[Pg i]

INTERNATIONAL CARTOONS
OF THE WAR

[Pg iii]

INTERNATIONAL
CARTOONS
OF THE WAR

SELECTED WITH AN INTRODUCTION

by H. PEARL ADAM

E. P. DUTTON & CO.
681 FIFTH AVENUE
NEW YORK

THE HISTORIAN who, a couple of centuries hence, tries to get at the real kernel of the great War, will find himself overwhelmed with material, buried under evidence, like the great authority on Penguinia. Every doubtful point will be clearly and irrefutably decided for him in at least seven different ways. A burning sense of conviction may be his, but he will not be sure which conviction it is. The lot of the historian has changed for the worse since the days of Herodotus. It no longer suffices for an account of a battle to be possible if not probable, marvellous if not possible, for it to rank as history; mankind chose to start on the thorny quest of Truth, and is now beginning to see that in every affair there are exactly as many Truths as there are actors.

When the war broke out in August, 1914, the curious art of conveying a knowledge of thoughts and fact between two or more human organisms, the only art or appliance which man has really invented without referring to Nature—the art of writing—was resorted to on every hand. An unprecedented crop of war books began to sprout from the blood-fertilized fields of Flanders. Men might safely exclaim: "Mine enemy hath written a book"; they had perforce to add: "And so hath each of my friends." They poured from the Press, little books and big, sober and hysterical, speculative and emotional. After them came the sedate polychromatic procession of Government literature. Along with them flowed the swift and multitudinous efforts of journalism. And in a very short time began those strange enterprises, at once droll and portentous, the Serial Histories of the War.

What the great historian will make of all this when his time comes to correlate it, it is difficult to say. If he feel conscientiously bound to consult contemporary evidence, there is little hope for him, unless he takes the bold step of writing a historical novel out of his inner consciousness instead.

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But there will be at least one unfailing guide for him. The very increase in mechanical processes which contributes to his undoing in the matter of books, will come to his aid with regard to pictures. Every great event since the invention of mechanical reproductive processes has produced its due reflection in the mirror of the artist. The crude old broadsheets told their tale of the Napoleonic wars more vividly than any historian could; and the present struggle, while it slew nearly every other art for the time being, worked up to fever-pitch the output of pictorial comment. In France, where this form of expression has always been popular, an unexampled flood of cartoon and caricature poured from artists both celebrated and unknown. Other countries followed suit, in proportion to their national liking for prints; and the evidence supplied by this mass of international material is as direct and reliable as anyone need demand.

II.

THE VALUE of the contemporary cartoon is very great; for it deals almost entirely with what people are feeling, in distinction to what they are doing. It uses their deeds as a mere background to their emotions, and it is only the emotions which count. What the soldier feels, the sailor, the mother at home, the man in the street—these are the really important things, for it is these things which are the causes of events. If enough ordinary people want peace at any price, the Governments of all the States in the world will be powerless to wage war one moment longer; if enough ordinary people consider their honour involved in fighting to a finish, emperors and kings and presidents and trade unions and the N.C.C. will united be unable to break the smallest twig from the olive.

The material of the cartoonist is drawn from sources useless to the writer, or at best, of only ephemeral utility. A chance-heard remark, the expression of a face seen in the street, the glances turned on a wounded man as he hobbles by on his stick, the ineptitude of a comment on the day's news—these are the media by which the cartoonist conveys his view of what his country feels. And he has this advantage over the writer—that a well-done drawing is a volume in itself; in one glance the eye has absorbed the background which a tedious explanation is necessary to convey in [Pg vii] words, and is free to take in the essential meaning of the drawing. A picture appeals as directly to the eye as does a sunset, or as food to the stomach, or a soft bed to the tired body. It uses a natural sense, not a cultivated faculty.

Cartoons are meant for the man in the street; they are meant to tell a story, to convey some feeling or idea rather than to be an artistic rendering of an object or collection of objects. Therefore artistic canons apply to them in this limited sense—that while the great cartoonist may and must be as big an artist as he can, he must first of all remember that he has to explain himself and his subjects, or he ceases to be a cartoonist at all. A Futurist Forain, a Cubist Raemaekers, are inconceivable because they would be quite useless as cartoonists, whatever they were as artists.

