Part 2

_The “Lusitania” Nightmare_

Though a year and more has passed since the great tragedy of the _Lusitania_, and many evil things have been done since that day by the enemy who strikes at rooted principles of civilization, yet by reason of its magnitude and its utter disregard of the elementary principles of humanity the memory of this deed is still alive in the minds of men. This “nightmare” that Raemaekers pictures was no dream fancy, but a reality; men and women walked along the rows of corpses laid out in the sheds, searching for that which they dreaded to find....

“There is no right but might,” said Germany in that act, “and there is no law in the exercise of might.” Men, women, and children alike of this perverted nation were bidden to rejoice over the sinking of the vessel--the fact cannot be too often stated or too fully kept in mind, more especially now that the fabric whence that doctrine of unguided force has emanated is crumbling under the blows of the Allied armies. For in the day of peace will be found many who will merit Achan’s fate through following Achan’s way, careless of the rows of little corpses that lay out for indentification after the sinking of the _Lusitania_--careless of all but the material aspect of the settlement that must be made when the military power of this present Germany is crushed.

If it be not crushed beyond the possibility of rising again--if there be any way left by which those who own no law but necessity and expedience may repeat the experiment of these years of war, then these lives that ended off the Old Head of Kinsale ended in vain, and their memory is dishonored. With that which caused this nightmare there must be no compromise.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN.

_“Fancy, How Nice....”_

The ethics of war are difficult to reduce to consistent principles. At first sight it does not seem more cruel to asphyxiate your enemy than to blow him to pieces with a land-mine or to turn a machine-gun upon him. Nevertheless, two facts are certain. One is that this very invention was offered to our War Office years ago, and was rejected as unworthy of a civilized nation. The other is that it is forbidden by The Hague Convention in a clause accepted by Germany herself.

The adoption, without warning, of poisonous gas is perhaps the most shameless of all the treacherous violations of international law which Germany has committed. It is now known that Germany had determined, before hostilities began, to violate all the laws of war. In the Official German War Book these conventions are referred to only with contempt. To disregard them is what the Germans call “absolute war”; and they claim that absolute war is the only logical kind of war.

In adopting this theory Germany has fallen far behind barbarism; for, cruel as the barbarian often is, there are always some things which he will not do to his enemy, some conventions which he will observe, either from the chivalry which belongs to the character of the genuine fighting man or from fear of Divine anger, or from a vague sense of what is due to human beings even when they are enemies. The notion that all moral principles are in abeyance during war is the most revolting doctrine that can be proclaimed. It is disgusting to find that it is openly defended by many of the religious guides of the German people, who profess to speak in the name of Christianity.

Such moral obliquity, one thinks, can only exist in a nation which does not play games. But perhaps the reason why games are discouraged in Germany is that they encourage a “foolish” sense of honor and chivalry in the serious business of life.

W. R. INGE, _Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral_.

_The Laodiceans_

“Thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold or hot.... Because thou sayest, I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing.... I counsel thee ... anoint thine eyes with eye-salve, that thou mayest see.”

Raemaekers has patience with most things, but with neutrality he would scorn to be patient. He refuses to parley with it, even when it waves the colors of his own country in its hand--if it ever does anything so sturdy as to wave colors. These old women are dreadful, they are almost as terrifying as his Prussian monsters. The persuasive old fanatic in the foreground arguing the divinity of lukewarmness is dreadful in herself, and more dreadful still because we all know that she exists, in belligerent as in neutral countries. And worse, far worse, is the granite female with her stone brooch in her marble collar behind her. The others are surprised, doubtful, not yet entirely won over to the specious argument; but the woman behind is a very Gibraltar of neutrality.

Seldom, very seldom, does Raemaekers draw dreadful women. His Germania is a symbol, not a woman. I can only remember one other cartoon, a merciless drawing of the Kaiser and the Kaiserin, in which a woman stands for evil. He likes to picture pity and mercy and nobility in the form of women, and when he wishes to paint sorrow and endurance he gives us such cartoons as those of the mothers and widows of Belgium. And this makes it the more likely that in these gossiping, selfish, silly, wicked creatures he is drawing a type of mind rather than a type of female. In every country there are “old women”; but they are not always females.

H. PEARL ADAM.

_“A Pitiful Exodus”_

This is one of Raemaekers’ crowds. He is fond of depicting crowds, and he is right. He has the art of making them singularly effective. He catches wonderfully both the general impression and the value of a face or figure here and there not violently obtruded but individually appealing.

And these crowds are so effective because they are so true. This is a war of crowds. The nations have fought in crowds, they have suffered in crowds. “Multitudes--multitudes in the valley of decision” might be said to be its text.

