Raemaekers' Cartoons Part 18

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 G.o.d allow it? Is G.o.d 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' l.u.s.t and they walked in their own counsels" (Ps. lx.x.xi, 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.

A. SHADWELL.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHRISTMAS EVE

JOSEPH: "The Holy War is at the door!"]

SERBIA

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 (_l.u.s.tige 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 anaemic 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.

HORACE ANNESLEY VACh.e.l.l.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SERBIA]

THE LAST OF THE RACE

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 demoralized 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 civilized 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 emphasizes.

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 cl.u.s.tered; 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 c.o.c.ked 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!

ARTHUR POLLEN.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LAST OF THE RACE

VON TIRPITZ: No, my dears, I'm not sending any more of you to those wicked English; the survivors shall go to the Zoo."]

THE CURRICULUM

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 navely did Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg disclose the _Zeitgeist_ of German rulers when with pa.s.sion he declared Britain to be going to war for "a sc.r.a.p of paper!" A purpose to serve, a treaty becomes "a sc.r.a.p"--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 s.p.a.cious 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 Sat.u.r.days, but many other days. And all to gratify the mad projectors imposing Kultur on an unwilling world!

W. M. J. WILLIAMS.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE NEW SCHOOL CURRICULUM

William: "Write it down, schoolmaster--Monday shall be Copper Day, Tuesday, Potato Day, Wednesday, Leather Day; Thursday, Gold Day, Friday, Rubber Day; Sat.u.r.day, No Dinner Day; and Sunday, Hate Day!"]

THE DUTCH JOURNALIST TO HIS BELGIAN CONFReRE

Whether the type here taken is a true criticism of a commercial att.i.tude 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 coa.r.s.e, 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 emphasizes an element in the general German plot against the world which is often forgotten in phrases about fire and sword. The Prussianized 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 any one who realizes 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 confreres 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.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DUTCH JOURNALIST TO HIS BELGIAN CONFReRE: "Eat and hold your tongue."]

A BORED CRITIC

From Homeric warfare to subterranean conflict of modern trenches is a far cry, and Ares, G.o.d 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 civilization, 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 civilized nation on earth; and before these lines are published their uncivilized 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.