The artistic value of the cartoons issued in all countries—and in some cases it is very great—is a matter for future discussion. It is of no present importance. What is of some actual value is a comparison between the cartoons of the various countries, for they show with unfailing accuracy the trend of public opinion. From the human point of view this comparison is invaluable to the student of humanity in the present upheaval. From the cheap postcard to the twopenny broadsheet, from the most commonplace poster to the finest lithograph, each has its place. To collect these things is not only very interesting, but most enlightening; the national spirit and the national moods of each country are unmistakably portrayed, and the crudest production takes rank with the best as a human document.

III.

THE GOOD cause has always produced the good cartoonist—witness the Napoleonic wars, when England rejoiced in Gillray and Rowlandson, while France had no topical draughtsman of any outstanding merit. So far as one can tell, this is very much the case with the present war. At any rate, the good cause has produced its good men, and, judging by what one can manage to see of German caricature, they have no mind of any large calibre at work on cartoons. This is, perhaps, because the greater part of the German drawings I have seen are intended to rouse hatred, scorn, and anger. Clever they certainly are, but too many of them are spiritually [Pg viii] debased. The best are those directed against England, which are dedicated to hatred, a passion greater than scorn or anger, and consequently more elevating in its effects. Otherwise the German cartoonist has not distinguished himself, in the sense that the war has not raised him above himself.

This can certainly not be said of France, where a crowd of new men have appeared, and where the well-known draughtsmen of pre-war days have been roused to unprecedented excellence by their emotions. At least one of them, M. Forain, has made history with his pencil. There came a time, when the first excitement had died away, when the victory of the Marne had for months been followed by stagnation—stagnation in victory, progress in casualties—a time when no news ever came, when Paris was left in a kind of twilight of suspense and endurance, when the economic pinch began to be acutely felt, when bereaved wives and mothers were told in the morning that their loved ones "were gloriously dead for their country," and read at night that "there is nothing to report on the front; the night was calm." And for just a moment the human need and sorrow of the individual cried louder than the pride of country. "It's very long, this war!" "What I want to know is, how much more do they expect us to endure?" "Could defeat be worse than war?" and even the sinister "if we win," were phrases that crept into conversation. It was hardly to be wondered at. France had expended so much energy on her magnificent effort in August, '14, when her very babies bore themselves proudly and with self-control, that she was bound to feel the reaction.

It did not last long, and it was Forain who swept it away by a dose of strong tonic. He drew two French privates in a trench, snow and hail and shrapnel raining round them, in conditions as bad as the most anxious mother's nightmare could have pictured them. And one says: "If only they hold out!" The other, with a look of great surprise, enquires: "Who?" "Those civilians!" In a week that drawing was historic, and civilian France, with a blush and a laugh, had pulled herself together. M. Forain does not care to have his drawings reproduced, or this famous cartoon would have been included in this book.

Nor, unfortunately, will M. Jean Véber have his cartoons reproduced [Pg ix] till after the war, which deprives us of that Napoleon of his, standing on his own tomb and crying "Vive l'Angleterre," which created such a stir on both sides of the Channel. "La Brûte est Lâchée," by the same artist, is one of the most impressive drawings France has produced since the war. Published so early as September, '14, it represents the Prussian monster, madness and fury in his face, starting out like an unleashed animal on his career of destruction.

This print was the first to indicate the enormous boom in war-drawings which has characterized Paris. Published at 5 francs, it was within a few months unobtainable under 500. Collectors took the hint, and the drawings of Forain, Steinlen, and other well-known artists were eagerly sought after, and rose to very high premiums. The character of the prints changed; with the exception of M. Véber's series, the greater part of the drawings published outside magazines and newspapers had been cheap, ranging from threepence to two francs each, and including some publications of deliberately naïve construction and crude colours, others which achieved without deliberation a startling likeness to the old broadsheets with their childlike simplicity. Postcards and prints fairly flooded Paris in the first few months of the war, but since the collector appeared on the scene in his dozens the cheaper publications have been displaced by more ambitious works that range up to a hundred francs each, and have crowded out the smaller artist, the smaller print-seller, and the smaller collector.