And Antwerp was ever a place of crowds; though not, of course, like this. Who does not know Antwerp as she was before the war? A great, buzzing, thriving hive on the water’s edge, filled with a jolly, comfortable, busy _bourgeoisie_; mediæval and modern at once, with her churches and her quays, her florid “Rubenses” her Van Dycks, her Teniers, her _Maison Plantin_, and all the rest of her past; her world commerce, her fortifications of to-day, deemed impregnable!

She had been besieged and fallen before. To-day she fell with scarcely a siege.

Who was responsible for this fiasco--for the defense which was no defense, the relief which was no relief? Why was the Naval Brigade sent there? Perhaps we shall know some day, when Raemaekers’ country is free to set them also free again.

What we can know is graphically and terribly told by Mr. John Buchan and the witnesses he cites.

The highways were black with the panting crowds: ladies of fashion, white-haired men and women, wounded soldiers, priests old and young, nuns, mothers, daughters, children. So it was described by one who saw it.

More than a quarter of a million of inhabitants left Antwerp in one day. The world has never before seen such an emptying of a great city. “Some day,” Mr. Buchan ends, “when its imagination has grown quicker, it will find the essence of war not in gallant charges and heroic stands, but in the pale women dragging their pitiful belongings through the Belgian fields in the raw October night.”

If anything could further quicken the world’s imagination it would be this picture. Rubens devised the famous “pomps” for the entry of Ferdinand of Austria. The German entry had no Rubens. But this miserable pomp, this “pitiful exodus,” has found its realistic Rubens in Raemaekers.

HERBERT WARREN.

_“Death the Friend”_

When the white horse rode out to war with the clever, handsome mountebank in the shining armor astride it (ignore for the moment the duller fact of an anxious, field-gray man in a Benz limousine) the demigod made, let us admit it, a brave show.

’Tis credibly reported that in his company rode his august familiar, “our old God” in a new mood and a brand new uniform, “wearing,” in fact, in the words of a dithyrambic Teuton, “the Death’s Head cap of the German Hussars and carrying a white banner.”

What that Other may be assumed to have made of Dixmude, Termonde, and the ineffable rest of it is for the curious to conjecture: as also at what exact stage of the swift journeyings back and forth of the tired white horse there came into a mind fed on rich, fat phrases and meaty metaphors, and the flattery of astute, strong men and the dazzling reflections of the imperial cheval glass, the first doubt as to whether the high approval of that Other were indeed an objective reality, or merely a figment of the imagination of an overwrought overman. In any case, there must soon have dawned an aching wonder as to how the devil the banner could be _white_.

And when was it that in place of that Other Rider in the hussar’s cap there seemed to be something queer and sinister astride behind him on his battle-weary steed? Was it then that he began to whistle so vigorously (_vide_ German Press _passim_) to keep up his spirits? And will there come a time (has it already come?) when that caressing touch on the shoulder will seem indeed the caress of a friend, and that gaunt index point to the only peace he will ever know?

JOSEPH THORP.

_A Higher Pile_

Full half a million men, yet not enough To break this township on a winding stream; More yet must fall, and more, ere the red stuff That built a nation’s manhood may redeem The Highest’s hopes and fructify his dream.

They pave the way to Verdun; on their dust The Hohenzollern mount and, hand in hand, Gaze haggard south; for yet another thrust, And higher hills must heap, ere they shall stand To feed their eyes upon the promised land.

One barrow, borne of women, lifts them high, Piled up of many a thousand human dead. Nursed in their mothers’ bosoms, now they lie-- A Golgotha, all shattered, torn and sped, A mountain for these royal feet to tread.

A Golgotha, upon whose carrion clay Justice of myriad men, still in the womb, Shall heave two crosses; crucify and flay Two memories accurs’d; then in the tomb Of world-wide execration give them room.

Verdun! Thy name is holy evermore; In thine heroic ruin the nations see A monument, upon whose living shore In vain the evil breaks; we bend the knee, Thou symbol of all human liberty.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS. [Illustration]

_Peace Reigns at Dinant_

The mere human criminal will cover his crime with disguises; but it may truly be said that the Prussian has buried even his crime in the evidences of it. He has made massacre itself monotonous; and made us weary of condemning what he was never weary of carrying out.

It is said that General Von der Goltz, on receiving complaints of the scarcely human parade of cruelty which accompanied the first entrance into Belgium, declared that such first bad impressions of the Prussian would wear off after his victory in the real campaign; and that, as he expressed it, “Glory will efface all.” That sort of glory, however, was itself effaced from the German prospects as early as the battle of the Marne; and we shall never know whether humanity is capable of so vile a forgiveness; or whether glory will efface all.

