The “Land & Water” Edition of Raemaekers’ Cartoons

Louis Raemaekers will stand out for all time as one of the supreme figures which the Great War has called into being. His genius has been enlisted in the service of mankind, and his work, being entirely sincere and untouched by racial or national prejudice, will endure; indeed, it promises to gain strength as the years advance. When the intense passions, which have been awakened by this world struggle, have faded away, civilisation will regard the war largely through these wonderful drawings. By them, not only the methods of German warfare will be judged, but the resolution will surely be begotten and nurtured that never again, so far as it is humanly possible, shall a recurrence of Teuton inhumanity and barbarism be permitted.

Before the war had been in progress many weeks the cartoons in the Amsterdam Telegraaf attracted attention in the capitals of Europe, many leading newspapers reproducing them. The German authorities, quick to realise their full significance, did all in their power to suppress them. Through German intrigue Raemaekers has been charged in the Dutch Courts with endangering the neutrality of Holland—and acquitted. A price has been set on his head, should he ever venture over the border.

When only a week or two ago he crossed to England, his wife received anonymous post-cards, warning her that his ship would certainly be torpedoed in the North Sea. The Cologne Gazette, in a leading article on Holland, threatens that country that “after the War Germany will settle accounts with Holland, and for each calumny, for each cartoon of Raemaekers, she will demand payment with the interest that is due to her.” Not since Saul and the men of Israel were in the valley of Elah fighting with the Philistines has so unexpected a champion arisen. With brush and pencil this Dutch painter will do even as David did with the smooth stone out of the brook; he will destroy the braggart Goliath, who, strong in his own might, defies the forces of the living God.

When Mr. Raemaekers came to London in December, he was received by the Prime Minister, and was entertained at a complimentary luncheon by the Journalists of the British capital. Similar honour was conferred on him on his second visit. He was the guest of honour at the Savage Club; the Royal Society of Miniature Painters elected him an Honorary Member. But it has been left to France to pay the most fitting recognition to his genius and to his services in the cause of freedom and truth. The Cross of the Legion of Honour has been presented to him, and on his visit to Paris this month a special reception is to be held in his honour at La Sorbonne, which is the highest purely intellectual reward Europe can confer on any man.

The great Dutch cartoonist is now in his forty-seventh year. He was born in Holland, his father, who is dead, having been the editor of a provincial newspaper. His mother, who is still alive and exceedingly proud of her son’s fame, is a German by birth, but rejoices that she married a Dutchman and thus escaped from the debasing influences of her native land. Mr. Raemaekers, who is short, fair, and of a ruddy countenance, looks at least ten years younger than his age. He took up3 painting and drawing when quite young and learnt his art in Holland and in Brussels. All his life he has lived in his own country, but with frequent visits to Belgium and Germany, where, through his mother, he has many relations. Thus he knows by experience the nature of the peoples whom he depicts.

For many years he was a landscape painter and a portrait painter, and made money and local reputation. Six or seven years ago he turned his attention to political work, and became a cartoonist and caricaturist on the staff of the Amsterdam Telegraaf, thus opening the way to a fame which is not only world-wide but which will endure as long as the memory of the Great War lasts. His ideas come to him naturally and without effort. Suggestions do not assist him; they hinder him when he endeavours to act on them. He is an artist to his finger-tips and throws the whole force of his being into his work. Some years ago he married a Dutch lady, who is devoted to music, and they have three children, two girls and a boy (the youngest); the eldest is now twelve. Very happy in his home, Mr. Raemaekers has no ambitions outside it, except to go on with his work and to continue the fight against the German Evil. A Teuton paper has declared that Raemaekers’ cartoons are worth at least two Army Corps to the Allies. This saying has pleased him greatly; he only wishes they were worth four Army Corps.

The strong religious tendency which so often distinguishes his work makes one instinctively ask to what Church does the artist belong. He replies that he belongs to none, but was brought up a Catholic, and his wife a Protestant, and the differences which in later life severed each from their early teaching caused them to meet on common ground. But the intense Christian feeling of these drawings is beyond cavil or dispute: they again and again bring home to the heart the vital truths of the Faith with irresistible force, and the artist ever expresses the Christianity, not perhaps of the theologian, but of the honest and kindly man of the world.

Praise has been bestowed upon his work by several German papers—qualified praise. The Leipziger Volkszeitung has declared that Raemaekers’ cartoons show unimpeachable art and great power of execution, but that they all lack one thing. They have no wit, no spirit. Which is true—in a sense. They do lack wit—German wit; they do lack spirit—German spirit. And what German wit and German spirit may be one can comprehend by a study of Raemaekers’ cartoons.

The cartoons by Louis Raemaekers properly need no introduction, since they explain themselves in every line. But it might be usefully pointed out that, so far, our Fleet has saved us from actual sight of Germany’s war methods. What shells and bombs we know have arrived from the blue, lacking the personality of the despatchers. Raemaekers lives on the other side of an electrified wire within a very short distance of the slaughter-houses at work. He has dealt with people still bloody, sweating, and dusty from their flight. He knows, or he knows friends who know men and women dead or dishonoured, or in present peril of murder or rape. He understands, as well as all his countrymen, that Belgium is being vivisected on Holland’s doorstep, that Holland may take warning. He is more than any resident in Great Britain of that tragedy. His evidence then is as unimpeachable as his art.

Raemaekers also realises in his presentments what we do not—that the German foulness in war is an integral part of the German philosophy of life, and when the armies give themselves up to their reasoned abominations, it is no more than Germany going joyously to the realisation of the depraved dreams which have been instilled into its mind in peace. He does not lose his temper over the4 fact. His line cuts as deeply as possible because he knows not only the visible act, but the life-tendency which made the act inevitable. We do not. We still keep the idea that certain things “are not done.” Our geographical position prevents us feeling the pressure that keeps the neutral nations quiet and useful to Germany. Our caricaturists only see the outside of things. So it happens that we who would be most affected by defeat are the least affected now in our own minds.

The abomination of frightfulness in Belgium recalls the sufferings and degradations which English women and children endured nearly sixty years ago when a section of the Indian army rebelled, and the mutineers, being joined by certain disaffected Indian princes and landowners, overcame small and isolated British communities and perpetrated identically the same barbarities as have been deliberately practised by the German troops during the present war. It was then that Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the distinguished American essayist, gave utterance to the following opinion in the Atlantic Monthly; it is now embodied in his well-known work “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.” Although the official voice of the United States has uttered no such protest, there is reason to believe that these words written by an American pen nine-and-fifty years ago do still represent the reasoned opinion of the bulk of American men and women:

Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with the higher? No matter who he was. Now look at what is going on in India—a white, superior “Caucasian” race, against a dark-skinned, inferior, but still “Caucasian” race—and where are English and American sympathies? We can’t stop to settle all the doubtful questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure to come out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general law that the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as it does the same nature in the inferior animals—tame it, or crush it. The Indian mail brings stories of women and children outraged and murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers. England takes down the Map of the World, which she has girdled with empire, and makes a correction thus: Delhi, Dele! The civilised world says, Amen.

Dele! Destroy utterly! Wipe off the face of the world—not Germany, or the German capital, or the German people, but the German philosophy of life as it has been expounded by its chief evangels, Treitschke, Bernhardi, and others. Dele! That should be the motto of each one of us. It is the message which Louis Raemaekers speaks with the whole strength of his genius. It has to be accomplished by the individual in his own sphere; it is a duty which cannot be deputised. Germany has proclaimed: “War is war; no treaty too sacred, no human right too divine, no woman too weak, no babe too tender to escape from the blind, brutal violence of war.” We must fight to the death. Either German philosophy is to be established, and freedom of body, mind, and soul crushed beneath the iron heel of Prussian Kultur, or else, at whatever the cost, this fearful menace to the peace and liberty of nations and individuals has to be destroyed root and branch. “I came not to send peace but a sword,” said the Saviour. Are we, who boast ourselves Christians and have heretofore rejoiced in Christianity, too weak or too fearful in this day of battle to take up the Saviour’s sword and to war for the eternal principles and ideals of right, justice, mercy, and loving-kindness?

This struggle is not merely a matter for the fighting men. It has to be carried into our counting-houses, our shops, our schools, and, if need be, our homes. Wherever we encounter the insidious presence of Germany and German ideas, there must they be overthrown, no matter how costly, difficult, or disagreeable the work may prove personally. The German has been taught that duty to his own State outweighs the laws of God and man. To betray hospitality, to be false to both written and spoken word, to be full of deceit, lying, and treachery—these are esteemed honourable actions even in times of peace where German interests are concerned by all her people from the Kaiser downwards. And the reverse is equally true. They who are not Germans, and who refuse to subscribe to the canons of Kultur, are reckoned beyond the pale of civilisation.

Nothing has been stated here which cannot be proved by independent testimony. The literature of the war and of the events antecedent to the war has grown apace, and this short prefatory note is not the place to review it. But attention may be profitably drawn to the testimony, borne by another neutral, to German methods. Dr. Anton Nyström, one of the most distinguished sons of Sweden, a historian of high repute, who has travelled widely throughout Europe, in his book “Before, During, and After 1914,” written only last summer, establishes that public feeling has been deliberately created in Germany during the last fifty years that that country should assume the mastery of all nations related to Germany without regard to material and historical factors. And wherever this mastery has been assumed, whether in Schleswig-Holstein, Poland, or Alsace and Lorraine, a systematic and ruthless suppression of the mother-tongue has been attempted, and the peoples have been persecuted for any tokens of affection for their own nationality. As it has been, so it will be again, if Germany triumphs. Furthermore, we know well to-day that the mastery of the Germanic peoples was intended only to be the beginning of the mastery of the world.

When complete these portfolios of Louis Raemaekers’ cartoons will constitute the most marvellous record of the horrible realities of this vast world-struggle, and will have a historical value which will grow greater with time. Already the originals have been purchased, and their present owners, in most instances, would not part with them for ten times the price they have paid. It has been well said that no man living amidst these surging seas of blood and tears has come nearer to the rôle of Peacemaker than Raemaekers. The peace which he works for is not a matter of arrangement between diplomatists and politicians: it is the peace which the intelligence and the soul of the Western world shall insist on in the years to be. God grant it be not long delayed, but it can only come when the enemy is entirely overthrown and the victory is overwhelming and complete.

AN APPRECIATION FROM THE PRIME MINISTER

Downing Street,
Whitehall, S.W.

Mr. Raemaekers’ powerful work gives form and colour to the menace which the Allies are averting from the liberty, the civilisation and the humanity of the future. He shows us our enemies as they appear to the unbiassed eyes of a neutral, and wherever his pictures are seen determination will be strengthened to tolerate no end of the war save the final overthrow of the Prussian military power.

Signed H. H. ASQUITH

“War is war,” the Germans preached and practised, and no matter how clement and correct may be the humanity of the Allies, we realise through these pictures what the human race has to face and endure once peace be broken. Is “Christendom after Twenty Centuries” to be even as Christianity was in the first century—an excuse for the perpetration of mad cruelties by degenerate Cæsars or Kaisers (spell it as you will) at their games? Cannot the higher and finer attributes of mankind be developed and strengthened without this apparently needless waste of agony and life? Is human nature only to be redeemed through the Cross, and must Calvary bear again and again its heavy load of human anguish?

One cannot escape from this inner questioning as one gazes on Raemaekers’ cartoons.

Were I privileged to have a hand at the Peace Conference, my co-operation would take the part of deeds and I should only ask to hang the walls of the council chamber with life-size reproductions of Raemaekers in blood-red frames. For human memory is weak, and as mind of man cannot grasp the meaning of a million, so may it well fail to keep steadily before itself the measure of Belgium—the rape and murder, the pillage and plunder, the pretences under which perished women and priests and children, the brutal tyranny—the left hand that beckoned in friendly fashion, the right hand, hidden with the steel.

We can very safely leave France to remember Northern France and Russia not to forget Poland; but let Belgium and Serbia be at the front of the British mind and conscience; let her lift her eyes to these scorching pictures when Germany fights with all her cunning for a peace that shall leave Prussia scotched, not killed.

Already one reads despondent articles, that the English tradition, to forgive and forget, is going to wreck the peace; and students of psychology fear that within us lie ineradicable qualities that will save the situation for Germany at the end.

To suspect such a national weakness is surely to arm against it and see that our contribution to the Peace Conference shall not stultify our contribution to the War.

The Germans have been kite-flying for six months, to see which way the wind blows; and when the steady hurricane broke the strings and flung the kites headlong to earth, those who sent them up were sufficiently proclaimed by their haste to disclaim.

But when the actual conditions are created and the new “Scrap of Paper” comes to light, since German honour is dead and her oath in her own sight worthless, let it be worthless in our sight also, and let the terms of peace preclude her power to perjure herself again. Make her honest by depriving her of the strength to be dishonest. There is only one thing on earth the German will ever respect, and that is superior force. May Berlin, therefore, see an army of occupation; and may “peace” be a word banished from every Allied tongue until that preliminary condition of peace is accomplished, and Germany sees other armies than her own.

Reason has been denied speech in this war; but if she is similarly banished from the company of the peace-makers, then woe betide the constitution of the thing they will create, for a “stable peace” must be the very last desire of those now doomed to defeat.

Some “neutrals,” and even some of the people here in England, still doubt the reality of the German atrocities in Belgium, but Raemaekers has seen and spoken with those to whom the scene depicted in this cartoon is an ugly reality. One who would understand it to the full must visualise the hands behind the thrusting rifle butts, and the faces behind the hands, as well as the praying, maddened, despairing, vengeful women of the picture—and must visualise, too, the men thrust back another way, to wait their fate at the hands of these apostles of a civilisation of force.

Yet even then full realisation is impossible; the man whose pencil has limned these faces has only caught a far-off echo of the reality, and thus we who see his picture are yet another stage removed from the full horror of the scene that he gives us. Not on us, in England, have the rifle butts fallen; not for us has it chanced that we should be shepherded “men to the right, women to the left”; not ours the trenched graves and the extremity of shame. Thus it is not for us to speak, as the people of Belgium and Northern France will speak, of the limits of endurance, and of war’s last terrors imposed on those whom war should have passed by and left untouched. We gather, dimly and with but a tithe of the feeling that experience can impart, that these extremities of shame and suffering have been imposed on a people that has done no wrong, and we may gain some slight satisfaction from the thought that to this nation is apportioned a share in the work of vengeance on the criminals.

This note of calculation is particularly to be seen in the fluctuations through which that policy has passed. When the enemy was absolutely certain of victory, out-numbering the invader by nearly two to one and sweeping all before him, we had massacres upon massacres: Louvain, Aerschot, the wholesale butchery of Dinant, the Lorraine villages (and in particular the hell of Guébervilliers). Even at the very extremity of his tide of invasion, and in the last days of it, came the atrocities and destruction of Sermaize. In the very act of the defeat which has pinned him and began the process of his destruction he was attempting yet a further repetition of these unnameable things at Senlis under the very gates of Paris.

Then came the months when he felt less secure. The whole thing was at once toned down by order. Pillage was reduced to isolated cases, and murder also. Few children suffered.

A recovery of confidence throughout his Eastern successes last summer renewed the crimes. Poland is full of them, and the Serbian land as well.

In general, you have throughout these months of his ordeal a regular succession, of excess in vileness when he is confident, of restraint in it when he is touched by fear.

This effect of fear upon the dull soul is a characteristic familiar to all men who know their Prussian from history, particularly the wealthier governing classes of Prussia. It is a characteristic which those who are in authority during this war will do well to bear in mind. Properly used, that knowledge may be made an instrument of victory.

“Horrible tyrants shall be afraid, when they do but hear of me; I shall be found good among the multitude, and valiant in war.” (Wisdom viii. 13, 14, 15.)

Wisdom and Wisdom alone could have painted this terrible picture—the most terrible perhaps which Raemaekers has ever done and yet the simplest. That he should have dared to leave almost everything to the imagination of the beholder is evidence of the wonderful power which he exercises over the mind of the people. Each of us knows what is in that goods-van and we shudder at its hideous hidden freight, fearing lest it may be disclosed before our eyes. Wisdom is but another name for supreme genius. So apposite are the verses which are quoted here from “The Wisdom of Solomon” in the “Apocrypha” that they seem almost to have been written on Louis Raemaekers.

Moreover, this picture brings home to all of us in the most forcible manner possible the full reality of the horror of war.

Of all the historical ignorance upon which the foolish Pacifist’s case is founded, perhaps the worst is the conception that these abominations are the natural accompaniment of war. They have attached to war when war was ill organised in type. But the more subject to rule it has become, the more men have gloried in arms, the more they have believed the high trade of soldier to be a pride, the more have they eliminated the pillage of the civilian and the slaughter of the innocent from its actions. Those things belong to violent passion and to lack of reason. Modern war and the chivalric tradition scorned them.

The edges of the Germanies have, in the past, been touched by the chivalric tradition: Prussia never. That noblest inheritance of Christendom never reached out so far into the wilds. And to Germany, now wholly Prussianised—which will kill us or which we shall kill—soldier is no high thing, nor is there any meaning attached to the word “Glorious.” War is for that State a business: a business only to be undertaken with profit against what is certainly weaker; to be undertaken without faith and with a cruelty in proportion to that weakness. In particular it must be a terror to women, to children, and to the aged—for these remain unarmed.

This country alone of the original alliance has been spared pillage. It has not been spared murder. But this country, though the process has perhaps been more gradual than elsewhere, is very vividly alive to-day to what would necessarily follow the presence of German soldiery upon English land.

As a matter of fact, instead of winning our admiration they have drawn our detestation. Not content with brushing aside all international laws of warfare, they have trampled upon every law, human and divine, standing in their way of conquest. Indeed, Germany’s method of fighting would disgrace the savages of Central Africa.

Prussianised Germany has the monopoly of “frightfulness.” When not “frightful,” Prussians troopers are not living down to the instructions of their War-lords to leave the conquered with nothing but eyes to weep with. Not content to crucify Canadians, murder priests, violate nuns, mishandle women, and bayonet children, the enemy torpedoes civilian-carrying liners, and bombs Red Cross hospitals. More, sinning against posterity as well as antiquity, Germans stand charged before man and God with reducing to ashes some of the finest artistic output of Christian civilisation. When accused of crimes such as these, Germany answers through her generals: “The commonest, ugliest stone put to mark the burial-place of a German grenadier is a more glorious and venerable monument than all the cathedrals of Europe put together” (General von Disfurth in Hamburger Nachrichten). “Thus is fulfilled the well-known prophecy of Heine: ‘When once that restraining talisman, the Cross, is broken ... Thor, with his colossal hammer, will leap up, and with it shatter into fragments the Gothic cathedrals’” (Religion and Philosophy in Germany in the Nineteenth Century).

The cartoon bears the quotation from Bernhardi “War is as divine as eating and drinking.” Yes; and German war is as divine as German eating and drinking. Anyone who has been in a German restaurant during that mammoth midday meal which generally precedes a sleep akin to a hibernation, will understand how the same strange barbarous solemnity has ruined all the real romance of war. There is no way of conveying the distinction, except by saying vaguely that there is a way of doing things, and that butchering is not necessary to a good army any more than gobbling is necessary to a good dinner. In our own insular shorthand it can be, insufficiently and narrowly but not unprofitably, expressed by saying that it is possible both to fight and to eat like a gentleman. It is therefore highly significant that Mr. Raemaekers has in this cartoon conceived the devil primarily as a kind of ogre. It is a matter of great interest that this Dutch man of genius, like that other genius whose pencil war has turned into a sword, Will Dyson, tends in the presence of Prussia (which has been for many moderns their first glimpse of absolute or positive evil) to depriving the devil of all that moonshine of dignity which sentimental sceptics have given him. Evil does not mean dignity, any more than it means any other good thing. The stronger caricaturists have, in a sense, fallen back on the medieval devil; not because he is more mystical, but because he is more material. The face of Raemaekers’ Satan, with its lifted jowl and bared teeth, has less of the half-truth of cynicism than of mere ignominious greed. The armies are spread out for him as a banquet; and the war which he praises, and which was really spread for him in Flanders, is not a Crusade but a cannibal feast.

The Germans have committed many more indefensible crimes than the military execution of the kind-hearted nurse who had helped war-prisoners to escape. They have murdered hundreds of women who had committed no offence whatever against their military rules. But though not the worst of their misdeeds, this has probably been the stupidest. It gained us almost as many recruits as the sinking of the Lusitania, and it made the whole world understand—what is unhappily the truth—that the German is wholly destitute of chivalry. He knows indeed that people of other nations are affected by this sentiment; but he despises them for it. Woman is the weaker vessel; and therefore, according to his code, she must be taught to know her place, which is to cook and sew, and produce “cannon-fodder” for the Government. Readers of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche will remember the advice given by those philosophers for the treatment of women. Nietzsche recommends a whip. It never occurred to German officialdom that the pedantic condemnation of one obscure woman, guilty by the letter of their law, would stir the heart of England and America to the depths, and steel our soldiers to further efforts against an enemy whose moral unlikeness to ourselves becomes more apparent with every new phase in the struggle.