This variety of output has been increased by the publication of many illustrated war-papers in Paris, such as Le Mot, l'Europe Anti-Prussienne, l'Anti-Boche, A la Baïonnette, war editions of already established papers, and a crop of crude halfpenny papers, printed after the Epinal manner, and greatly used by children and the very low classes. A coloured history of the war, of extraordinary naïveté, issued in penny sheets, was intended for use in schools, but achieved an additional success in hospitals, where the thin sheet was easily held and folded, and the incidents depicted roused the liveliest interest among the wounded.

In the whole of this output it is difficult to find any sign of wavering in the national spirit of France. Once the civilians had decided to hold [Pg x] out, there could be no other stumbling-block. Naturally, in such a range of drawings, there are many that drop into brutality on the one hand, vulgarity on the other; but the overwhelming majority breathe a spirit of calm, determined endurance, with a ready laugh for hardships, a sly dig at politicians, and no little irony at the expense of their own weaknesses and foibles. Very often, so often as to set the key for the whole, the note is heroic, sometimes grimly so. There is none of the splenetic fury of the German drawings about the majority of the French ones; the Germans are ridiculed and hated, it is true, but the spirit is more steady and less spiteful—it rests on an emotion which for forty-five years has been a religion to the Frenchman.

The English cartoons are as different as possible from both the French and the German. We have no separately published prints, our postcards have been few, vulgar, and negligible; our cartoonists are really only offered the pages of newspapers and magazines in which to exert their influence over us. And there cannot be two questions as to that influence—it is the influence of good humour. The French mistake it sometimes for indifference, but the English know better. The Germans say they mistake it for frivolity, but they so foam at the mouth about it that one suspects them of glimpsing the spirit behind the smile. The grim note of Steinlen and Forain is almost wholly wanting from English cartoons. The Kaiser, who is a devil in France, is merely making an unholy fool of himself in England; the Crown-Prince, a mass of vice in Paris, is "an awful silly blighter" in London. Will Dyson, the young artist of whom Australia has such reason to be proud, is our grimmest product, and even he lets the Prussian off more easily than do the French artists. Because, after all, don't you know, we're going to thrash the brutes, but there's no need to make a fuss about it, hang it all. Let us have our pipe and our grin, and let us keep to those till the end. For the Lord's sake don't let us have any heroics—those are for doing, not for showing. That is the attitude which one finds over and over again in English drawings; not contempt of danger, so much as a serene determination to grin at it and have no fuss.

Punch has come out brilliantly in this particular. Allowed by tradition [Pg xi] to have two heroic cartoons a week, the rest of his pages are dedicated to the god of laughter. Germany reads Punch with stupefaction. What, we not only laugh at the Germans, we laugh more at the English! Extraordinary, sinister, effete, degenerate race! It is true, we laugh at ourselves far more than at anybody else—and very often it is for that painful but cogent reason, that we may not weep. Perhaps at the front they laugh wholeheartedly at Punch; at home it is a different laugh that greets Tommy in his imperturbable good-humour. In the midst of a hell of fire, Tommy says that what with the beastly Belgian tobacco and the blooming French matches, this'll be the death of him. Sitting on the edge of a trench which consists of nothing but mud and water, in a fearful downpour, he remarks that he pities the poor fellows at home—the London streets must be something awful! And on a dozen other occasions he has expressed that cheery soul of his, in a way as charming as it is moving.

As for the Germans, perhaps Mr. Punch reached his happiest moment when he gave us the German family "enjoying its morning hate." A French paper copied that with enjoyment tinged with bewilderment, since the idiomatic "morning hate" was beyond the French editor, who published it merely as "a study of a German family at breakfast time". The Germans have not published it at all.

Nothing more light-hearted and good-humoured than Mr. Heath Robinson's fantastic inventions (such as the Tatcho bomb) could be found—unless perhaps, in the inimitable "Big and Little Willie" of Mr. Haselden, which have given pleasure to countless people, at the front and at home, and have caused howls of Majestätsbeleidigungisch laughter in German trenches, when Tommy has been so kind as to throw a copy over.

