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G. K. CHESTERTON.
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MURDER ON THE HIGH SEAS
The recent descent of so many of her citizens from the people now warring in Europe has of necessity prevented America from looking on events in Europe with a single eye. But the predominant American type and the predominant American frame of mind are still typified by the lithe and sinuous figure of the New England pioneer. It is his tradition to mind his own business, but it is also his business to see that none of the old monarchies make free with his rights or with his people. And he stands for a race that has been cradled in wars with savages. No one knows better the methods of the Apache and the Mohawk, and when women and children fall into such pitiless hands as these, it goes against the grain with Uncle Sam to keep his hands off them, even if the women and children are not his own. He would like to be indifferent if he could. He would prefer to smoke his cigar, and pass along, and believe those who tell him that it is none of his affair. But when he does look—and he cannot help looking—he sees a figure of such heavy bestiality that his gorge rises. He must keep his hands clenched in his pockets lest he soils them in striking down the blood-stained gnome before him.
Can he restrain himself for good? That angry glint in his eye would make one doubt it. Here, surely, the artist sees with a truer vision than the politician. And if Uncle Sam's anger does once get the better of him, if doubts and hesitations are ever thrust on one side, if he takes his stand where his record and his sympathies must make him wish to be, then let it be noted that this base butcher stands dazed and paralyzed by the threat.
ARTHUR POLLEN.
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AD FINEM
Ay—to your end!—to your end amid the execrations of a ravaged world! Through all the ages one other only has equalled you in the betrayal of his trust. May your sin come home to you before you go, as did his! May his despair be yours! It is most desperately to be regretted that no personal suffering on your part, in this life at all events, can ever adequately requite you for the desolations you have wrought.
Outrage on outrage thunders to the sky The tale of thy stupendous infamy,— Thy slaughterings,—thy treacheries,—thy thefts,— Thy broken pacts,—thy honour in the mire,— Thy poor humanity cast off to sate thy pride;— 'Twere better thou hadst never lived,—or died Ere come to this.
I heard a great Voice pealing through the heavens, A Voice that dwarfed earth's thunders to a moan:—
Woe! Woe! Woe, to him by whom this came! His house shall unto him be desolate And, to the end of time, his name shall be A by-word and reproach in all the lands He repined.... And his own shall curse him For the ruin that he brought. Who without reason draws the sword— By sword shall perish! The Lord hath said ... So be it, Lord!
JOHN OXENHAM.
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"U'S"
It is the essence of great cartooning to see things simply, and to command the technical resources that shall show the things, so simply seen, in an infinite variety of aspects. No series of Raemaekers' drawing better exemplifies his quality in both these respects than those which deal with Germany's sea crimes.
In the cartoon before us the immediate message is of the simplest. The Kaiser counts the head of British merchantmen sunk. Von Tirpitz counts the cost. But note the subtlety of the personation and environment. The Kaiser has those terrible haunted eyes that have marked the seer's presentment of him from quite an early stage of the war. There can be no ultimate escape from the dreadful vision that has set the seal of despair on this fine and handsome visage. He is shown, not as a sea monster, but as some rabid, evasive, impatient thing, dashing from point to point—as from policy to policy—with the angry swish that tells the unspoken anger failure everywhere compels. For the victories do not bring surrender, nor does frightfulness inspire terror. The merchant ships still put to sea—and the U boats pay the penalty.
The futility of this campaign of murder is typified by making Von Tirpitz, its inventor, an addle-headed seahorse, the nursery comedian of the sea. Stupid and ridiculous bewilderment stares from his foolish eyes. Another submarine has failed to find a safe victim in a trading ship, but has been hoisted with its own sea petard. The impotence of the thing!
This conference of the Admirals of the Atlantic, held in the sombre depths, is a biting satire, in its mingled comedy and tragedy, on the effort to win command of the sea from its bottom.
ARTHUR POLLEN.
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MATER DOLOROSA
You thought to grasp the world; but you shall keep Its crown of curses nailed upon your brow. You that have fouled the purple, broke your vow, And sowed the wind of death, the whirlwind you shall reap.
Shout to your tribal god to bless the blood Of this red vintage on the poisoned earth; Clash cymbals to him, leap and shout in mirth; Call on his name to stay the coming, cleansing flood.
We are no hounds of heaven, nor ravening band Of earthly wolves to tear your kingdom down. We stand for human reason; at our frown The coward sword shall fall from your accursed hand.
We do not speak of vengeance; there shall run No little children's blood beneath our heel. No pregnant woman suffers from our steel; But Justice we shall do, as sure as set of sun.
Or short, or long, the pathway of your feet, Stamped on the faces of the innocent dead, Must lead where tyrant's road hath ever led. Alone, O perjured soul, your Justice you shall meet.
No sacrifice the balance of her scale Can win; no gift of blood and iron can weigh Against this one mad mother's agony: In her demented cry a myriad women wail.
The equinox of outraged earth shall blaze And flash its levin on your infamous might. Man cries to fellow-man; light leaps to light, Till foundered, naked, spent, you vanish from our gaze.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
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"GOTT STRAFE ITALIEN!"
When Italy, still straining at the leash which held her, helpless, to the strange and unnatural Triplice, began to show signs of awakening consciousness, Germany's efforts to lull her back to the unhappy position of silent partner in the world-crime were characteristic of her methods. Forthwith Italy was loaded with compliments. The country was overrun with "diplomats," which is another name in Germany for spies. Bribery of the most brazen sort was attempted. The newspapers recalled in chorus that Italy was the land of art and chivalry, of song and heroism, of fabled story and manly effort, of honour and loyalty. Hark to the Hamburger Fremdenblatt of February 21, 1915:
"The suggestion is made that Italy favours the Allies. Preposterous! Even though the palsied hand of England—filled with robber gold—be held out to her, Italy's vows, Italy's sense of obligation, Italy's word once given, can never be broken. Such a nation of noblemen could have no dealings with hucksters."
Germany is, indeed, a fine judge of a nation's "word once given" and a nation's "vows," which its Chancellor unblushingly declared to be mere scraps of paper. Now let us see what the Hamburger Nachrichten had to say about Italy immediately after her secession from the Triple Alliance: "Nachrichten, June 1, 1915. That Italy should have joined hands with the other noble gentlemen, our enemies, is but natural. It would, of course, be absurd—where all are brigands—were the classical name of brigandage not included in the number.... We do not propose to soil our clean steel with the blood of such filthy Italian scum. With our cudgels we shall smash them into pulp."
"Gott strafe Italien" indeed! Bombs on St. Mark's in Venice, on the Square of Verona, on world treasures unreplaceable. The poisoned breath of Germany carries its venom into the land of sunshine and song, whose best day's work in history has been to wrest itself free from the grip of the false friend.
RALPH D. BLUMENFELD.
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SERBIA
Serbia has suffered the fate of Belgium. Germany and Austria, with Bulgaria's aid, have plunged another little country "in blood and destruction." Another "bleeding piece of earth" bears witness to the recrudescence of the ancient barbarism of the Huns. Serbia's wounds,
"Like dumb mouths, Do ope their ruby lips,"
to beg for vengeance on "these butchers." Turkey, whom the artist portrays as a hound lapping up the victim's blood, is fated to share the punishment for the crime. But the prime instigator is the German Emperor, whose Chancellor, with bitter irony, claims for his master the title of protector of the small nationalities of Europe. Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg can on occasion affect the mincing accents of the wolf when that beast seeks to lull the cries of the lamb in its clutches. The German method of waging war has rendered "dreadful objects so familiar" that the essential brutality of the enemy's activities runs a risk of escaping at times the strenuous denunciation which Justice demands. But the searching pencil of Mr. Raemaekers brings home to every seeing eye the true and unvarying character of Teutonic "frightfulness." All instincts of humanity are cynically defied on the specious ground of military necessity. Mr. Raemaekers is at one with Milton in repudiating the worthless plea:
"So spake the fiend, and with necessity, The tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deeds."
SIR SIDNEY LEE.
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JUST A MOMENT—I'M COMING
Here is a drawing that ought to be circulated broadcast throughout Australia and New Zealand, that ought to hold a place of honour on the walls of their public chambers; should hang in gilded frames in the houses of the rich; be pinned to the rough walls of frame-house and bark humpy in every corner of "The Outback." It should thrill the heart of every man, woman, and child Down Under with pride and thankfulness and satisfaction, should even bring soothing balm to the wounds of those who in the loss of their nearest and dearest have paid the highest and the deepest price for the flaming glory of the Anzacs in Gallipoli.
