Chapter V: Part 5

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.

HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL

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 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!

ARTHUR POLLEN

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 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!

W. M. J. WILLIAMS

WILLIAM: “Write it down, schoolmaster--Monday shall be Copper Day; Tuesday, Potato Day; Wednesday, Leather Day; Thursday, Gold Day; Friday, Rubber Day; Saturday, No Dinner Day; and Sunday, Hate Day!”]

The Dutch Journalist to his Belgian Confrère

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.

G. K. CHESTERTON

A Bored Critic

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.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS

“The Peace Woman”

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.

CLIVE HOLLAND

THE NEUTRAL SOLDIER: “Madam, we would prefer the protection of an armour-plate.”]

The Self-satisfied Burgher

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.

W. L. COURTNEY

“What does it matter if we’re annexed afterwards, so long as we remain neutral now?”]

The Decadent

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.

Well--he has got his desire, and more than he expected.

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.

JOHN OXENHAM

1914: “Now the war begins as we like it.”

1915: “But this is not as I wished it to continue.”

(Published after the French success in Champagne.)]

Liquid Fire

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.

CLIVE HOLLAND

Nish and Paris

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.

SIDNEY LEE

“I commenced this as the entry into Paris, but I must finish it as the entry into Nish.”]

The Fire Fiend

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.

WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY

“Hullo! Potsdam? Did you thank your dear old God for this new success?”]

The German Oculist

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.

W. L. COURTNEY

GERMAN OCULIST (trying on spectacles): “What do you read now?”

DUTCHMAN: “Deutschland über Alles.”

GERMAN OCULIST: “That is right; that pair exactly suits you.”

“Oranje Boven” is the Dutch cry which answers to the German “Deutschland über Alles.”]

Willy-Nilly

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?

Raemaekers answers the question with his wonderful pencil in this cartoon.

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.

What are their inmost thoughts--now?

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.

HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL

WILLIAM: “Perhaps, but hardly as much so as I anticipated.”]

The Shirkers

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:

What have I done for you,
England, my England?
What is there I would not do,
England, my own?

SIDNEY LEE

Lager Beer for Tripoli

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.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS

French rifles were seized at Genoa in beer casks. These had been consigned by Germans to Tripolitan insurgents, it being hoped that their discovery might lead to trouble between France and Italy.]

The German Anti-Bellicist

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.”

CLIVE HOLLAND

“If you insist upon Belgium being evacuated by Germany, what is the good of my being a member of the Anti-War Council?”]

One of the Kaiser’s Many Mistakes

Louis Botha--we touch our hats to you!

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.

And Germany once was great, and might have been greater.

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.

No matter now the rights and wrongs of it;
You fought us bravely and we fought you fair.
The fight is done. Grip hands! No malice bear!
We greet you, brothers, to the nobler strife
Of building up the newer, larger life!

Join hands! Join hands! Ye nations of the stock!
And make henceforth a mighty Trust for Peace;--
A great enduring peace that shall withstand
The shocks of time and circumstance; and every land
Shall rise and bless you--and shall never cease
To bless you--for that glorious gift of Peace.

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.

JOHN OXENHAM

“I have carried out everything in accordance with our compact at Vereeniging.”]

The German Spy

Ridicule is the rapier which pierces the pachydermatous hide of the Hun.

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?

I hope not, but I hae ma doots.

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.

For this alone may the Lord be praised!

HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL

THE SPY: “Military secrets behind? Eh?”

POLICEMAN: “Much more dangerous things for Germany--Raemaekers’ cartoons.”]

Belgium in Holland

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.

EDMUND GOSSE

“Your sufferings are mine as are your fortunes.”]

Serbia

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.

WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY

“Now we can make an end of him.”]

Slow Asphyxiation

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.

JOSEPH THORP

The German Propagandist

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.

ALFRED STEAD

“I assure you, my friends, that anyone who does not love us, whatever his nationality, has assuredly been bought over by the enemy.”]

Jackals in the Political Field

“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”?

HERBERT WARREN

JACKALS (_Flemish pro-Germans_): “What he leaves of Belgium will be enough for us.”]

The Sacrifice

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.

And this man calls upon God to bless his evil doings!

“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.

They are pitiful sacrifices to the blood-lust of this modern Moloch.

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.

JOHN OXENHAM

For humanity’s sake.]

“Lusitania” Amok

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.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN

“Gott strafe England, or I will do it myself.”]

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 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.

CECIL CHESTERTON

“We have gained a good bit; our cemeteries now extend as far as the sea.”]

“It was I who opened fire on Rheims”

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.