England has never taken cartoons so seriously as has France, nor has she a public for separate topical prints; but she has done as much as she can, for her war cartoons accurately express her mind, and that is their real function and constitutes their real value.

Neutral countries have had to be careful in some ways; it is difficult to find any interesting war-prints or postcards on sale there. What there are [Pg xii] are rather insipid, at any rate to the Allied mind. But in individual newspapers and periodicals the struggle has raged fiercely by pen and pencil, pro-Ally or pro-German. Mr. Robert Carter, for instance, in his drawings in the New York Evening Sun, has spoken with no uncertain voice, as one of his cartoons in this book will witness. Spain has had more pro-Ally cartoons than one might have expected, Scandinavia has been very discreet—Italy never was, even before she came in.

Holland remains, and well has she shown that she still possesses that spirit of resistance to the oppressor which dictated the pages of her superb history. Small in size, in a geographical position of great danger, her economic interests very largely identified with the welfare of Germany, Holland might have been excused for holding her peace. Everyone knew that German influence was, and is, very important in Holland; that the Netherlands reek with German espionage, and that method of commercial penetration which is one of Prussia's most valued weapons. Yet none of these things sufficed to silence the Dutch love of liberty and hatred of oppression. A band of Dutch cartoonists, hot with indignation, took the bit between their teeth, and ran away with their pencils, their papers, their public, and, if their startled Government is right, very nearly with Dutch neutrality. Anyone who has watched Dutch drawings must have been impressed by the fire of the pro-Ally artists, Braakensiek, Albert Hahn, Peter van den Hem, and Lazrom. Neutrality is too pale for them.

And, of course, there is Louis Raemaekers. Only a neutral could have done what he has done; but it might not have been done at all had not Raemaekers arisen with his accusing pencil. In his work the war takes on its right colour, as something far above international hatreds or the struggle of policies, far above even a battle for the welfare of peoples whose interests are opposed. It appears in its right aspect, as a spiritual conflict, more deadly, more earnest, more vital, than any revolution or reformation or war since that struggle in which proud Lucifer fell. This is every man's war, the world's war, the war of God and devil. And, taking this heroic view of it, Raemaekers has stepped into the rôle of Tragedy, which is "to arouse pity and terror, and the noble movements of the soul." His [Pg xiii] "Prisoners" and "Barbed Wire" (Plates XXII. and XXIII.) show well his detached, tragic quality. There are many of his drawings which are too dreadful to be contemplated for long—"Slow Gas Poisoning," the German thief trampling in blood that drops from his heavy sack, the professor and the devil leering delightedly into each other's eyes. But after such horrors one comes always back to the exquisite tenderness which is the real distinguishing characteristic of Raemaekers. The young German soldier who writes home that "our cemeteries now stretch nearly to the sea" is as tenderly drawn as are the widows of Belgium. The tenderness of strength is the heart of the tragic spirit, the heart that bleeds for suffering and weakness, the heart that grows hot for injustice and wrong. It is this spirit, with its heart of tenderness, that has made the fame of Raemaekers. It is not comfortable nor pleasant to be roused to the tragic sentiments, but it is right that we should; and had the Allies needed any reassurance as to the nature of the reason for which they fight, Raemaekers' work would have supplied it. The good cause has found its good artist, and he is all the stronger because he is a neutral. Like Truth in the cartoon with which this book closes, he has held up the mirror to the Prussian, and we can see, Germany can see, the whole world can see, what kind of soul is reflected therein.

I.

II.

VIII.

IX.

XII. & XIII.

XIV.

XVII.

XVIII.

XXV.

XXVII.

XXIX.

(A Franco-Russian Drawing.)

L.

It is not easy to come by copies of the German papers, as the Trade-with-the-Enemy Act frowns upon such commerce. Happily, there are neutral countries, through whose agency something may be done. This and the following six pages are devoted to German Cartoons, from Simplicissimus, the famous Munich illustrated paper. They are very clever, very mordant, very amusing, and always at their best when directed against England.

LIV.