Here in the artist's pencil is a monument to those heroes greater than pinnacles of marble, of beaten brass and carven stone; a monument that has travelled over the world, has spoken to posterity more clearly, more convincingly, and more rememberingly than ever written or word-of-mouth speech could do. It is to the everlasting honour of the people of the Anzacs that they refrained from echoing the idle tales which ran whispering in England that the Dardanelles campaign was a cruel blunder, that the blood of the Anzacs' bravest and best had been uselessly spilt, that their splendid young lives had been an empty sacrifice to the demons of Incompetence and Inefficiency. To those in Australia who in their hearts may feel that shreds of truth were woven in the rumours—that the Anzacs were spent on a forlorn hope, were wasted on a task foredoomed to failure—let this simple drawing bring the comfort of the truth.
The artist has seen deeper and further than most. The Turkish armies held from pouring on Russia and Serbia, from thumping down the scales of neutrality in Greece and Roumania perhaps, from massing their troops with the Central Powers; the Kaiser chained on the East and West for the critical months when men and munitions were desperately lacking to the Allies, when the extra weight of the Turks might have freed the Kaiser's power of fierce attack on East and West this is what we already know, what the artist here tells the wide world of the part played by the heroes of the Dardanelles. In face of this, who dare hint they suffered and died in vain?
BOYD CABLE.
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THE HOLY WAR
Surely the artist when he drew this was endowed with the wisdom of the seer, the vision of the prophet. For it was drawn before the days in which I write, before the Russian giant had proved his greatness on the body of the Turk, before the bludgeon-strokes in the Caucasus, the heart-thrust of Erzerum, the torrent of pursuit of the broken Turks to Mush and Trebizond.
We know—and I am grateful for the chance to voice our gratitude to him—the greatness of our Russian Ally. We remember the early days when the Kaiser's hosts were pouring in over France, and the Russian thrust into Galicia drew some of the overwhelming weight from the Western Front. We realize now the nobility of self-sacrifice that flung an army within reach of the jaws of destruction, that risked its annihilation to draw upon itself some of the sword-strokes that threatened to pierce to the heart of the West. Our national and natural instinct of admiration for a hard fighter, and still greater admiration for the apex of good sportmanship, for the friend or foe who can "take a licking," who is a "good loser," went out even more strongly to Russia in the dark days when, faced by an overwhelming weight of metal, she was forced and hammered and battered back, losing battle-line after battle-line, stronghold after stronghold, city after city; losing everything except heart and dogged punishment-enduring courage.
And how great the Russian truly is will surely be known presently to the Turk and to the masquerading false "Prophet of Allah."
"No one is great save Allah," says William, and even as the Turk spoke more truly than he knew in calling the Russian great, even as he was bitterly to realize the greatness, so in the fullness of time must William come to realize how great is the Allah of the Moslem, the Christian God Whom he has blasphemed, and in Whose name he and his people have perpetrated so many crimes and abominations.
BOYD CABLE.
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GOTT MIT UNS
When we consider the public utterances of the German clergy, we can very easily substitute for their symbol of Christian faith this malignant, grotesque, and inhuman monster of Louis Raemaekers. Indeed, our inclination is to thrust the green demon himself into the pulpit of the Fatherland; for his wrinkled skull could hatch and his evil mouth utter no more diabolic sentiments than those recorded and applauded from Lutheran Leipsic, or from the University and the chief Protestant pulpit in Berlin.
Such sermons are a part of that national debacle of reasoning faculty which is the price intellectual Germany has paid for the surrender of her soul to Prussia.
An example or two may be cited from the outrageous mass.
Professor Rheinhold Seeby, who teaches theology at Berlin University, has described his nation's achievements in Belgium and Serbia as a work of charity, since Germany punishes other States for their good and out of love. Pastor Philippi, also of Berlin, has said that, as God allowed His only Son to be crucified, that His scheme of redemption might be accomplished, so Germany, God with her, must crucify humanity in order that its ultimate salvation may be secured; and the Teutonic nation has been chosen to perform this task, because Germany alone is pure and, therefore, a fitting instrument for the Divine Hand. Satan, who has returned to earth in the shape of England, must be utterly destroyed, while the immoral friends and allies of Satan are called to share his fate. Thus evil will be swept off the earth and the German Empire henceforth stand supreme protector of the new kingdom of righteousness. Pastor Zoebel has ordered no compromise with hell; directed his flock to be pleased at the sufferings of the enemy; and bade them rejoice when thousands of the non-elect are sent to the bottom of the sea.
Yes, we will give the green devil his robe and bands until Germany is in her strait-jacket; after which experience, her conceptions of a Supreme Being and her own relation thereto may become modified.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
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THE WIDOWS OF BELGIUM
This deeply pathetic picture evokes the memory of many sad and patient faces which we have seen during the last eighteen months. It is the women, after all—wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters—who have the heaviest load to bear in war-time.
The courage and heroism which they have shown are an honour to human nature. The world is richer for it; and the sacrifices which they have bravely faced and nobly borne may have a greater effect in convincing mankind of the wickedness and folly of aggressive militarism than all the eloquence of peace advocates.
We must not forget that the war has made about six German widows for every one in our country. With these we have no quarrel; we know that family affection is strong in Germany, and we are sorry for them. They, like our own suffering women, are the victims of a barbarous ideal of national glory, and a worse than barbarous perversion of patriotism, which in our opponents has become a kind of moral insanity.
These pictures will remain long after the war-passion has subsided. They will do their part in preventing a recrudescence of it. Who that has ever clamoured for war can face the unspoken reproach in these pitiful eyes? Who can think unmoved of the happy romance of wedded love, so early and so sadly terminated?
THE DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S.
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THE HARVEST IS RIPE
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.
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"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 civilized 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.
The German is a "dirty fighter," and to the British soldier that alone puts him beyond the pale. He has outraged all the rules and the instincts of chivalry. His bravery in battle is the bravery of a ravening wolf, of a blood-drunk savage animal. It is only left to the Allies to treat him as such, to thrash him by brute force, and then to clip his teeth and talons and by treaty and agreement amongst themselves to keep him chained and caged beyond the possibility of another outbreak.
BOYD CABLE.
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THE GREAT SURPRISE
In the note to another picture I have remarked on the farcical hypocrisy of the German Emperor in presenting himself, as he so often does, as the High Priest of several different religions at the same time. They are nearly all of them religions with which he would have no sort of concern, even if his religious pose were as real as it is artificial.
Being in fact the ruler and representative of a country which alone among European countries builds with complete security upon the conviction that all Christianity is dead, he can only be, even in theory, the prince of an extreme Protestant State. Long before the War it was common for the best caricaturists of Europe, and even of Germany, to make particular fun of these preposterous temporary Papacies in which the Kaiser parades himself as if for a fancy-dress ball; and in the accompanying picture Mr. Raemaekers has returned more or less to this old pantomimic line of satire.
The cartoon recalls some of those more good-humoured, but perhaps equally contemptuous, sketches in which the draughtsmen of the French comic papers used to take a particular delight; which made a whole comic Bible out of the Kaiser's adventures during his visit to Palestine. Here he appears as Moses, and the Red Sea has been dried up to permit the passage of himself and his people.
It would certainly be very satisfactory for German world-politics if the sea could be dried up everywhere; but it is unlikely that the incident will occur, especially in that neighbourhood. It will be long before a German army is as safe in the Suez Canal as a German Navy in the Kiel Canal; and the higher critics of Germany will have no difficulty in proving, in the Kiel Canal at all events, that the safety is due to human and not to divine wisdom.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
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THOU ART THE MAN!
The Man of Sorrows is flogged, and thorn-crowned, and crucified, and pierced afresh, by this other man of sorrows, who has brought greater bitterness and woe on earth than any other of all time. And in his soul—for soul he must have, though small sign of it is evidenced—he knows it. Deceive his dupes as he may—for a time—his own soul must be a very hell of broken hopes, disappointed ambitions, shattered pride, and the hideous knowledge of the holocaust of human life he has deliberately sacrificed to these heathen gods of his. No poorest man on earth would change places with this man-that-might-have-been, for his time draws nigh and his end is perdition.
Let That Other speak:
"Their souls are Mine. Their lives were in thy hand;— Of thee I do require them!
"The fetor of thy grim burnt-offerings Comes up to Me in clouds of bitterness. Thy fell undoings crucify afresh Thy Lord—who died alike for these and thee. Thy works are Death:—thy spear is in My side,— O man! O man!—was it for this I died? Was it for this?— A valiant people harried to the void,— Their fruitful fields a burnt-out wilderness,— Their prosperous country ravelled into waste,— Their smiling land a vast red sepulchre,— —Thy work!
