Part 8

To think otherwise, to maintain, with whatever specious argument, that Force must dominate mankind, is not merely a negation of Christianity, but a negation of Humanity. Such is the creed of the Hun. By it he has been judged and found wanting.

HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.

_The Super-Hooligans_

The suggestion of this caricature is perhaps not so obvious to Englishmen as might be wished, for it represents the Kaiser, and the forces behind him, as more broken down than we have reason to think they were, or at any rate, than they appeared to us at the time this cartoon first appeared. It may be that to the neutrals their cause seemed less hopeful, and more out-at-elbows, as here depicted. The continuous fall of the mark in neutral countries may mean this.

The figure of President Wilson is at any rate exceedingly clever. Detached, professorial, contemplative, slightly academic, not to say donnish, he contemplates “Mr. Turveydrop” and “Bill Sykes,” for such characters they appear to be, with pensive, amused speculation. He certainly cannot expect more than swagger and sham gentility, scarcely disguising brutal ruffianism, from such figures. But is not the reality more serious and murderous?

The Kaiser is doubtless an actor, but not quite such a shabby-genteel third-rater as this, and his bullies are no doubt burglars and ruffians, but not of the old-fashioned, bludgeon type; rather the smart, modern operators, armed with automatic revolvers, oxygen blowpipes, swift motors, and other appliances of up-to-date science. “Super-Hooligans” both doubtless are, but unfortunately not to be despised as enemies. This, however, would be less easy to present in caricature, and perhaps less telling.

The point is the folly of expecting any true “gentleness,” or anything but a veneer of gentility, from Germany.

HERBERT WARREN.

_Before the Fall_

When, in August of 1914, the German hosts set out on their way to victory and yet greater victory, they had in their minds a figure which, for them, had been girdled round with dignities almost sacred. Whatever their secret thoughts regarding this figure might have been, it was ostensibly something very nearly sacred; to the rest of the world it was an imperial figure, portrayed in many attitudes, but in practically every attitude there was the suggestion of illimitable pride. The world that is not Germany had laughed at this figure a little: over certain telegrams, over the assumption of genius in certain artistic fields, and over a versatility that was almost Neronic. There was not wanting, among free peoples, a certain amount of contempt for this figure.

Here you have the figure in a new attitude, and though at the time this cartoon was published the triumphs in Rumania were still to come, and the German lines of defense were apparently as strong as ever, yet the cartoon expressed a truth, as do all these cartoons of Raemaekers. As insecurely as is pictured here stood this man who aped Napoleon and Alexander, at whose bidding women and children were fed into the furnace of war, through whose senseless ambition countless homes were made places of mourning for the men who would return no more. More than three years of suffering, and the face of the world changed, the progress of the world arrested--for this!

Beneath him is the gulf; he has hurled millions into it, and here postures no more as second only to omnipotence, but waits the inevitable fall. Thank God that it is inevitable.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN.

_The Shirkers_

It is inevitable that there should be in every country degenerates who decline to play the game. England has her disreputable leaven of shirkers; France, whose heroism beggars description, has to reckon with her _embusqués_. The serene cheerfulness with which the bitterest sacrifices are faced daily by the mass of the nations engaged in the terrible conflict, bring into powerful relief the obliquity and depravity of the handful of men who seek to escape the heavy burden that lies upon all. There is no possibility of exaggerating the mean infamy of the men who seek their own safety by skulking behind the broad backs of the defenders of their country, when every call of duty and right demands their presence in the fighting-line. It is very difficult to distinguish between the sinfulness of shirking at a crisis like the present and the crime of overt treachery. No injustice would be done if every shirker were made to understand that he is liable to the traitor’s penalty if he persist in his offense.

The repetition of conscientious objections to war, at a time when a nation is committed to a strife in which any slackening spells for it practical annihilation, causes graver and graver perplexity. It is doubtful whether any healthy mind can now plead a conscientious objection without provoking suspicion of his powers of coherent reasoning. A condition of things has arisen in which private sentiment, however honestly cherished, is bound to yield to public needs. It is a tradition of the country in normal times to treat the conscientious objector with tenderness. As far as public safety allows, it is even now a proper function of Government to discriminate between an honest delusion, however anti-social, and a wilful defiance, from contemptible motives of selfishness or cowardice, of right principle. A very formidable danger clearly lurks in any continuance of the lax toleration which is often extended to the conscientious objector, by virtue of the opportunity such considerate treatment offers the shirker of indulging his evil propensities.

