Chapter II: Part 2

Prussia in every war has betrayed that peculiar mark of barbarism consisting in using the intellectual weapons of a superior, but not knowing how to use them. It is still a matter of mystery to the directing Prussian mind why the sinking of the _Lusitania_ should have shocked the world. A submarine cannot take a prize into port. The _Lusitania_ happened to be importing goods available in war, therefore the _Lusitania_ must be sunk. All the penumbræ of further consideration which the civilised man weighs escape this sort of logic. Similarly, the Prussian argues, if an armed man is prepared to surrender, convention decrees that his life should be spared. Therefore, if an armed man be just fresh from the murder of a number of children, he has but to cry “Kamerad” to be perfectly safe. And Prussia foams at the mouth with indignation whenever this strict rule of conduct is forgotten in the heat of the moment. The use of poison in the field which Prussia for the first time employed (and reluctantly compelled her civilised opponents to reply to) is in the same boat. A shell bursts because solid explosive becomes gaseous. To use shell which in bursting wounds and kills men is to use gas in war; therefore if one uses gas in the other form of poison, disabling one’s opponent with agony, it is all one. Precisely the same barbaric use of logic--which reminds one of the antics of an animal imitating human gestures--will later apply to the poisoning of water supplies, or the spreading of an epidemic. It is soldierly and excites no contempt or indignation to strike at your enemy with a sword or shoot a pellet of lead at him in such a fashion that he dies. What is all this foolish pother about killing him with bacilli in his cisterns or with a drop of poison in his tea? Men in war have burned groups of houses with the torch in anger or for revenge. Why distinguish between that and the methodical sprinkling of petroleum from a hose by one gang and the equally methodical burning of the whole town house by house with little capsules of prepared incendiary stuff? The rule always applies--but only against the opponent: never to oneself. From that attitude of mind the Prussian will never emerge. We shall, please God, see that mood in all its beauty in later stages of the war, when the coercion of the Prussian upon his own soil leads to acts indefensible by Prussian logic. We have already had a taste of this sort of reasoning when the royalties fled from Karlsruhe and when the murderers upon the sinking Zeppelin received the reward due to men who boast that they will not keep faith.

HILAIRE BELLOC

“I was a ‘lifer,’ but they found I had many abilities for bringing civilisation amongst our neighbours, so now I am a soldier.”]

Miss Cavell

Most of the English caricaturists are much too complimentary to the German Emperor. They draw his moustaches, but not his face. Now his moustaches are exactly what he, or the whole Prussian school he represents, particularly wishes us to look at. They give him the fierce air of a fighting cock; and however little we may like fierceness, there will always be a certain residual respect for fighting, even in a cock. Now the Junker moustache is a fake; almost as much so as if it were stuck on with gum. It is, as Mr. Belloc has remarked, curled in a machine all night lest it should hang down. Raemaekers, in the sketch which shows the Kaiser as waiting for Nurse Cavell’s death to say, “Now you can bring me the American protest,” has gone behind the moustache to the face, and behind the face to the type and the spirit. The Emperor is not commanding in a lordly voice from a throne, but with a leer and behind a curtain. In the few lines of the lean unnatural face is written the real history of the Hohenzollerns, the kind of history not often touched on in our comfortable English humour, but common to the realism of Continental art: the madness of Frederick William, the perversion of Frederick the Great, the hint, mingled with subtler talents, of the mere idiocy that seems to have flowered again in the last heir of that inhuman house. The Hohenzollerns have varied from generation to generation in many things and like many families; some of them have been tyrants, some of them geniuses, some of them merely boobies; but they have shared in something more than that hereditary policy which has been the poison in Christendom for two hundred years. There is a ghost who inhabits these perishing tenements, and in such a picture as this of Raemaekers’ men can see it looking out of the eyes. And it is neither the spirit of a tyrant nor of a booby; but the spirit of a sly invalid.

G. K. CHESTERTON

WILLIAM: “Now you can bring me the American protest.”]

The Hostages

Ay, boy--you may well ask.

And the world asks also, and in due time will exact an answer--to the last drop of innocent blood.

What have you done?

You have fallen into the hands of the most scientifically organised barbarism the world has ever seen, or, please God, ever will see--to whom, of deliberate choice, such words as truth, honour, mercy, justice, have become dead letters, by reason of the pernicious doctrines on which the race has been nourished--by which its very soul has been poisoned.

Dead letters?--worn-out rags, the very virtues they once represented, even in Germany, long since flung to the dust-heaps of the past in the soulless scramble for power and a place in the sun which no one denied her.

Deliberately, and of malice prepense, the military caste of Prussia has taught, and the unhappy common-folk have accepted, that as a nation they are past all that kind of thing. There is only one right in the world--the might of the strongest. The weak to the wall! Make way for the Hun, whose god is power, and his high-priests the Kaiser and the Krupps.

And so, every nation, even the smallest, on whom the eye of the Minotaur has settled in baleful desire, has said, “Better to die fighting than fall into the hands of the devil!” And they have fought--valiantly, and saved their souls alive, though their bodies may have been crushed out of existence by overwhelming odds. As nations, however, they shall rise again, and with honour, when their treacherous torturers have been crushed in their turn.