"Thou art the man! The scales were in thy hand. For this vast wrong I hold thy soul in fee. Seek not a scapegoat for thy righteous due, Nor hope to void thy countability. Until thou purge thy pride and turn to Me,— As thou hast done, so be it unto thee!"
JOHN OXENHAM.
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SYMPATHY
The cartoon requires no words to tell the story. It holds chapter upon chapter of tragedy. "I will send you to Germany after your father!" Where is the boy's father in Germany? In a prison? Mending roads? Lying maimed and broken in a rude hospital? Digging graves for comrades about to be shot? Or, more likely still, in a rough unknown stranger's grave? Was the father dragged from his home at Louvain, or Tirlemont, or Vise, or one of the dozen other scenes of outrage and murder—a harmless, hard-working citizen-dragged from his hiding-place and made to suffer "exemplary justice" for having "opposed the Kaiser's might," but in reality because he was a Belgian, for whose nasty breed there must be demonstrations of Germany's frightfulness pour encourager les autres?
And the child's mother and sisters—what of them? He is dejected, but not broken. There is dignity in the boy's defiant pose. The scene has, perhaps, been enacted hundreds of times in the cities of Belgium, where poignant grief has come to a nation which dared to be itself.
Follow this boy through life and observe the stamp of deep resolve on his character. Though he be sent "to Germany after your father," though he be for a generation under the German jack-boot, his spirit will sustain him against the conqueror and will triumph in the end.
RALPH D. BLUMENFELD.
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THE REFUGEES
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 Liege 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 realizing 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 civilization till the men responsible for such things are brought to realize 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.
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"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.
CLIVE HOLLAND.
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"MILIEU DE FANTOMES TRISTES ET SANS NOMBRE"
There is something daunting, even to the mind of one not guilty of war or of massacres, in the thought of multitudes: the multitude of the dead, of the living, of one generation of men since there have been men on earth. And war brings this horror to us daily, or rather nightly, because such great companies of men have suddenly died together, passing in comradeship and community from the known to the unknown. Yet dare we say "together?" The unparalleled solitariness and singleness of death is not altered by the general and simultaneous doom of battle.
And it is with the multitude, and all the ones in it, that the maker of war is in unconscious relation. He does not know their names, he does not know them by any kind of distinction, he knows them only by thousands. Yet every one with a separate life and separate death is in conscious relation with him, knows him for the tyrant who has taken his youth, his hope, his love, his fatherhood.
What a multitude to meet, whether in thought, in conscience, or in another world! We all, no doubt, try to make the thought of massacre less intolerable to our minds by telling ourselves that the sufferers suffer one by one, to each his own share, and not another's; that though the numbers may appeal, they do not make each man's part more terrible. But this is not much comfort. There is not, it is true, a sum of multiplication; but there is the sum of addition. And that addition—the multitude man by man—the War Lord has to reckon with: Frederick the Great with his men, Napoleon with his, the German Emperor with his—each one of the innumerable unknown knowing his destroyer.
ALICE MEYNELL.
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BLUEBEARD'S CHAMBER
The Committee of Enquiry, like another Portia, clothed in the ermine-trimmed robe of Justice and the Law, has unlocked with the key of Truth the door of the closed chamber. The key lies behind her inscribed in Dutch with the name that tells its nature. The Committee then pulls back the curtain, and reveals the horrors that are behind it. Before the curtain is fully drawn back, Enquiry sinks almost in collapse at the terrible sight that is disclosed. There hang to pegs on the wall the bodies of Bluebeard's victims, a woman, an old man, a priest, two boys, and a girl still half hidden behind the curtain. The blood that has trickled from them coagulates in pools on the ground.
Bluebeard himself comes suddenly: he hurries down the steps brandishing his curved sword, a big, burly figure, with square, thick beard, and streaming whiskers, wearing a Prussian helmet, his mouth open to utter a roar of rage and fury. The hatred and scorn with which the artist inspires his pictures of Prussia are inexhaustible in their variety: Prussia is barbarism attempting to trample on law and education, brutality beating down humanity, a grim figure, the incarnation of "frightfulness." I can imagine the feelings with which all Germans must regard the picture that the Dutch artist always gives of their country, if they regard Prussia as their country. "For every cartoon of Raemaekers," said a German newspaper, "the payment will be exacted in full, when the reckoning is made up." To this painter the Prussian ruling power is incapable of understanding what nobility of nature means. He can practise on and take advantage of the vices and weaknesses of his enemies; he can buy the services of many among them, and have all the worser people in his fee as his servants and agents; but he is always foiled, because he forgets that some men cannot be bought, and that these men will steel their fellow-countrymen's minds to resist tyranny to the last. The mass of men can be led either to evil or to good.
The Prussian military system assumes the former as certain, and is well skilled in the way. But there is the latter way, too, which Prussia never knew and never takes into account as a possibility; and men as a whole prefer the way to good before the way to evil, when both are fully explained and made clear. This saves men, and ruins Prussia.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY.
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THE RAID
The seaman of history is a chivalrous and romantic figure, a gallant and relentless fighter, a generous and a tender conqueror. In Codrington's first letter to his wife after the battle of Trafalgar, he tells her to send L100 to one of the French captains who goes to England from the battle as a prisoner of war. The British and French navies cherish a hundred memories of acts like these. If the German navy survives the war what memories will it have? It must search the gaols for the exemplars in peace of the acts that win them the Iron Cross in war.
Note in this drawing that the types selected are not in themselves base units of humanity. They have been made so by the beastly crimes superior orders have forced them to commit. But even this has not brought them so low but they wonder at the topsy-turvydom of war that brings them honour where poor Black Mary only got her deserts in gaol.
The crimes of the higher command have passed in Germany uncondemned and unbanned by cardinals and bishops. But the conscience of Germany cannot be wholly dead. Nor will six years only be the term of Germany's humiliation and remorse. The spotless white of the naval uniform, sullied and besmirched by those savage cruelties, cannot, any more than the German soul, be brought back "whiter than snow" by any bestowal of the Iron Cross. The effort to cleanse either would "the multitudinous seas incarnadine."
ARTHUR POLLEN.
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BETTER A LIVING DOG THAN A DEAD LION
Here is the grim choice of alternatives presented to other nations by the creed of Deutschland ueber Alles—the cost of resistance and the reward of submission. On one side lies the man who has fought a good fight "for Freedom." He has lost his life but won an immortal memory inscribed upon the cross. The other has saved his life, and lo! it is a "dog's life." He is not even a well-treated dog. Harnessed, muzzled, chained, he crawls abjectly on hands and knees and drags painfully along the road, not only the cart, but his heavy master too.
In the Netherlands and other parts of the Continent, where dogs are used to pull little carts, the owner generally pulls too; it is a partnership in which the dog is treated as a friend and visibly enjoys doing his share. Partnership with Germany is another matter. The dog does all the work, the German takes his ease with his great feet planted on the submissive creature's back.
The belligerent nations have made their choice. Germany's partners have chosen submission and are playing the dog's part, as they have discovered. The Allies on the other side are paying the price of resistance in the sacrifice of life for Freedom. And what of the neutrals? They are evading the choice under cover of the Allies and waxing fat meanwhile. It is not a very heroic attitude and will exclude them from any voice in the settlement. But we understand their position, and at least they are ready to fight for their own freedom. There are, however, individuals who are not ready to fight at all. They call themselves conscientious objectors, prate of the law of Christ, and pose as idealists. If they followed Christ they would sacrifice their lives for others, but they are only concerned for their own skins. Their place is in the shafts The true idealist lies beneath the Cross.
ARTHUR SHADWELL.
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"THE BURDEN OF THE INTOLERABLE DAY"
Most people have wondered from time to time what the Kaiser thinks in his inmost heart and in the solitude of his own chamber about the condition of Germany and about the War. What impression has been made on him by the alternation of victories and failures during the last twenty months? After all he has staked everything—he has everything to lose. What does he feel? What impression do the frightful losses of his own people make on him?
Raemaekers tells in this cartoon. The Kaiser has this moment been wakened from sleep by the entrance of a big gorgeously dressed footman, carrying his morning tea. The panelling of the royal chamber in the palace at Potsdam is faintly indicated. The Kaiser sits up in bed, and a look of agony gathers on his face as he realizes that he has wakened up to the grim horror of a new day, and that the delightful time which he has just been living through was only a dream. He had dreamed that the whole thing was not true—that the War had never really occurred, and that he could face the world with a conscience clear from guilt; and now he has wakened up to bear the burden for another day. It is written in his face what he thinks. You see the deep down-drawn lines in the lower part of the face, the furrows upon the forehead, and the look almost of terror in the eyes. But a smug-faced flunkey offers him a cup of tea with buttered toast, and he must come back to the pretence of that tragi-comedy, the life of the King-Emperor.