It is death unredeemed, death with no very positive suggestion, with no hint of heroism, none of heroic action, little even of heroic passion; just death, helpless, hopeless, pointing to nothing but decomposition, decay, disappearance, anéantissement, reduction of the fair frame of life to nothingness. That is the peculiar horror of this war. Were the picture, as it well might be, even more hideous, and did it suggest something more definite, a story of struggle, say, recorded in contortion, or by wounds and weapons, it might be better.

But men killed by machines, men killed by natural forces unnaturally employed, are indeed a fact and a spectacle squalid, sorry, unutterably sad.

All wars have been horrible, but modern wars are more in extremes. Heroism is there, but not always. It is possible only in patches. There is much of the mere sacrifice of numbers. Strictly, there are scenes far worse than this, for death unredeemed is not the worst of sufferings or of ills. But few are sadder. This is indeed war made by those who hold it and will it to be “not a sport, but a science.” There is no sport here. Men killed like this are like men killed by plague or the eruption of a volcano. And, indeed, what else are they? They are victims of a diseased humanity of the eruption—literal and metaphorical—of its hidden fires. And wars will grow more and more like this. What can stop them and banish these scenes? Only the hate of hate, only the love that can redeem even such a sight as this when at last we remember that it is for love’s sake only that flesh and blood are in the last resort content to endure it.

The bubble is very nicely balanced, for German “kultur,” which is in reality but another word for “system” or “organisation,” rather than that which English-speaking people understand by “culture,” has built up a system of internal credit that shall ensure the correct balance of the bubble—for just as long as the militarist policy of Germany can endure the strain of war. But money alone is not sufficient for victory; the peasant hard put to it to suppress his laugh, and the crowned Germania that built up the paper pedestal of the bubble, needed many other things to make that pedestal secure; there was needed integrity, and the respect of neighbouring nations, and the understanding of other points of view beside the doctrine of force, and liberty instead of coercion of a whole nation, and many other things that the older civilisations of Europe have accepted as parts of their code of life—the things this new, upstart Germany has not had time to learn. Thus, with the paper credit—and even with the gold reserve of which Germany has boasted, the pedestal is but paper. And the winds that blow from the flooded, corpse-strewn districts of the Yser, from Artois, from Champagne and the Vosges hills and forests, and from the long, long line of Russia’s grim defences—these winds shall blow it away, leaving a nation bankrupt not only in money, but in the power to coerce, in the power to inspire fear, and in all those things out of which the Hohenzollern dynasty has built up the last empire of force.

There are some English critics who have not yet considered so simple a thing as that the case against horrors must be horrible. In this respect alone this publication of the work of the distinguished foreign cartoonist is a thing for our attention and enlightenment. It is the whole point of the awful experience which has to-day swallowed up all our smaller experiences, that we are in any case confronted with the abominable; and the most beautiful thing we can hope to show is only an abomination of it. Nevertheless, there is horror and horror. The distinction between brute exaggeration and artistic emphasis could hardly be better studied than in Mr. Raemaekers’ cartoon, and the use he makes of the very ancient symbol of the wheel. Europe is represented as dragged and broken upon the wheel as in the old torture; but the wheel is that of a modern cannon, so that the dim background can be filled in with the suggestion of a wholly modern machinery. This is a very true satire; for there are many scientific persons who seem to be quite reconciled to the crushing of humanity by a vague mechanical environment in which there are wheels within wheels. But the inner restraint of the artist is suggested in the treatment of the torment itself; which is suggested by a certain rending drag in the garments, while the limbs are limp and the head almost somnolent. She does not strive nor cry; neither is her voice heard in the streets. The artist had not to draw pain but to draw despair; and while the pain is old enough the particular despair is modern. The victim racked for a creed could at least cry “I am converted.” But here even the terms of surrender are unknowable; and she can only ask “Am I civilised?”

Uncle Sam is no longer the simple New England farmer of a century ago. He is rich beyond calculation. His family is more numerous than that of any European country save Russia. His interests are world-wide, his trade tremendous, his industry complex, his finance fabulous. Above all, his family is no longer of one race. The hatreds of Europe are not echoed in his house; they are shared and reverberate through his corridors. It is difficult, then, for him to take the simple views of right and wrong, of justice and humanity, that he took a century ago. He is tempted to balance a hundred sophistries against the principles of freedom and good faith that yet burn strongly within him. He is driven to temporise with the evil thing he hates, because he fears, if he does not, that his household will be split, and thus the greater evil befall him. But those that personify the evil may goad him once too often. Dumba the lesser criminal—as also the less dexterous—has betrayed himself and is expelled. When will Bernstorff’s turn come? That it will come, indeed must come, is self-evident. The artist sees things too clearly as they are not to see also what they will be. He therefore skips the ignoble interlude of prevarication, quibble, and intrigue, and gives us Uncle Sam happy at last in his recovered simplicity. So we see him here, enjoying himself, as only a white man can, in a whole-hearted spurning of lies, cruelty, and murder.

Note that Bernstorff—the victim of a gesture “fortunately rare amongst gentlemen”—is already in full flight through the air, while Uncle Sam’s left foot has still fifteen inches to travel. The promise of an added velocity indicates that the flight of the unmasked diplomatist will be far. The sketched vista of descending steps gives us the satisfaction of knowing that the drop at the end will be deep. Every muscle of our sinewy relative is tense, limp, and projectile—the mouthpiece of Prussia goes to his inevitable end. There is no need of a sequel to show him shattered and crumpled at the bottom of the stairway.

Raemaekers is never false, and he never works for effect alone. That is what makes him so terrible to the people he criticises, and so effective.

When he wants to depict the sturdy Dutch soul he draws a sturdy Dutch Body—ready to defend her home. No flags, no highfalutin, no symbolical figure posed for show; just cleanliness, determination, and good sense facing bestiality and oppression.

The figure that stands for the Freedom of the Home opposed to the figure that stands for the Freedom of the Seas.

This terrible cartoon points its own lesson so forcibly that its effect is more likely to be weakened than strengthened by any verbal comment. Death quaffs a goblet of human blood to the health of Civilisation. Death has never enjoyed such a carnival of slaughter before, and it is Civilisation that has made the holocaust possible. The comparatively simple methods of killing employed by barbarians could not have destroyed so many lives; nor could barbarian states have raised such huge armies. The artist makes us feel that such a war as this is an act of moral madness, a disgrace to our common humanity. It is true that some of the nations engaged are guiltless, and others almost guiltless; but there is a solidarity of European civilisation which obliges us all to share the shame and sorrow of this monstrous crime. Universal war is the reductio ad absurdum of false political theories and false moral ideals; and the reductio ad absurdum is the chief argument which Providence uses with mankind. Perhaps it is the only argument which mankind in the mass can understand.

There is nothing more pathetic in some ways to-day than the position of the small neutral countries in Europe, and especially those which directly adjoin Germany. And there is nothing more galling than the inability of the Allies to give them any help. For the hour they are absolutely at the mercy of Germany, or would be, if she had any, and they know it. They are certainly liable and exposed to all her flouts and cuffs and to any displays of bad temper or bullying or terrorism it may please her to exercise. And none perhaps is worse off in this respect than Holland. It suits Germany to be fairly civil to Switzerland, who could give her a good deal of trouble by joining France and Italy; and no doubt it suits her too to some extent to consider Denmark, for Denmark commands the entrance to the Baltic; and, further, Germany does not wish to bring all Scandinavia down upon herself just at present. That can wait; but Holland is in the worst plight of all. She has the terrible spectacle of Belgium, ruined and ravaged just on the other side of the way. And she has a very considerable and valuable mercantile marine.

The great and good Germany cannot be troubled to distinguish between Dutch and other boats, and if occasionally a Dutch ship is captured or sent to the bottom, it is a useful reminder of what she might do to her “poor relation” if she really let herself go. Fighting for the freedom of the seas! Holland has fought for them herself. Holland has a great naval tradition. She knows quite well what England has been and is. She knows too, and can see, how her sons and brothers in South Africa were treated by the British in England’s last war, and how they regard England and Germany now.

Raemaekers’ cartoon is very skilful. If we had not seen it done, we should not have believed it possible to produce at once so clever a likeness of von Tirpitz and so excellent an old fox. But the goose is by no means a foolish bird, though its wisdom may sometimes be shown in knowing its own weakness. It was they, and not the watch-dogs, that saved the Capitol. In old days it was the custom to call the Germans the “High Dutch” and the inhabitants of Holland the “Low Dutch.” It was a geographical distinction. The contrast in moral elevation is the other way.

A vile feature of German “frightfulness” is this: that she mixes poison with her prisoners’ rations. Not content with starving their bodies, she hides truth from them and floods their minds with lies. Those in command—officers, educated men, claiming the service of their soldiers and civil guard and the respect of their nation—deliberately hash a daily meal of falsehood and serve up German victories and triumphs on land and sea as sauce to the starvation diet of their defenceless captives.

In the earlier months of the war, while yet the spiritual slough into which Germany had sunk was unguessed, and the mixture of child and devil exemplified by “frightfulness” continued unfathomed, these daily lies undoubtedly answered their cowardly purpose, cast down the spirit of thousands, and added another pang to their captivity. But our armies know better now, and those diminishing numbers likely to be taken prisoner in the future see the end more clearly than the foe can. Lies will be met with laughter henceforth, for our enemies have put themselves beyond the pale. They may starve and insult our bodies; but their power to poison our brains has passed from them for ever. We know them at last. They have spun a web of barbed villainy between their souls and ours; and the evil committed for one foul purpose alone—to terrify free men and break the spirit of the sons of liberty—has produced results far different and created a situation more terrible for them than for their outraged enemies.

For in this matter of misrepresentation and lying, born of Prussia and by her spoon-fed pack of martinets, professors, and Churchmen, mingled with Germany’s daily bread for a generation, it is she and not we who will reap the whirlwind of that sowing; it is she and not we who must soon pant and tear the breast in the pangs of the poison.

Between the mad and the sane there can be only one victor; and when the time comes, may Germany’s robe of repentance be a strait-waistcoat of the Allies’ choosing. For she has drunk deep of the poison, and those who anticipate a speedy cure will be as mad as she. When the escaped tigress is back in her cage, men look to the bars, for none wants a second mauling.

I am not sure that in this cartoon of Raemaekers the most pleasing detail is not the servant’s right eye. You will observe in that servant’s right eye an expression familiar in those who overhear this sort of comment upon the peculiar bestialities of the Prussian in Belgium and Poland, this extenuation of his baseness. When the war was young the opportunity for giving that glance was commoner than it is now. There were many even in a belligerent country who would tell you in superior fashion how foolishly exaggerated were the so-called “atrocities.” The greater number of such men (and women) talked of “two Germanies”—one the nice Germany they knew and loved so well, and the other apparently nasty Germany which raped, burned, stole, broke faith, tortured, and the rest. Their number has diminished. But there is a little lingering trace of the sort of thing still to be discovered: men and women who hope against hope that the Prussian will really prove good at heart after all. And it is usually just after some expression of the kind that the most appalling news arrives with a terrible irony to punctuate their folly. It reminds one a little of the man in the story who was sure that he could tame a wild cat, and was in the act of recording its virtues when it flew in his face. To an impartial observer who cared nothing for our sufferings or the enemy’s vices, there would be something enormously comic in the vision of these few remaining (for there are still some few remaining) that approach the wild beast with soothing words and receive as their only reward a very large bomb through the roof of their house, or the news that someone dear to them has been murdered on the high seas. But to those actively suffering in the struggle the comic element is difficult to seize, and it is replaced by indignation. This fantastic misconception of the thing that is being fought is bound to be burned right out by the realities of the enemy acts in belligerent countries. It will be similarly destroyed—and that in no very great space of time—in all neutral countries as well. Prussia will have it so. She is allowing no moral defence to remain for her future. It is almost as though the men now directing her affairs lent ear carefully to every word spoken in praise of them abroad, and met it at once by the tremendous denial of example. It is almost as though the Prussian felt it a sort of personal insult to receive the praise of dupes and fools, and perhaps it is.

This war has produced examples of every kind of misery which human beings can inflict upon each other, except one. Europe has mercifully been spared long sieges of populous towns, ending in the surrender of the starving population. But many towns and villages have been burnt; and masses of refugees have fled before the invader, knowing too well the brutal treatment which they had to expect if they remained. Very many of the unhappy Belgians have taken refuge in Holland; a considerable number have found an asylum in this country. They are homeless and ruined; if the war were to end to-morrow, many of them would not know where to go or how to live. Families have been broken up; husbands and wives, parents and children, are ignorant of each other’s fate. In this picture we see a crowd of children, herded together like a flock of sheep, with nobody to take care of them. Their via dolorosa is marked by long rows of crosses on either side, emblems of suffering, death, and sacrifice. In the distance rise the smoke and flames from one of the innumerable incendiary fires which the Germans, like the cruel banditti of the Middle Ages, have kindled wherever they go.

Prussia in every war has betrayed that peculiar mark of barbarism consisting in using the intellectual weapons of a superior, but not knowing how to use them. It is still a matter of mystery to the directing Prussian mind why the sinking of the Lusitania should have shocked the world. A submarine cannot take a prize into port. The Lusitania happened to be importing goods available in war, therefore the Lusitania must be sunk. All the penumbræ of further consideration which the civilised man weighs escape this sort of logic. Similarly, the Prussian argues, if an armed man is prepared to surrender, convention decrees that his life should be spared. Therefore, if an armed man be just fresh from the murder of a number of children, he has but to cry “Kamerad” to be perfectly safe. And Prussia foams at the mouth with indignation whenever this strict rule of conduct is forgotten in the heat of the moment. The use of poison in the field which Prussia for the first time employed (and reluctantly compelled her civilised opponents to reply to) is in the same boat. A shell bursts because solid explosive becomes gaseous. To use shell which in bursting wounds and kills men is to use gas in war; therefore if one uses gas in the other form of poison, disabling one’s opponent with agony, it is all one. Precisely the same barbaric use of logic—which reminds one of the antics of an animal imitating human gestures—will later apply to the poisoning of water supplies, or the spreading of an epidemic. It is soldierly and excites no contempt or indignation to strike at your enemy with a sword or shoot a pellet of lead at him in such a fashion that he dies. What is all this foolish pother about killing him with bacilli in his cisterns or with a drop of poison in his tea? Men in war have burned groups of houses with the torch in anger or for revenge. Why distinguish between that and the methodical sprinkling of petroleum from a hose by one gang and the equally methodical burning of the whole town house by house with little capsules of prepared incendiary stuff? The rule always applies—but only against the opponent: never to oneself. From that attitude of mind the Prussian will never emerge. We shall, please God, see that mood in all its beauty in later stages of the war, when the coercion of the Prussian upon his own soil leads to acts indefensible by Prussian logic. We have already had a taste of this sort of reasoning when the royalties fled from Karlsruhe and when the murderers upon the sinking Zeppelin received the reward due to men who boast that they will not keep faith.

Most of the English caricaturists are much too complimentary to the German Emperor. They draw his moustaches, but not his face. Now his moustaches are exactly what he, or the whole Prussian school he represents, particularly wishes us to look at. They give him the fierce air of a fighting cock; and however little we may like fierceness, there will always be a certain residual respect for fighting, even in a cock. Now the Junker moustache is a fake; almost as much so as if it were stuck on with gum. It is, as Mr. Belloc has remarked, curled in a machine all night lest it should hang down. Raemaekers, in the sketch which shows the Kaiser as waiting for Nurse Cavell’s death to say, “Now you can bring me the American protest,” has gone behind the moustache to the face, and behind the face to the type and the spirit. The Emperor is not commanding in a lordly voice from a throne, but with a leer and behind a curtain. In the few lines of the lean unnatural face is written the real history of the Hohenzollerns, the kind of history not often touched on in our comfortable English humour, but common to the realism of Continental art: the madness of Frederick William, the perversion of Frederick the Great, the hint, mingled with subtler talents, of the mere idiocy that seems to have flowered again in the last heir of that inhuman house. The Hohenzollerns have varied from generation to generation in many things and like many families; some of them have been tyrants, some of them geniuses, some of them merely boobies; but they have shared in something more than that hereditary policy which has been the poison in Christendom for two hundred years. There is a ghost who inhabits these perishing tenements, and in such a picture as this of Raemaekers’ men can see it looking out of the eyes. And it is neither the spirit of a tyrant nor of a booby; but the spirit of a sly invalid.

And the world asks also, and in due time will exact an answer—to the last drop of innocent blood.

You have fallen into the hands of the most scientifically organised barbarism the world has ever seen, or, please God, ever will see—to whom, of deliberate choice, such words as truth, honour, mercy, justice, have become dead letters, by reason of the pernicious doctrines on which the race has been nourished—by which its very soul has been poisoned.

Dead letters?—worn-out rags, the very virtues they once represented, even in Germany, long since flung to the dust-heaps of the past in the soulless scramble for power and a place in the sun which no one denied her.

Deliberately, and of malice prepense, the military caste of Prussia has taught, and the unhappy common-folk have accepted, that as a nation they are past all that kind of thing. There is only one right in the world—the might of the strongest. The weak to the wall! Make way for the Hun, whose god is power, and his high-priests the Kaiser and the Krupps.

And so, every nation, even the smallest, on whom the eye of the Minotaur has settled in baleful desire, has said, “Better to die fighting than fall into the hands of the devil!” And they have fought—valiantly, and saved their souls alive, though their bodies may have been crushed out of existence by overwhelming odds. As nations, however, they shall rise again, and with honour, when their treacherous torturers have been crushed in their turn.

And, wherever the evil tide has welled over a land, indemnities, incredible and unreasonable, have been exacted, and hostages for their payment, and for good behaviour under the yoke meanwhile, have been taken.

Woe unto such! In many cases they have simply been shot in cold blood—murdered as brazenly as by any Jack-the-Ripper. Murder, too, of the most despicable—murder for gain—the gain that should accrue through the brutal terrorism of the act and its effect on the rest.

And, if deemed advisable to gloss the crime with some thin veneer of imitation justice for the—unsuccessful—hoodwinking of a shocked and astounded world, what easier than an unseen shot in some obscure corner from a German rifle? Then—“Death to the hostages!—destruction to the village!—a fine of £100,000 on the town!”

Those provocative shots from German rifles have surely been the most profitably engineered basenesses in the whole war. They have justified—but in German eyes only—every committable crime, and they cost nothing—except the souls of their perpetrators.

“It’s your money we want—and your land—and your property—and, if necessary, your lives! You are weak—we are strong—and so——!” That is the simple Credo of the Hun.

But for all these things there shall come a day of reckoning and the account will be a heavy one.

“What have you done?” You have at all events put the rope round the necks of your murderers, and the whole world’s hands are at the other end of it.

The war has been singularly barren of heroic figures, perhaps because the magnitude of the events has called forth such a multitude of individually heroic acts that no one can be placed before the rest; yet, when this greatest phase of history comes to be written down with historic perspective, one figure—that of King Albert of Belgium—will stand as that of a twentieth-century Bayard, a great knight without fear and without reproach.

Action on such far-flung lines as those of the European conflict has called for no great leaders in the sense in which that phrase has applied to previous wars; no Napoleon has arisen, though William Hohenzollern has aspired to Napoleonic dignity; war has become more mechanical, more a matter of mathematics—and the barbarians of Germany have made it more horrible. But, as if to accentuate German brutality and crime, this figure of King Albert stands emblematic of the virtues in which civilisation is rooted; to the broken word of Germany it opposes untarnished honour; to the treacherous spirit of Germany it opposes inviolable truth; to the relentless selfishness of Germany it opposes the vicarious sacrifice of self, of a whole country and nation for the sake of a principle. And, in later days, men will remember how this truly great king held steadfastly to the little portion of his kingdom that the invasion left him; how he remained to inspirit his men by noble example, stubbornly rejecting peace without honour, and holding, when all else was wrecked, to the remnants of that army which saved Europe in the gateway of Liége. Amid violation, desecration, and destruction, Albert of Belgium has won imperishable fame.

There is an order of minds that intuitively distrusts Science, detracts from the force of her achievements, and contends that devotion to machinery ends by making men machines. Many who argue thus have fastened on Germany’s new war inventions as proof that Science makes for materialism and opposes the higher values of humanity and culture.

This is special pleading, for against the destructive forces discovered and liberated by German chemists in this war, one has only to consider the vast amelioration of human life for which modern science has to be thanked. Because art has been created to evil purpose, shall we condemn pictures, or statues? Because the Germans have employed gas poisons in warfare, are we to condemn the incalculable gifts of organic chemistry?

