Raemaekers' Cartoons Part 22

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 But both are out of date.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?"

HERBERT WARREN.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JACKALS IN THE POLITICAL FIELD

JACKALS (Flemish Pro-Germans): "What he leaves of Belgium will be enough for us."]

A LETTER FROM THE GERMAN TRENCHES

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 princ.i.p.al 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 ill.u.s.trated 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.

CECIL CHESTERTON.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A LETTER FROM THE GERMAN TRENCHES

"We have gained a good bit, our cemeteries now extend as far as the sea."]

HIS MASTER'S VOICE

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 recognized. 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 Sten," here satirized 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 goodwill 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.

A. SHADWELL.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HIS MASTER'S VOICE

The _Vlaamsche Stem_ (Flemish Voice), a Flemish paper, was bought by the Germans, whereupon the whole staff resigned, as it no longer represented its t.i.tle.]

HUN GENEROSITY

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:--

_Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes._

The bribe, wrenched from another, was, of course, indignantly rejected, but one wonders what the secret feelings of the Hapsburgs may be toward 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 portrayed 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 reestablished, but many years must pa.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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.

HORACE ANNESLEY VACh.e.l.l.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HAVE ANOTHER PIECE?"]

EASTER, 1915

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 crystallized 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: "Voila la chose jugee." It is the idea when that 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 exact.i.tude. 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 organized 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.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EASTER, 1915

"And they bowed the knee before Him."]

PAN GERMANICUS AS PEACE MAKER

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.

ALFRED STEAD.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PAN GERMANICUS AS PEACE MAKER

THE DOVE: "They say they do not want peace, as they have time enough."

THE EAGLE: "Alas! That is just what we haven't got."]

GOTT MIT UNS

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.