The Dutch artist is fully alive to the comic element which underlies that tragedy. The King-Emperor, as he awakes from sleep and sits forward from that mountain of pillows, would be a purely comic figure were it not for the terrible tragedy written in his face. A footman in brilliant livery is a comic figure. The splendour of this livery brings out the comic element by its contrast to, and yet its harmony with, the stupid self-satisfaction of the countenance and the curls of the powdered hair.
The Kaiser, however, awakens to more than the pretences and shams of court life. The vast dreams which he cherished before the War of world-conquest and an invincible Germany are fled now, and he must face, open-eyed and awake, the stern reality.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY.
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EAGLE IN HEN-RUN
The Dutchman who could see this cartoon and not admit its simple truth would have to be a very blind pro-German. At present time it pays Germany to pretend a friendship for Holland, but the premeditated murder of Belgium is a plain object-lesson of the sort of friendship and agreement that Germany makes with a country and people which stand in her way and are too small to withstand her brute force. Can any Dutchman doubt what would be Holland's fate if Germany emerged even moderately victorious from this war? The German War Staff would give a good deal to have the control of Holland and a free passage to the sea from Antwerp. They refrain from using force to gain that control only because they cannot afford to have a fresh frontier to guard and because it is quite useful to have Holland neutral and a forbidden ground and water to the Armies and Navies of the Allies, a shield over the heart of Berlin and Germany. It would pay the Germans to have Holland with them and openly against the Allies, and they would no doubt gladly make an "agreement" to that effect; but there is little likelihood of that as long as the Dutch can visualize the "agreement" as clearly as the cartoonist has done here.
There are many people who for years past have suspected Germany's sinister designs on the whole of the Netherlands. The brutal ravaging of Belgium, the talk that already runs, openly or in whispers, in Germany of "annexation of conquered territories" and "extended borders," tell plainly the same tale—that any agreement between a small country and Germany means merely the swallowing-up of the small nation, the "agreement" of a meal with the swallower-up.
BOYD CABLE.
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THE FUTURE
There can be no doubting of the future. The Allied forces, who in Raemaekers' drawing stand for Liberty, are assuredly destined to wring the neck of the Prussian eagle, which typifies the tyranny of brute force.
"For freedom's battle, once begun ... Though baffled oft, is ever won."
"There is only one master in this country," the Kaiser has said of Germany. "I am he, and I will not tolerate another." He has also told his people: "There is only one law—my law; the law which I myself lay down." It is supererogatory to dispute either of these imperial pronouncements. The Future contents herself with the comment: "Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee."
The Kaiser and his counsellors have now translated words into deeds, and every instrument of savagery has been since August, 1911, enlisted by Tyranny in the attempt to overthrow Liberty. "A thousand years ago," the Kaiser once declared to his Army, "the Huns under their king Attila made themselves a name which still lives in tradition." The Future replies to him that he and his fighting hordes will also live in tradition. They will be remembered for their defiance of the conscience of the world, which obeys no call but that of Liberty.
SIDNEY LEE.
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CHRIST OR ODIN?
You cannot well conceive a science, whether it be mathematics, or architecture, or philosophy, without its axioms, dogmas, or first principles. Without them there is no basis on which to raise the superstructure. So it is with the science of religion. Take Christianity: if it is to be taught scientifically, it must start with the most tremendous dogma, the Divinity of Christ. Either Christ was or He was not what He claimed to be. If He was not, you must shout with the Sanhedrim: "Crucify Him!" If He was, you must sing with the Church: "Come, adore Him." One thing is certain, you cannot be indifferent to His claim or to Him; you must either hate Him and His creed, like the Prussian warring Superman, or love Him and it, like England's Crusading Kings.
The cartoon before us is the finished picture which I can trace from its first rough sketch in the hands of Kant, through its different stages of development in the schools of Hegel, of Schopenhauer, of Strauss, till it was ready for its final touches in the hands of Nietzsche. In fancy I see it hung, on the line, in the Prussian picture-gallery under the direction of War Lords, whose boasted aim it is that the world shall be governed only by Prussian Kultur and Prussian Religion.
The fatal mistake made by the Teutonic race in the past was, we are told, the adoption of Roman culture and Roman religion. Germany once submitted to an alien God and to an alien creed. She, the mistress of the earth, the mightiest of the mighty, and the most Kultured of the Kultured, had actually once worshipped "an uncultured peasant Galilean," and made profession of "His slave morality."
Now they had altogether done with Christ, the Nazarene. The shout had gone forth: "We will not have this Man to rule over us." In the future no gods but Thor and Odin shall rule the "world-dominating race." Prussia seemed to think the world's need to-day was the religion not of Virtue, but of Valour. "In a day now long fled was heard the cry: 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,' but to-day there shall go forth the word: 'Blessed are the valiant, for they shall make the earth their throne.' In the past ye heard it said: 'Blessed are the poor in spirit,' but now I say to you: 'Blessed are the great in soul, for they shall enter into Valhalla.' Again, in the dark ages it was said to you: 'Blessed are the peace-makers,' but now in the blaze of day I say unto you: 'Blessed are the war-makers, for they shall be called, if not the children of Jahve, the children of Odin, who is greater than Jahve.'" For those who want more of this mad jargon on the same lines let me refer them to the late Professor Cramb's book on Germany and England.
With this cartoon before me, I am driven to fear that when the war is done there will rise up in Germany a louder and stronger cry against the Christianity of Christ than ever was attempted after the Franco-Prussian War. The "man of blood and iron," the man with the mailed fist and the iron heel, I much apprehend, will not be satisfied with tearing down the emblem of the physical Body of Christ, but to slake his bloodthirsty spirit he will want to go on to belabour His Mystical Body no less. God avert it!
BERNARD VAUGHAN.
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FERDINAND
In this war, where the ranks of the enemy present to us so many formidable, sinister, and shocking figures, there is one, and perhaps but one, which is purely ridiculous. If we had the heart to relieve our strained feelings by laughter, it would be at the gross Coburg traitor, with his bodyguard of assassins and his hidden coat-of-mail, his shaking hands and his painted face. The world has never seen a meaner scoundrel, and we may almost bring ourselves to pity the Kaiser, whom circumstances have forced to accept on equal terms a potentate so verminous.
But we no longer smile, we are tempted rather to weep, when we think of the nation over whom this Ferdinand exercises his disastrous authority. Forty years will have expired this spring since the Christian peasants of Bulgaria rose in arms against the Turkish oppressor. After a year of wild mountain fighting, Russia, with fraternal devotion, came to their help, and at San Stefano in March, 1877, the aspirations of Bulgaria were satisfied under Russia auspices. Ten years later Ferdinand the usurper descended upon Sofia, shielded by the protection of Austria, and since then, under his poisonous rule, the honour and spirit of the once passionate and romantic Bulgarian nation have faded like a plant in poison-fumes.
Raemaekers presents the odious Ferdinand to us in the act of starting for the wars—he who faints at the sight of a drawn sword. His hired assassins guard him from his own people and from the revenge of the thousands whom he has injured. But will they always be able to secure so vile a life against the vengeance of history? How soon will Fate condescend to crush this painted creature?
EDMUND GOSSE.
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JUGGERNAUT
Yes, Kultur, the German Juggernaut, has passed this way. There is no mistaking the foul track of his chariot-wheels. Kultur is the German God. But there is a greater God still. He sees it all. He speaks,—
"Was it for this I died?
—Black clouds of smoke that veil the sight of heaven; Black piles of stones which yesterday were homes; And raw black heaps which once were villages; Fair towns in ashes, spoiled to suage thy spleen; My temples desecrate, My priests out-cast:— Black ruin everywhere, and red,—a land All swamped with blood, and savaged raw and bare; All sickened with the reek and stench of war, And flung a prey to pestilence and want; —Thy work!
"For this?— —Life's fair white flower of manhood in the dust; Ten thousand thousand hearts made desolate; My troubled world a seething pit of hate; My helpless ones the victims of thy lust;— The broken maids lift hopeless eyes to Me, The little ones lift handless arms to Me, The tortured women lift white lips to Me, The eyes of murdered white-haired sires and dames Stare up at Me. And the sad anguished eyes Of My dumb beasts in agony. —Thy work!"
JOHN OXENHAM.
