so much which we thought it right and decent to hide in our hearts before—that this spectacle of the Kaiser and his dame gloating over innocent deaths has a force and a drive which the British are bound to recognize in a special degree. And the faces of the maniac and his senile wife, glowering at their “good news,” cannot help but recall to us Father’s look when he read that we had taken La Boisselle, Mother’s face when she heard that casualties were “comparatively” light. The paper is something more than paper and ink nowadays.
“And such a brave Zepp he was”
Aestatem increpitans seram Zepyrosque morantes.
Chiding the lateness of the summer still
And “Zeppers” all too tardy for his will.
This is rather the attitude we should have expected of the all-highest, whom, of course, the seasons ought to obey. It is hard on him that we should have had such a late summer, and that his “Zeppers” should have had to wait so long and, after all, done so little.
For the “gentle Zeppers” from the east to-day, like those from the west of old, come with fair weather and serene skies. They may find an exceptional night in winter when “the moon is hid,” for, like all evil-doers, “they love darkness rather than light,” and “the night is still,” but it is in the calm of summer and autumn that they look to make their best harvest and their boldest onslaughts. Equinoctial gales, sleet and snow do not suit them, so brave are they. They are not keen to face either the battle or the breeze, so brave are they.
It would be unfair to deny bravery altogether to the Boches. They have shown it in their own “book of arithmetic” way on land, on sea, and in the air. (H)immelmann, as the Tommies of course called him, certainly showed himself “at ’ome in his native (h)element, as bold as a ’awk,” though brought down by a half-fledged eagle at the finish. But he was an aviator and took risks. The brave “Zepps” have not taken many; we do not blame them. There is no reason why they should, and every reason why they should not. They are delicate and expensive birds to rear. When they are on the wing there are a good many “marks over,” and when the anti-aircraft gun finds those “marks,” light currency though they be, they fall even faster than on the Exchange.
Formidable, no doubt, the Zepps are. It is our good luck more than our good management that they have not done more damage. But brave, as bravery goes in this war, hardly that, so far. We should have expected the Kaiser to curse them and the weather, not to weep. Weeping? Kaisers and Kaiserins and Count Zeppelins should be made of sterner stuff. We do not hear that Herod and Herodias were seen weeping because the attack on Rachel cost them an assassin or two. Yet that is the picture Raemaekers gives us here, scathingly, sarcastically, graphic as ever.
“They were brave.” “They fought against odds unnumbered” (of women and children and men 10,000 feet below them). “They fell with their tails to the foe.” Yes, the Zepps are very brave. They’ll have to be braver still before they’re done!
HERBERT WARREN.
P.S.—This was written before September 2. Yes, they’ll have to take more risks, and they and their friends will have to be braver yet.
Flying Over Holland
HOLLAND has acted a rather more than neutral part in this war. Cocoa and bacon, butter and potatoes, lard and oil, beef, fish, sugar, and rice—the amount she has eaten of these has been truly astounding. She has eaten so much and slept so soundly that she has not heard the Zeppelins flying over her, bound for England.
Should aeroplanes fly over her, bound for Germany, would she wake up?
She has also eaten rubber and dry-goods, and so many other indigestible things that if she doesn’t sulfer from somnolence, for decency’s sake and as a proof that she still belongs to the human family, she ought to pretend to suffer from it—when the aeroplanes fly over her, bound for Germany.
One wonders what her opinions are on this cartoon presented to her by her most illustrious son.
“If they don’t increase their Army”
WE were inclined at the beginning of this war to be a little unreasonable in our demands on the sympathy of the neutral nations. This was particularly the case with Holland, whose geographical position with regard to Belgium and to ourselves is a most delicate one. We did not always consider sufficiently what too lively an expression of opinion friendly to the Allies might cost the Dutch. They saw themselves, three years ago, watched through the peep-holes of their eastern frontier by a neighbor without pity, without scruple, and without decency. To have given the Germans an opportunity of attacking them unawares would have been to see the tulips of Haarlem trampled into mud and the church-windows of Gouda smashed; to let the libraries of Leyden be pillaged and the art-treasures of The Hague be carried off to Berlin; to find the cathedral tower of Utrecht used as a target for cannon, and the canals of Amsterdam choked with the corpses of Dutch women and children. What Belgium has endured would be poured out in fourfold horror upon Holland. No wonder that the Dutch are prudent in their language, circumspect in their actions.