And, wherever the evil tide has welled over a land, indemnities, incredible and unreasonable, have been exacted, and hostages for their payment, and for good behaviour under the yoke meanwhile, have been taken.

Woe unto such! In many cases they have simply been shot in cold blood--murdered as brazenly as by any Jack-the-Ripper. Murder, too, of the most despicable--murder for gain--the gain that should accrue through the brutal terrorism of the act and its effect on the rest.

And, if deemed advisable to gloss the crime with some thin veneer of imitation justice for the--unsuccessful--hoodwinking of a shocked and astounded world, what easier than an unseen shot in some obscure corner from a German rifle? Then--“Death to the hostages!--destruction to the village!--a fine of £100,000 on the town!”

Those provocative shots from German rifles have surely been the most profitably engineered basenesses in the whole war. They have justified--but in German eyes only--every committable crime, and they cost nothing--except the souls of their perpetrators.

“It’s your money we want--and your land--and your property--and, if necessary, your lives! You are weak--we are strong--and so----!” That is the simple Credo of the Hun.

But for all these things there shall come a day of reckoning and the account will be a heavy one.

May it be exacted to the full--from the rightful debtors!

“What have you done?” You have at all events put the rope round the necks of your murderers, and the whole world’s hands are at the other end of it.

JOHN OXENHAM

“Father, what have we done?”]

King Albert’s Answer to the Pope

The war has been singularly barren of heroic figures, perhaps because the magnitude of the events has called forth such a multitude of individually heroic acts that no one can be placed before the rest; yet, when this greatest phase of history comes to be written down with historic perspective, one figure--that of King Albert of Belgium--will stand as that of a twentieth-century Bayard, a great knight without fear and without reproach.

Action on such far-flung lines as those of the European conflict has called for no great leaders in the sense in which that phrase has applied to previous wars; no Napoleon has arisen, though William Hohenzollern has aspired to Napoleonic dignity; war has become more mechanical, more a matter of mathematics--and the barbarians of Germany have made it more horrible. But, as if to accentuate German brutality and crime, this figure of King Albert stands emblematic of the virtues in which civilisation is rooted; to the broken word of Germany it opposes untarnished honour; to the treacherous spirit of Germany it opposes inviolable truth; to the relentless selfishness of Germany it opposes the vicarious sacrifice of self, of a whole country and nation for the sake of a principle. And, in later days, men will remember how this truly great king held steadfastly to the little portion of his kingdom that the invasion left him; how he remained to inspirit his men by noble example, stubbornly rejecting peace without honour, and holding, when all else was wrecked, to the remnants of that army which saved Europe in the gateway of Liége. Amid violation, desecration, and destruction, Albert of Belgium has won imperishable fame.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN

“With him who broke his word, devastated my country, burned my villages, destroyed my towns, desecrated my churches, and murdered my people, I will not make peace before he is expelled from my country and punished for his crimes.”]

The Gas Fiend

There is an order of minds that intuitively distrusts Science, detracts from the force of her achievements, and contends that devotion to machinery ends by making men machines. Many who argue thus have fastened on Germany’s new war inventions as proof that Science makes for materialism and opposes the higher values of humanity and culture.

This is special pleading, for against the destructive forces discovered and liberated by German chemists in this war, one has only to consider the vast amelioration of human life for which modern science has to be thanked. Because art has been created to evil purpose, shall we condemn pictures, or statues? Because the Germans have employed gas poisons in warfare, are we to condemn the incalculable gifts of organic chemistry?

Look at the eye of Louis Raemaekers’ snake. That is the answer. It is the force behind this application of it that has brought German Science to shame. A precious branch of human knowledge has been prostituted by lust of blood and greed of gain until Science, in common with all learning, comes simply to be regarded by the masters of Germany as one more weapon in the armoury, one more power to help win “The Day.” Every culture is treated in their alembic for the same purpose.

We may picture the series of experiments that went to perfection of their poison gas; we may see their Higher Command watching the death of guinea-pig, rabbit, and ape with increasing excitement and enthusiasm as the hideous effects of their discovery became apparent. Be sure an iron cross quickly hung over the iron heart that conceived and developed this filthy arm; for does it not offer the essence--quintessence of all “frightfulness”? Does it not challenge every human nerve-centre by its horror? Does it not, once proclaimed, by anticipation awake those very emotions of dread and dismay that make the stroke more fatal when it falls?

These people pictured their snake paralysing the enemy into frozen impotence; the floundering Prussian psychology that cuts blocks with a razor and regards German mind as the measure of all mind, anticipated that poison gas would appeal to British and French as it had appealed to them. But it was not so. Their foresight gave them an initial success in the field; it slew a handful of men with additions of unspeakable agony--and rekindled the execration and contempt of Civilisation.