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MICHAEL AND THE MARKS
"The Loan: good for 100 marks!" Look at him! He is the favoured of the Earth, lives in Germany, where Kultur is peerless, and education complete (even tho' the man may become a martyr of method). War comes! and he is seen, as an almond tree in blossom his years tell, when lo! a War Loan is raised with real Helfferichian candour, and Michael has just stepped out of the Darlehnskasse, at Oberwesel-on-the-Rhine, or other seat of Kultur and War Loan finance. Are visions about? said an American humorist now gone to the Shades; and Michael, Loan note in hand, eyes reversed, after a visit to two or three offices, wants to know, and wonders whether this note can be regarded as "hab und gut," and if so, good for how much? Is it a wonder that an artist in a Neutral Country should depict German affairs as in this condition, and business done in this manner? Michael is puzzled; and in the language of the Old Kent Road, "'e dunno where 'e are!" He is puzzled, and not without cause.
All who have followed Germany's financing of the War share Michael's perplexity. Brag is a good dog: but it does not do as a foundation for credit. Gold at Spandau was trumpeted for years as a "war chest"; but when the "best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft agley," especially when a war does not end, as it should, after a jolly march to Paris in six weeks, through a violated and plundered Belgium, then comes the rub—and the paper which puzzles Michael. A German, possibly Dr. Helfferich, the German Finance Minister, may believe, and some do believe, that it does not matter how much "paper," in currency notes, a State, or even a Bank, may issue. The more experienced commercial and banking concerns of the world insist upon a visible material, as well as the personal security, to which the German is prone. The round-about method of issuing German War Loans unquestionably puzzles Michael; but will not impose on the world outside.
Let it be marked also, that German credit methods have been, in part, the proximate cause of this War; a system of credit-trading may last for some years only to threaten disaster and general ruin. Now, it is "neck or nothing"; Michael goes the round of the Loan offices, and behold him! Germany herself fears a crash in credit, and even the German Michael feels that it is impending. Already the mark exchanges over 30 below par.
W. M. J. WILLIAMS.
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THEIR BERESINA
"Is it still a long way to the Beresina?"
The whole civilized world sincerely hopes not.
Death, with the grin on his fleshless face, is hurrying them along to it as fast as his troika can go. Three black horses abreast he drives—Dishonour, Disappointment, and Disgrace—and the more audacious of the carrion-crows fly croaking ominously alongside.
Little Willie, with the insignia of his family's doom on his head, is not happy in his mind. "Father's" plans have not worked smoothly, his promises have not been fulfilled. Little Willie is concerned for his own future. He is the only soul in the world who is.
When the First—the real—Napoleon entered Russia, on June 24, 1812, he led an army of 414,000 men—the grande armee. When the great retreat began from burnt-out Moscow he had less than 100,000. By the time the Beresina was reached but little of the grand army was left. "Of the cavalry reserve, formerly 32,000 men, only 100 answered the muster-roll." The passage of the river, which was to interpose its barrier between him and the pursuing Russians, was an inferno of panic, selfishness, and utter demoralization. Finally, to secure his own safety, Napoleon had the bridges burnt before half his men had crossed. The roll-call that night totalled 8,000 gaunt spectres, hardly to be called men.
"Father, is it still a long way to the Beresina?"
We may surely and rightly put up that question as a prayer to the God whom Kaiser William claims as friend, but whom he has flouted and bruised as never mortal man since time began has bruised and flouted friend before.
"Is it still a long way to the Beresina?"
God grant them a short quick course, an end forever to militarism, to the wastage it has entailed, and to all those evils which have made such things possible in this year of grace 1916.
JOHN OXENHAM.
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NEW PEACE OFFERS
The present policy of Germany is a curious mixture of underhand diplomacy and boastful threats. If she desires to impress the neutral States, she vaunts the great conquests that she has been able to accomplish. She points out, especially to Roumania and to Greece, how terrible is her vengeance on States which defy her, such as Belgium and Serbia, while vague promises are given to her Near-Eastern Allies—Bulgaria and Turkey—that they will have large additions to their territory as a reward for compliance with the dictates of Berlin.
But, on the other hand, it is very clear that, as part and parcel of this vigorous offensive, Germany is already in more quarters than one suggesting that she is quite open to offers of peace. As every one knows, Von Buelow in Switzerland is the head and controlling agent of a great movement in the direction of peace; while lately we have heard of offers made to Belgium that if she will acknowledge a commercial dependence on the Central Empires her territory will be restored to her. Similar movements are going on in America, because throughout Germany still seeks to pose as a nation which was attacked and had to defend herself, and is therefore quite ready to listen if any reasonable offers come from her enemies to bring the war to a close.
The unhappy German Imperial Chancellor has to play his part in this sorry comedy with such skill as he can manage. To his German countrymen he has to proclaim that the war has been one brilliant progress from the start to the present time. This must be done in order to allay the apprehensions of Berlin and to propitiate the ever-increasing demand for more plentiful supplies of food. Secretly he has to work quite as hard to secure for the Central Empires such a conclusion of hostilities as will leave them masters of Europe. And, without doubt, he has to put up with a good many indignities in the process. "The worst of it is, I must always deny having been there." Kicked out by the Allies, he has to pretend that no advances were ever made. Perhaps, however, such a task is not uncongenial to the man who began by asserting that solemnly ratified treaties were only "scraps of paper."
W. L. COURTNEY.
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THE SHIELDS OF ROSSELAERE
The climax of meanness and selfishness would seem to be reached when an armed man shelters himself behind the unarmed; yet it is not the climax, for here the artist depicts a body of German troops sheltering themselves behind women, calculating that the Belgians will not fire on their own countrywomen and unarmed friends, and that so the attack may safely gain an advantage.
There is a studied contrast between the calm, orderly march of the troops with shouldered arms and the huddled, disorderly progress to which the townspeople are compelled. These are not marching; they are going to their death. Several of the women have their hands raised in frantic anguish, their eyes are like the eyes of insanity, and one at least has her mouth open to emit a shriek of terror. Two of the men are in even worse condition; they are collapsing, one forward, one backward, with outstretched hands as if grasping at help. The rest march on, courageously or stolidly. Some seem hardly to understand, some understand and accept their fate with calm resignation.
One old woman walks quietly with bowed head submissive. In the front walks a priest, his hand raised in the gesture of blessing his flock. The heroism of the Catholic priesthood both in France and in Belgium forms one of the most honourable features of the Great War, and stands in striking contrast with the calculating diplomatic policy of the Papacy. There is always the same tendency in the "chief priests" of every race and period to be tempted to sacrifice moral considerations to expediency, and to prefer the empty fabric of an imposing Church establishment to the people who make the Church. But the clergy of Belgium are there to prove what the Church can do for mankind. This cartoon would be incomplete and would deserve condemnation as inartistic if it were not redeemed by the priest and the old woman.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY.
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THE OBSTINACY OF NICHOLAS
The venerable quip that what is firmness in ourselves is obstinacy in our opponents is illustrated with a ludicrous explicitness in the whole tenor of German official utterance since the failure of the great drives. The obtuseness of the Allies is so abysmal (it is again and again complained in the Reichstag and through Wolff) that they are unable to see that Germany is the permanently triumphant victor. Whereas for Germany, whose cause even the neutrals judge to be lost, to hold out at the cost of untold blood and treasure is merely the manifestation of heaven-conferred German steadfastness. The Army into whose obstinate corporate head it is hardest to drive the idea of German military all-powerfulness is the Russian, of which retreating units, actually armed with staves against a superbly equipped (but innocent and wantonly attacked) foe, were so stupid as to forget how to be broken and demoralized.
And this long, imperturbable, verdamte Nicholas, who was declared on the highest German authority (and what higher?) to be annihilated twice, having turned a smashing tactical defeat into strategical victory, bobs up serenely in another and most inconvenient place. Absurd; particularly when "what I tell you three times is true." ... Neonapoleon didn't remember Moscow. But he will.
JOSEPH THORP.
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THE ORDER OF MERIT
Turkey had no illusions from the beginning on the subject of the war. If the choice had been left to the nation she would not have become Germany's catspaw. Unfortunately for Turkey, she has had no choice. For years upon years the Sultan Abdul Hamid was Turkey. Opposition to his will meant death for his opponent. Thus Turkey became inarticulate. Her voice was struck dumb. The revolution was looked upon hopefully as the dawn of a new era. Abdul Hamid was dethroned; his brother, a puppet, was exalted, anointed, and enthroned. Power passed from the Crown, not, as expected, to the people and its representatives, but into the hands of a youthful adventurer, in German pay, who has led his country from one folly to another.
Turkey did not want to fight, but she had no choice, and so she was dragged in by the heels. She has lost much besides her independence. The crafty German has drained her of supplies while giving naught in return. The German's policy is to strive throughout for a weak Turkey. The weaker Turkey can be made, the better will it be for Germany, which hopes still, no matter what may happen elsewhere, so to manipulate things as to dominate the Ottoman Empire after the war.