Look at the eye of Louis Raemaekers’ snake. That is the answer. It is the force behind this application of it that has brought German Science to shame. A precious branch of human knowledge has been prostituted by lust of blood and greed of gain until Science, in common with all learning, comes simply to be regarded by the masters of Germany as one more weapon in the armoury, one more power to help win “The Day.” Every culture is treated in their alembic for the same purpose.

We may picture the series of experiments that went to perfection of their poison gas; we may see their Higher Command watching the death of guinea-pig, rabbit, and ape with increasing excitement and enthusiasm as the hideous effects of their discovery became apparent. Be sure an iron cross quickly hung over the iron heart that conceived and developed this filthy arm; for does it not offer the essence—quintessence of all “frightfulness”? Does it not challenge every human nerve-centre by its horror? Does it not, once proclaimed, by anticipation awake those very emotions of dread and dismay that make the stroke more fatal when it falls?

These people pictured their snake paralysing the enemy into frozen impotence; the floundering Prussian psychology that cuts blocks with a razor and regards German mind as the measure of all mind, anticipated that poison gas would appeal to British and French as it had appealed to them. But it was not so. Their foresight gave them an initial success in the field; it slew a handful of men with additions of unspeakable agony—and rekindled the execration and contempt of Civilisation.

As an arm, poison gas cannot be considered conspicuously successful, since it is easily countered; but for the Allies it had some value, since it weighted appreciably the scale against Germany in neutral minds and added to the universal loathing astir at the heart of the world. Only fear now holds any kingdom neutral: there is not an impartial nation left on earth.

A blonde woman, wearing the Imperial crown and with her hair braided in pigtails like a German backfisch, is whirling in the tango with a skeleton partner. Her face is livid with terror and fatigue, her limbs are drooping, but she is held by inexorable bony claws. On the feet of the skeleton are dancing pumps, a touch which adds to the grimness. This ghoulish dance does not lack its element of ghastly ceremonial.

The Dance of Death has long been the theme of the moralist in art, from Orcagna’s fresco on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa to Holbein’s great woodcuts and our own Rowlandson. In Germany especially have these macabre imaginings flourished. The phantasmagoria of decay has haunted German art, as it haunted Poe, from Dürer to Boecklin. But the mediæval Dance of Death was stately allegory, showing the pageant of life brooded over by the shadow of mortality. In M. Raemaekers’ cartoon there is no dignity, no lofty resignation. He shows Death summoned in a mad caprice and kept as companion till the revel becomes a whirling horror.

It is the profoundest symbol of the war. In a hot fit of racial pride Death has been welcomed as an ally. And the dance on which Germany enters is no stately minuet with something of tragic dignity in it. It is a common modern vulgar shuffle, a thing of ugly gestures and violent motions, the true sport of degenerates. Once begun there is no halting. From East to West and from West to East the dancers move. There is no rest, for Death is a pitiless comrade. From such a partner, lightly and arrogantly summoned, there can be no parting. The traveller seeks a goal, but the dancers move blindly and aimlessly among the points of the compass. Death, when called to the dance, claims eternal possession.

When the future historian gives to another age his account of all that is included in German “frightfulness,” there is no feature upon which he will dilate more emphatically than the extraordinary use made by the enemy of their Zeppelin fleet. In the experience we have gained in the last few months we discover that the Zeppelins are not employed—or, at all events, not mainly employed—for military purposes, but in order to shake the nerves of the non-combatant population. The history of the last few Zeppelin raids in England is quite sufficient testimony to this fact. London is bombarded, although it is an open city, and a large amount of damage is done to buildings wholly unconnected with the purposes of the war. The persons who are killed are not soldiers, they are civilians; the buildings destroyed are not munition works, but dwelling-houses, and some of the points of attack are theatres.

The same thing has happened in the provinces. In the last raid over the Midlands railway stations were destroyed, some breweries were injured, but, with exceedingly few exceptions, munition works and factories for the production of arms were untouched. Here again the victims are not either soldiers or sailors, or even workmen employed in turning out instruments of war, but peaceable citizens and a large proportion of women and children.

Some such act of brutality is illustrated in the accompanying cartoon. A private house has been attacked, the mother has been killed, the father and child are left desolate. The little daughter at her father’s knee, who cannot understand why guiltless people should suffer, asks the importunate question whether her mother had done anything wrong to deserve so terrible a fate. To the childish mind it seems incomprehensible that aimless and indiscriminate murder should fall on the guiltless.

Indeed the mother had done no wrong. She only happened to belong to one of the nations who are struggling against a barbaric tyranny. In that reckless crusade which the Central Powers are waging against all the higher laws of morality and civilisation, some of the heaviest of the blows fall on the defenceless. It is this appalling inhumanity, this godless desire to maim and wound and kill, which nerves the arms of the Allies, who know that in a case like this they are fighting for freedom and for the Divine laws of mercy and loving-kindness.

And it is for the young especially that the war is being waged, young boys and young girls like the motherless child in the picture, in order that they may inherit a Europe which shall be free from the horrible burden of German militarism, and be able to live useful lives in peace and quietness. No, little girl, mother did no wrong! But we should be guilty of the deepest wrong if we did not avenge her death and that of other similar victims by making such unparalleled crimes impossible hereafter.

The Prussian turns everything to account, from the scrapings of the pig-trough to the Austrian Emperor.

The Bavarian lists, the Saxon lists, the Austrian lists—these are all only indications of injuries to the Prussian’s life-saving waistcoat. If this war is to be a war to the last penny and the last man, the last Austrian will die before the last Saxon, the last Saxon before the last Bavarian, the last Bavarian before the last Prussian—and the last Prussian will not die: he will live to clutch at the last penny.

And the pity of it is that the Austrian is quite a good fellow, the Saxon is a decent sort of man, the Bavarian is chiefly a brute in drink, whilst the Prussian—we all know what the Prussian is, the black centre of hardness, the incarnation of the shady trick, and the very complex soul of mechanical efficiency.

The Hohenzollern here makes a sandbag of the Hapsburg, of whom Fate has already made a football.

Fate has always been behind the Hapsburg for his own sins and those of his house. She has made him kneel at last.

The German claim—not the Austrian nor the Turk, for the alliance following Germany is to be allowed little force—is that, the civilisation of Europe now being defeated, a Roman pride may be generous to the fallen. Before modern Germany is routed, as may be seen in the features of its citizens, the nobility of its public works, and the admirable, restrained, and classic sense of its literature, this generosity to a humbled world will take the form of letting nations, of right independent, enjoy some measure of freedom under a German suzerainty. In the matter of property the magnanimous descendants of Frederick and William the Great will restore the machines which cannot be wrenched from their concrete beds, and the walls of the manufactories. More liquid property, such as jewellery, furniture, pictures—and coin—it will be more difficult to trace. In any case, Europe may breathe again, though with a shorter breath than it did before Germany conquered at the Marne.... This is the majestic vision which the subtle diplomats of Berlin present to the admiration of the neutral Powers, happily free from wicked passions of war, and not blinded, as are the British, French, Russians, Italians, Belgians, and the Serbians, by petty spite. Their audience, their triple audience, is part of Greece, some of the public of Spain, and sections of that of the United States. To the French and the British armies in the West, to the Russians in the East, and to the Italians upon their frontiers, the terms appear insufficient. Therein would seem to lie the gravity of Prussia’s case. These belligerent Powers will go so far as to demand more than the mere restoration of stolen property, from cottage furniture to freedom. And their anger has risen so high that they even propose to make the acquirer of these goods suffer very bitterly indeed. What plea he will then raise under discomforts more serious than those he has caused to the peasants of Flanders and of Poland, and how those pleas will affect his neutral audience, will have no effect whatever on the result of the war, or on his own unpleasing fate. Those appeals will have a certain interest, however, because we know from the past that the German mind is unstable. Within fifteen short months it proposed the annihilation of the French armies and the occupation of Paris. It failed. It next offered terms upon suffering defeat. It withdrew them. It next made certain at least of a conquest of Russia, failed again, offered terms again, withdrew them again; was directed to the blockading of England, failed; thought Egypt better, and then changed its mind. It was but yesterday in the mood that this cartoon suggests; to-morrow its mood will have utterly changed again, probably to a whine, perhaps to a scream. Such instability is rare in the history of nations which propose a conquest of others, and it is a very poor furniture for the mind.

The wolf is not perhaps the beast by which one would most wish one’s country to be represented. But the wolf, like every animal when defending its dearest, and when assailed with treachery, has its nobility. And the Roman she-wolf certainly has had in all ages her dignity and her force.

Italy certainly calls not only for our sympathy, but for our admiration. She has had a very difficult course to steer. The ally for so long of Germany and Austria, if owing them less and less as time went on, it was difficult for her to break with them. But the day came when she had to break with them, and once again “act for herself.” She told them a year ago she would be a party to no aggressive or selfish war, she would be no bully’s accomplice. She “denounced”—it is a good word—such a compact. Non haec in fœdera veni.

Then it was, when the she-wolf showed her teeth, that they offered to give her what was her own. But what would the Trentino be worth if Germany and Austria were victorious? No, the wolf is right, “she must fight for it,” and behind Austria’s underhanded treachery stands Germany’s open violence and guns.

And Italy loves freedom. This war is a war made by her people. As of old her King and her diplomats go with them in this new Resorgimento. And the she-wolf must beware the trap. She needs the spirit again not only of her people and of Garibaldi and of Victor Emmanuel, but of Cavour. And she has it.

The cartoon suggests all the elements of the situation. The wolf ponders with turned head, half doubtful, half desperate. The poor little cub whimpers pitifully. The hunters dissemble their craft, the trap waits in the path ready to spring. It is not even concealed. Is that the irony of the artist, or is it only due to the necessity of making his meaning plain? Whichever it is, it is justified.

The legend of the Wandering Jew obsessed the imagination of the Middle Age. The tale, which an Armenian bishop first told at the Abbey of St. Albans, concerned a doorkeeper in the house of Pontius Pilate—or, as some say, a shoemaker in Jerusalem—who insulted Christ on His way to Calvary. He was told by Our Lord, “I will rest, but thou shalt go on till the Last Day.” Christendom saw the strange figure in many places—at Hamburg and Leipsic and Lubeck, at Moscow and Madrid, even at far Baghdad. Goodwives in the little mediæval cities, hastening homeward against the rising storm, saw a bent figure posting through the snow, with haggard face and burning eyes, carrying his load of penal immortality, and seeking in vain for “easeful death.” There is a profound metaphysic in such popular fancies. Good and evil are alike eternal. Arthur and Charlemagne and Ogier the Dane are only sleeping and will yet return to save their peoples; and the Wandering Jew staggers blindly through the ages, seeking the rest which he denied to his Lord.

In George Meredith’s “Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History” there is a famous passage on Napoleon. France, disillusioned at last,

That is the penalty of mortal presumption. The Superman who would shatter the homely decencies of mankind and set his foot on the world’s neck is himself bound captive. He is the slave of the djinn whom he has called from the unclean deeps. There can be no end to his quest. Weariness does not bring peace, for the whips of the Furies are in his own heart.

The Wandering Jew of the Middle Age was a figure sympathetically conceived. He had still to pay the price in his tortured body, but his soul was at rest, for he had repented his folly. Raemaekers in his cartoon follows the conception of Gustave Doré rather than that of the old fabulists. The modern Ahasuerus has no surety of an eventual peace. We have seen the German War Lord flitting hungrily from Lorraine to Poland, from Flanders to Nish, watching the failure of his troops before Nancy and Ypres, inditing grandiose proclamations to Europe, prophesying a peace which never comes. He is a figure worthy of Greek tragedy. The [Greek: hubris] which defied the gods has put him outside the homely consolations of mankind. He has devoted his people to the Dance of Death, and himself, like some new Orestes, can find no solace though he seek it wearily in the four corners of the world.

The position of Holland and Denmark is one of excruciating anxiety to the citizens of those countries. They know that the Allies are fighting the battle of their own political existence, but they are so hypnotised with well-founded terror of the implacable tyrant on their flank that they are not only bound to neutrality, but are afraid to express their sympathies too plainly. Dutch editors have been admonished and punished under pressure from Berlin; the brilliant artist of these cartoons is in danger on his native soil. A leading German newspaper has lately announced that “we will make Holland pay with interest for these insults after the war.” A German victory would inevitably be followed in a few years by the disappearance from the map of this gallant and interesting little nation, our plucky rival in time past, our honoured friend to-day. No nation has established a stronger claim to maintain its independence, whether we consider the heroic and successful struggles of the Dutch for religious and political liberty, their triumphs in discovery, colonisation, and naval warfare, their unique contributions to art, or the manly and vigorous character of their people. It is needless to say that we have no designs upon any Dutch colony!

Here is pictured a grim fact that the Peace cranks would do well to see plainly. The surgeon who is operating on a cancer case cannot allow himself to be satisfied with merely the removal of the visible growth which is causing such present agony to the patient. He must cut and cut deep, must go beyond even the visible roots of the disease, slice down into the clear, firm flesh to make sure and doubly sure that he has cut away the last fragment of the tainted tissues. Only by doing so can he reasonably hope to prevent a recurrence of the disease and the necessity of another operation in the years to come. And so only by carrying on this war until the last and least possibility of the taint of militarism remaining in the German system is removed can the Allies be satisfied that their task is complete. Modern surgery has through anæsthetics taken away from a patient the physical pain of most operations, but modern War affords no relief during its operation. That, however, can be held as no excuse for refusing to “use the knife.” What would be said of the surgeon who, because an operation—a life-saving operation—was causing at the time even the utmost agony, stayed his hand, patched up the wound, was content only to stop the momentary pain, and to leave firm-rooted a disease which in all human probability would some time later break out again in all its virulence? What would be said of such a surgeon is only in lesser degree what would be said by posterity of the Allies if they consented or were persuaded to apply the bandage and healing herbs of Peace to the disease of Militarism, to make a surface cure and leave the living tentacles of the disease to grow again deep and strong. But here at least the doctors do not disagree. Once and for all the Ally surgeons mean to make an end to Militarism. The sooner the Peace cranks and Germany realise that the sooner the operation will be over.

If you wish to see the position of Holland look at the map of Europe as it was before August 4th, 1914, and the map of Europe as it is to-day.

In 1914 Holland lay overshadowed by the vast upper jaw-bone of a monster—Prussia—a jaw-bone reaching from the Dollart to Aix-la-Chapelle.

In August and September, 1914, Prussia, by the seizure of Belgium, developed a lower jaw-bone reaching from Aix-la-Chapelle to Cassandria on the West Schelde. To-day Holland lies gripped between these two formidable mandibles that are ready and waiting to close and crush her. For years and years Prussia has been waiting to devour Holland. Why? For the simple reason that Holland is rich in the one essential thing that Prussia lacks—coast-line.

Look again at the map and see how Holland and Belgium together absolutely wall Prussia in from the sea. Belgium has been taken on by Prussia; if we do not tear that lower jaw from Prussia, Holland will be lost, and the sea-power of England threatened with destruction.

The ruffian with the automatic pistol waiting behind the tree requires the life as well as the basket of the little figure advancing towards him.

When Raemaekers pictures Von Tirpitz to us, he does so with savage scorn. He is not the hard-bitten pirate of story—but a senile, crapulous, lachrymose imbecile; an object of derision. He fits more with one of Jacobs’s tales of longshore soakers, than with the tragedies that have made him infamous. But when he draws Von Tirpitz’s victims, the touch is one of almost harrowing tenderness. The Hun is a master of many modes of killing, but however torn, or twisted, or tortured he leaves the murdered, Raemaekers can make the dreadful spectacle bearable by the piercing dignity with which he portrays the dead. In none of these cartoons is his sæva indignatio rendered with more sheer beauty of design, or with a craftsmanship more exquisite, than in this monument to the sea-mined prey. The symbolism is perfect, and of the essence of the design. The dead sink slowly to their resting-place, but the merciful twilight of the sea veils from us the glazed horror of the eyes that no piety can now close. Even the dumb senseless fish shoots from the scene in mute and terrified protest, while from these poor corpses there rise surfaceward the silver bubbles of their expiring breath. One seems to see crying human souls prisoned in these spheres. And it is, indeed, such sins as these that cry to Heaven for vengeance. Blood-guiltiness must rest upon the heads of those that do them, upon the heads of their children—aye, and of their children’s children too. This exquisite and tender drawing is something more than the record of inexpiable crime. It is a prophecy. And the prophecy is a curse.

The cartoon in which the Prussian is depicted as saying to his bound and gagged victim, “Ain’t I a lovable fellow?” is one of the most pointed and vital of all pictorial, or indeed other, criticisms on the war. It is very important to note that German savagery has not interfered at all with German sentimentalism. The blood of the victim and the tears of the victor flow together in an unpleasing stream. The effect on a normal mind of reading some of the things the Germans say, side by side with some of the things they do, is an impression that can quite truly be conveyed only in the violent paradox of the actual picture. It is exactly like being tortured by a man with an ugly face, which we slowly realise to be contorted in an attempt at an affectionate expression. In those soliloquies of self-praise which have constituted almost the whole of Prussia’s defence in the international controversy, the brigand of the Belgian annexation has incessantly said that his apparent hardness is the necessary accompaniment of his inherent strength. Nietzsche said: “I give you a new commandment: Be hard.” And the Prussian says: “I am hard,” in a prompt and respectful manner. But, as a matter of fact, he is not hard; he is only heavy. He is not indifferent to all feelings; he is only indifferent to everybody else’s feelings. At the thought of his own virtues he is always ready to burst into tears. His smiles, however, are even more frequent and more fatuous than his tears; and they are all leers like that which Mr. Raemaekers has drawn on the face of the expansive Prussian officer in the arm-chair. Compared with such an exhibition, there is something relatively virile about the tiger cruelty which has occasionally defaced the record of the Spaniard or the Arab. But to be conquered by such Germans as these would be like being eaten by slugs.

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 paralysed by the threat.

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.

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’ drawings 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.

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 21st, 1915:—

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 1st, 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.

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,

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:

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?

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 realise 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 sportsmanship, 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 realise the greatness, so in the fullness of time must William come to realise 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.

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 debâcle of reasoning faculty which is the price intellectual Germany has paid for the surrender of her soul to Prussia.

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.

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 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.

“The Yellow Book,” it may be remembered, was the official publication of some of the details of atrocities committed by the Huns on the defenceless women and children of ravished Belgium. It told in cold and unimpassioned sentences, in plain and simple words more terrible than the most fervid outpourings of patriot or humanitarian, the tale of brutalities, of cold-blooded crimes, of murders and rape and mental and physical tortures beyond the capabilities or the imaginings of savages, possible only in their refinements of cruelty to the civilised apostles of Kultur. There are many men in the trenches of the Allies to-day who will say that the German soldier is a brave man, that he must be brave to advance to the slaughter of the massed attack, to hold to his trenches under the horrible punishment of heavy artillery fire.

As a nation we are always ready to admit and to admire physical courage, and if Germany had fought a “clean fight,” had “played the game,” starkly and straightly, against our fighting men, we could—and our fighting men especially could, and I believe would—have helped her to her feet and shaken hands honestly with her after she was beaten. But with such a brute beast as the unmasking of the Yellow Book has revealed Germany to be we can never feel friendship, admiration, or respect.

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.

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.

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.

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 Visé, 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.

The wonder is not that women went mad, but that there are left any sane civilians of the ravished districts of Belgium after all those infamies perpetrated under orders by the German troops after the first infuriating check of Liége and before the final turning of the German line at the battle of the Marne. We have supped full of horrors since, and by an insensible process grown something callous. But we never came near to realising the Belgian agony, and Raemaekers does us service by helping to make us see it mirrored in the eyes of this poor raving girl. This indeed is a later incident, but will serve for reminder of the earlier worse.

It is really not well to forget. These were not the inevitable horrors of war, but a deliberately calculated effect. There seems no hope of the future of European civilisation till the men responsible for such things are brought to realise that, to put it crudely and at its lowest, they don’t pay.

What the attitude of Germany now is may be guessed from the blank refusal even of her bishops to sanction the investigation which Cardinal Mercier asks for. It is still the gentle wolf’s theory that the truculent lamb was entirely to blame.

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.

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 everyone 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 appal, 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.

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.

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 £100 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.”

Here is the grim choice of alternatives presented to other nations by the creed of Deutschland über 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.

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 realises 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.

The Dutchman who could see this cartoon and not admit its simple truth would have to be a very blind pro-German. At the 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 visualise 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.

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.

“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, 1914, 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.

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!

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?

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,—

“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.

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 sold in the world who is.