As an arm, poison gas cannot be considered conspicuously successful, since it is easily countered; but for the Allies it had some value, since it weighted appreciably the scale against Germany in neutral minds and added to the universal loathing astir at the heart of the world. Only fear now holds any kingdom neutral: there is not an impartial nation left on earth.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS

The German Tango

A blonde woman, wearing the Imperial crown and with her hair braided in pigtails like a German _backfisch_, is whirling in the tango with a skeleton partner. Her face is livid with terror and fatigue, her limbs are drooping, but she is held by inexorable bony claws. On the feet of the skeleton are dancing pumps, a touch which adds to the grimness. This ghoulish dance does not lack its element of ghastly ceremonial.

The Dance of Death has long been the theme of the moralist in art, from Orcagna’s fresco on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa to Holbein’s great woodcuts and our own Rowlandson. In Germany especially have these _macabre_ imaginings flourished. The phantasmagoria of decay has haunted German art, as it haunted Poe, from Dürer to Boecklin. But the mediæval Dance of Death was stately allegory, showing the pageant of life brooded over by the shadow of mortality. In M. Raemaekers’ cartoon there is no dignity, no lofty resignation. He shows Death summoned in a mad caprice and kept as companion till the revel becomes a whirling horror.

It is the profoundest symbol of the war. In a hot fit of racial pride Death has been welcomed as an ally. And the dance on which Germany enters is no stately minuet with something of tragic dignity in it. It is a common modern vulgar shuffle, a thing of ugly gestures and violent motions, the true sport of degenerates. Once begun there is no halting. From East to West and from West to East the dancers move. There is no rest, for Death is a pitiless comrade. From such a partner, lightly and arrogantly summoned, there can be no parting. The traveller seeks a goal, but the dancers move blindly and aimlessly among the points of the compass. Death, when called to the dance, claims eternal possession.

JOHN BUCHAN

“From East to West and West to East I dance with thee!”]

The Zeppelin Triumph

When the future historian gives to another age his account of all that is included in German “frightfulness,” there is no feature upon which he will dilate more emphatically than the extraordinary use made by the enemy of their Zeppelin fleet. In the experience we have gained in the last few months we discover that the Zeppelins are not employed--or, at all events, not mainly employed--for military purposes, but in order to shake the nerves of the non-combatant population. The history of the last few Zeppelin raids in England is quite sufficient testimony to this fact. London is bombarded, although it is an open city, and a large amount of damage is done to buildings wholly unconnected with the purposes of the war. The persons who are killed are not soldiers, they are civilians; the buildings destroyed are not munition works, but dwelling-houses, and some of the points of attack are theatres.

The same thing has happened in the provinces. In the last raid over the Midlands railway stations were destroyed, some breweries were injured, but, with exceedingly few exceptions, munition works and factories for the production of arms were untouched. Here again the victims are not either soldiers or sailors, or even workmen employed in turning out instruments of war, but peaceable citizens and a large proportion of women and children.

Some such act of brutality is illustrated in the accompanying cartoon. A private house has been attacked, the mother has been killed, the father and child are left desolate. The little daughter at her father’s knee, who cannot understand why guiltless people should suffer, asks the importunate question whether her mother had done anything wrong to deserve so terrible a fate. To the childish mind it seems incomprehensible that aimless and indiscriminate murder should fall on the guiltless.

Indeed the mother had done no wrong. She only happened to belong to one of the nations who are struggling against a barbaric tyranny. In that reckless crusade which the Central Powers are waging against all the higher laws of morality and civilisation, some of the heaviest of the blows fall on the defenceless. It is this appalling inhumanity, this godless desire to maim and wound and kill, which nerves the arms of the Allies, who know that in a case like this they are fighting for freedom and for the Divine laws of mercy and loving-kindness.

And it is for the young especially that the war is being waged, young boys and young girls like the motherless child in the picture, in order that they may inherit a Europe which shall be free from the horrible burden of German militarism, and be able to live useful lives in peace and quietness. No, little girl, mother did no wrong! But we should be guilty of the deepest wrong if we did not avenge her death and that of other similar victims by making such unparalleled crimes impossible hereafter.

W. L. COURTNEY

“But Mother had done nothing wrong, had she, Daddy?”]

Keeping Out the Enemy

The Prussian turns everything to account, from the scrapings of the pig-trough to the Austrian Emperor.

The Bavarian lists, the Saxon lists, the Austrian lists--these are all only indications of injuries to the Prussian’s life-saving waistcoat. If this war is to be a war to the last penny and the last man, the last Austrian will die before the last Saxon, the last Saxon before the last Bavarian, the last Bavarian before the last Prussian--and the last Prussian will not die: he will live to clutch at the last penny.

And the pity of it is that the Austrian is quite a good fellow, the Saxon is a decent sort of man, the Bavarian is chiefly a brute in drink, whilst the Prussian--we all know what the Prussian is, the black centre of hardness, the incarnation of the shady trick, and the very complex soul of mechanical efficiency.

The Hohenzollern here makes a sandbag of the Hapsburg, of whom Fate has already made a football.

