Raemaekers' Cartoons Part 16

VON BETHMANN-HOLLWEG AND TRUTH

_"Incorrupta Fides, nudaque Veritas"_ HORACE

"Good Faith unstained, and Truth all-unadorned"

_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 pa.s.sion, 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 bl.u.s.tered, 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:

"Bright Ithuriel's lance Truth kindling truth where'er it glance"

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 _dementi_.

The most famous is

"_Magna est veritas et praevalet_"

"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.

HERBERT WARREN.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VON BETHMANN-HOLLWEG AND TRUTH

"Truth is on the path and nothing will stay her."]

VAN TROMP AND DE RUYTER

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 att.i.tude! 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 n.o.bler spirits and braver days?

ARTHUR POLLEN.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VAN TROMP AND DE RUYTER

"So long as you permit Zeppelins to cross our land you surely should cease to boast of our deeds."

Whenever a Dutchman wishes to speak of the great past of his country he calls to mind the names of these heroes.]

WAR AND CHRIST

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 agonized fury of a lost soul upon things sacred to the G.o.d 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 l.u.s.t, the worship of unrighteous strength--in fact, in all that can be summed up in the single word "Prussia."

CECIL CHESTERTON.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WAR AND CHRIST]

BARBED WIRE

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 surpa.s.ses 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.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BARBED WIRE]

THE HIGHER POLITICS

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 civilized 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 sh.e.l.l-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 sh.e.l.ls, 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.