When the First—the real—Napoleon entered Russia, on June 24th, 1812, he led an army of 414,000 men—the grande armée. 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 demoralisation. 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.

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.

God grant them a short quick course, an end for ever 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.

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 everyone knows, von Bülow 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.”

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 opened 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.

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 demoralised.

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.

This cartoon is horribly suggestive of Hun utilitarian methods! I am told by an eminent chemist that six pounds of glycerine can be extracted from the corpse of a fairly well nourished Hun, and I can well believe that such an opportunity for replenishing the diminishing stocks of a much needed commodity is not neglected by the Great General Staff.

They have scrapped sentiment, together with humanity. What is gun-fodder to the Scourge of God? These unfortunates, when alive, were driven ruthlessly to inevitable slaughter. They are sent as ruthlessly to the blast furnaces. One million dead men are resolved into six million pounds of glycerine. Thus the Happy Fatherland is served.

One wonders whether the statisticians of the Central Powers have yet computed what a million of dead Huns represents in cash. A soldier capable of serving his country in the field must be worth at least fifty pounds sterling per annum to that country. Let us say that each dead man represents a capitalisation of one thousand pounds. We have then, roughly, a loss of one thousand million pounds, leaving out the totally and partially disabled.

What a handicap when they begin, after the war, the economic struggle for supremacy!

Time was when the enemy losses sent a shiver down our spinal columns. That time—thanks to Hun methods—has passed.

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 beside 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.

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.

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 the 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.

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 humanised 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.

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 Civilisation, everything which has served to humanise 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 feelings 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.

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 civilisation. 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.

Wherever Prussia rules she has only one method of ruling—that of terror. Wherever she finds civilisation and the wealth which civilisation 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 idéologies 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 for ever destroyed, can bring nothing but that slavery which the Prussians have themselves accepted and which they would now impose upon the whole civilisation of Europe.

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 châteaux 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, systematised 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.

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 civilisation and brought the whole temple down. But has she not destroyed herself utterly amid the ruins? Her industry is paralysed, 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.

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:

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.

It may be asserted that the plea of “Frightfulness” will not be recognised a “military necessity” when Germany is judged, and that this enemy of civilisation, 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 civilisation, Germany’s heart recognised 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.

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 for ever 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 like 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.

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 immortalises 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 élan 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 comes, 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.

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 civilisation. 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.”

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 for evermore 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!

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 über 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.

“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”?

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:—

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 Jackboots,” in his childhood the spoiled child of the camp, as a man, and Cæsar, 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 littérateur, 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.

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.

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.

Of all forms of “Kultur” or “frightfulness” that which materialises in “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.

The fine cartoon which Raemaekers has drawn to bring home to the imagination what this form of “Kultur” stands for makes it easy for us in London to sympathise with our brothers and sisters in Paris. We have as yet been spared daylight raids in the Metropolitan area, and so we needed this cartoon to enable us to realise fully what “Kultur” by indiscriminate Zeppelin bombs means.

Who cannot see the cruel drama played out in that Paris street? The artist has assembled for us in a few living figures all the actors. The dead woman; the orphaned child, as yet scarcely realising her loss; the bereaved workman, calling down the vengeance of Heaven upon the murderers from the air; the stern faces of the sergents de ville, evidently feeling keenly their impotence to protect; and in the background other sergents, the lines of whose bent backs convey in a marvellous manner and with a touch of real genius the impression of tender solicitude for the injured they are tending. And faintly indicated, further still in the background, the crowd that differs little, whether it be French or English, in its deeper emotions.

How often have I been asked by sorrow-stricken mothers and wives: “Why does not Providence intervene either to stop, this war, or at least to check its cruelties and horrors?” If for many amongst us not yet bereaved this European massacre is a puzzle, it should not cause us dismay or surprise if the widow or son-bereaved mother lifts up her hands exclaiming: “Why did not God save him? Why did He let him be shot down by those Huns?”

Truth to tell, God has, so to speak, tied up His own hands in setting ours free. When He placed the human race upon the surface of this planet He dowered them with freedom, giving to each man self-determining force, by the exercise of which he was to become better than a man or worse than a beast. Good and evil, like wheat and cockle, grow together in the same field. The winnowing is at harvest-time, not before. Meanwhile, we ourselves have lived to see the fairest portions of this fair creation of God changed from a garden into a desert—pillaged, ravaged, and brought to utter ruin by shot and shell, sword and fire. When I have said this, I have but uttered a foreword to the hideous story, spoken the prologue only of the “frightful” tragedy. We are all familiar with at least some of the revolting facts and details with which the German soldiery has been found charged and convicted by Commissions appointed to investigate the crimes and atrocities adduced against them. The verdicts of French, Belgian, and English tribunals are unanimous. They all agree that Germany has been caught red-handed in her work of dyeing the map of Europe red with innocent blood.

When you bend your eyes to the pathetic cartoon standing opposite this letterpress, is there not brought home to you in a way, touching even to tears, the “frightful” consequences of the misuse of human powers, more especially of the attribute of freedom? If Germany had chosen to use, instead of brute force, moral force, what a great, grand, and glorious mission might have been hers to-day. If, instead of trying the impossible task of dominating the whole world with her iron hand upon its throat and her iron heel upon its foot, she had been satisfied with the portion of the map already belonging to her, and had not by processes of bureaucratic tyranny driven away millions of her subjects who preferred liberty to slavery, America to Germany, by this date she might have consolidated an Empire second in the world to none but one. Alas! in her over-reaching arrogance she has, on the contrary, set out to de-Christianise, de-civilise, and even de-humanise the race for which Christ lived and died.

Our high mission it is to try to save her from herself. Already I can read written in letters of blood carved into the gravestone of her corrupted greatness,

Nuda Veritas: it was Horace who in a famous Ode first presented the figure of Truth thus. And whom did he make her companions and sisters? They were three, and their names were “Modesty,” “Fair Dealing,” and “Good Faith.” The four sisters do indeed go together in a quadruple alliance and entente, and when one is flouted or estranged, the others are alienated and become enemies too.

The Germans were believed to be—some few still believe them to be—a “truth-loving nation.” They had a passion, we were told, for truth, for accuracy, for scientific exactness. Theirs might be a blunt and brutal frankness, but they were at least downright and truthful.

Well, they first flouted Modesty—they bragged and blustered, bluffed and “bounded.” They could not keep it up. They had to act. Fair Dealing went by the board. Then Good Faith became impossible, for, as this very von Bethmann-Hollweg declared, “Necessity knew no law.” Now they have forsaken Truth. They must deceive their own people. The “lie” has entered into their soul. Never was so systematic a use made of falsehoods small and great.

But Truth expelled is not powerless. Naked, she is still not weaponless. She has her little “periscope,” her magic mirror, which shows the liar himself, as well as the world, what he is like. And she has another weapon, as those who know their “Paradise Lost” will remember:

It is not shown here, for it is invisible, but none the less potent. With it Truth can indeed “shame the devil.” She not only shows what the liar is like outside, but reveals his inner hideousness, and actual shape, for all to see.

There are many sayings about Truth, and they are all awkward for the liar. “Truth will out,” said a witty English judge, “even in an affidavit.” It will out, even in a German Chancellor’s démenti.

“Magna est veritas et prævalet”
“Great is Truth and she prevails,” in the end.

Yes, “She is on the path, and nothing will stop her.” She started on the hills of the little but free republic of Switzerland; she is slowly traversing the plains of the vast free republic of America. Her last contest will be over the Germans themselves.

A generation ago a little clique of wise men at Oxford patted themselves on the back for having discovered “The Historical Method.” But the common people of all countries have always known it. The names of the great dead are not forgotten, nor yet the great things for which they stood. There may be no strict liturgy for the ancestor worship of the West, but that worship is a simple fact, and it is a thing that timorous politicians would do well to remember. Here Raemaekers appeals to his countrymen to regard their past, to be worthy of the great seamen who took the Dutch Fleet up the Medway, and lashed brooms to the mast-head of the ships that swept the sea clear of British enemies.

The Dutch were fighting for their liberty then. Great Britain is fighting for liberty in Europe to-day—and for Dutch liberty to boot. The enemy of all liberty uses Holland as a short cut whereby her pirates of the air can get more quickly to their murder work in England. Would the hero ancestors, of whom the Dutch so boast, have tolerated this indignity? The artist seer supplies the answer.

Note the mixture of the ghostly and the real in this vivid and vivacious drawing. But if it is easy to see through the faint outlines of the sailor spirits, it is easier for these gallant ghosts to see through the unrealities of their descendants’ fears and hesitations. The anger of the heroes is plainly too great for words. How compressed the lips! How tense the attitude! The hands gripped in the angriest sort of impatience! Mark the subtle mingling of seaman and burgher in the poise and figures. Mark particularly van Tromp’s stiffened forefinger on his staff.

Is the fate of L19 the fruit of our artist’s stinging reminder that Holland once had nobler spirits and braver days?

The deliberate war made by Prussia in all those areas which she can reach or occupy against the symbols and sacred objects of the Christian faith is a phenomenon in every way worthy of consideration. It is clearly not a matter of accident. The bombardment at Rheims Cathedral, for example, can be proved to have been deliberate. It had no military object; and the subsequent attempts to manufacture a military reason for it only produced a version of the occurrence not only incredible but in flat contradiction to the original admissions of the Germans themselves. But such episodes as those of Rheims and Louvain merely attract the attention of the world because of the celebrity of the outraged shrines. All who are familiar with the facts know that deliberate sacrilege no less than deliberate rape and deliberate murder has everywhere marked the track of the German army.

The offence has been malignant. That does not, of course, mean that it has been irrational; quite the contrary. One fully admits that Prussia, being what she is, has every cause to hate the Cross, and every motive to vent the agonised fury of a lost soul upon things sacred to the God she hates.

The moral suggested by this cartoon of Raemaekers’ must not be confused with the ridiculous and unhistoric pretence that war itself is essentially unchristian. When Mr. Bernard Shaw, if I remember right, drew from the affair of Rheims the astonishing moral that we cannot have at the same time “glorious wars and glorious cathedrals,” he might surely have remembered that the age in which Rheims Cathedral was built, whatever else it was, was not an age of Pacifism. The insult to Jesus Christ is not in the sword (which in His own words He came to bring), but in the profanation of the sword. It is in cruelty, injustice, treachery, unbridled lust, the worship of unrighteous strength—in fact, in all that can be summed up in the single word “Prussia.”

Save for the spiked helmets, the gruesome figures in the foreground of this cartoon might have belonged in life to any one of the warring nationalities. It is a noteworthy fact, however, that not one of the nations at war has shown so little care for its dead as Germany, whose corpses lie and rot on every front on which they are engaged.

The world cannot blame Germany for the introduction of barbed wire as an accessory of war, though it is well known that German wire surpasses any other in sheer devilish ingenuity; not that it is more effective as an entanglement, but its barbs are longer, and are set more closely together, than in the wire used by other nationalities; it is, in short, more frightful, and thus is in keeping with the rest of the accessories of the German war machine.

But this in the cartoon is normal barbed wire, with its normal burden. One may question whether the All-Highest War Lord, who in the course of his many inspections of the various fronts must have seen sights like this, is ever troubled by the thought that these, his men, lie and hang thus for his pleasure, that their ghastly fate is a part of his glorious plan. He set out to remake the world, and here is one of the many results—broken corpses in the waste.

Part of the plan, broken corpses in the waste. By the waste and the corpses that he made shall men remember the author and framer of this greatest war.

There is a significance in this cartoon which I believe will appeal much more strongly to the firing line than to Home. The Front distrusts politics, and especially the higher politics. That means the juggling and wire-pulling of the Chancelleries, and the Front has an uneasy conviction that at the subtleties and craftiness and cunning of the diplomatic game we cannot compete with “The Bosche.” Hard knocks and straight fighting the Front does understand, and at that game are cheerfully confident of winning in the long run.

It would be bitter news to the fighting men that any peace had been patched up on any terms but those the Allies soon or late will be in a position to dictate, to lay down and say flatly, “Take them and have Peace; or leave them and go on getting licked.” The Front doesn’t like War. No man who has endured the horrors and savagery and “blood, mud, and misery” of civilised warfare could pretend to like it. No man who has endured the long-drawn misery of manning the waterlogged trenches for days and weeks and months can look forward with anything but apprehension to another winter of war. No man who has attacked across the inferno of the shell-and-bullet-swept “neutral ground,” or has hung on with tight-clenched teeth to the battered ruins of the forward fire trench under a murderous rain of machine-gun and rifle bullets, a howling tempest of shells, an earth-shaking tornado of high explosives, can but long for the day when Peace will be declared and these horrors will be no more than a past nightmare.

But the Front will “stick it” for another winter or several winters, will go through many bitter attacks and counter-attacks to win the complete victory that will ensure, and alone will ensure, lasting peace. We know our limitations and our weaknesses. We admit that, as the American journalist bluntly put it, we are “poor starters,” but we know just as surely he was right in completing the phrase, “but darn good finishers.” Let the “higher politicians” on our side stand down and leave the fighting men to finish the argument. Let them keep the ring clear, and let the Front fight it out. The Front doesn’t mind “taking the responsibility,” and it will give “Kaiser Bill” and “Little Willie” all the responsibilities they can handle before the Great Game is over.

Raemaekers is pitiless, but never oversteps the truth. National Debts are ever national millstones, worn around the neck. They are worn unwillingly, and they are not ornamental; they are a burden, and the weight is sometimes crushing. A prospect of that sort seems to be the lot of several of the “Great Powers” of Europe for the remainder, and the greater portion, of the Twentieth Century. Though German “civilisation” were more worthy of such a term and its associations as Kultur ten times over, would it become any Potentate and his advisers to impose it on so many countries at such a cost in suffering as all this—and more?

But Kaiser Wilhelm and his crew of State-at-any-price men impose not on other peoples only: they impose on their own kith and kin. Look at these three sad and apprehensive figures playing the Loan Game—the first, the second, the third Loan! Children, says the artist, passing the coin from one hand to another’s, and getting richer at each pass!! Yes, children, the German people treated so by a few dominies. State dominies and the Director (or dupe!) at Berlin! No people gains, every people loses by incurring a Debt; but in Germany, and to-day! to incur an indebtedness, contract a loss, does not suffice; the people must not know it.

Even the children know that coin has not left them richer: many, very many Germans know the Kultur War to be ruinous: but Berlin must play the Game still, and assume that the tricks and aims cannot be understood! It is lack of regard for other nations carried into German Finance; and all because the bureaucratic military heart is a stone. The piling up of State paper goes on, but not merrily, as Michael goes from Darlehnkasse to Reichsbank, one, two, three (and is about to go the fourth time!). This game of processions to the Kasse does not increase the available wealth within beleaguered Germany: and the 100-mark Note has no reference to material wealth securing it.

Now, the Commercial magnates of Germany realise the crushing fact—No indemnity possible!! and what of the Notes which are held? When shades of night fall heavily, and the Loan Game can be played no more, will the German people, tricked and impoverished, go to bed supperless and silent? German finance IS “a scrap of paper.”

True, O Liebknecht, it is indeed a war of rapine, engendered, planned, and brought about by the nation to which you belong. Yet, foul as is that nation, its foulness is not greater than your futility, by which you show up the strength of that which you oppose with as much effect as our own Snowden and Casement can claim for their efforts to arrest the work of the Allies.

Men who claim British birth claim also the quality of loyalty, as a rule, and thus there can be little sympathy with such a one as this Liebknecht, whom Raemaekers shows as a little ascetic in the presence of the sombre War Lord. It is part of the plan of Nature that every country shall breed men like this: men who are constitutionally opposed to the current of affairs, ridiculously futile, blatantly noisy, the type of which extreme Socialists and Syndicalists are made. Possessed of a certain obstinacy which is almost akin to courage, they accomplish nothing, save to remain in the public eye.

Such is Liebknecht, apostle of a creed that would save the world by the gospel of mediocrity, were human nature other than it is. But, in considering this Liebknecht, let us not forget that he has no more love for England, or for any of the Allies, than the giant whom he attempts so vainly to oppose; he is an apostle, not of peace, but of mere obstruction, perhaps well-meaning in his way, but as futile as the Crown Prince, and as ludicrous.

Some of these drawings remind us that the great cartoonist’s message was primarily delivered to his own countrymen. They explain why he was accused, but not convicted, of endangering the neutrality of the Netherlands. He presents the German monster as a menace to all freedom, and not least to the freedom of the Dutch people. Germany’s allies have sold theirs; they are harnessed to the Prussian war chariot, and must drag it whither the driver bids them, whip in hand. The nations in arms against Germany are fighting for their own and each other’s freedom; and the neutrals stand looking anxiously on. Raemaekers warns them that their freedom too is at stake. He sees that it will disappear if the Allies fail in the struggle, and he shows his countrymen what they may expect.

In every country there are some ignoble souls who would rather embrace servitude than fight for freedom. They have a conscientious objection to—danger. How far the Dutch Junkers deserve Raemaekers’ satire it is not for foreigners to judge. But we know the type he depicts—the sporting “nuts,” with their careful get-up, effeminate paraphernalia and vacuous countenances. So long as they can wear a sporting costume and carry a gun they are prepared to take a menial place under a Prussian over-lord and submit with a feeble fatalism to the loss of national independence. It is light satire in keeping with the subject, and it provides a relief to the sombre tragedy which is the artist’s prevailing mood.

Not the least amazing phenomenon of these most amazing times is the fact that millions of men should consent to be hurled to certain death, and to permit the ruin of their countries, to satisfy the insensate ambitions of rulers, who, when all is said and done, are but men, and in some cases even of alien birth and personally not specially beloved by them.

Surely one outcome of this world-war will be the birth of a new determination in every nation that its own voice and its own will shall control its own destinies—that no one man or self-appointed clique shall swing it to ruin for his or their own selfish purposes. Who pays the piper must in future call the tune.

Mary, worn with grief and fear, covers her emaciated face with scarred hands, as she kneels in prayer before the infant Jesus. Joseph, grown old and feeble, nails up a barricade of planks to strengthen the door against the missiles of Kultur already bursting through it and threatening the sleeping child. So in that first Christmas, nineteen centuries ago, he saved Mary’s child from the baby-massacre ordered by Herod to preserve his own throne.

Kultur, the gathered wisdom of the ages, has brought us back to the same Holy War. What a Christmas! What a Festival of Peace and goodwill towards men!

People ask: Why does God allow it? Is God dead? Foolish questions. When I was at school I had the good fortune to be under a great teacher whose name is honoured to-day. He used to tell us that the most terrible verse in the Bible was: “So He gave them up unto their own hearts’ lust and they walked in their own counsels” (Ps. lxxxi, 13).

Man has the knowledge of good and evil; he has eaten of the tree and insists on going his own way. He knows best. Is not this the age of science and Kultur? We must not cry out if the road we have chosen leads to disaster.

Yet still the Child of Christmas lives and a divine light shines round His head. He sleeps.

Genius has set forth the most brutal characteristic of the Hun. In moments of triumph, invariably he is the bully, and, as invariably, he wallows in brutality—witness Belgium under his iron heel and, in this cartoon, stricken Serbia impotent to ward off the blow about to be dealt by a monstrous fist. That is the Teuton conception of War, Merry War (Lustige Krieg)! In the English prize-ring we have an axiom indelibly impressed upon novices—“Follow up one stout blow with another—quick!” That, also, is the consummate art of war. But when a man is knocked out we don’t savage him as he lies senseless at our feet. The Hun does. His axiom is—“As you are strong, be merciless!”

In the small pig-eyes, in the gross, sensual lips, the mandril-like jaw, the misshapen ear, I see not merely a lifelike portrait of a Hun, but a composite photograph of all Huns, something which should hang in every house in the kingdom until the terms of such a peace have been imposed which will make the shambles in Belgium, Poland, and Serbia an eternal nightmare of the past, never to be repeated in the future. And over the anæmic hearts of the Trevelyans, the Ramsay MacDonalds, the Arthur Ponsonbys, who dare to prattle of a peace that shall not humiliate Germany, I would have this cartoon tattooed, not in indigo, but in vermilion.

If Ulysses Grant exacted from the gallant Robert Lee “Unconditional Surrender,” and if our generation approves—as it does—that grim ultimatum, what will be the verdict of posterity should we as a nation—we who have been spared the unspeakable horrors under which other less isolated countries have been “bled white”—descend to the infamy of a compromise between the Powers of Darkness and Light? The Huns respect Force, and nothing else. Mercy provokes contempt and laughter. I hold no brief for reprisals upon helpless women and children; I am not an advocate of what is called the “commercial extermination of Germany”; but it is my sincerest conviction that criminals must be punished. The Most Highest War Lord and his people, not excluding the little children who held high holiday when the Lusitania was torpedoed, are—CRIMINALS.