Fate has always been behind the Hapsburg for his own sins and those of his house. She has made him kneel at last.

H. DE VERE STACPOOLE

The German Offer

The German claim--not the Austrian nor the Turk, for the alliance following Germany is to be allowed little force--is that, the civilisation of Europe now being defeated, a Roman pride may be generous to the fallen. Before modern Germany is routed, as may be seen in the features of its citizens, the nobility of its public works, and the admirable, restrained, and classic sense of its literature, this generosity to a humbled world will take the form of letting nations, of right independent, enjoy some measure of freedom under a German suzerainty. In the matter of property the magnanimous descendants of Frederick and William the Great will restore the machines which cannot be wrenched from their concrete beds, and the walls of the manufactories. More liquid property, such as jewellery, furniture, pictures--and coin--it will be more difficult to trace. In any case, Europe may breathe again, though with a shorter breath than it did before Germany conquered at the Marne.... This is the majestic vision which the subtle diplomats of Berlin present to the admiration of the neutral Powers, happily free from wicked passions of war, and not blinded, as are the British, French, Russians, Italians, Belgians, and the Serbians, by petty spite. Their audience, their triple audience, is part of Greece, some of the public of Spain, and sections of that of the United States. To the French and the British armies in the West, to the Russians in the East, and to the Italians upon their frontiers, the terms appear insufficient. Therein would seem to lie the gravity of Prussia’s case. These belligerent Powers will go so far as to demand more than the mere restoration of stolen property, from cottage furniture to freedom. And their anger has risen so high that they even propose to make the acquirer of these goods suffer very bitterly indeed. What plea he will then raise under discomforts more serious than those he has caused to the peasants of Flanders and of Poland, and how those pleas will affect his neutral audience, will have no effect whatever on the result of the war, or on his own unpleasing fate. Those appeals will have a certain interest, however, because we know from the past that the German mind is unstable. Within fifteen short months it proposed the annihilation of the French armies and the occupation of Paris. It failed. It next offered terms upon suffering defeat. It withdrew them. It next made certain at least of a conquest of Russia, failed again, offered terms again, withdrew them again; was directed to the blockading of England, failed; thought Egypt better, and then changed its mind. It was but yesterday in the mood that this cartoon suggests; to-morrow its mood will have utterly changed again, probably to a whine, perhaps to a scream. Such instability is rare in the history of nations which propose a conquest of others, and it is a very poor furniture for the mind.

HILAIRE BELLOC

The Wolf Trap

The wolf is not perhaps the beast by which one would most wish one’s country to be represented. But the wolf, like every animal when defending its dearest, and when assailed with treachery, has its nobility. And the Roman she-wolf certainly has had in all ages her dignity and her force.

“Thy nurse will hear no master,
Thy nurse will bear no load,
And woe to them that spear her,
And woe to them that goad.
When all the pack loud baying
Her bloody lair surrounds,
She dies in silence biting hard
Amidst the dying hounds.”

Italy certainly calls not only for our sympathy, but for our admiration. She has had a very difficult course to steer. The ally for so long of Germany and Austria, if owing them less and less as time went on, it was difficult for her to break with them. But the day came when she had to break with them, and once again “act for herself.” She told them a year ago she would be a party to no aggressive or selfish war, she would be no bully’s accomplice. She “denounced”--it is a good word--such a compact. _Non haec in fœdera veni._

Then it was, when the she-wolf showed her teeth, that they offered to give her what was her own. But what would the Trentino be worth if Germany and Austria were victorious? No, the wolf is right, “she must fight for it,” and behind Austria’s underhanded treachery stands Germany’s open violence and guns.

And Italy loves freedom. This war is a war made by her people. As of old her King and her diplomats go with them in this new _Resorgimento_. And the she-wolf must beware the trap. She needs the spirit again not only of her people and of Garibaldi and of Victor Emmanuel, but of Cavour. And she has it.

The cartoon suggests all the elements of the situation. The wolf ponders with turned head, half doubtful, half desperate. The poor little cub whimpers pitifully. The hunters dissemble their craft, the trap waits in the path ready to spring. It is not even concealed. Is that the irony of the artist, or is it only due to the necessity of making his meaning plain? Whichever it is, it is justified.

HERBERT WARREN

“You would make me believe that I shall have my cub given back to me, but I know I shall have to fight for it.”]

Ahasuerus II.

The legend of the Wandering Jew obsessed the imagination of the Middle Age. The tale, which an Armenian bishop first told at the Abbey of St. Albans, concerned a doorkeeper in the house of Pontius Pilate--or, as some say, a shoemaker in Jerusalem--who insulted Christ on His way to Calvary. He was told by Our Lord, “I will rest, but thou shalt go on till the Last Day.” Christendom saw the strange figure in many places--at Hamburg and Leipsic and Lubeck, at Moscow and Madrid, even at far Baghdad. Goodwives in the little mediæval cities, hastening homeward against the rising storm, saw a bent figure posting through the snow, with haggard face and burning eyes, carrying his load of penal immortality, and seeking in vain for “easeful death.” There is a profound metaphysic in such popular fancies. Good and evil are alike eternal. Arthur and Charlemagne and Ogier the Dane are only sleeping and will yet return to save their peoples; and the Wandering Jew staggers blindly through the ages, seeking the rest which he denied to his Lord.