Turkey is still a rich country, in spite of her enormous sacrifices in the past decade. She has been exploited from end to end by the German adventurer, who will continue the process of bleeding so long as there is safety in the method; but Turkey is beginning to ask herself, as does the figure of the fat Pasha in the cartoon: "And is this all the compensation I get?" An Iron Cross does not pay for the loss of half a million good soldiers. Yet that is the exact measure of Turkey's reward.
RALPH D. BLUMENFELD.
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THE MARSHES OF PINSK
In what are we most like our kinsmen the Germans, and in what most unlike? I was convicted of Teutonism when first, in Germany, I ate "brod und butter," and found the words pronounced in an English way, slurred. But if we are like the Germans in the names of simple and childish things, we grow more unlike them, we draw farther apart from them, as we grow up. We love war less and less, as they love it more. We love our word of honour more and more as they, for the love of war, love their word less.
There is no nation in the world more unlike us; because there is no war so perfect, so conscious, so complete as the German. And being thus all-predominant, German war is the greatest of outrages on life and death. We English have a singular degree of respect for the dead. It has no doubt expressed itself in some slight follies and vulgarities, such as certain funeral customs, not long gone by; but such respect is a national virtue and emotion. No nation loving war harbours that virtue. And in nothing do the kinsmen with whom we have much language in common differ from us more than in the policy that brought this Prussian host to cumber the stagnant waters of the Marshes of Pinsk.
The love of war has cast them there, displayed, profaned, in the "cold obstruction" of their dissolution. Corruption is not sensible corruption when it is a secret in earth where no eye, no hand, no breathing can be aware of it. There is no offence in the grave. But the lover of war, the Power that loved war so much as to break its oath for the love of war, and for the love of war to strike aside the hand of the peace-maker, Arbitration, that Power has chosen thus to expose and to betray the multitude of the dead.
ALICE MEYNELL.
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GOD WITH US
Three apaches sit crouched in shelter waiting the moment to strike. One is old and gaga, his ancient fingers splayed on the ground to support him and his face puckered with the petulance of age. One is a soft shapeless figure—clearly with small heart for the business, for he squats there as limp as a sack. One is the true stage conspirator with a long pendulous nose and narrow eyes. His knife is in his teeth, and he would clearly like to keep it there, for he has no stomach for a fight. He will only strike if he can get in a secret blow. The leader of the gang has the furtive air of the criminal, his chin sunk on his breast, and his cap slouched over his brows. His right hand holds a stiletto, his pockets bulge with weapons or plunder, his left hand is raised with the air of a priest encouraging his flock. And his words are the words of religion—"God with us." At the sign the motley crew will get to work.
It is wholesome to strip the wrappings from grandiose things. Public crimes are no less crimes because they are committed to the sound of trumpets, and the chicanery of crowned intriguers is morally the same as the tricks of hedge bandits. It is privilege of genius to get down to fundamentals. Behind the stately speech of international pourparlers and the rhetoric of national appeals burn the old lust and greed and rapine. A stab in the dark is still a stab in the dark though courts and councils are the miscreants. A war of aggression is not less brigandage because the armies march to proud songs and summon the Almighty to their aid.
Raemaekers has done much to clear the eyes of humanity. The monarch of Felix Austria, with the mantle of the Holy Roman Empire still dragging from his shoulders, is no more than a puzzled, broken old man, crowded in this bad business beside the Grand Turk, against whom his fathers defended Europe. The preposterous Ferdinand, shorn of his bombast, is only a chicken-hearted assassin. The leader of the band, the All Highest himself, when stripped of his white cloak and silver helmet, shows the slouch and the furtive ferocity of the street-corner bravo. And the cry "God with us," which once rallied Crusades, has become on such lips the signal of the apache.
JOHN BUCHAN.
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FERDINAND THE CHAMELEON
There is one whole field of the evil international influence of Germany in which Ferdinand of Bulgaria is a much more important and symbolic person than William of Prussia. He is, of course, a cynical cosmopolitan. He is in great part a Jew, and an advanced type of that mauvais juif who is the principal obstacle to all the attempts of the more genuine and honest Jews to erect a rational status for their people.
Like almost every man of this type, he is a Jingo without being a patriot. That is to say, he is of the type that believes in big armaments and in a diplomacy even more brutal than armaments; but the militarism and diplomacy are not humanized either by the ancient national sanctities which surround the Czar of Russia, or the spontaneous national popularity which established the King of Serbia. He is not national, but international; and even in his peaceful activities has been not so much a neutral as a spy.
In the accompanying cartoon the Dutch caricaturist has thrust with his pencil at the central point of this falsity. It is something which is probably the central point of everything everywhere, but is especially the central point of everything connected with the deep quarrels of Eastern Europe. It is religion. Russian Orthodoxy is an enormously genuine thing; Austrian Romanism is a genuine thing; Islam is a genuine thing; Israel, for that matter, is also a genuine thing.
But Ferdinand of Bulgaria is not a genuine thing; and he represents the whole part played by Prussia in these ancient disputes. That part is the very reverse of genuine; it is a piece of ludicrous and transparent humbug. If Prussia had any religion, it would be a northern perversion of Protestantism utterly distant from and indifferent to the controversies of Slavonic Catholics. But Prussia has no religion. For her there is no God; and Ferdinand is his prophet.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
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THE LATIN SISTERS
The Latin Sisters! Note carefully the expression of France as contrasted with that of Italy. France, violated by the Hun, exhibits grim determination made sacrosanct by suffering. Italy's face glows with enthusiasm. One can conceive of the one fighting on to avenge her martyrs, steadfast to the inevitable end when Right triumphs over Might. One can conceive of the other drawing her sword because of the blood tie which links them together in a bond that craft and specious lies have tried in vain to sunder. What do they stand for, these two noble sisters? Everything which can be included in the word—ART. Everything which has built up, stone upon stone, the stately temple of Civilization, everything which has served to humanize mankind and to differentiate him from the beasts of Prussia.
Looking at these two sisters, one wonders that there are still to be found in England mothers who allow their children to be taught German. One hazards the conjecture that it might well be imparted to exceptionally wicked children, if there be any, because none can question that the Teutonic tongue will be spoken almost exclusively in the nethermost deeps of Hades until, and probably after, the Day of Judgment.
For my sins I studied German in Germany, and I rejoice to think that I have forgotten nearly every word of that raucous and obscene language. Had I a child to educate, and the choice between German and Choctaw were forced upon me, I should not select German. French, Italian, and Spanish, cognate tongues, easy to learn, delightful to speak, hold out sweet allurements to English children. Do not these suffice? If any mother who happens to read these lines is considering the propriety of teaching German to a daughter, let her weigh well the responsibility which she is deliberately assuming. To master any foreign language, it is necessary to talk much and often with the natives. Do Englishwomen wish to talk with any Huns after this war? What will be the feeling of an English mother whose daughter marries a Hun any time within the next twenty years? And such a mother will know that she planted the seed which ripened into catastrophe when she permitted her child to acquire the language of our detestable and detested enemies.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.
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MISUNDERSTOOD
It need not necessarily be supposed that the directors of German destiny, who are not devoid of intelligence, took the ravings of Bernhardi over-seriously. He had his special uses no doubt before the day. But on the morrow of the day, when questions of responsibility came to be raised, he became one of many inconvenient witnesses; and there has scarcely been a better joke among the grim humours of this catastrophe than the mission of this Redhot-Gospeller of the New Unchivalry of War to explain to "those idiotic Yankees" that he was really an ardent pacifist. The most just, the most brilliant, the most bitter pamphlet of invective could surely not say so much as this reeking cleaver, those bloody hands, that fatuous leer and gesture, this rigid victim. Bernhardism was not a mere windy theory. It was exactly practised on the Belgian people.
And this spare, dignified figure of Uncle Sam, contemptuously incredulous, is, I make bold to say, a more representative symbol of the American people than one which our impatience sometimes tempts us now to draw. Most Americans now regret, as Pope Benedict must regret, that the first most cruel rape of Belgium was allowed to pass without formal protest in the name of civilization. But that occasion gone, none other, not the Lusitania even, showed so clear an opportunity. A people's sentiments are not necessarily expressed by the action of its Government, which moves always in fetters. Nor has President Wilson's task been as simple as his critics on this or the other side of the Atlantic profess to believe.
JOSEPH THORP.
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PROSPERITY REIGNS IN FLANDERS
Wherever Prussia rules she has only one method of ruling—that of terror. Wherever she finds civilization and the wealth which civilization creates, she can do nothing but despoil. She is as incapable of persuasion as of creation. No people forced to endure her rule have ever been won to prefer it as the Alsatians came to prefer the rule of France or as many Indians have come to prefer the rule of England. In Belgium she has been especially herself in this respect.