Raemaekers, the master of an infinite variety of moods and touch, reserves a special category of scorn for von Tirpitz. Savage cruelty in war, the wanton destruction of life and property, the whole gospel of frightfulness—these things have been abandoned (so the historians tell us), not because savagery was bad morals, but because it was the worst way of making war. It was wiser to take the enemy’s property and put it to your own use than to destroy it. If it was plundered it was wasted. It was wiser to spare men, women, and children, so that they should be better subjects if they remained conquered, less irreconcilable enemies, if they were restored to their old allegiance. Besides, murder, plunder, and rapine demoralised your men. They made them less efficient troops for fighting. Doubtless the argument is sound. But it would never have been accepted had not the horrors of savagery been utterly loathsome and repulsive to the nations that abandoned them.

Conventions in the direction of humanity are not, then, artificial restrictions in the use of force. They are natural restrictions, because all Christian and civilised people would far rather observe them than not. Germany has revelled in abandoning every restraint. Raemaekers shows the cruelty, the wickedness of this in scores of his drawings. Here it is its folly that he emphasises.

The submarine is no longer a death-dealing terror. It has become a blubbering fish. And the author of its crimes is no diabolical triton, but a semi-imbecile old dotard, round whom his evil—but terrified—brood have clustered; they fawning on him in terror, he fondling them in shaky, decrepit fondness. Note the flaccid paunch, the withered top, and the foolish, hysterical face. How the full-dress cocked hat shames his nakedness!

And this, remember, is the German High Admiral as history will know him, when the futility of his crimes is proved, their evil put out of memory, and only their foolishness remains!

The nations are being educated amain, let us hope. Germany has prided herself on her education, her learning, and on her Kultur. To-day she is beyond the calculation of all that foresight which has been her boast, and foible. Human nature, other than German, has not been on the national curriculum, and, as in other departments of study, what has not been reduced to rule and line is beyond the ken and apprehension. How stupendously wrong a Power which could count, and into a European War! on insurrection in India, the Cape, and other parts of the British Empire! and how naively did Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg disclose the Zeitgeist of German rulers when with passion he declared Britain to be going to war for “a scrap of paper”! A purpose to serve, a treaty becomes “a scrap”—in German courtly hands.

The artist depicts a scene, with masterly pencil, where von Bethmann-Hollweg himself is charged by the All-Highest to be schoolmaster. It is a grim department of the training. Think of the unseen as well as that shown. What you do see is the lordly, truculent Kaiser, raising that menacing finger again. In spacious chair, he sits defiant, aggressive, as a ferocious captain; and there opposite is the “great Chancellor,” bent, submissive, apprehensive, tablet and pencil ready to take down the very word of Kaiserly wisdom and will. What is it? The day’s fare for a week! reaching a climax of “No dinner” on Saturday, and “Hate” on Sunday! Educative! of course it will be.

Some day, not so far, even the German people will not regard the orders of the Army and Navy Staff, the cruel mercies of the Junkers, as a revelation of Heaven’s will. Three pounds of sugar for a family’s monthly supply will educate, even when the gospel of force has been preached for fifty years to a docile people. Many of us are in “a strait betwixt two” as we see how thousands of inoffensive old men, women, and children are made to suffer, are placed by the All-Highest in this Copper and Hate School. It is not this, that, and the other that causes this, but the Director of the School, who does not, while the miserable scholars do, know what it is to endure “No dinner,” not only on Saturdays, but many other days. And all to gratify the mad projectors imposing Kultur on an unwilling world!

Whether the type here taken is a true criticism of a commercial attitude in a neutral State like Holland, it does not become us to discuss. Raemaekers is a Dutchman, and doubtless a patriotic Dutchman. And the patriot, and the patriot alone, has not only the right but the duty of criticising his own country.

For us it is better to regard the figure as an international, and often anti-national, character who exists in all nations, and who, even in a belligerent country like our own, can often contrive to be neutral and worse than neutral. A prosperous bully with the white waistcoat and coarse, heavily cuffed hands, with which such prosperity very frequently clothes itself, is represented as thrusting food in the starved face of an evicted Belgian and saying: “Eat and hold your tongue.”

The situation is worthy of such record, if only because it emphasises an element in the general German plot against the world which is often forgotten in phrases about fire and sword. The Prussianised person is not only a military tyrant; he is equally and more often a mercantile tyrant. And what is in this respect true of the German is as true or truer of the Pro-German.

The cosmopolitan agent of Prussia is a commercial agent, and works by those modern methods of bribing and sacking, of boycott and blackmail, which are not only meaner, but often more cruel, than militarism. For anyone who realises the power of such international combinations, there is the more credit due to the artists and men of letters who, like Raemaekers himself, have decisively chosen their side while the issue was very doubtful. And among the Belgian confrères there must certainly have been many who showed as much courage as any soldier, when they decided not to eat and be silent, but to starve and to speak.

From Homeric warfare to subterranean conflict of modern trenches is a far cry, and Ares, God of Battles, may well yawn at the entertainment with which the Demon of War is providing him. But the spectator of this grim “revue” lacks something of the patience of its creator, and our Mephistopheles, marking the god’s protest, will doubtless hurry the scene and diversify it with new devilries to restore his interest. Indeed, that has happened since Raemaekers made his picture.

The etiquette of butchery has become more complicated since Troy fell, yet it has been so far preserved till now that the fiend measures Ares with his eyes and speculates as to how far the martial god may be expected to tolerate his novel engines. Will asphyxiating gas, and destruction of non-combatants and neutrals on land and sea, trouble him? Or will he demand the rules of the game, and decline to applaud this satire on civilisation, although mounted and produced regardless of cost and reckoning?

As the devil’s own entertainment consists in watching the effects of his masterpiece on this warlike spectator, so it may be that those who “staged” the greatest war in mankind’s history derive some bitter instruction from its reception by mankind. They know now that it is condemned by every civilised nation on earth; and before these lines are published their uncivilised catspaws will have ample reason to condemn it also. Neutrals there must be, but impartials none.

The sense and spirit of the thinking world now go so far with human reason that they demand a condition of freedom for all men and nations, be they weak or powerful. That ideal inspires the majority of human kind, and it follows that the evolution of morals sets strongly on the side of the Allies.

“War,” says Bernhardi, “gives a biologically just decision, since its decisions rest on the very nature of things.” So be it.

In this humorous yet pathetic cartoon—humorous because of its truth to the type, and pathetic because of the futility of the effort depicted—with unfailing skill the artist shows the folly of the cry “Peace! Peace!” when there is none. In the forefront is a type of woman publicist who can never be happy unless the limelight secured by vocal effort and the advocacy of a “crazy” cause is focussed upon her. She calls “Peace!” that the world may hear, not attend. Behind her stands that other type of detached “peace woman,” who has, judging from her placid yet grieved expression, apparently scarcely realised that the War is too serious and has its genesis in causes too deep-rooted to be quelled by her or her kind. One can imagine her saying: “A war! How terrible! It must be stopped.”

The soldier, who is wise enough to prefer armour-plate even to a shield provided by substantially built peace women clad in white, looks on amused. The thinking world as a whole so looks on at “Arks” launched by American millionaire motor manufacturers, and at Pacifist Conferences held whilst the decision as to whether civilisation or savagery shall triumph, and might be greater than right, yet hangs in the balance. There must be no thought of peace otherwise than as the ultimate reward of gallant men fighting in a just cause, and until with it can come permanent security from the “Iron Fist” of Prussian Militarism and aggression, and the precepts of Bernhardi and his kind are shown to be false. Those who talk of peace in the midst of “frightfulness,” of piracy, of reckless carnage and colossal sacrifices of human life which are the fruits of an attempt to save by military glory a crapulous dynasty, however good their intention, lack both mental and moral perspective.

The artist has depicted the ordinary attitude of a self-satisfied burgher not only in Holland but in other countries also. “What does it matter if we are annexed afterwards, so long as we remain neutral now?” That is the sort of speech made by selfish merchants in some of the neutral countries, especially those of Scandinavian origin. It is really a variety of the old text: “Let us eat, drink, and be merry; for to-morrow we die.” Why not, it is urged, make the best of present facilities? As long as we are left alone we can pursue our ordinary industrialism. We can heap up our percentages and profits. Our trade is in a fairly flourishing condition, and we are making money. No one knows what the future may bring; why, therefore, worry about it? Besides, if the worst comes to the worst and Germany annexes us, are we quite sure that we shall be in a much worse condition than we are now? It will be to the interest of Berlin that we should carry on our usual industrial occupations. Our present liberty will probably not be interfered with, and a change of masters does not always mean ruin.

So argues the self-satisfied burgher. If life were no more than a mere matter of getting enough to eat and drink and of having a balance at the banker’s, his view of the case might pass muster. But a national life depends on spiritual and ideal interests, just as a man’s life “consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.” Freedom is the only principle of growth, and freedom is the one thing which German militarism desires to make impossible for all those whom she gathers into her fold. The loss of liberty means the ruin of all those ends for which a State exists. Even the material prosperity which the self-satisfied burgher desires will be definitely sacrificed by a submission to Teutonic autocracy.

War is a fiery winnower of incapacities. Many reputations have gone to the scrap-heap since August, 1914. None more surely than that of the braggart Crown Prince. It is said that this terrible catastrophe was largely of his bringing about and his great desire and hope.

He was going to do mighty things—to smash through the frontier and lead the German hordes triumphantly through France. And what has he done?

In the treacherous surprise of the moment he got across the frontier, and there the weighty French fist met the Imperial optic, and has since developed many stars in it. He has been held, wasting men, time, opportunity, and his own little apology for a soul. He has done nothing to justify his position or even his existence. He has wrecked his home-life by wanton indulgence. He has made himself notorious by his private lootings of the châteaux cursed with his presence.

Even in 1870 the native cupidity of the far finer breed of conquerors could not resist the spoils of war, and, to their eternal disgrace, trainloads of loot were sent away to decorate German homes—as burglars’ wives might wear the jewellery acquired by their adventurous menfolk in the course of their nefarious operations.

But we never heard of “Unser Fritz,” the then Crown Prince, ransacking the mansions he stayed in. He was a great man and a good—the very last German gentleman. And this decadent is his grandson!

“Unser Fritz” was a very noble-looking man. His grandson—oh, well, look at him and judge for yourselves! Of a surety the sight is calculated to heighten one’s amazement that any nation under the sun, or craving it, could find in such a personality, even as representative of a once great but now exploding idea, anything whatever even to put up with, much less to worship and die for.

The race of Hohenzollern has wilted and ravelled out to this. The whole world, outside Prussia, devoutly hopes ere long to have seen the last of it.

It has been at all times, with the single exception above noted, a hustling, grabbing, self-seeking race. May the eyes of Germany soon be opened! Then, surely, it will be thrust back into the obscurity whence heaven can only have permitted it to escape for the flagellation of a world which was losing its ideals and needed bracing back with a sharp, stern twist.

When one sits down to think, there are few things in connection with the devastating War now raging, wild-beast-like, almost throughout the length and breadth of Europe, so appalling as the application of science and man’s genius to the work of decimating the human species.

Early in the conflict, which is being fought for the basal principles of civilisation and moral human conduct, one was made to realise that the Allied Powers were opposed to an enemy whose resources were only equalled by his utter negation of the rules of civilised warfare. Soon, to the horrors of machine-guns and of high-explosive shells of a calibre and intensity of destructive force never before known, were added the diabolical engines for pouring over the field of battle asphyxiating gases. We know the horrors of that mode of German “frightfulness,” and some of us have seen its effects in the slowly dying victims in hospitals. But that was not enough. Yet other methods of “frightfulness” and savagely which would have disgraced the most ruthless conquerors of old, were to be applied by the German Emperor in his blasphemous “Gott mit uns” campaign. And against the gallant sons of Belgium, France, England, and Russia in turn were poured out with bestial ingenuity the jets and curtains of “liquid fire” which seared the flesh and blinded the eyes. For this there will be a reckoning if God be still in heaven whilst the world trembles with the shock of conflict, and the souls of men are seared.

Raemaekers in this cartoon shows not only the horror of such a method of warfare, but also, with unerring pencil, the unwavering spirit of the men who have to meet this “frightfulness.” There is a land to be redeemed, and women and children to be avenged, and so the fighting men of the allied nations go gallantly on with their stern, amazed faces set towards victory.

Very happily and very graphically has Raemaekers here pointed the contrast between the Gargantuan hopes with which the Kaiser and his Junker army embarked on the War, and the exiguous and shadowy fruits of their boasted victories up to the present. They foretold a triumphal entry into the conquered capital of France within a month of the opening of hostilities. Yet the irony of Fate has, slowly but surely, cooled the early fever of anticipation. The only captured town where the All-Highest has found an opportunity of lifting his voice in exultant pæan is Nish, a secondary city of the small kingdom of Serbia. There, too, he perforce delayed his jubilation until the lapse of some eighteen months after the date provisionally and prematurely fixed in the first ebullition of over-confidence, for his triumphal procession through Paris.

Nish is a town of little more than 20,000 inhabitants; about the size of Taunton or Hereford—smaller than Woking or Dartford. Working on a basis of comparative populations, the Emperor would have to repeat without more delay his bravery at Nish in 150 towns of the same size before he could convince his people that he is even now on the point of fulfilling his first rash promises to them of the rapid overthrow of his foes. Pursuing the same calculation, he is bound to multiply his present glories 350 times before he can count securely on spending a night as conquering hero in Buckingham Palace.

Even the Kaiser must know in his heart that woefully, from his own and his people’s point of view, did he overestimate his strength at the outset. For the time he contents himself with the backwater of Nish for the scene of his oratory of conquest. His vainglorious words may well prove in their environment the prelude of a compulsory confession of failure, which is likely to come at a far briefer interval than the eighteen months which separate the imaginary hope of Paris from the slender substance of Nish.

Among the many inventions which German ingenuity and science have devised for the effective conduct of this war, and for the elevation of Germany to supremacy in the world, the most repellent in general estimation has been the use of fire; but this commends itself with peculiar zest to Mephistopheles, who here sits on a chair beside the telephone and calls up the Prussian Palace at Potsdam. He cannot restrain his admiration and delight at this new invention. It is entirely to his heart. He sits with one leg rested on the knee of the other; and you will notice that the foot of this leg, with its carefully careless drawing, suggests a cloven hoof, while the scanty hair, by its arrangement, gives the effect of a pair of horns: even in this figure, an ornament of high-class society, there linger the signs of the half-bestial figure of Satan. The face is wholly the countenance of the devil, conceived as the man of society, who has moved amid the luxury of the most fashionable circles, where his wit and cynicism have made him popular.

All his surroundings are suited to his character. The chair on which he sits has goat’s feet, and its back is the bearded head of a goat. The very telephone has something about it subtly suggestive of the devil. A gorgeously attired flunkey who stands behind the chair does not attempt to conceal his delight at the joke; for he is not the conventional English serving man, who betrays no appreciation of what is said by his master. He is in perfect sympathy with the devil, for he is himself a devil. The nature of the devil is expressed more completely in the footman than in the master. His legs are the legs of a goat, and his feet are its cloven hoofs; and, whereas on the master’s head the idea of horns is suggested only by the arrangement of the hair, horns openly protrude from the bald skull of the serving-man. There is no veneer of fashion and intellect and wit here: the hateful animalism of the face is in keeping with the animal limbs.

From these surroundings comes the message to Potsdam. The Prussian monarchs have always been given to the outward forms of religion in their messages. For every success which they have announced to their people they have professed their appreciation of the good conduct of that German God whom alone they recognise. But Mephistopheles has been struck with one omission in the series of messages from the Kaiser at the front announcing the stages of his success. There has been no expression of thanks to the “dear old God” for the application of fire as an agent of victory, and he calls up his friend at Potsdam to twit him with the omission.

The position of Holland as a neutral state is one of increasing difficulty. She has no desire to join in the war on either side; all she asks for is to be left alone to pursue her own mercantile path and to maintain the rights and privileges of her kingdom. Naturally enough, however, she feels very uneasy at the close proximity of a power like Germany, which has shown how little the independence of nationalities is regarded in her military councils. Holland, it must be remembered, has the example of Belgium before her eyes. She knows therefore what it must mean to be overrun by Hunnish hordes, and to lose at once the vitality of her national life and the security of her towns.

Raemaekers’ picture graphically depicts the efforts that are being made by German agents to convert Holland’s neutrality into an active support of Berlin. The German oculist trying on spectacles persuades his patient that the Dutch cry “Oranje Boven” is synonymous with “Deutschland über Alles.” In the earlier stages of the war it did not interfere with German projects that Holland should remain neutral, for hers was a useful country through which to import the various supplies of munitions and food which Germany needed. Now, however, that the stringency of the British blockade has so largely interfered with the transit of goods, Germany may discover it to be to her advantage to possess Holland as an Ally. Hence the zeal of the Teuton oculist and his insidious attempts to make the Dutchman see things as Germany sees them. The fact is, of course, that the possession of the Dutch coast line would add not a little to German facilities in her submarine and Zeppelin attacks.

The question uppermost in most of our minds at the present moment is, I take it, what are the Huns thinking? And, in particular, what are the Willies thinking?

We know that the Huns prepared for and started this war with a bee in their bonnets, a bee which buzzed about Xerxes, Hannibal, Alexander and Napoleon. The two Willies were avowedly “out” for what they call “Weltmacht,” or world dominion. Bernhardi put it in tabloid form:—“Weltmacht oder niedergang.”

If one fact shines out conspicuously after these dreadful months of slaughter it is this—that the Willies will not achieve world dominion.

Raemaekers pourtrays the All Highest with snow white hair and a dyed moustache still pointing upwards. The dyed moustache seems to me the keynote of the cartoon—la petite note qui chante. It should be white to match the hair, and drooping. What an effort to keep a stiff upper lip, when day after day the War Lord scans the casualty lists, and realises—as he must—that sooner or later the deluded Fatherland will know what he knows, and draw from that knowledge conclusions which he is powerless to modify or avert!

They have drunk to “Der Tag.” And that Day is about to dawn, the DAY which will present them to their own people as discredited rulers and humiliated schemers.

The Ramsay Macdonalds, the Charles Trevelyans, the Arthur Ponsonbys—et id genus omne—have prattled about the inexpediency of humiliating Germany. What a waste of foolish words! Can the imagination of Man conceive of any greater humiliation than that which Destiny, not the Allies, must inflict upon Hunland? That humiliation, inevitably, will come from within, and prey like a hideous cancer upon the body politic. No publicist, however prescient, can measure its ravages, for they are hidden from our sight. But none can doubt that, like a cancer, these ravages will grow and spread till the world gapes aghast at them. Whatever punishment we may be able to inflict upon these Baby-Killers and Pirates will be as nothing compared with the humiliation which, pede claudo, dogs the steps of failure and bankruptcy.

In this cartoon, the younger of the two Weary Willies is fitly habited in sable. He is in deepest mourning for the last of his dynasty—HIMSELF.

Current experience is proving that war is a grim condition of life, and that none can escape its effects. No religious or philosophic precept is potent enough in practical application to prevent its outbreak or to stay its course. The strong man of military age, who claims the right to pursue normal peaceful avocations when his country is at war, pleads guilty, however involuntarily, to aberrations of both mind and heart.

There are few who do not conscientiously cherish repugnance for war, but practically none of those to whom so natural a sentiment makes most forcible appeal deem it a man’s part to refuse a manifest personal call of natural duty. The conscientious objector to combatant service may in certain rare cases deserve considerate treatment, but very short shrift should await the able-bodied men who, from love of ease or fear of danger, simulate conscientious objection in order to evade a righteous obligation.

Lack of imagination may be at times as responsible for the sin of the shirker as lack of courage. Patriotism is an instinct which works as sluggishly among the unimaginative as among the cowardly and the selfish. The only cure for the sluggish working of the patriotic instinct among the cowardly and the selfish is the sharp stimulus of condign punishment. But among the unimaginative it may be worth experimenting by way of preliminary with earnest and urgent appeals to example such as is offered not only by current experience, but also by literature and history. No shirkers would be left if every subject of the Crown were taught to apprehend the significance of Henley’s interrogation:

It is interesting to consider how absolute has been the rupture of Germany’s oath, as taken on her subscription to the Hague Convention. In the light of the violation of the neutrality of Belgium—that colossal infamy, destined to rank for all time as the greatest and vilest betrayal to which a civilised nation has ever sunk—the rest, considered singly, may seem lesser offences. Yet the violation of the neutrality of Luxemberg; the violation of the French frontier before declaration of War; the violation of the Geneva Convention; the slaughter of prisoners and wounded; the rape and arson, loot and murder; the use of forbidden bullets and forbidden asphyxiating gas; the bombardment of unfortified towns; the treachery and needless cruelty inflicted against civil populations; the crimes on the high seas—all tower together into such a massive indictment as no nation has yet been driven by her tyrants to endure. But beyond this, the warfare, as carried on by Germany’s creatures in all lands, alone amounts to a wide infraction of the promise that Count Münster signed at the Hague for the German Empire in 1899. “Treacherous methods of warfare” were then abjured by a people which has sunk to such depths of treachery that Judas, Brutus, Cassius, in the threefold jaws of Dis, might protest at their intrusion.