In George Meredith’s “Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History” there is a famous passage on Napoleon. France, disillusioned at last,

“Perceives him fast to a harsher Tyrant bound;
Self-ridden, self-hunted, captive of his aim;
Material grandeur’s ape, the Infernal’s hound.”

That is the penalty of mortal presumption. The Superman who would shatter the homely decencies of mankind and set his foot on the world’s neck is himself bound captive. He is the slave of the djinn whom he has called from the unclean deeps. There can be no end to his quest. Weariness does not bring peace, for the whips of the Furies are in his own heart.

The Wandering Jew of the Middle Age was a figure sympathetically conceived. He had still to pay the price in his tortured body, but his soul was at rest, for he had repented his folly. Raemaekers in his cartoon follows the conception of Gustave Doré rather than that of the old fabulists. The modern Ahasuerus has no surety of an eventual peace. We have seen the German War Lord flitting hungrily from Lorraine to Poland, from Flanders to Nish, watching the failure of his troops before Nancy and Ypres, inditing grandiose proclamations to Europe, prophesying a peace which never comes. He is a figure worthy of Greek tragedy. The [Greek: hubris] which defied the gods has put him outside the homely consolations of mankind. He has devoted his people to the Dance of Death, and himself, like some new Orestes, can find no solace though he seek it wearily in the four corners of the world.

JOHN BUCHAN

“Once I drove the Christ out of my door; now I am doomed to walk from the Northern Seas to the Southern, from the Western shores to the Eastern mountains, asking for Peace, and none will give it to me.”--_From the Legend of the “Wandering Jew.”_]

Our Candid Friend

The position of Holland and Denmark is one of excruciating anxiety to the citizens of those countries. They know that the Allies are fighting the battle of their own political existence, but they are so hypnotised with well-founded terror of the implacable tyrant on their flank that they are not only bound to neutrality, but are afraid to express their sympathies too plainly. Dutch editors have been admonished and punished under pressure from Berlin; the brilliant artist of these cartoons is in danger on his native soil. A leading German newspaper has lately announced that “we will make Holland pay with interest for these insults after the war.” A German victory would inevitably be followed in a few years by the disappearance from the map of this gallant and interesting little nation, our plucky rival in time past, our honoured friend to-day. No nation has established a stronger claim to maintain its independence, whether we consider the heroic and successful struggles of the Dutch for religious and political liberty, their triumphs in discovery, colonisation, and naval warfare, their unique contributions to art, or the manly and vigorous character of their people. It is needless to say that we have no designs upon any Dutch colony!

THE DEAN OF ST. PAUL’S

GERMANY, TO HOLLAND: “I shall have to swallow you up, if only to prevent those English taking your colonies.”]

Peace and Intervention

Here is pictured a grim fact that the Peace cranks would do well to see plainly. The surgeon who is operating on a cancer case cannot allow himself to be satisfied with merely the removal of the visible growth which is causing such present agony to the patient. He must cut and cut deep, must go beyond even the visible roots of the disease, slice down into the clear, firm flesh to make sure and doubly sure that he has cut away the last fragment of the tainted tissues. Only by doing so can he reasonably hope to prevent a recurrence of the disease and the necessity of another operation in the years to come. And so only by carrying on this war until the last and least possibility of the taint of militarism remaining in the German system is removed can the Allies be satisfied that their task is complete. Modern surgery has through anæsthetics taken away from a patient the physical pain of most operations, but modern War affords no relief during its operation. That, however, can be held as no excuse for refusing to “use the knife.” What would be said of the surgeon who, because an operation--a life-saving operation--was causing at the time even the utmost agony, stayed his hand, patched up the wound, was content only to stop the momentary pain, and to leave firm-rooted a disease which in all human probability would some time later break out again in all its virulence? What would be said of such a surgeon is only in lesser degree what would be said by posterity of the Allies if they consented or were persuaded to apply the bandage and healing herbs of Peace to the disease of Militarism, to make a surface cure and leave the living tentacles of the disease to grow again deep and strong. But here at least the doctors do not disagree. Once and for all the Ally surgeons mean to make an end to Militarism. The sooner the Peace cranks and Germany realise that the sooner the operation will be over.

BOYD CABLE

“For the sake of the world’s future we must first use the knife.”]

Little Red Riding Hood

If you wish to see the position of Holland look at the map of Europe as it was before August 4th, 1914, and the map of Europe as it is to-day.

In 1914 Holland lay overshadowed by the vast upper jaw-bone of a monster--Prussia--a jaw-bone reaching from the Dollart to Aix-la-Chapelle.

In August and September, 1914, Prussia, by the seizure of Belgium, developed a lower jaw-bone reaching from Aix-la-Chapelle to Cassandria on the West Schelde. To-day Holland lies gripped between these two formidable mandibles that are ready and waiting to close and crush her. For years and years Prussia has been waiting to devour Holland. Why? For the simple reason that Holland is rich in the one essential thing that Prussia lacks--coast-line.