But there is a real sense in which we may say that infamy has effaced all. In the first stage of the war Prussia conducted assassination upon the same scale as grand strategy; and it is as difficult to recall every woman or child whose death was in itself a breach of all international understandings as it is to recall every poor fellow in uniform who has fallen in the open fighting which everyone understands.

The pen becomes impotent when it attempts to give life to statistics; and I do not know that anything can come closer to it than the pencil, when it draws what the artist has drawn here--merely one quiet soldier, in the corner of one quiet town; and beyond only the corner of a heap of figures, which are yet more quiet.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

_Humanity v. Kultur_

One of the most marked features of Raemaekers’ art is his intense feeling of patriotism. He is proud of his country and of her past history, and he is resolute to be true to the fame of the Netherlands in the past and to preserve the freedom which is the heritage of her people. Another characteristic is his abhorrence of the prospect of German tyranny over his country. He hates that danger, which must ever be present to the mind of a patriotic Dutchman. It has been the pressing danger of the country for many years, and the danger increases and becomes more imminent year by year. He hates that thought, both because it would put an end to the freedom of his country and because he detests the character of Germany, and many of his cartoons express this abhorrence in the extremest form. He loathes the nature and the effects of German “Kultur.”

Both these characteristics are expressed in this cartoon. The Netherlands is represented as a young Dutch girl in the national costume, a working woman wearing apron and cap and big wooden shoes. She has taken off one of the shoes, holding it ready to strike, while in a threatening attitude and with flashing eye she faces a hideous hag in dirty, slovenly attire, who represents the great enemy. The artist’s cartoons vie with one another in the ugliness which is imparted, sometimes in one way, sometimes in another, to the enemy, but there is none which represents Prussia in a more detestable form than this. Prussia is a drunken woman, who is just coming out from a public-house, and is leaning against the door, hardly able to stagger on. The sign at the door is inscribed in German: “Bierhaus zur Deutschen Kultur.” Prussia shrinks back from the assault which Holland is threatening. Yet the assault is not an armed one; it is the assault of criticism and righteous indignation, as uttered in the press and through art. The crown of the empire, with the iron cross hanging from the apex, is tumbling off the head of the drunken woman. The right hand, which she holds up in deprecation, is dripping with blood. The neck of a large bottle protrudes from a pocket in her dirty and ragged apron on which the bloody mark of a child’s hand is imprinted. But with her bloodstained hand Prussia deprecates the attacks of criticism by the protest: “A real lady like me does not do such a thing”--forgetting in her drunken mind that she bears the marks of guilt on her person. She has been indulging in “Kultur” until she is in the last stage of intoxication, barely able to stand upright, and quite unable to preserve the crown of empire. Another characteristic of Raemaekers is evident: the perfect, absolute assurance of victory. There can be no question what the future will be; the issue of conflict, either in discussion or in other ways, between this stalwart young woman and the broken, drunken wretch cannot be doubted for a moment. The crown is already slipping away, and no gesture, no support, will be in time to keep it in its place.

WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY.

_The Bill_

Even a dragon’s teeth decay And then there comes a painful time When morsels won’t be made away: Hence spring this picture and this rhyme Of dragons rather past their prime.

A varied menu spread before The hungry Kaiser and his son, From which the royal epicure With other courses chose this one-- Paris to follow when ’twas done.

A dainty dish the waiter thought To set before a king, or clown; Yet though they gulped and chewed and fought Not sire nor son could get it down-- This little, sturdy, ancient town.

And, what is more, their appetites, That yesterday were sharp and keen, This wretched dish of Verdun blights: Its toughness they had not foreseen; The cooking’s bad, the inn unclean.

“My son, I think we’ll try elsewhere.” “Right O! dear father, so we will. I’m spoiling for a change of air. Don’t let this trifle make you ill: Our cannon fodder pay the bill!”

EDEN PHILLPOTTS.

“_You need not storm this place_”

The magnificent imagery of Isaiah is alone adequate to interpret the artist’s picture. The German Kaiser is at the entrance to hell, on the gloomy portals of which is written the motto: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” The devil, with a Mephistophelian irony, tells his captive: “You need not storm this place.” Hell is only too ready to house the great malefactors who have sinned against light and are doomed to torment.