The French arms for Tripoli were a typical trifle; they sink into subject for laughter before the understanding between France and Italy and the knowledge of what Germany has done since that incident. And now, in the hour of need, we learn that Teutonic inspiration has taken another hint from Frederick the Great. Forged English paper money begins to circulate in the Fatherland.

To this they have come; and since English Treasury notes do not go to Germany, and we are told that all leaving this country return swiftly to it, let us trust that any presentation of the forged paper in London may win the attention it deserves.

After wading through the oceans of casuistry by which German “Professors” and others have sought to exonerate Germany for the violation of Belgian neutrality and for the appalling crimes of Louvain, Visé, and the “Lusitania,” one is no nearer comprehending that “attitude of mind” which is exemplified by the question of the German Anti-Bellicist, and of the German apostles of “Kultur” in general. It is not sheer muddleheadedness, but has been brought about by a calculated, immoral perversion of intellect.

It is an attitude of mind that is lost to a sense of humour—the absence of which indeed is a German national characteristic. And there is nothing more deadening as regards the finer subtleties of life and conscience. “The saving grace of humour” is a phrase containing a crystallisation, of an idea of far greater moment than appears on the surface.

What thousands of German so-called “Anti-Bellicists” are saying and will continue to say is, as Raemaekers’ cartoon suggests, “We think we hate War, but we know we covet our neighbour’s vineyard, and having seized it mean to keep it if we can.”

You are supremely and triumphantly one of the Kaiser’s many mistakes. You have proved yourself once again a capable leader and a man among men. You have proved him once more incapable of apprehending the meaning of the word honour. You are an honourable man. Even as a foe you fought us fair and we honoured you. You have valiantly helped to dig the grave of his dishonour and have proved him a fool. We thank you! And we thank the memory of the clear-visioned men of those old days who, in spite of the clamour of the bats, persisted in tendering you and yours that right hand of friendship which you have so nobly justified.

You fought us fair. You have uprisen from the ashes of the past like the Phœnix of old. You are Briton with the best.

Fair fight breeds no ill-will. It is the man, and the nation, that fights foul and flings God and humanity overboard that lays up for itself stores of hatred and outcastry and scorn which the ages shall hardly efface.

Delenda est Germania!—so far as Germania represents the Devil and all his works.

The following lines were written fourteen years ago when we welcomed the end of the Boer War. We are all grateful that the hope therein expressed has been so amply fulfilled. That it has been so is largely due to the wisdom and statesmanship of Louis Botha.

Germany, if she had so willed, could have come into that hoped-for Trust for Peace.

But Germany would not. She put her own selfish interests before all else and so digs her own grave.

William of Potsdam, portrayed in this cartoon as a Cook’s tourist, chatters with rage whenever he is laughed at. Behold here the All Highest in a composite portrait of Himself in a few of his favourite “stunts.” Mark the hat of the mighty hunter who slays hecatombs of wild boars without running any risk to his august person, the asker of innumerable and importunate questions (he expected one of our generals to tell him the official length of our ballet dancers’ skirts!), the snapshotter, the wearer of English clothes of sporting cut, and first, last, and all the time—the SPY. Britons forgive and forget easily, but we may well wonder whether, after this war, high-born Huns all of them now revealed as spies will be received as of yore by our magnates and lavishly entertained? Shall we see immense Junkers mixing champagne and stout in our clubs? Shall we lose our own appetites at the sight of gracious ladies wolfing our best food with all four feet in the trough?

What rankles in my humble breast is not so much the barbarity of the Beast, but the humiliating reflection that we allowed him to prowl amongst us masquerading as a fat sheep, grazing peacefully in our verdant pastures!

I submit that all Huns, male and female, should be sent to Coventry by the Allies for at least one decade. It would be fatuous to suppose that any Hun could change his character during so brief a period, but “doing time” may teach him—as it has taught other criminals—that it pays to be honest. It is not likely that the Baby Killers and Pirates will recognise any principle except expediency.

It is a comforting thought, also, that the Hun, after this war, will be ill provided with what schoolboys call—“journey-money.” In the pleasant land of France, sur les côtes d’azur et éméraude, our ears will not be split by their raucous, spluttering accents; our eyes will not be offended by their obese, ridiculous persons. We shall, I hope, wander in peace through the Eternal City. I remember a young Hun at Wengen who barged into every skater on the rink not adroit enough to avoid him. I do not expect to meet him again.

In the present crisis of Belgian affairs there is much to remind the historical student of the events which led to the fall of Antwerp in 1585, and the outrageous invasion of the Southern Netherlands by the army of Parma. Then, as now, Holland opened her arms to her wounded and captive sister. The best Flemish scholars and men of letters emigrated to the land where Cornheert and Spieghel welcomed them.

Merchants and artisans flocked to a new sphere of energy in Amsterdam. Several of the professorial chairs in that city, and in the great universities of Leyden and Harderwijk, were filled by learned Flemings, and the arts, that had long been flourishing in Brussels, fled northward to escape from the desolating Spanish scourge. The grim pencil of Raemaekers becomes tender whenever he touches upon the relation of the tortured Belgium to her sister, Holland, his own beloved fatherland.

We do not know yet, in this country, a tithe of the sacrifices which have been made in Holland to staunch the tears of Belgium. “Your sufferings are mine, and so are your fortunes,” has been the motto of the loyal Dutch.

The fight of the one and the four might, in view of the difference in the size of the combatants, be called quite fairly “the fight of the one and the fifty-three.” Each of the assailants has his own character. Germany is represented as a ferocious giant; Austria follows Prussia’s lead, a little the worse for wear, with a bandaged head as the souvenir of his former campaign: he does his best to look and act like Germany. Bulgaria loses not a moment, but puts his rifle to his shoulder to shoot the small enemy: he acts in his own way, according to his own character: kill the enemy as quickly as possible and seize the spoil, that is his principle. Turkey is a rather broken-down and dilapidated figure, who is preparing to use his bayonet, but has not got it quite ready. Serbia, erect, with feet firmly planted, stands facing the chief enemy, a little David against this big Goliath and his henchman, Austria; and the other two, so recently deadly foes, now standing shoulder to shoulder, attack him while his attention is directed on Germany.

The leader and “hero” of this assault is Prussia, big, brutal, remorseless. The Dutch artist always concentrates the spectator’s attention on him. You can almost hear the roar coming out of his mouth: “Gott strafe Serbien.” This is the figure, as Raemaekers paints him, that goes straight for his object, regardless of moral considerations. Serbia is in his way, and Serbia must be trampled in the mire. The artist’s sympathy is wholly with Serbia, who is pictured as the man fighting against the brute, slight, but active and noble in build, facing this burly foe.

And poor old Turkey! Always a figure of comedy, never ready in time, always ineffective, never fully able to use the weapons of so-called “civilisation.” Let it a ways be remembered that in the Gallipoli peninsula, when the Turks at first were taking no prisoners, but killing the wounded after their own familiar fashion with mutilation, for the sake of such spoil as could be carried away, Enver Pasha issued an order that thirty piastres should be paid for every prisoner brought in alive, a noble and humane regulation. Let us hope that the reward was always paid, not stolen on the way, as has been so often the case in Turkey.

Many a stout-hearted man can “bite upon the bullet” and bear pain up to the varying but inevitable limit when unconsciousness puts an end to literally unbearable agony. But is there anyone who could face with any show of courage the unutterable terror of slow asphyxiation? This is indeed a horrible picture. Raemaekers has helped us to realise the unrealisable, setting down with his swift and merciless pencil the oft-repeated incident of the despair, even to tears, of surgeons and nurses who, God knows, might well have thought they had little to learn about human suffering.

The German will blush for this devilry till the last day of history. One other deed of his was near as bad—the attempt to fasten on the French the guilt of this infamous departure from the laws of chivalry in war. One other deed was worse—that of the Prussian officer prisoner who, as reported by our “Eye-witness,” saw some of our men writhing on the ground in the throes of this agony and—laughed.

This bad business of the poison-gas was a damnable crime and a short-sighted. It tempered the fighting resolution of our men. Ask in particular any Canadian since Ypres, and certainly after and because of that day many a German in the field has received a bayonet wound instead of quarter and a kindly cigarette. It is for Germans after repentance to ask themselves whether after all such initiative has really any military value—except to the other side.

If you don’t see what you want, pay for it, is Germany’s motto to-day. A veritable rain of German gold has fallen in all the neutral countries during the war. Italy, Roumania, Greece, Spain, Holland, Switzerland, and Scandinavia have had the tares of German secret funds sown amongst the wheat of genuine public opinion. It was Bismarck’s belief that by gold all newspapers and most men are to be bought.

To-day it is hard to make any German bureaucrat believe that it is not possible to make neutrals think black is white if only enough money be spent. The fact that German black is very very black does not deter the industrious secret fund distributors. Newspapers are bought, agitators are subsidised, a false public opinion is artificially created—and the principal end is always to help those who made the war in Germany and those who keep it going to calm the masses in repeating what neutral papers and neutral led captains say.

A nation which has to depend upon such means of drugging itself into acquiescence has little to hope for. In Italy, in Roumania, the scattering of German gold has availed nothing—but while there remains a neutral State there will German secret funds be scattered. And with it all, the bellowing, blustering German propagandist, thumping any neutral table and endeavouring to make people believe that all men are as he is, knows well that he only gets a hearing, even from the lowest elements of any nation, because behind him is his colleague with the money-bag—Raemaekers has expressed in the money-bag holder all the true inwardness of the German system of propaganda.

“When the tiger,” says the naturalist, “has killed some large animal, such as a buffalo which he cannot consume at one time, the jackals collect round the carcase at a respectful distance and wait patiently until the tiger moves off. Then they rush from all directions, carousing upon the slaughtered buffalo, each anxious to eat as much as it can contain in the shortest time.”

The human jackal is one of the most squalid and sordid creatures and features of war. We saw him in Dublin the other day emerging from his slum den to loot Sackville Street. Every battlefield feeds its carrion beasts and birds.

This picture of Belgium and its jackals is doubtless only too true. Mr. Raemaekers and the Dutch have better means of knowing than we. The jackal, says the same naturalist, belongs to the Canidæ, the “dog tribe.” The scientific name of the true dog is Canis familiaris, “the household dog.” The jackal is Canis aureus, the “gold dog.” The epithet describes no doubt his colour. The human Canis aureus perhaps deserves his title on not less obvious grounds.

“The continent of Europe,” the naturalist goes on, “is free from the jackal.” It was supposed till yesterday to be free from the lion and tiger.

But in the prehistoric times of the cave man, geologists say, there was both in England and Europe the great “sabre-tooth” tiger. Kipling, who knows everything about beasts, knows him and puts him into his “Story of Ung”: “The sabre-tooth tiger dragging a man to his lair.”

To-day the cave tiger has come back and with him the cave jackal. There is a terrible beauty about the tiger. The jackal is a mean and hideous brute. But both are out of date. Did not Monsieur Capus say the other day that Europe “cannot allow a return of the cave epoch”?

The Kaiser is presumably human, though, in the language of former times, he is also presumably—if not undoubtedly—possessed of a devil, or of many legions of devils.

How any human being can support the thought of the woeful red horror into which he, deliberately, and of long-planned evil intention, plunged the world passes the possibilities of human comprehension.

Deliberately, cold-bloodedly, for the simple purpose of furthering his own ends, he has ordered the massacre of women and children in untold multitudes, and his orders have been executed by the tools he fashioned in the years of treacherous peace for the purpose. Executed too by fiends in human shape who were forced to do as they were ordered or take the consequences. Fathers of families themselves in many cases no doubt, it is one of the marvels of this new savagery that men, so calling themselves, could be found to do such deeds. Many of them have gone to their account. The arch-fiend still survives.

“Suffer the little ones to come unto Me!” said Christ. And His wounded heart must bleed afresh at knowledge of it all.

There was massacre of the innocents in Judea when Herod thought to save himself by slaying the infant Christ with all the other children. But Christ lived. The Kaiser out-Herods Herod, and slays Christ afresh in the murder of all these little ones.

Their blood cries aloud to God. He is Justice. Their cries shall not go unheard of Him. But by their death and the horror of it they are helping to rid the world of the most monstrous tyranny which ever aspired to rule it.

The unerring insight to motive which characterises Raemaekers’ work is well displayed in this cartoon, in which is shown not only the German fury against England, but the senselessness of that fury. The raging, soulless hate depicted here is the hate that takes no count of the lives of women and children, but would sacrifice these and all else to its own ends. The crime is one that will live in men’s memories while recollection of this war endures, and will be placed at the head of that long list of acts which can have no possible effect on the result of the war, and, in fact, can have no result at all beyond showing the guiding spirit of Germany as Raemaekers shows it—ugly, mad, and a thing worthy only of destruction at the hands of sane civilisation.

In the rush of events we are in danger, not of forgetfulness, but of neglect of comprehension of the spirit prompting acts like the sinking of the Lusitania, for the stern purpose of these times is all-absorbing, and material urgencies must, for the time, stand before the reckoning out of a rate of payment for such deeds as this. But in the day of the great reckoning it would be well if this cartoon could be kept full in sight of the reckoners; not for mere vengeance, for that would not bring back those who went down with the Lusitania, or fell under bombs dropped aimlessly or with intent to terrorise—and, in any case, humanity could never exact full vengeance for such acts as these, nor is such a figure as this true presentation of Germany of to-day capable of feeling human vengeance. For the sake of future generations, for the safety of humanity and that civilisation as we know it may endure, the reckoning must include the extinction of this spirit which Raemaekers shows as that of a raging and senseless slaughterer.

In this cartoon Raemaekers has contrived to indicate powerfully what is after all the dominant and peculiar note of the German people. No European nation has ever taken war—as people say—so “seriously,” that is, with so much concentration of attention and elaborate preparation, as has the German Empire. No people has ever had it so thoroughly drilled into its collective mind as have the German subjects of that Empire that war is not only, as all Christian people have always believed, an expedient lawful and necessary upon occasion, but a thing highly desirable in itself, nay, the principal function of a “superior” race and the main end of its being.

And yet after all the actual German is never, like the Frenchman, a natural and instinctive warrior—any more than he is, like the Englishman, a natural and instinctive adventurer. The whole business of Prussian militarism, with the half-witted philosophy by which it is justified, has to be imposed upon him from without by his masters. He fights just as he works, just as he tortures, violates and murders, because he is told to do so by persons in a superior position, holding themselves stiffly, dressed in uniform, and able to hit him in the face with a whip.

Long before the war the absurd Koepenick incident gave us a glimpse of this astonishing docility on its farcical side. Its tragic side is well illustrated by the droves of helpless and inarticulate barbarians driven into the shambles daily (as at Verdun) for the sole purpose of covering up the blunders of their very “efficient” superiors. One could pity the wretches if there were not so considerable a leaven of wickedness in their stupidity.

Extremes so meet that the perversions of the Pacifist make but the reverse of the Prussian shield. As to the Pacifist all war is crime, so to the Prussian all crime is legitimate war. In the sublime resistance of the soldier who defends his country, its women and its children, even to the spilling of his soul, the Pacifist will see nothing but the crime of murder; and to the Prussian the act of war is mainly the perpetration of crime unhindered, from common lying to murder most foul, and beyond that. These crimes the Pacifist palliates and condones, with his Fellowships of Reconciliation and his schools for the Conscientious Liar; while the Prussian celebrates them as victories.

The wilful destruction of works of art as an act of war is a crime unknown among civilised peoples; and if there be degrees in that crime the destruction of such a work as Rheims Cathedral—the pious labour of a colony of artists directed to one end for seven generations—is surely the most monstrous. At Rheims, at Louvain, at Ypres, at a dozen places this spite of the grinning crétin has been manifested; and perhaps after all we were never justified in our amazement. Dull savages do such things in mere incomprehension; and mere incomprehension before a work of art is Prussian nature. The best Prussian use of such a work is to build upon it some irrelevant statistic, some ludicrous polemik, some laborious medley of meaningless side-issue.

Let one thing be borne in mind, however, against the settlement to be made at the end of this war. It is against the policy of civilised peoples to trust savages with the possession either of works of art or weapons of precision.

Cattle are skittish at times, and generally the skittishness is associated with heat. Corn and Cattle do not suggest anything fierce, unless hunger intervene, and then the cattle may become, not skittish, but fierce, and even furious. Are the cattle and the corn once again made to speak a language not their own?

Depicted is an incident of this revealing bloody time. The Austrian Francis Joseph has been brought into subjection by Wilhelm of Potsdam, second of that name overlord of Germany. But, you say, Wilhelm is not overlord of Francis Joseph of Schönbrunn! Facts are as they are. Do you see that spiked helmet crowning the head of intolerance, moustache challenging heaven, and outstretched finger dropping ultimata! The earth is the Kaiser’s, and the cattle thereof. “If you won’t let me have your corn, I will not let you have my cattle”—though the cattle came from Denmark they are “my cattle.” True, there is the other “Kaiser” opposite; but that is another story. We are told it is risky work going hunting with a tiger; and methinks aged Francis Joseph will confess that it is even so. His grey hairs have not saved him personally, his “ramshackle Empire” has been, time and again, over-run, his territory has been offered as sops by his younger brother and master of Potsdam. The only wonder in the legend below is “your corn”; above the artist depicts a raging tyrant whose is all, to dispose as the laws of Kultur may please.

Honour among thieves! That is only when they are in the retail trade. The appetite grows as it is fed, and masterly never becomes master-ful. Austria-Hungary is reputed already as satiated with war’s losses, not repentant, and her people in dire need. But her partner in iniquity is a master: and Austria’s need is an opportunity to bargain, and to make subject; hence the shrinking, cringing Hapsburg before the challenging moustache, strident voice, accusing finger of young Hohenzollern, lean and worn! Before the world, here is the fact, these Kaisers, like foot-pads quarrelling—and there are the two privates, so lean and abject, while the “swag” is in question.

The manipulation of the Press is one of the weapons which Bismarck taught German Imperialism to use. Like others it has been developed by his successors into an instrument which the master himself would hardly have recognised. It is one of the most potent means of that “peaceful penetration” of all other countries which was nothing but a preparation for war. And it has been used in the war with a purposefulness of aim and a versatility of method that betoken long and systematic study. It is a ubiquitous influence and the most subtle of all. Yet the Press is held in greater contempt by official and other ruling circles in Germany than in any other country. They despise the tool, while tacitly acknowledging its utility by unsparing use.

This curious state of things is the fault of the Press. What has rendered it such a pliant tool in the hands of German Imperialism is either credulity or venality; and both are contemptible qualities. Credulity is probably the more prevalent, at least in this country, where shoals of newspapers, blinded by their own prejudices, were the dupes of German duplicity. But there has been venality, too, both crude and subtle. The case of the “Vlaamsche Stem,” here satirised by Raemaekers, is exceptional. So crude and gross a method of influencing the Press as bribing the proprietor of a newspaper (probably with the aid of threats) to hand it over with its staff and good-will could hardly be practised where any independence survived. It was not practised with success even in conquered Flanders, for the staff, to their eternal credit, refused to listen to the new master’s voice. But there are journalists who, less intelligent than the terrier, faithfully accept the voice from the Pickelhaube and wag their little tails when they hear it. To them is offered the parable which shows their relation to their master.

The All-Highest, so we are told, loves a joke at another’s expense, a trait in his character essentially barbaric. Raemaekers reproduces the twinkle in the Imperial eye as William of Potsdam offers to a quondam ally the foot which belongs to his senile and helpless brother of Hapsburg. The roar of anguish from the prostrate octogenarian provokes, as we see, not pity but a grim smile. Italy’s monarch, we may imagine, is muttering to himself:—

The bribe, wrenched from another, was, of course, indignantly rejected, but one wonders what the secret feelings of the Hapsburgs may be towards the Hohenzollerns. We know that the Turk cherishes no love for the Hun who has beguiled him, but we cannot gauge as yet the real strength or weakness of the bond between the Huns on the one hand and the Austrians and Hungarians on the other. Raemaekers has pourtrayed Franz Josef flat on his back. In the language of the ring he is “down and out.” Possibly it may have been so from the beginning. At any rate, in this country, there is an amiable disposition to regard Franz Josef as a victim rather than an accomplice, a weakling writhing beneath the jack-boot of Prussia, impotent to hold his own. It may not be so. Time alone will reveal the truth.