Look again at the map and see how Holland and Belgium together absolutely wall Prussia in from the sea. Belgium has been taken on by Prussia; if we do not tear that lower jaw from Prussia, Holland will be lost, and the sea-power of England threatened with destruction.

The ruffian with the automatic pistol waiting behind the tree requires the life as well as the basket of the little figure advancing towards him.

He has been in ambush for forty years.

H. DE VERE STACPOOLE

Germany lying in wait for Holland.]

The Sea Mine

When Raemaekers pictures Von Tirpitz to us, he does so with savage scorn. He is not the hard-bitten pirate of story--but a senile, crapulous, lachrymose imbecile; an object of derision. He fits more with one of Jacobs’s tales of longshore soakers, than with the tragedies that have made him infamous. But when he draws Von Tirpitz’s victims, the touch is one of almost harrowing tenderness. The Hun is a master of many modes of killing, but however torn, or twisted, or tortured he leaves the murdered, Raemaekers can make the dreadful spectacle bearable by the piercing dignity with which he portrays the dead. In none of these cartoons is his _sæva indignatio_ rendered with more sheer beauty of design, or with a craftsmanship more exquisite, than in this monument to the sea-mined prey. The symbolism is perfect, and of the essence of the design. The dead sink slowly to their resting-place, but the merciful twilight of the sea veils from us the glazed horror of the eyes that no piety can now close. Even the dumb senseless fish shoots from the scene in mute and terrified protest, while from these poor corpses there rise surfaceward the silver bubbles of their expiring breath. One seems to see crying human souls prisoned in these spheres. And it is, indeed, such sins as these that cry to Heaven for vengeance. Blood-guiltiness must rest upon the heads of those that do them, upon the heads of their children--aye, and of their children’s children too. This exquisite and tender drawing is something more than the record of inexpiable crime. It is a prophecy. And the prophecy is a curse.

ARTHUR POLLEN

“Seduction”

The cartoon in which the Prussian is depicted as saying to his bound and gagged victim, “Ain’t I a lovable fellow?” is one of the most pointed and vital of all pictorial, or indeed other, criticisms on the war. It is very important to note that German savagery has not interfered at all with German sentimentalism. The blood of the victim and the tears of the victor flow together in an unpleasing stream. The effect on a normal mind of reading some of the things the Germans say, side by side with some of the things they do, is an impression that can quite truly be conveyed only in the violent paradox of the actual picture. It is exactly like being tortured by a man with an ugly face, which we slowly realise to be contorted in an attempt at an affectionate expression. In those soliloquies of self-praise which have constituted almost the whole of Prussia’s defence in the international controversy, the brigand of the Belgian annexation has incessantly said that his apparent hardness is the necessary accompaniment of his inherent strength. Nietzsche said: “I give you a new commandment: Be hard.” And the Prussian says: “I am hard,” in a prompt and respectful manner. But, as a matter of fact, he is not hard; he is only heavy. He is not indifferent to all feelings; he is only indifferent to everybody else’s feelings. At the thought of his own virtues he is always ready to burst into tears. His smiles, however, are even more frequent and more fatuous than his tears; and they are all leers like that which Mr. Raemaekers has drawn on the face of the expansive Prussian officer in the arm-chair. Compared with such an exhibition, there is something relatively virile about the tiger cruelty which has occasionally defaced the record of the Spaniard or the Arab. But to be conquered by such Germans as these would be like being eaten by slugs.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

“Ain’t I a lovable fellow?”]

Murder on the High Seas

The recent descent of so many of her citizens from the people now warring in Europe has of necessity prevented America from looking on events in Europe with a single eye. But the predominant American type and the predominant American frame of mind are still typified by the lithe and sinuous figure of the New England pioneer. It is his tradition to mind his own business, but it is also his business to see that none of the old monarchies make free with his rights or with his people. And he stands for a race that has been cradled in wars with savages. No one knows better the methods of the Apache and the Mohawk, and when women and children fall into such pitiless hands as these, it goes against the grain with Uncle Sam to keep his hands off them, even if the women and children are not his own. He would like to be indifferent if he could. He would prefer to smoke his cigar, and pass along, and believe those who tell him that it is none of his affair. But when he does look--and he cannot help looking--he sees a figure of such heavy bestiality that his gorge rises. He must keep his hands clenched in his pockets lest he soils them in striking down the blood-stained gnome before him.

Can he restrain himself for good? That angry glint in his eye would make one doubt it. Here, surely, the artist sees with a truer vision than the politician. And if Uncle Sam’s anger does once get the better of him, if doubts and hesitations are ever thrust on one side, if he takes his stand where his record and his sympathies must make him wish to be, then let it be noted that this base butcher stands dazed and paralysed by the threat.

ARTHUR POLLEN

“Well, have you nearly done?”]

