Raemaekers' Cartoons Part 8

We know--and I am grateful for the chance to voice our grat.i.tude 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 realize now the n.o.bility 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 sportmanship, 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 realize the greatness, so in the fullness of time must William come to realize how great is the Allah of the Moslem, the Christian G.o.d Whom he has blasphemed, and in Whose name he and his people have perpetrated so many crimes and abominations.

BOYD CABLE.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HOLY WAR

THE TURK: "But he is so great."

WILLIAM: "No one is great, save Allah, and I am his prophet."]

GOTT MIT UNS

When we consider the public utterances of the German clergy, we can very easily subst.i.tute 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 _debacle_ of reasoning faculty which is the price intellectual Germany has paid for the surrender of her soul to Prussia.

An example or two may be cited from the outrageous ma.s.s.

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 G.o.d allowed His only Son to be crucified, that His scheme of redemption might be accomplished, so Germany, G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l; 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.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "GOTT MIT UNS"]

THE WIDOWS OF BELGIUM

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 n.o.bly 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-pa.s.sion 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 DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WIDOWS OF BELGIUM]

THE HARVEST IS RIPE

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.

WILLIAM MITCh.e.l.l RAMSAY.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HARVEST IS RIPE]

"UNMASKED"

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 unimpa.s.sioned 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 civilized 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 ma.s.sed 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.

BOYD CABLE.

[Ill.u.s.tration: UNMASKED

The Yellow Book.]

THE GREAT SURPRISE

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 pa.s.sage 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 Ca.n.a.l as a German Navy in the Kiel Ca.n.a.l; and the higher critics of Germany will have no difficulty in proving, in the Kiel Ca.n.a.l at all events, that the safety is due to human and not to divine wisdom.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GREAT SURPRISE

Moses II leads his chosen people through the Red Sea to the promised (Eng)land.]