But this much is reasonably certain. When peace is declared, the sincere friendship which once existed between ourselves and the Dual Monarchy may be re-established, but many years must pass before we forgive or forget the Huns. They are boasting to-day that as a nation they are self-sufficing and self-supporting. Amen! Most of us desire nothing better than to leave them alone till they have mended their manners and purged themselves of a colossal and unendurable conceit. I cannot envisage Huns playing tennis at Wimbledon, or English girls studying music at Leipzig. The grass in the streets of Homburg will not, for many years, be trodden out by English feet; the harpies of hotel keepers throughout the Happy Fatherland will prey, it may be presumed, upon their fellow Huns. Then they will fall to “strafing” each other instead of England. And then, as now, their mouthings will provoke inextinguishable laughter.

Ever since with the beginning of Christendom a new soul entered the body of exhausted Europe, it is true to say that we have not only had a certain idea but been haunted by it, as by a ghost. It is the idea crystallised in legends like those of St. Christopher and St. Martin. But it is equally apparent in the most modern ethics and eloquence, as, for instance, when a French atheist orator urged the reconsideration of a criminal case by pointing at the pictured Crucifixion which hangs in a French Law Court and saying: “Voilà la chose jugée.” It is the idea that when oppressing the lowest we may actually be oppressing the highest, and that not even impersonally, but personally. We may be, as it were, the victims of a divine masquerade; and discover that the greatest of kings can travel incognito.

Such a picture, therefore, as the cartoonist has drawn here can be found in all ages of Christian history as a comment on contemporary oppression. But while the central figure remains always the same, the types of the tyrant and the mocker hold our temporary attention; for they are sketched from life and with a living exactitude. Upon one of them especially it would be easy to say a great deal; the grinning Prussian youth with the spectacles and the monkey face, who is using a Prussian helmet instead of the crown of thorns.

Such a scientific gutter-snipe is the real and visible fruit of organised German education; he is a much truer type than any gory and hairy Hun. In the face of that young atheist there is everything that can come from the congestion of the pagan with the parvenu; all the knowingness that is the cessation of knowledge; and that something which always accompanies real atheism—arrested development.

A large number of the Belgians are said to have been in German pay, and their support contributed to put the country helpless under German power. Does this cartoon show Belgians of that class, or only the ordinary selfish and pleasure-seeking element of society, too weak to be even worth purchase by the enemy? The scene is a café at The Hague. In the background the band is making music with all its heart and all its power. Two Belgians going out enveloped in greatcoats with capes to face the stormy weather stop for a moment to speak to an acquaintance, one of a party who are enjoying themselves at ease. They are joining the army.

The party is evidently not interested in such a trifle as their country and its fate: they are well out of Belgium, which must be an uncomfortable place to live in at present, and they are not going back till Belgium is a fit home for the butterflies of fashion. The fifth of the party, down in the right-hand corner, has the vacuous face of an imbecile. Two of the others wear a foolish grin, as the word passes between one of them, a lady, and the more capable-looking man seated next her: “Fancy, they’re off to fight.” What fools to think of duty and country, when it means leaving comfort and the life of society, and facing the storm, with the risk of death!

Whether the artist’s eye be turned to Germany or to Holland, he gives proof that his vision is clear and his sense of propriety and humour keen. But the “new oil line” is Dutch, and here the humour is more genial, the satire less sharp and biting. In the foreground, drawn with great force and dignity, is the Lion of England, in blandest mood, who with his back to the German, astride the cask in strikingly complacent smiles, holds the dish to the tap in England, pouring out oil which is carried by an ingenious use of the Lion’s tail to the German’s cask. Over the great Lion, and held by the Lion, is the umbrella, inscribed N.O.T. [the Netherlands Oversea Trust], under cover of which the oil is thus cleverly carried to the smiling German. The artist touches safely and surely a delicate subject which a journalist could not treat without rousing anger; but in result a situation is shown which is sure to prove, and is proving, a trying one both to the Dutch and to the British people. However, there can be little question but that the edge of his wit is turned upon his “ain countrie” by this formidable artist-commentator.

The cunning and brutality of a German debased by the worship of Kultur, of force, are almost wholly absent here; and instead the artist treats the question of Neutrality, and smiles in line and colour at both Holland and Britain. Poor “human nature” is held up to the mirror; foibles, failings, and futility reflected. That the Lion should think that N.O.T. umbrella shelters him from trickery only shows his vanity: that the oil goes to the “enemy” shows the artist’s views of some Dutchmen; that N.O.T. may also suggest that the German’s need is supplied even by the Lion’s tail of pride. Is there a further satire of men in war? While men are mown down on the field by death’s improved tools, some men will always find it “good business” to deal in “oil,” or something else at the expense of a belligerent. If the Dutchman does the business, and the German, broadly pleased, has his sore need supplied, there is the generous Lion, ’neath an umbrella which he upholds himself, made to oil an enemy, the German of the age of Kultur! Canto virginibus puerisque.

Imagine the feelings of the hindlegs of a stage elephant on being told that the performance is to be a continuous one and you will have some inkling of the dismay of the Kaiser and his henchman, concealed in the plumage of the War Eagle and the Dove of Peace respectively. The one bird is as useless as the other in bringing the war to the end desired in Berlin. The stage eagle is daily losing its plumage, and is rapidly becoming but a moulty apology for the king of birds. As for the dove, it has been used so often, with constantly changing olive branch in its beak, that it now makes its appearance shamefacedly and absolutely without heart.

Imperial eagle mask with half-mad military quasi-deity inside and dove of peace, on the German model, with calculating miscalculating statesman, you rang the curtain up, you cannot ring it down, either to the music of the Hymn of Hate or the Te Deum for peace—the eagle can no longer look boldly straight into the sun, looking for his place in it; the dove has taken permanent quarters in the German ark as it whirls round and round in the whirlpool of impotent effort, ever drawing nearer to the final crash. When the Dove of Peace does come, it will be a real bird of good omen, not a German reserve officer masquerading as one.

This picture is a perfectly accurate symbolic study of the German Empire. Therefore, naturally, it is one of the most dreadful that were ever drawn. In all the gruesome “Dances of Death” in which the fifteenth century took so grim a pleasure, no artist ever conceived the horrible idea of a fat skeleton. But we have not only conceived the thought, we have seen the thing—“a terror in the sunshine.” We know that chest, puffed up with a wind of pride, and that stomach heavy with slaughter and rich living; and above them the Death’s Head. We have seen it. We have felt its foul breath. Its name is Prussia.

Look at a portrait of Frederick the Great, the “onlie true begetter” of this abortion. It oddly suggests what Raemaekers has set down here; the face a skull, the staring eyes those of a lost soul. But the skeleton has grown fat since Frederick’s day—fat on the blood and plunder of nations. Only there is no living flesh on its bones, nothing of humanity about it.

“Can these dry bones live?” was the question asked of the prophet. It might have been asked of Frederick: “Can this nation live, created of your foul witchcraft, without honour, without charity, without human brotherhood or fellowship, without all that which is the flesh and blood of mankind?” The answer must have been that it could live, though with a life coming from below and essentially infernal. It could live—for a time. It could even have great power because its time was short.

In the picture opposite the best elements of the great cartoonist’s genius have full scope. One has the biting satire, the humour and the extraordinary gift of representing facial expressions with an economy of line reminding one of some of the best work of the late Phil May, that prince of humorous British caricaturists.

Raemaekers does not spare even his own countrymen when he discovers a situation inimical to the welfare of the Allied cause, or one which involves an obvious absurdity.

Here we have such a situation. In the early days of the War of far greater frequency than at present, thanks to the ever tightening “strangle hold” of the British Fleet. There can be no doubt that for many months Holland (greatly to her material gain) turned herself into a conduit pipe for the supply of contraband of War to the Central Empires and more especially to Germany. Daily there were scenes such as that depicted, though possibly veiled with some thin veneer either of legality or subterfuge.

Dutch peasants (as well as the agents of the rich merchants and the resident German smugglers) of all ages and grades flocked to the frontier figuratively if not literally to drop their bags of contraband over the slenderly marked line which divides Holland from Germany.

On the faces of the smugglers one sees the grin of satisfaction and the smug recognition of the truth of the ancient saw, “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.” They are all doing their little bit—though strictly neutral, of course—to keep the Huns alive, to provide the means of killing the soldiers of the Allies, and—at the same time are adding to that “nest egg” which is so dear to the Dutch heart.

At the frontier line are two soldiers. The Dutch guard with a stolid appearance in his back, and with a look of detachment and bland unconsciousness of what is going on behind it, discoverable even on the small portion of his face that is visible. On the other side of the frontier stands the Hun guard smiling sardonically at the Dutch ideas of neutrality, and the eagerness with which the people of the land he covets, and hoped to take, play his game.

In this cartoon the Dutch artist pays a high compliment to the British working man. The hideous figure of Alcoholism dressed in rags, with large bony hands at the end of her thin bony arms, with the glaring eyes, the distorted face and the dishevelled hair of a raging mad woman, approaches the workman, offering bottles of whisky which he has struck from her hand. Two of them lie smashed on the ground, the third is falling. The workman’s choice is made voluntarily. He will be neither the slave of drink, on the one hand, nor the slave of prohibitory law on the other. He will judge for himself, and his decision is expressed in this cartoon. He knows the nature of Alcoholism which assails him, and he looks at her with anger and contempt as he points to the answer which he has expressed in the bottles falling or broken.

It contains also the answer which this artist of a foreign and neutral country makes to the charges of drunkenness that were a year ago hurled against the British workman. He was said to be endangering the country by his self-indulgence. While there are exceptions, unfortunately, to the picture that Raemaekers here shows us, there need be no hesitation in believing that the workman’s attitude, as the artist sees it, is the attitude of the overwhelming majority. It is not often that a higher compliment has been paid to the workman than in this cartoon. It is the ideal truth; and the more widely it is seen and appreciated, the more it will make the ideal into the actual truth. It does not enter into the artist’s purpose to show the serious loss caused by the alcoholism of even a small minority, but this point of view must not be forgotten in real life.

A German business firm never lets go of a customer once it seizes him. Of course that is an extreme statement, for customers die or change their country, or even revolt against the importunities of the German bagman. Still, it may be taken as a fact that Germany exhibits a pertinacity in trade that rivals her pertinacity in war.

Now Foreign Trade in the conception of Germany does not mean, though it includes, the selling of goods; it means the destruction of all other than German interests. Politics and economics are convertible terms in the mind of the Fatherland. To absorb and make German the world—that is the idea woven in invisible thread in the fabrics she sells, written in invisible ink in her contracts, stamped in invisible letters on her metal goods.

Before the war she was fast reducing great free nations to economic serfdom, so that to buy a rat-trap they had to turn to Germany, who sold them, with a certain grim humour, even the very guns to fight her in, what she considered to be, an already won war.

She paralysed England, Russia, and France economically and politically, just as a snake paralyses its victims, and she was about to swallow them one after the other, and would have swallowed them only that she opened her mouth too soon.

Consider then the fate of a little nation entering into a political and economic rapprochement with this cormorant people who have so nearly devoured England:

I remember very early in the war a distinguished neutral saying to me: “Germany hopes for swift and wide conquests, not so much that she believes that she can retain all she seizes as that she hopes in the end to have much to bargain with. Her policy, should she fail in her world conquest, will be analogous to that of a thief who seeks to purchase liberty and immunity from punishment for a crime with the money he has stolen.” It is an aspect of Germany’s policy that will repay watching. When peace terms come to be discussed, the Allies must not accept stolen goods even in part settlement for German crimes and aggression.

Raemaekers here suggests, what has been present in many other minds, the idea that the capture of Dutch ships was stage-managed to enable the new Ambassador at The Hague to “create a good impression” in his favour by a release of the ships.

The action may have impressed shipping circles, and have avoided “strained relations” between the two Governments of The Hague and of Berlin; but the Dutch must indeed be a simple folk and blind if they did not on this occasion “look the gift horse in the mouth” with a view to ascertaining its exact value.

To clumsy diplomacy Germany has more than once added a lack of humour of an astonishing degree of obtuseness in dealing with neutral nations, of which this incident of the Dutch ships is an excellent example.

Raemaekers’ terrible picture represents a scene of frequent occurrence in Belgium during the earlier months of the war. The tragedy depicted requires no comment; it is sufficiently explicit in the cynical smile of the German soldier, the agony of the Belgian mother, and the heap of corpses before her amongst which she is to find her son.

German military ethics have been the wonder and the detestation of the whole world. But they have been practised and carried out by the present army in accordance with principles laid down long ago by German military writers, especially by Clausewitz. It was Clausewitz above all who enunciated the axiom that in times of war every elementary consideration of humanity must be postponed in pursuit of victory. Prince Bismarck adopted the doctrines of Clausewitz and often blamed the German soldiers for the leniency with which they at times treated the French in the war of 1870. It was not enough, so Bismarck thought, to slay the actual combatants. “It will come to this,” he said, “that we will shoot down every male inhabitant.”

It is especially interesting to see what attitude the Teuton savages assumed towards the efforts of those who were anxious to mitigate the horrors of war. In a handbook published in 1902 by the German General Staff, we observe the ruthless effrontery with which all the efforts of the men who negotiated The Hague, Geneva and Brussels conventions were swept away. It was laid down with absolute frankness that “German military authorities do not recognise the validity of any international conventions dealing with the laws of war.”

Thus the scenes which have so shocked us in the present campaign are not inconsistent with, are, indeed, the logical outcome of, principles long since accepted by Berlin. War must be carried to its extreme, even against a peaceful population, because in this way the strongest inducements will be brought to bear upon them to admit conquest and therefore to accept the ultimate conclusion of peace. We know from recent reports of the French Government and other authorities that the murder of prisoners and wounded men has been of frequent occurrence, and that not once but many times orders have been issued to give no quarter. Hostages, also, have been terrorised. Taken in order to serve as securities for the good conduct of the civil population, they have not only been put in the forefront of danger but frequently killed in order to execute the decrees of “Terrorism.”

What in point of fact is the German idea of waging war? Inasmuch as the duty of a nation at war is to conquer, all measures, however indefensible in time of peace, are justified. Moreover, if any engagements have been entered into during the pre-war period, they become cancelled when war has begun.

Is it not absolutely necessary that a nation which adopts, principles like these should be so weakened in military strength as to render it impotent for mischief for at least half a century?

Raemaekers knows far more about the real feelings of his own countrymen than a foreigner can do. We have seen that the Dutch people are full of sympathy for the Belgian refugees, and that they have helped them with great generosity. English fugitives from the war zone have also been kindly treated in Holland. But from what I have heard myself, I fear that there are many Dutchmen who do not realise that the existence of their country as an independent nation is bound up with the success of the Allies.

All the corrupt and malign influences which Germany has been sedulously and treacherously exercising in neutral countries have been exerted in their worst forms in Holland. The country is honeycombed with German intrigues, and half-strangled in a network of commercial interests and obligations. The Press is practically not free, and a numbing sense of terror is spread over the population.

In the long run the fate of Belgium, terrible as it has been, may be preferable to that of Holland, unless the countrymen of De Reuter and Van Tromp have the resolution to strike a blow for their honour and freedom, while there is yet time. They are in danger of becoming the vassals of a Power which has no more sympathy with the ideals of a free commonwealth than Philip II., and which has shown that it can surpass the Duke of Alva in cruelty.

The Huns pay the price of lies by being constrained “to lie on still.” But, sooner or later—sooner, perhaps, than they think—their lies will come home to roost. The great gullible Hun public, the slaves of an iron discipline, will learn the truth. No people in the history of the world has been so consummately befooled, so systematically humbugged. One wonders what the awakening will be like? The army, if we may credit the testimony of some prisoners, is just beginning to ask questions; the women of Hunland are on the ragged edge of revolt. The Junkers, it is true, sit heavily upon public opinion, the safety-valve of every nation. Meanwhile, hidden forces are accumulating strength. A cataclysmic explosion must take place. And then the savage instincts of the great blonde beast, instincts fostered by an intelligence perverted to evil, will glut themselves to satiety. La Carmagnole will be danced in Berlin.

As with individuals, so with nations—the most terrible humiliations come from within.

Mynheer van Ploomp, Frau van Ploomp, and Fräulein van Ploomp sitting censoriously on the newspaper, may be raging for their country to come into the war, but they certainly don’t look like it.

One can never judge, of course, by outside appearances, but the casual observer might reasonably infer from the surface look of things that Mynheer had not done so very badly by keeping out of the scrap.

As “Patriot”—“Nederlander,” etc., he may write ferocious epistles to the papers demanding a firm stand by his country on the side of right. But the compression of his left optic belies the supposition.

Mynheer’s “neutrality” has very comfortably lined his own nest and his own inside. And yet he knows—none better that, should the tiger take it into his head, he would be gobbled up at a mouthful. Knows moreover that, if by any fatal chance the tiger won the game, he would inevitably be the next morsel to be gobbled.

When Germany is at last on the run, the ferocious bellicose party will probably come in on the side of the winners. It is not a lofty game. But it probably pays.

Louis Raemakers knows his own countrymen better than we can, and this satire at the expense of the peace at any price brigade is doubtless well deserved. The attitude might have been pardoned two years ago, but it is merely insane to-day. And none knows that fact better than Holland. Like America, she is taking care of herself; indeed, no nation has better reason to do so with a neighbour at her elbow unamenable to reason and uncontrolled by conscience.

Historians to come, however, will argue that our blindness was unpardonable, and our surprise and unpreparedness before the advent of war must cast a heavy slur on the future credit of our past diplomacy. For what could be clearer than Germany’s attitude or brighter than the beacons which had directed and were still directing her course? Bernhardi tells us all there is to know; Frederick the Great established the Prussian tradition on a basis of fraud and force; Bismarck sustained it and William II. has striven to reap the harvest of their sowing. It has needed the united might of Europe to prevent him from doing so. But to cry out against Teutonic principle and practice, as though it were a thing of yesterday sprung upon us in these wars, is absurd. Every politician worthy the name had the pages of history open for his perusal. Frederick pointed out that alliances in which each contracting party has different interests must never hold good under all conditions, or represent a permanent political system. He declared that no alliance or agreement in the world can be effective after the bond of common and reciprocal interest is broken.

Why then marvel at the Belgian “Scrap of paper,” or any number of them? It was a political commonplace with the German Chancellor and his Master that oaths should be broken at the moment it became inconvenient to keep them. Bernhardi himself says that political agreements must always be concluded with a tacit reservation and can only hold as long as the interests of both contracting parties are satisfied.

“La guerre,” said Mirabeau, “est l’industrie nationale de la Prusse.” She came into existence by that industry and no other; and until civilisation can crush that industry, peace terms with Prussia must not depend upon her promise to fulfil them but upon our power to make her do so. To cry “Down with militarism!” therefore is emphatically to play the German game, and she will always support that cry in other mouths, just as she applauds our “Free Trade” and other traditions that have played into her hands so long.

Holland at least is alive to danger, and since the artist drew this picture we have learned by communiqué from Dutch General Headquarters that the army is equipped in every possible respect, and able to face the prospect of war with confidence. The nation as a whole has supported Parliament with enthusiasm, and the preparations have been directed and inspired by the spectacle of modern warfare and its highest needs.

“Here I and sorrows sit. This is my throne, bid Kings come worship it.” Such seems to be an appropriate legend for Raemaekers’ beautiful triptych which he has entitled “Our Lady of Antwerp.” Full of compassion and sympathy for all the sufferings of her people, she sits with the Cathedral outlined behind her, her heart pierced with many agonies. On the left is one of the many widows who have lost their all in this war. On the right is a soldier stricken to death, who has done his utmost service for his country and brings the record of his gallantry to the feet of Our Lady of Antwerp.

Antwerp, as we know, was at the height of its prosperity in the sixteenth century. We have been told that no fewer than five hundred ships used to enter her port in the course of a day, while more than two thousand could be seen lying in her harbour at one time. Her people numbered as many as one million, her fairs attracted merchants from all parts of Europe, and at least five hundred million guilders were put into circulation every year. We know what followed. Its very prosperity proved a bait to the conqueror. In 1576 the city was captured by the Spaniards, who pillaged it for three days. Nine years later the Duke of Parma conquered it, and about the time when Queen Elizabeth was resisting the might of Spain Antwerp’s glory had departed and its trade was ruined. At the close of the Napoleonic wars the city was handed over to the Belgians.