Ad Finem

Ay,--to your end!--to your end amid the execrations of a ravaged world! Through all the ages one other only has equalled you in the betrayal of his trust. May your sin come home to you before you go, as did his! May his despair be yours! It is most desperately to be regretted that no personal suffering on your part, in this life at all events, can ever adequately requite you for the desolations you have wrought.

Outrage on outrage thunders to the sky
The tale of thy stupendous infamy,--
Thy slaughterings,--thy treacheries,--thy thefts,--
Thy broken pacts,--thy honour in the mire,--
Thy poor humanity cast off to sate thy pride;--
’Twere better thou hadst never lived,--or died
Ere come to this.

I heard a great Voice pealing through the heavens,
A Voice that dwarfed earth’s thunders to a moan:--

_Woe! Woe! Woe, to him by whom this came!
His house shall unto him be desolate.
And, to the end of time, his name shall be
A byword and reproach in all the lands
He rapined.... And his own shall curse him
For the ruin that he brought.
Who without reason draws the sword--
By sword shall perish!
The Lord hath said.... So be it, Lord!_

JOHN OXENHAM

WAR AND HUNGER: “Now you must accompany us to the end.”

THE KAISER: “Yes, to my end.”]

“U’s”

It is the essence of great cartooning to see things simply, and to command the technical resources that shall show the things, so simply seen, in an infinite variety of aspects. No series of Raemaekers’ drawings better exemplifies his quality in both these respects than those which deal with Germany’s sea crimes.

In the cartoon before us the immediate message is of the simplest. The Kaiser counts the head of British merchantmen sunk. Von Tirpitz counts the cost. But note the subtlety of the personation and environment. The Kaiser has those terrible haunted eyes that have marked the seer’s presentment of him from quite an early stage of the war. There can be no ultimate escape from the dreadful vision that has set the seal of despair on this fine and handsome visage. He is shown, not as a sea monster, but as some rabid, evasive, impatient thing, dashing from point to point--as from policy to policy--with the angry swish that tells the unspoken anger failure everywhere compels. For the victories do not bring surrender, nor does frightfulness inspire terror. The merchant ships still put to sea--and the U boats pay the penalty.

The futility of this campaign of murder is typified by making von Tirpitz, its inventor, an addle-headed seahorse, the nursery comedian of the sea. Stupid and ridiculous bewilderment stares from his foolish eyes. Another submarine has failed to find a safe victim in a trading ship, but has been hoisted with its own sea petard. The impotence of the thing!

This conference of the Admirals of the Atlantic, held in the sombre depths, is a biting satire, in its mingled comedy and tragedy, on the effort to win command of the sea from its bottom.

ARTHUR POLLEN

HIS MAJESTY: “Well, Tirpitz, you’ve sunk a great many?”

TIRPITZ: “Yes, sire, here is another ‘U’ coming down.”]

Mater Dolorosa

You thought to grasp the world; but you shall keep
Its crown of curses nailed upon your brow.
You that have fouled the purple, broke your vow,
And sowed the wind of death, the whirlwind you shall reap.

Shout to your tribal god to bless the blood
Of this red vintage on the poisoned earth;
Clash cymbals to him, leap and shout in mirth;
Call on his name to stay the coming, cleansing flood.

We are no hounds of heaven, nor ravening band
Of earthly wolves to tear your kingdom down.
We stand for human reason; at our frown
The coward sword shall fall from your accursed hand.

We do not speak of vengeance; there shall run
No little children’s blood beneath our heel.
No pregnant woman suffers from our steel;
But Justice we shall do, as sure as set of sun.

Or short, or long, the pathway of your feet,
Stamped on the faces of the innocent dead,
Must lead where tyrant’s road hath ever led.
Alone, O perjured soul, your Justice you shall meet.

No sacrifice the balance of her scale
Can win; no gift of blood and iron can weigh
Against this one mad mother’s agony:
In her demented cry a myriad women wail.

The equinox of outraged earth shall blaze
And flash its levin on your infamous might.
Man cries to fellow-man; light leaps to light,
Till foundered, naked, spent, you vanish from our gaze.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS

“Gott strafe Italien!”

When Italy, still straining at the leash which held her, helpless, to the strange and unnatural Triplice, began to show signs of awakening consciousness, Germany’s efforts to lull her back to the unhappy position of silent partner in the world-crime were characteristic of her methods. Forthwith Italy was loaded with compliments. The country was overrun with “diplomats,” which is another name in Germany for spies. Bribery of the most brazen sort was attempted. The newspapers recalled in chorus that Italy was the land of art and chivalry, of song and heroism, of fabled story and manly effort, of honour and loyalty. Hark to the _Hamburger Fremdenblatt_ of February 21st, 1915:--

“The suggestion is made that Italy favours the Allies.
Preposterous! Even though the palsied hand of England--filled with
robber gold--be held out to her, Italy’s vows, Italy’s sense of
obligation, Italy’s _word once given_, can never be broken. Such a
nation of noblemen could have no dealings with hucksters.”