Moreover, till the autumn of 1914, Holland had cultivated a pacific spirit. She did not believe in military danger, and through the masses of the people there ran a kind of resentment against the army, as a body of men paid out of the taxes for doing nothing. In all this Holland was wittingly the opposite of her ferocious and gigantic neighbor. But all this is over now. Raemaekers shows us the sturdy Dutch soldier, with his back turned to wheedling German whisperers, guarding the long eastern frontier beyond the Maas. Holland has been roused out of her opiate dream of non-resistance, and she vibrates with heroic echoes from Ypres and from Dixmude. She is fully aware that she is called upon to be the arbiter of her own destiny, and that she must meet force with force. Holland is safe so long as she prepares her own defense, for Germany never attacks unless she believes herself to be sure of victory. She knows that the Dutch have “increased their army,” and that the hour of “easy” and insolent conquest is over.
Religion and Patriotism
THIS horrible war that has been sprung upon us has taught the Empire many useful lessons. It has been a revelation in character value. In the long piping time of peace, before grim-visaged war broke in upon us, we were much too self-centered. Colonials and others returning from our overseas dominions to the “Old Country” did not hesitate to say how appalled they were by the wealth and how shocked they were by the uses to which it was being put in England.
It seemed to them, coming home from the simple life to the lap of luxury, that men and women in England were living to pile up colossal wealth and to bask in the sunshine of newspaper notoriety. I might continue in this strain for pages more, but that is not my purpose. What I do want to say is that, as soon as the tocsin of war was heard across the silver sea, and the bugle-call of duty was sounded, these same club-loungers and society-loafers rolled up, rallying to the flag as though they had been born for nothing else. In the story of England’s life only will the headline “Five Millions of Volunteers to the Colors” be read, topping the chapter telling of this European war to our children’s children.
Not only have those on the highest rung of the social ladder responded to the King’s call for service, but those on the lowest rung also—never was there such a fellowship in arms by land and on sea.
But if England with her overseas peoples stands out in such fine relief against the dark war background, we must not forget that our Allies have shone out as conspicuously as ourselves as fighting patriots, resolved to do or die.
Chaplains, too, have done fine work for country as well as for religion. Conspicuous among all Churchmen rises the lithe, imposing, ascetic figure of His Eminence Cardinal Mercier. If ever there was a follower of the Good Shepherd, ready to lay down his life for his sheep, it is the Cardinal Archbishop of Malines. “The Good Shepherd giveth his life for his sheep.” Nothing could have pleased the Cardinal better than to have escaped the sights forced upon him by sacrificing his own life for his flock. But it was not to be; his life has been spared that all the world might find in this good shepherd its object lesson in true religion and in true patriotism.
The Prisoners
AMONG the suggestions for treating our German prisoners, the public has misunderstood that emanating from the Government. To utter the word “reprisals,” when we know right well that the whole sense and tradition of this country would rise in rebellion against any such system, is to speak in vain. Moreover, other and juster lines of action are within our reach. It has been suggested that we should treat our prisoners exactly as Germany treats hers; but since her system is beneath the accepted standards of humanity, and such as no civilized country could practise without loss of self-respect, that course remains unjustified. A worthier way would seem to be that those responsible for the crime are made to suffer, and that, instead of doing injustice now by punishing men not to blame for our enemy’s cruelties, we exact justice after the war is ended and then look to it that all—chiefs and subordinates alike—who have tortured and starved the Allied prisoners, in military or internment camps, should be brought to pay the penalty for their cowardly villainies. That will lie within our power; and did Germany clearly understand the intention, it is reasonable to hope she might take steps to save herself from the consequences of her brutality. Moreover, the threat is no mere thunder, for though the country is still in ignorance, still buoyed by false news and fatuous communiqués, those at the helm know well enough the Central Empires are on a lee shore of ultimate defeat.
With some truth these boys, spectacled students and stunted human failures swept into the net of France’s prisoners, may echo their “all-highest” and say: “We did not want to do it.” They, indeed, did not, and who can feel for them much more than pity? Such men are not even good cannon fodder; and no more striking comment on the passes to which Germany is coming in her efforts to fill the failing lines need be sought than in the material our prisoners often reveal. She has, indeed, many thousands more of the cream of her manhood to destroy before the end; but to offer such feeble stuff as this to the combustion of war cannot long delay the final need.
Señor Gomez Garrillo, writing as a neutral in the “Gaulois,” has told us how the British, though fully realizing the hatred of the German people, do not echo it; for they see in their prisoners only unhappy men, to be treated with compassion and respect. That is not a spirit that will be found on the losing side of the World War.
Well, My Friend!