A wise policy would have dictated such a careful respect for private rights and such a deference to native traditions as might conceivably have weakened the determination of the Belgians to resist to the death those who had violated their national independence. But Prussia is incapable of such a policy. In any territory which she occupies, whether temporarily or permanently, her only method is terror and her only aim loot. She did indeed send some of her tame Socialists to Brussels to embark on the hopeless enterprise of persuading the Belgian Socialists that honour and patriotism were ideologies bourgeoises and that the "economic interests" of Belgium would be best promoted by a submission. These pedantic barbarians got the answer which they deserved; but on their pettifogging thesis Raemaekers' cartoon is perhaps the best commentary.
The "prosperity" of Belgium under Prussian rule has consisted in the systematic looting, in violation of international law, of the wealth accumulated by the free citizens of Belgium, for the advantage of their Prussian rulers; while to the mass of the people it has brought and, until it is forever destroyed, can bring nothing but that slavery which the Prussians have themselves accepted and which they would now impose upon the whole civilization of Europe.
CECIL CHESTERTON.
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THE LAST HOHENZOLLERN
Behind him stands the embodiment of all that Prussian kultur and efficiency mean, wooden uninventiveness, clockwork accuracy of movement—without soul or inspiration. He himself is thin and scraggy—Raemaekers has intensified these characteristics, but even so the caricature of the reality is more accurate than unkind. Many months ago, this vacuous heir of the house of Hohenzollern set to work on the task of overcoming France, and the result ... may be found in bundles of four, going back to the incinerators beyond Aix, in the piled corpses before the French positions at and about Verdun; some of the results, the swag of the decadent burglar, went back in sacks from the chateaux that this despicable thing polluted and robbed as might any Sikes from Portland or Pentonville.
He is the embodiment, himself, of the last phase of Prussian kultur. Somewhere back in the history of Prussia its rulers had to invent and to create, and then kultur brought forth hard men; later, it became possible to copy, and then kultur brought forth mechanical perfection rather than creative perfection, systematized its theories of life and work, and brought into being a class of men just a little meaner, more rigid, more automaton-like, than the original class; having reduced life to one system, and that without soul or ideal, kultur brought forth types lacking more and more in originality. Here stands the culminating type; he will copy the good German Gott—he is incapable of originating anything—and will "do the same to France."
As far as lies in his power, he has done it; in the day of reckoning, Germany will judge how he has done it, and it is to be hoped that Germany will give him his just reward, for no punishment could be more fitting. The rest of the world already knows his vacuity, his utter uselessness, his criminal decadence. As his father was stripped of the Garter, so is he here shown stripped of the attributes to which, in earlier days, he made false claim. There remains a foolish knave posturing—and that is the real Crown Prince of Germany.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
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PIRACY
In the summer of 1914 Germany stood before the world, a nation of immense, and to a great extent of most honourable, achievement. Her military greatness had never been in dispute. But in the previous twenty years she had developed an internal industry and an external commerce on a scale and with a rapidity entirely unprecedented. She had to build a navy such as no nation had ever constructed in so short a time. She seemed destined to progress in the immediate future as she had progressed in the immediate past.
What has the madness for world conquest done for her now? She has made enemies of all, and made all her enemies suffer. Like the strong blind man of history, she has seized the columns of civilization and brought the whole temple down. But has she not destroyed herself utterly amid the ruins? Her industry is paralyzed, her commerce gone. Her navy is dishonoured. Some force she still possesses at sea, but it is force to be expended on sea piracy alone. And it is not piracy that can save her. At most, in her extremity, it will do for her what a life belt does for a lone figure in a deserted ocean. It prolongs the agony that precedes inevitable extinction. It is the throw of the desperate gambler that Germany has made, when she flings this last vestige of her honour into the sea.
ARTHUR POLLEN.
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WEEPING, SHE HATH WEPT
While a world of mourners is plaintively asking, "What has become of our brave dead, where are they? Alas! how dark is the world without them, how silent the home, how sad the heart"; whilst the mourner is groping like the blind woman for her lost treasure, the Belgian mother, and the Belgian widow, and the Belgian orphan are on their knees, praying, "Eternal rest give to them, O Lord; let a perpetual light shine upon them," the Christian plea that has echoed down the ages from the day of the Maccabees till now, exhorting us to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins. I would remind the broken-hearted mother beseeching me to tell her where can her brave boy be gone, adding, "His was such a lonely journey; did he find his way to God?" of the words of the poet, who finds his answer to her question in the flight of a sea bird sailing sunward from the winter snows:
There is a Power whose care Teaches thy way along the pathless coast, The desert and illimitable air, Lone, wandering but not lost:
He who from zone to zone Guides, through the boundless sky, thy certain flight, In the lone way which thou must tread alone Will lead thy steps aright.
The brave soldier, who in the discharge of high duty has been suddenly shot into eternity by the fire of the enemy, will surely, far more easily than the migrating bird, wing his flight to God, Who, let us pray, will not long withhold him the happy-making vision of Heaven. Pilgrims homeward-bound, as you readily understand, at different stages of their journey will picture Heaven to themselves differently, according as light or darkness, joy or sorrow encompass them. Some will picture Heaven as the Everlasting Holiday after the drudgery of school life, others as Eternal Happiness after a life of suffering and sorrow, others again as Home after exile, and some others as never-ending Rapture in the sight of God.
But to-day, when " frightfulness" is the creed of the enemy, and warfare with atrocities is his gospel, very many amongst us, weary with the long-drawn battle, sick with its ever-recurring horrors, and broken by its ghastly revelations, will lift up their eyes to a land beyond the stars.
FATHER BERNARD VAUGHAN.
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MILITARY NECESSITY
It may be asserted that the plea of "Frightfulness" will not be recognized a "military necessity" when Germany is judged, and that this enemy of civilization, even as the enemy of society, will be held responsible for its crimes, though they stand as far above the imagination as beyond the power of a common felon. Bill Sikes may justly claim "military necessity" for his thefts and murders, if Germany can do so for hers.
Under Article No. 46 of the Regulations of The Hague, we learn that "Family honour and rights, individual life and private property must be respected," and, under Article No. 47, "all pillage is expressly forbidden." But while it was a political necessity to subscribe to that fundamental formula of civilization, Germany's heart recognized no real need to do so, and secretly, in cold blood, at the inspiration of her educated and well-born rulers, she plotted the details of a campaign of murder, rape, arson, and pillage, which demanded the breaking of her oath as its preliminary. Well might her Chancellor laugh at "the scrap of paper," which stood between Germany and Belgium, when he reflected on the long list of sacred assurances his perjured country had already planned to break.
No viler series of events, in Northern France alone, can be cited than those extracted from the note-books of captured and fallen Germans. Such blood-stained pages must be a tithe of those that returned to Germany, but they furnish a full story of what the rank and file accomplished at the instigation and example of their officers. Space precludes quotation; but one may refer the reader to "Germany's Violations of the Laws of War,"[A] published under the auspices of the French Foreign Office. It is a book that should be on the tables at the Peace Conference.
We cannot hang an army for these unspeakable offences, or treat those who burn a village of living beings as we would treat one who made a bonfire of his fellow-man; nor can we condemn to penal servitude a whole nation for bestial outrages on humanity, ordered by its Higher Command and executed by its troops; but at least we may hope soon to find the offending Empire under police supervision of Europe, with a ticket-of-leave, whose conditions shall be as strict as an outraged earth knows how to draw them.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
[Footnote A: English translation. Heinemann.]
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LIBERTE! LIBERTE, CHERIE!
There have been many surprises in this war. The evil surprises, patiently, scientifically, diabolically matured in the dark for the upsetting and downcasting of a too-trusting world by the enemy of mankind, whose "Teuton-faith" will surely forever outrival that "Punic-faith" which has hitherto been the by-word for perfidious treachery. The heartening surprises of gallant little Belgium and Serbia; the renascence of Russia; the wonderful upleap to the needs of the times by Great, and still more by Greater Britain; and, not least, the bracing of the loins of our closest Allies just across the water.
In the very beginning, when the Huns tore up that scrap of paper which represented their honour and their right to a place among decent dwellers on the earth, and came sweeping like a dirty flood over Belgium and Northern France, the overpowering remembrance of 1870 still lay heavy on our sorely-tried neighbours. They had not yet quite found themselves. The Huns had a mighty reputation for invincibility. It seemed impossible to stand against them. There were waverings, even crumplings. There were said to be treacheries in high places.
The black flood swept on. Von Kluck was heading for Paris, and seemed likely to get there. Then suddenly, miraculously as it seemed, his course was diverted. He was tossed aside and flung back.