A place of many memories, whose geographical position was well calculated to arouse the cupidity of the Germans, was bound to be gallantly defended by the little nation to which it now belonged. Whether earlier help by the British might or might not have altered the course of history we cannot tell. Perhaps it was not soon enough realised how important it was to keep the Hun invader from the sacred soil. At all events we do not look back on the British Expedition in aid of Antwerp in 1914 with any satisfaction, because the assistance rendered was either not ample enough or else it was belated, or both. So that Our Lady of Antwerp has still to bewail the ruthless tyranny of Berlin, though perhaps she looks forward to the time when, once more in possession of her own cities, Belgium may enter upon a new course of prosperity. We are pledged to restore Belgium, doubly and trebly pledged, by the words of the Prime Minister, and justice will not be done until the great act of liberation is accomplished.

Nothing, when one analyses it, could be imagined more thoroughly characteristic of Prussia than the particular stroke of policy by which a large proportion of the male population of Belgium—as also in a somewhat lesser degree of Northern France—was separated from its family ties and hurried away into exile in Germany, there to be compelled to work for the profit of enemies.

Firstly, it was a violation of the civilised and Christian tradition of European arms. By the rules of such warfare the non-combatant was spared, wherever possible; not only his life but his property and liberty were secure so long as he did not abuse his position.

Secondly, it was an affront to decent human sentiment quite apart from technical rules; the man, guilty of no offence save that of belonging to a country which Prussia had invaded without justice and ravaged without mercy, was torn from his family, who were left to the mercy of their opponents. We all know what that mercy was like.

Thirdly, it was an insult to the human soul, for the unfortunate victims were not only to be exiled from their country, but to be driven by force and terror to serve against it.

Fourthly, and finally, like all the worst Prussian crimes, it was a stupid blunder. Prussia has paid already a very high price for any advantage she may have gained from the mutinous and unwilling labour of these men, and for the swelling of her official return for the edification of her own people and of neutrals by the inclusion of “prisoners of war” of this description. To-day, when she knows not where to turn for men, she is obliged to keep a huge garrison tied up in Belgium to guard her line of retreat. And when the retreat itself comes, the price will rise even higher, and the nemesis will be both just and terrible.

A certain number of Raemaekers’ cartoons concern the politics and the people of his own country in such a way that comment on them by one who is not fully conversant with the situation in Holland is an impertinence, but in this case the artist’s satire is patent to all. The contempt of the Queen at this bald rendering of Germany’s many veiled offers is fully apparent; every line of the figure is expressive of disdain, and the figure in the background appeals without result.

It is that figure in the background which has most interest, however; it is yet another expression of the truth that these cartoons have made so vividly evident, that Germany will stop short of nothing to gain her ends. This envoy is the German as we knew him before the war, deferent, somewhat waiter-ish, and at the same time suggestive of the German commercial traveller—the very worst kind of commercial traveller, for whom the word “business” covers such underhand dealings as accompanied the furtherance of German plans in all countries—a spy in disguise.

He says, in effect—“Yours is a very little country; in the day of our world-dominance it will be well that you should have our protection.” He wants the mouths of the Scheldt, and all that furtherance of German naval plans which dominance over Holland would give, and he offers all that Germany is prepared to offer to any ally or potential ally.

The German Band, as we know it in this country, has never been noted for harmonious music. Blatancy, stridency, false notes, and persistency after the coppers, have been its chief characteristics.

Never since the world began has there been such a campaign of barefaced humbug and lying as that organised by William, Hindenburg, Hollweg and Co. for the deceiving and fleecing of the much-tried countries temporarily under their sway.

But the money had to be got in by hook or by crook, and by hook and by crook and in every nefarious way they have milked their unfortunate peoples dry.

But there is another side to all this. In time, the veil of lies and false intelligence of victories in the North Sea, and at Verdun, and, indeed, wherever Germany has fought and failed, will be rent by the spear of Truth.

Then will come the débâcle. And then, unless every scrap of grit and backbone has been Prussianised out of the Teuton, the revulsion of feeling will sweep the oppressors out of existence; and Germany, released from the strangle-hold, may rise once more to take the place among the civilised nations of the world which, by her foul doings of the last two years, she has deliberately forfeited.

To understand the true inwardness of this cartoon, the reader must be familiar with the writings of General von Hartmann, one of the chief evangelists of German methods of warfare. The following gem is extracted from an article by von Hartmann, published in 1877, on “Military Necessities and Humanity”:—

“The warrior has need of passion. It must not, indeed, as the result of opposition, be regarded as a necessary evil; nor condemned as a regrettable consequence of physical contact; nor must we seek to restrain and curb it as a savage and brutal force; for in causing a powerful and exclusive concentration of individual energies it becomes an indispensable agent of the consummation of conflict. Every warlike exploit is before all things of a personal nature; it puts before all else the affirmation of the individual character, and it demands, in its agent, a release from the oppressive rule of the moderating laws of everyday life.... Violence and passion are the two levers essential to any warlike action, and, we say it advisedly, of all military greatness.”

It is when Germany’s absence of morals is most blatant that her presence of mind comes to the rescue. It is a strange and wonderful mind that she reveals—a weird combination of childishness without its innocence, of wickedness without its cunning. Yet somehow the German mental process is sometimes convincing. It is really one of the wonders of the world that it should be so. When a country that stole Silesia, Poland, Schleswig, Alsace-Loraine, Belgium and Serbia solemnly assures a shocked and startled world that its life-long object is to protect the freedom of small nationalities; when a Government, that kills peaceful passengers by the hundred and torpedoes neutral trading ships, says it does so in the cause of the freedom of the seas; when a frenzied Emperor, foiled in the effort to conquer Europe by a surprise attack, vows that his only purpose is self-defence, one would think that such talk could deceive nobody—not even the speaker. A child’s lie embarrasses but does not mislead its elders. Why, then, does the German lie mislead? Or is it that the bully only seems to be believed?

The feebler spirits of Holland would rather believe anything than be forced into the turmoil of war. Germany, as a protector of the weak, the champion of the small, they are willing to accept—rather than meet Germany in arms. Nay, they—the descendants of the greatest seamen, and to-day dependent on the sea for more than half the country’s wealth—would prefer Germany’s guarantee of sea freedom than run the risk of her land atrocities.

Raemaekers is the enfant terrible of political argument. The German contention is childish, the Dutch credulity is childish, and he meets them with a child’s demonstration of what the truth would be. Three great outlets of the sea are blocked by three brutal figures. We have only to look at them to realise that here are dangerous playmates.

In this cartoon Raemaekers endeavours to bring home to his compatriots one lesson of the War. That as human nature now is—and especially German in-human nature—the only guarantee, not necessarily of peace but of life, for the smaller nations on the borders of the German Empire is the provision of a force sufficient to give pause to wanton aggression.

A large and more efficient Army might not have saved Belgium. It would, however, possibly have diverted the German advance to another quarter. It would undoubtedly have gained much valuable time for the Allies in their fight for the cause of freedom and the preservation of small nations.

Of the importance of a large and efficient Army to Holland at the present juncture there can be no question. Germany in retreat may invade the territory of the gallant little nation of free people, whose history is a glorious and eloquent plea for their continued existence as a separate nation, unless they are prepared to offer effective resistance. Often the dying throes of a wild beast involve an unexpectedly wide area in destruction. And if Germany wins, Holland may make up its mind to becoming an appendage of the Hunnish Empire.

That this is realised by the more thoughtful and prescient Dutch no one who knows them doubts; but the wave of prosperity in war time which Holland has experienced may serve to dull the apprehension of the less suspicious and far-sighted of her people.

With the case of the Belgian refugees before their eyes one may hope that the lesson may strike home. Indeed, we cannot believe that the wrongs of Belgium will be readily forgotten.

The central figure of the cartoon is not less eloquent because the despair that is written upon the face is less emotional than that of the girl and woman, or even the little boy. But it grips. Wisdom, too often, alas! is purchased only with the bitter coin of experience.

Amongst my most treasured possessions is a photograph taken on board the lost Invincible after the battle of the Falkland Islands was over. Three-quarters of a mile away Inflexible is silhouetted against the evening sky, and between the two ships lies the flotsam of the Gneisenau, with 200 or more German sailors clinging to wreckage or swimming for their lives. A few steam pinnaces and cutters are picking up these poor drowning fellows as fast as they can. The fighting navy, having conquered its foe, is engaged upon the task, always dear to it, of saving life. It is an added pleasure to befriend those who have fought gallantly.

I do not know whether Raemaekers has ever seen this photograph, but this drawing shows the drowning people, the wreckage, exactly reproduced. But here the only boat has itself been smashed by a shot, so that the last hope of safety of those in the water has been taken from them. And the ship that sinks is not a fighting ship, and the poor souls struggling for their lives are not fighting men. Can these men in the foreground be the sailors of a fighting navy?

For the officer of this submarine is not content to warn the Falaba and give its people a chance to save themselves before sinking her. He has, indeed, warned her, but, with a refinement of cruelty, has torpedoed the ship while the women and children were being hastily got off; and, not content with this, has fired on and sunk the boats in which his terrified victims hoped to escape.

There is here no artistic exaggeration. The picture is horrible just because it is photographically accurate.

It is a hideous negation of all that the word “navy” has stood for in every country that has ever possessed one. In nothing does Raemaekers show his Dutch blood more than in his savage anger at this gruesome perversion of the sea tradition. For the Dutch have a great naval history and know the meaning of a seaman’s honour.

The true sailor is great in his bravery because he is still greater in his chivalry. What will history say of these debauched brutes who revel in their hangman’s task?

In this one picture is the whole story of German submarine war, which heeds the presence of neither women nor children, but strikes swiftly, secretly, and without giving its victim the opportunity of defence. Not that in war it is demanded that the opponent should be given chance of a fight on equal terms; for in sea war the whole object of a naval commander is to concentrate an overwhelming superiority of fire on his enemy, and to destroy.

It remained for Germany, however, to apply this doctrine of destruction to mercantile craft and to neutral shipping, and to conduct war on the principle that war justifies any means, any barbarity, even the indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatants. This assassin striking from behind has called the British blockade barbarous; but that blockade at least gives the nation against whom it is exercised a choice between evils, so much so in fact that all nations recognise it, and for ages have recognised it, as part of the procedure of war—no accusation of barbarity was made against Germany in 1871 for the starvation of the civilian population of Paris. But this sea-murder is a different thing, a thing that does not advance the end of the war, and a sign of a claim on the part of its authors that civilisation cannot allow. It is as if they questioned: “Since we have a certain power of destruction, shall we not use it as pleases us?”

And the answer? There were, after the sinking of the Lusitania, rows of bodies of women and children laid out for identification; there were many other instances, almost equally tragic, and the answers that they afford are eloquent enough. May they be well remembered in the day of settlement.

Looking at this cartoon one can understand why Raemaekers is not persona grata in the Happy Fatherland. With half a dozen touches he has changed Satan from the magnificent Prince of Evil whom Gustave Doré portrayed into a—Hun. Henceforth we shall envisage Satan as a Hun, talking the obscene tongue—now almost the universal language in Hades—and hailed by right-thinking Huns as the All Highest War Lord. Willy senior must be jealous.

With the learned Professor, the cartoonist not only produces a composite portrait of all the Herren Professoren, but also drives home the point of his amazing pencil into what is perhaps the most instructive lesson of this monstrous war—the perversion to evil uses of powers originally designed, nourished, and expanded to benefit mankind. When the Furor Teutonicus has finally expended itself, we do not envy the feelings of the illustrious chemists who perfected poison gas and liquid fire! Will they, when their hour comes, find it easy to obey the poet’s injunction, and, wrapping the mantle of their past about them, “lie down to pleasant dreams”?

We are assured that these professors have not exhausted their powers of frightfulness. It may be so. This is certain: Such frightfulness will ultimately exhaust them. With this reflection, we may leave them, grist to be ground by the mills of God.

Nothing could be more thoroughly characteristic of the Prussian mind than its utter misunderstanding of England. It exhibits all the characteristics which we are accustomed to associate with “German Thought,” and especially the combination of enormous industry in the accumulation of facts with an utter inability to appreciate such facts as cannot be catalogued and an amazing stupidity in passing judgment even upon the facts which are recognised.

Thus, before the outbreak of war, the Prussians, knowing that we were in the main a commercial people, immediately deduced the conclusion that we should never fight for any other purpose than that of making money. They found themselves in error. Similarly, after our intervention, they looked up their documents and, discovering that we had never had a very large army, concluded that we were not to be reckoned with seriously in the field of military operations. Our naval power they allowed for, for they could count the ships and had them all duly docketed. But our army was “contemptible,” and would certainly remain so.

That a nation, not originally military, could transform itself into a nation in arms by the mere action of patriotic enthusiasm and anger was a thing altogether undreamed of in the Prussian philosophy. The revelation that the thing was so has produced first, incredulity, and then a sort of bewilderment, as if all the foundations of “scientific thought,” as the Germans understand it, had collapsed—as, indeed, they had.

The thing that has not collapsed is the eternal strength which belongs to a nation utterly convinced with the justice of its cause. The thing is not possible to Prussians; but it is possible to Englishmen, as the Prussians are already beginning to know.

The lecturer, with true German casuistry, minimises the rhinoceros and magnifies the fly, so that there is “very little difference” between them, as far as his arguments are concerned. Fortunately for the cause of the Allies, casuistry is not a military asset; had it been one, Germany would long since have won the war, and that not only on this count, for the saying that “the wish is father to the thought” is nowhere more true than in Germany.

There, the people are now firmly convinced that the war was forced on them, thanks to the casuistry of their leaders; they honestly believe, if professorial writings have any sincerity in them, that the invasion of Belgium was justified by their need, and that scraps of paper are only scraps of paper where they, the chosen nation for the spread of culture, are concerned; they believe that Britain’s blockade is barbarous and unjust, that France is an effete nation, that Russia is peopled by a horde of savages, that the starvation of their civilian prisoners instead of exchanging them is a just measure on their part—and many other things which sane reasoning shows to be false. They have, apparently, an endless credulity.

If one would question the cause for this, the answer lies in one word—“Pan-Germanism,” that disease which has sapped away the moral fibre of a nation and implanted colossal conceit in its place. No statement is more true than that Germany is devoid of a sense of humour, for this sense is in its essence that of proportion, and not only in her methods of war and her dealings with the rest of the world has Germany lost all sense of proportion, but also in her estimate of herself and her place in the scheme of things. A proper sense of proportion is incompatible with Pan-Germanism.

Since the opening of hostilities in the present war the Scottish regiments have given repeated proofs of a valour which adds new lustre to the great traditions of Scottish soldiership. Through all the early operations—on the retreat from Mons and at the battles of the Marne and the Aisne—the Royal Scots Guards, the Scots Greys, the Gordon, the Seaforth and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers gained many fresh laurels by their heroism and undaunted spirit. The London Scottish Territorials, too, have shown a prowess as signal as that of the Scots of the Regular Army; while the mettle of men of Scottish descent has made glorious contribution in France and elsewhere to the fine records of the Overseas armies.

It is the inevitable corollary that death should levy a heavy toll on Scottish soldiers in the field. Thousands of kilted youth have suffered the fate which Raemaekers depicts in the accompanying cartoon. It is not, of course, only the young Scot whose thought turns in the moment of death to the hearth of his home with vivid memories of his mother. But the word “home” and all that the word connotes often makes a more urgent appeal to the Scot abroad than to the man of another nationality. There is significance in the fact that, far as the Scots are wont to wander over the world’s surface, they should, under every sky and in every turning fortune, treasure as a national anthem the song which has the refrain:—

The German soldier in this war would seem to have lost well nigh all touch of humanity. Yet the draughtsman here suggests that even the German soldier on occasion yields to the pathos of the young Scot’s death-cry for home and mother. There is grim irony in the dying man’s blurred vision, which mistakes the hand of his mortal foe for that of his mother.

England has without doubt been Germany’s favourite bug-a-boo for the war. Once she threatened to exalt France to pride of place, but her allegiance soon returned to John Bull, and she has left no trick of hate untried to place him in the pillory before her own subjects and neutral nations.

“Let shame,” said Herr Maximilian Harden, who, as a German-Jew, may perhaps view the wider issues with some detachment and plead to his adopted people for philosophy and self-control—“let shame spread a thick veil over self-deification and enemy-bedevilment.” A futile appeal must this be to a nation that knows no shame, from its Emperor to his humblest slave. Self-deification is the marrow in German bones, the oil in German joints; while as to bedevilment of the enemy, in this they naturally excel, since supreme power of detraction is a complement of envy and jealousy: the one involves the others.

Michael’s dummy “John Bull” was, however, very clearly made in Germany, and Holland is not deceived. She adjoins Belgium—a circumstance the man behind the scarecrow perhaps forgot—and they who have been watching Germany at work in their neighbour’s country are not going to be alarmed at this silly German “John Bull.” They know the real John Bull at first hand, and his methods of conducting commerce and practising war. It was not John Bull who torpedoed the Tubantia and committed a thousand other pirate and brigand acts against this neutral power. It was not John Bull who in August of last year wrote to the Burgomaster of little Wavre and demanded £120,000, failing which Wavre would be set on fire and destroyed “without distinction of persons, the innocent to suffer with the guilty.”

Holland is staunch, for she knows that Germany’s care for the weak nations is the good wife’s love for the chickens and the butcher’s for the lamb. Michael would like to thrust his revolver into John’s hand and pretend afterwards that he had pulled the trigger; but the smiling Dutch frontier guard is in no danger of being deceived.

The “Land and Water” edition of Raemaekers’ Cartoons will be complete in twenty-six parts.

Each part will contain Twelve Cartoons in colours and Twelve Chapters by our most prominent writers. When complete there will be 312 Cartoons and 312 Chapters.

These cartoons and articles will illustrate and describe every phase of the war in a manner quite distinct from any other war publication, and when complete, the parts of which this is the first, will constitute a short, vivid and graphic history of the war, which will live and be treasured long after the mass of literature now being produced is forgotten. These parts are compiled so that when bound the stories and illustrations will be continuous. The twenty-six parts will be divided into two volumes, thirteen parts to one volume. Those who wish to possess the work complete should order the whole of the twenty-six parts immediately from their Newsagents, thereby making sure that no one part is missing from the complete set.

Special Binding Cases, designed by Mr. Raemaekers, will be available in due course.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

Transcriber’s Notes

Spelling inconsistencies were not changed, as several different people wrote the commentaries.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

The original pages from which the images were obtained had faded unevenly and turned somewhat yellow. The method used to restore them probably altered the background colors in some cases, particularly in the later images.

The “SPECIAL NOTICE” and order slip at the end of the book originally were found between pages 48 and 49. The sheet of paper on which they were printed appears to have been tipped into the book, not bound, and was moved so as to not interrupt the flow of the rest of the book.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The "Land & Water" edition of Raemaekers' cartoons, volume 1

THE “LAND & WATER” EDITION OF RAEMAEKERS’ CARTOONS

INTRODUCTION By the Editor of Land and Water

AN APPRECIATION FROM THE PRIME MINISTER

“FOR YOUR MOTHERLAND”

The Next to be Kicked Out—Dumba’s Master

The Friendly Visitor

“To Your Health, Civilisation!”

Fox Tirpitz Preaching to the Geese

The Prisoners

It’s Unbelievable

Kreuzland, Kreuzland über Alles

The Ex-Convict

Miss Cavell

The Hostages

King Albert’s Answer to the Pope

The Gas Fiend

The German Tango

The Zeppelin Triumph

Keeping Out the Enemy

The German Offer

The Wolf Trap

Ahasuerus II.

Our Candid Friend

Peace and Intervention

Little Red Riding Hood

The Sea Mine

“Seduction”

Murder on the High Seas

Ad Finem

“U’s”

Mater Dolorosa

“Gott strafe Italien!”

Serbia

“Just a moment—I’m coming”

The Holy War

“Gott mit Uns”

The Widows of Belgium

The Harvest is Ripe

“Unmasked”

The Great Surprise

Thou art the Man!

Sympathy

The Refugees

“The Junker”

“Au milieu de fantômes tristes et sans nombre”

Bluebeard’s Chamber

The Raid

Better a Living Dog than a Dead Lion

“The Burden of the Intolerable Day”

Eagle in Hen-run

The Future

Christ or Odin?

Ferdinand

Juggernaut

Michael and the Marks

Their Beresina

New Peace Offers

The Shields of Rosselaere.

The Obstinacy of Nicholas

Bundles of Four

The Order of Merit

The Marshes of Pinsk

God with Us

Ferdinand the Chameleon

The Latin Sisters

Misunderstood

Prosperity Reigns in Flanders

The Last Hohenzollern

Piracy

“Weeping, She hath Wept”

Military Necessity

Liberté! Liberté, Chérie!

I—“A Knavish Piece of Work”

II—“Sisyphus,—his Stone”

Concrete Foundations

Pallas Athene

The Wonders of Culture

“Folk Who Do Not Understand Them”

On the Way to Calais

THE “LAND & WATER” EDITION OF
RAEMAEKERS’
CARTOONS

INTRODUCTION
By the Editor of Land and Water