THIS picture represents two men whom the accidents of diplomacy and intrigue have placed upon the thrones of two small nations of southeastern Europe. The peoples whom they respectively rule have every conceivable reason for desiring the triumph of that principle of international right for which the Allies stand in this war, and which is the only possible defense of small nationalities. They have also special obligations toward those who are to-day championing that principle, for the Bulgarians owe their liberation from Turkish tyranny primarily to Russia, while the Greeks owe the restoration of their national independence to that very combination of Great Britain, France and Russia which at Navarino nearly a century ago half-foreshadowed the present Great Alliance.
But of these men one is an intriguer of mean origin, vile antecedents, and corruptly personal aims, while the other is the husband of a Hohenzollern. Therefore, in the one case the intriguer sells his people to the enemy, while in the other the semi-German princeling deserts not only his natural allies, but those to whom he is pledged by treaty. Of the Balkan States, Serbia alone is faithful to the cause of nationality; and it is not unimportant to note that of these states Serbia alone possesses a native dynasty. It is to be hoped that after the war princes will no longer figure among the exports of the German Empire.
“How quiet it must be in the English harbors blockaded by our fleet”
RAEMAEKERS has here selected two typical naval officers, and has placed them on the quay in Kiel Harbor, pacing along in sight of the water and some of the ships of the High Seas Fleet lying at anchor.
The expressions on the two faces are worth careful study. On that of the taller and nearer man one has a cleverly caught and underlying indication of doubt. He seems to say: “Of course, we are blockading the British Fleet, which has taken shelter from our invincible warships in the Thames Estuary. And, of course, since the Battle of Jutland, we have swept the seas and wrested the trident from the grasp of Britain. But....” At the back of his mind is evidently at all events the germ of a question. “Why, if this be so, do our ships lie at anchor, and our people go short of the imported necessities of life?” And in the mind of that type of man no amount of inspired press accounts of fictitious victories, and no thanks of the Kaiser and profusion in the decoration of “naval heroes,” can lull to rest the suspicion that all is not as it should be.
The second type depicted is a more common one in the German Navy. He carries his chin up, while his companion carries his down. He says: “Of course, we have driven the British Battle Fleet to its harbors, and, of course, we won a notable victory off Jutland, and, equally of course, when we bombarded Scarborough and other seaside pleasure resorts we actually destroyed immensely strong fortifications, and did enormous and material damage to military and naval bases.” This type of man could believe anything. And he does! He has assimilated greedily all the mental pabulum that is designed to teach that Germany cannot be beaten because she is Germany, and that the Germans are superior to every other race. He swallowed it as greedily as a small boy, a collegian, or a naval cadet, and it has become part of him. He neither can know, will know, nor wishes to know the truth. There is something pathetic as well as stupid in his blindness and imperviousness to facts. He is of the type which will believe Germany invincible long after she has been beaten. He is of the type that will prolong the war by continuing to celebrate phantom victories even when the fleets of the Allies are hammering at the gates of the Kiel Canal. In this cartoon Raemaekers’ satire is gentler than its wont, but not less effective on that account.
The Brigands
AH, No! Not brigands! Not pirates! They belong to the good days of youth, the “Boys’ Own Annual,” Stevenson, Henty, Kingston, when there were words of pure magic that wrought spells. Is there a boy with soul so dead who never to himself hath said “Sallee Rovers,” “High Barbary,” “Masked Men on Maidenhead Thicket,” “A Toby Man on a Black Horse,” for the sheer pleasure of evoking the little shiver that goes with Romance? Has the deep villainy of Long John Silver anything in common with Tirpitz? Long John would never have allowed the right of Tirpitz to fly the Jolly Roger. Would Claude Duval have taken the Kaiser’s hand? Never!
The skull and crossbones have fallen on evil days, the black flag has had its sable purity rent and torn; no boy is going to stick his nose into a book about the Kaiser and Willie in future days, in order to snuff up sensuously the very smell of such a jolly good tale. Ah, these others were a merry company, and they swung very rightly on creaking gallows, or walked the plank into glittering foreign seas, for crimes which would show saintly white upon the Potsdam flag. They were bad men, but witless, too; they did such petty sins, imagined such small crimes. If they bullied a little boy, we thought them already damnable rascals! One little boy! Anybody could count him on their fingers; but we need the higher mathematics to compute the wrong of Potsdam. It is like weighing Saturn, or measuring Lucifer; we must go outside our world to do either.
Better the lonely gibbet on the heath than the stalled ox of Potsdam; let us walk the plank like the honest murderers we are, and go to the perdition that suits with our knaveries and cruelties and black crimes; but let us from creaking chain and blanched sea-sand enter a protest against having the Berlin brood fathered on us; nay, sirs, must even the good fat swine in his filth be compared with such as these?