And it is good to recall the reason he himself is said to have given for his failure.
"At Mons the British taught the French how to die."
That is a great saying and worthy of preservation for all time. Whether Von Kluck said it or not does not matter. It represents and immortalizes a mighty fact.
France was bending under the terrible impact. Britain stood and died. France braced her loins and they have been splendidly braced ever since.
The Huns were found to be resistible, vulnerable, breakable. The old verve and elan came back with all the old fire, and along with these, new depths of grim courage and tenacity, and, we are told, of spirituality, which may be the making of a new France greater than the world has ever known.
And that we shall welcome. France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia have suffered in ways we but faintly comprehend on this side of the water. When the Great Settling Day conies, this new higher spirit of France will, it is to be devoutly hoped, make for restraint in the universal craving for vengeance, and prove a weighty factor in the righteous re-adjustment of things and the proper fitting together of the jig-saw map of Europe.
JOHN OXENHAM.
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I—"A KNAVISH PIECE OF WORK"
There can be no defence of the spirit of hatred in which the Germans have, so fatally for their future, carried on this amazing mad war of theirs, in violation of all human instincts of self-respect and self-preservation, to say nothing of the obligations of religion and morality observed among mankind from the first dawnings of civilization. The knavery, the villainy, and the besotted bestiality of it can never be forgotten, and must never be forgiven, and Louis Raemaekers, gifted as he is with the rare dramatic genius that discriminates his Cartoons, has but discharged an obvious patriotic duty in publishing them to the world at large, as true and faithful witnesses to the unspeakable and inexpiable abominations wrought throughout Belgium and French Flanders by the Germans—which, already, in the course of Divine retribution, have involved their own country in material losses it will take from three to four generations to repair; and their once honoured name in contempt, and reprobation, and infamy, wherefrom it can never be redeemed.
Nevertheless, as an Englishman, I shrink from giving any emphasis there may be in my "hand and signature" to these righteously condemnatory and withering cartoons; and because, each one of them, as I turn to it, brings more and more crushingly home to me the transcending sin of England—of every individual Englishman with a vote for Members of Parliament—in not having prepared for this war; a sin that has implicated us in the destruction of the whole rising generation of the flower of our manhood; and, before this date, would have brought us under subjection to Germany but for the confidence placed by the rank and file of the British people and nation in Lord Kitchener of Khartum.
Now—face to face with enemies—from the Kaiser downward to his humblest subjects—animated by the highest, noblest ideals, but again perverted for a time—as in the case of their ancestors in the Middle Ages—by a secular epidemic of "Panmania," they are to be faced not with idle reproaches and revilings, still less with undignified taunts and gibes, but with close-drawn lips and clenched teeth, in the determination that, once having cast Satan out of them, he shall be bound down to keep the peace of Christendom—"for a thousand years."
GEORGE BIRDWOOD.
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II—"SISYPHUS,—HIS STONE"
Sisyphus, as the story goes, was a King who widely extended the commerce, and largely increased the wealth, of Corinth, but by avaricious and fraudful ways; for the sin whereof he was sentenced after death to the unresting labour of rolling up a hill in Tartarus, a huge unhewn block of stone, which so soon as he gets it to the hill top, for all his efforts, rolls down again. In classical representation of the scene he is associated with Tantalus and Ixion; Tantalus, who, presuming too much on his relations with Zeus, was after death afflicted with an unquenchable thirst amidst flowing fountains and pellucid lakes—like the lakes of "The Thirst of the Antelope" in the marvellous mirages of Rajputana and Mesopotamia—that ever elude his anguished approaches; and with Ixion, the meanest and basest of cheats, and most demoniac of murderers, whose posthumous punishment was in being stretched, and broken, and bound, in the figure of the svastika, on a wheel which, self-moved—like the wheels of the vision of Ezekiel—whirls forevermore round and round the abyss of the nether world. The moral of these tortures is that we may well and most wisely leave vengeance to "the high Gods." They will repay!
GEORGE BIRDWOOD.
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CONCRETE FOUNDATIONS
Nothing has damned the Germans more in the eyes of other nations, belligerent and neutral alike, and nothing will have a more subtle and lasting influence on future relations, than the revelation of stealthy preparation for conquest under a mask of innocent and friendly intercourse. The whole process of "peaceful penetration," pursued in a thousand ways with infernal ingenuity and relentless determination, is an exhibition of systematic treachery such as all the Macchiavellis have never conceived. Germany has revealed herself as a nation of spies and assassins. To take advantage of a neighbour's unsuspecting hospitality, to enter his house with an air of open friendship, in order to stab him in the back at a convenient moment, is an act of the basest treachery, denounced by all mankind in all ages. No one would be more shocked by it in private life than the Germans themselves. But when it is undertaken methodically on a national scale under the influence of Deutschland ueber Alles, the same conduct becomes ennobled in their eyes, they throw themselves into it with enthusiasm and lose all sense of honour. Such is the moral perversion worked by Kultur and the German theory of the State.
An inevitable consequence is that in future the movements and proceedings of Germans in other countries will be watched with intense suspicion, and if Governments do not prevent the sort of thing depicted by Mr. Raemaekers the people will see to it themselves. The cartoon is not, of course, intended to reflect personally on the owner of Krupp's works, who is said to be a gentle-minded and blameless lady. It is her misfortune to be associated by the chance of inheritance with the German war machine and one of the underhand methods by which it has pursued its aims.
A. SHADWELL.
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PALLAS ATHENE
"Has it come to this?" Well may the Goddess ask this question. Times are indeed changed since the heroic days. Germany has still her great Greek scholars, one or two of them among the greatest living, men who know, and can feel, the spirit, as well as the letter, of the old Classics. Do they remember to-day what the relation of the Goddess of Wisdom was to the God of War, in Homer, when, to use the Latin names which are perhaps more familiar, to the general reader than the Greek, Mars "indulged in lawless rage," and Jove sent Juno and Minerva to check his "frightfulness?"
"Go! and the great Minerva be thine aid; To tame the monster-god Minerva knows, And oft afflicts his brutal breast with woes."
and how the hero Diomede, with Minerva's aid, wounded the divine bully and sent him bellowing and whimpering back, only to hear from his father the just rebuke:
"To me, perfidious! this lamenting strain? Of lawless force shall lawless Mars complain? Of all the gods who tread the spangled skies, Thou most unjust, most odious in our eyes! Inhuman discord is thy dear delight, The waste of slaughter, and the rage of fight!"
It is most true. Such has ever been War for War's sake, and when the Germans themselves are wounded and beaten, they complain like Mars of old of "lawless force."
But Raemaekers has introduced another touch more Roman than Greek, and reminding us perhaps of Tacitus rather than of Homer.
Who was Caligula, and what does his name mean? "Little Jack-boots," in his childhood the spoiled child of the camp, as a man, and Caesar, the first of the thoroughly mad, as well as bad, Emperors of Rome, the first to claim divine honours in his lifetime, to pose as an artist and an architect, an orator and a litterateur, to have executions carried out under his own eyes, and while he was at meals; who made himself a God, and his horse a Consul.
Minerva blacking the boots of Caligula—it is a clever combination!
But there is an even worse use of Pallas, which War and the German War-lords have made. They have found a new Pallas of their own, not the supernal Goddess of Heavenly Wisdom and Moderation, but her infernal counterfeit, sung of by a famous English poet in prophetic lines that come back to us to-day with new force.
Who loves not Knowledge, who shall rail Against her beauty, may she mix With men and prosper, who shall fix Her pillars? let her work prevail——
Yes, but how do the lines continue?
What is she cut from love and faith But some wild Pallas from the brain
Of Demons, fiery hot to burst All barriers in her onward race For power? Let her know her place, She is the second, not the first.
Knowledge is power, but, unrestrained by conscience, a very awful power.
This is the Pallas whom the "Demons," from whose brain she has sprung, are using for their demoniac purposes. She too might have her portrait painted—and they. Perhaps Raemaekers will paint them both before he has done.
HERBERT WARNER.
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THE WONDERS OF CULTURE
Of all forms of "Kultur" or "frightfulness" that which materializes in the "the terror which flieth by night" is to the intelligent mind at one and the same time the most insensate and damnable. It fails to accomplish, either in Paris or in London, the subjugation by terror of the people for which Germans seem to hope. It is only in German imagination that it accomplishes "material and satisfactory damage to forts, camps, arsenals, and fortified towns." In reality it inflicts misery and death upon a mere handful of people (horrible as that may be) and destroys chiefly the homes of the poor. It serves no military end, and the damage done is out of all proportion to the expenditure of energy and material used to accomplish it. |
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