It is inevitable to recall the great oracles of Isaiah on the King of Babylon--that enemy of his race who had enslaved the Jewish people, persecuted God’s elect and led them into captivity. “Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?... How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cast down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”

But the King of Babylon was received with greater ceremony than falls to the lot of the German Kaiser. To welcome the former the old kings rise from their thrones. Wilhelm is led by the devil alone, and no pomp or circumstance of war surrounds him. His sin is as the sin of those who have believed in their transcendent power and are the victims of megalomania. He, too, said in his heart: “I will ascend into Heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will be like the Most High.” Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

And the sentence passed on such enemies of the human race is the same which Isaiah uttered thousands of years ago. “Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; that made the world as a wilderness and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners?” The very catalogue of offenses is the same. And the penalty is that no such posthumous glory as encircles the monarchs of the past will come to him. He goes down to the stones of the pit, cast out from all honorable burial, as “a carcass trodden underfoot.”

Never did Raemaekers dip his pen in bitterer gall than when he limned this appalling picture of the fate which awaits a merciless and bloodthirsty tyrant.

W. L. COURTNEY.

_Hohenzollern Madness_

Maybe the French poet of genius is already born who will sing the Epic of Verdun. One thinks of him staring into his mother’s face, and blinking a pair of wondrous brown eyes at the summer sun. France is too near, too careful and troubled about the present, too deeply plunged in grief and pain to tell that story with the majestic isolation of genius, or fling her inspiration wide enough, as yet, to catch the significance of this supreme event.

Marble and bronze will record it, and imperishable verse--of that we may be sure; for the nation that has defended Verdun against the might of Germany holds the seeds of magistral art. Art must spring quickened, enlarged, and ennobled from these furnace fires; and it will happen, as of old, that a people great enough to do great deeds lack not for children of genius to record their immortality in achievements themselves immortal.

That follows in fullness of time; for at this moment, while cannon thunder and men die happy, with the light of coming victory for a crown, we may well think of such men alone and pay our homage to the heroes who have saved Verdun at the cost of their lives.

But what of Germany’s sons? What of the thousands who have fallen in fruitless attempts to take the hill of Dead Men?

It may be ere long that these armies, driven by whip and revolver from behind, will wake to the futility of their continued destruction and begin to measure the worth of the royal command still hurling them to death, that its own wounded vanity and strategical and political incompetence shall find a salve in their sacrifice.

Raemaekers imagines nothing here, for his picture is a transcript of familiar truth. Death welcomes to its bony bosom the pride of a kingdom, while the rulers of that kingdom flog their subjects on to the annihilation that awaits them. Such forlorn tactics are all that remain to the beggared tyrant and his son. But men are not as corn or the beasts of the field: this harvest cannot be renewed by the passage of a year; and when Death has fed full, he must wait for another such meal until the boyhood of Germany has come to man’s estate. May the youthful Teutons with their manhood win sanity also, and escape forever the slavery that has driven more than half a million of their fathers to fruitless destruction before Verdun.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS.

“_My master asks you to look after these peace doves_”

Raemaekers in this excellent cartoon is not less direct, although he is at the same time more subtle, than in some others. Holland, typified by the seated figure, has an expression of amazement and suspicion, if not actual fear, upon her face. The _Boche_ is not content with merely offering the basket of spurious doves, but has thrust it upon Holland’s lap. The bearer who, in the name of his master, asks the latter to look after the “doves” is obviously trying to look agreeable as well as innocent, but the battered helmet and the leer upon his face serve to betray him.

Holland, says her great artist in this picture, has no use for “peace doves,” or, at least, for those of the breed that wear the spiked helmets of the Prussians. One may suspect, as the artist and Holland herself apparently do, that the “doves,” symbolic of peace, may prove the stormy petrels of war. They may be said to typify the propagandists who, having settled in Holland from the early days of the war, have carried on a crafty campaign of misrepresentation and calumny not alone against the Allies, but against the country which has hitherto preserved neutrality and sacrificed so much in works of benevolence in regard to Belgian and other refugees, and the British airmen and seamen which the accidents and tides of war have brought to or thrown upon her shores.

The “doves of peace,” and there are many Germans now resident in Holland, have probably all of them “Mannlichers” as well as spiked helmets for use if needed.

In regard to all transactions with the Huns or their master, Holland will do well to remember Virgil’s oft-quoted line: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

Every “dove,” whether in the guise of propagandist, commercial representative, official, or agent for the purchase of foodstuffs, and whether bringing a cage of “peace doves” or bags of gold, is a potential enemy to the peace and independence of Holland. The triumph of the Central Empires means the subjugation of the Dutch people, and the “peace doves” within her borders would soon quit their cooing and be transformed into the “Prussian Eagle’s brood.”

CLIVE HOLLAND.

_Famine in Belgium_

“When the German conquers Belgium and Poland the first thing he does is to raise agriculture, commerce, and industry to a state of immediate prosperity. Gain and comfort for the new subjects cling to the soles of his feet.”