Germany is, indeed, a fine judge of a nation’s “word once given” and a nation’s “vows,” which its Chancellor unblushingly declared to be mere scraps of paper. Now let us see what the _Hamburger Nachrichten_ had to say about Italy immediately after her secession from the Triple Alliance:--“_Nachrichten_, June 1st, 1915.--That Italy should have joined hands with the other noble gentlemen, our enemies, is but natural. It would, of course, be absurd--where all are brigands--were the classical name of brigandage not included in the number.... We do not propose to soil our clean steel with the blood of such filthy Italian scum. With our cudgels we shall smash them into pulp.”

“_Gott strafe Italien_” indeed! Bombs on St. Mark’s in Venice, on the Square of Verona, on world treasures unreplaceable. The poisoned breath of Germany carries its venom into the land of sunshine and song, whose best day’s work in history has been to wrest itself free from the grip of the false friend.

RALPH D. BLUMENFELD

Serbia

Serbia has suffered the fate of Belgium. Germany and Austria, with Bulgaria’s aid, have plunged another little country “in blood and destruction.” Another “bleeding piece of earth” bears witness to the recrudescence of the ancient barbarism of the Huns. Serbia’s wounds,

“Like dumb mouths,
Do ope their ruby lips,”

to beg for vengeance on “these butchers.” Turkey, whom the artist portrays as a hound lapping up the victim’s blood, is fated to share the punishment for the crime. But the prime instigator is the German Emperor, whose Chancellor, with bitter irony, claims for his master the title of protector of the small nationalities of Europe. Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg can on occasion affect the mincing accents of the wolf when that beast seeks to lull the cries of the lamb in its clutches. The German method of waging war has rendered “dreadful objects so familiar” that the essential brutality of the enemy’s activities runs a risk of escaping at times the strenuous denunciation which Justice demands. But the searching pencil of Mr. Raemaekers brings home to every seeing eye the true and unvarying character of Teutonic “frightfulness.” All instincts of humanity are cynically defied on the specious ground of military necessity. Mr. Raemaekers is at one with Milton in repudiating the worthless plea:

“So spake the fiend, and with necessity,
The tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deeds.”

SIR SIDNEY LEE

The Austro-German-Bulgarian attack on Serbia began in October, which in Holland is called the “butcher’s month,” as the cattle are then killed preparatory to the winter.]

“Just a moment--I’m coming”

Here is a drawing that ought to be circulated broadcast throughout Australia and New Zealand, that ought to hold a place of honour on the walls of their public chambers; should hang in gilded frames in the houses of the rich; be pinned to the rough walls of frame-house and bark humpy in every corner of “The Outback.” It should thrill the heart of every man, woman, and child Down Under with pride and thankfulness and satisfaction, should even bring soothing balm to the wounds of those who in the loss of their nearest and dearest have paid the highest and the deepest price for the flaming glory of the Anzacs in Gallipoli.

Here in the artist’s pencil is a monument to those heroes greater than pinnacles of marble, of beaten brass and carven stone; a monument that has travelled over the world, has spoken to posterity more clearly, more convincingly, and more rememberingly than ever written or word-of-mouth speech could do. It is to the everlasting honour of the people of the Anzacs that they refrained from echoing the idle tales which ran whispering in England that the Dardanelles campaign was a cruel blunder, that the blood of the Anzacs’ bravest and best had been uselessly spilt, that their splendid young lives had been an empty sacrifice to the demons of Incompetence and Inefficiency. To those in Australia who in their hearts may feel that shreds of truth were woven in the rumours--that the Anzacs were spent on a forlorn hope, were wasted on a task foredoomed to failure--let this simple drawing bring the comfort of the truth.

The artist has seen deeper and further than most. The Turkish armies held from pouring on Russia and Serbia, from thumping down the scales of neutrality in Greece and Roumania perhaps, from massing their troops with the Central Powers; the Kaiser chained on the East and West for the critical months when men and munitions were desperately lacking to the Allies, when the extra weight of the Turks might have freed the Kaiser’s power of fierce attack on East and West--this is what we already know, what the artist here tells the wide world of the part played by the heroes of the Dardanelles. In face of this, who dare hint they suffered and died in vain?

BOYD CABLE

The Holy War

Surely the artist when he drew this was endowed with the wisdom of the seer, the vision of the prophet. For it was drawn before the days in which I write, before the Russian giant had proved his greatness on the body of the Turk, before the bludgeon-strokes in the Caucasus, the heart-thrust of Erzerum, the torrent of pursuit of the broken Turks to Mush and Trebizond.

We know--and I am grateful for the chance to voice our gratitude 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 realise now the nobility 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 sportsmanship, 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 realise the greatness, so in the fullness of time must William come to realise how great is the Allah of the Moslem, the Christian God Whom he has blasphemed, and in Whose name he and his people have perpetrated so many crimes and abominations.

BOYD CABLE

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 substitute 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 _debâcle_ 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 mass.

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 God allowed His only Son to be crucified, that His scheme of redemption might be accomplished, so Germany, God 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 hell; 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

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 nobly 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.