SIDNEY LEE.

_For Merit_

There is no doubt a certain unfairness in the inevitable wartime method of laying the burden of the crimes of war upon this or that pair of shoulders. Princes in particular must pay this penalty attached to their august station. And few can have less just reason to complain than this slim heir of the Hohenzollerns who so thirsted for the glory of war. He has found out by now that it is a less glorious affair than it seemed when set forth in heady, unwise speech (after unwise dining) from the box of a Danzig theater.

Deprived of his expected bays by the idiotic obstinacy of the so utterly decadent French, his fond parent bestows on him the Order _pour le Mérite_ with oak leaves. It is not quite easy to see why. Surely there cannot have been any obscure sardonic reference to tanning.

But if, as the artist suggests, and the plainest reading of the facts of the fruitless Verdun assault seems to confirm, lives of men were squandered in a reckless attempt to save the princeling’s face (which was, in fact, beyond saving), then does he richly deserve the grim decoration with which in the name of infamy he is here invested--the Order of Butchery, with knives. And you may view the crosses upon the pathetic mounds before Verdun as so many entries in the Recording Angel’s ledger.

JOSEPH THORP.

_Duty v. Militarism_

Same here!

Same, I suppose, in every country.

The final necessity has put to the proof that which goes to the making of a man and of a nation.

The man who is prepared to lay down his life for his country simply regards it as a duty, and does it regardless of everything. And Duty is a noble leader.

The man who is not prepared to give up his usual pleasures and dissipations, even though his country be in extremity, looks askance at the call, labels it militarism, and will have none of it.

Every age and every nation has its shirkers, who have been only too willing to let any but themselves bear their burdens so that their own personal comfort might not be interfered with. And shirkers such as these have the deserved contempt of every honest man.

But, in strictest justice to the few--like the Friends, and those who believe with them that force is no remedy--while one cannot but wonder what would have become of the world if evil were to be allowed to ravage it at will, and while one finds it difficult to view matters from their standpoint, it must be acknowledged that the military coercion of genuine conscience in these days is an anachronism which galls one’s feelings.

The one thing we have now to guard against in this free land of ours is lest in breaking by force the unspeakable tyranny of Prussian militarism we lay our own necks under an equal yoke.

JOHN OXENHAM.

_The Troubadour_

Germania loved music and so the troubadour sang to her.

Gaily the troubadour sang of glory and empire, and the good German sword.

And he sang a song of _Kultur_, a pocketful of loot.

And a song of tears, the tears of widows and orphans in other lands, widows of foolish men who had denied her omnipotent will; and of foolish reluctant virgins to whom was given the shining compensation of bearing sons to her flushed warriors.

And if he sang of her own sons that lay before Liége, and by the Yser, and on the high road to Paris and to Calais, and Petrograd, it was still a song of glory in a minor but triumphant key.

For also he sang a song of an all-highest promise that, wreathed with the splendid bays of victory, her sons should return before the next ripening of the harvest. But the harvest was gathered and they came not.

And then he sang a song of the sea with the moan of the winds in it, and the cries of little children--which for a sea-song was not a pleasant song.

And thereafter with a fine operatic vehemence he broke into a song of glorious hate.

And again he sang (in a queer mocking voice) of the promise. But another harvest was garnered (and eaten) and still her sons returned not.

And she began to be afraid.

So (for he had a pretty wit) he sang again a song of glory and feasting, and there was laughter in his voice.

And at the last a song of thanks most indubitably sincere.

And she turned and looked upon the troubadour and found that he was Death--in the high boots of a German Hussar.

And she stopped her ears, not to mute his singing, but to shut out the thunder of the guns that came down all the winds.

JOSEPH THORP.

_See the Conquering Hero Comes_

A bitter satire on the moral and intellectual claims of Germany. The conquering hero of the twentieth century and the bearer of _Kultur_ is no mere Hun. He is a “throw-back” to an ancestral type far more remote than Attila, who was a comparatively polished person. He is primitive Man, not Rousseau’s imaginary _l’homme naturel_, but the _Urmensch_, a veritable monster, gross, bloated, abominable, compact of evil, and more repulsive than the wild beasts he has tamed to do his hideous will. They are monstrous creatures too, but dull and brutish. They are incapable of moral judgment; they follow their instincts and know no better. But he knows. He is Man, to whom has been given understanding and lordship over all the beasts. He is their master by reason of his superior brain, and that superiority is the measure of his depravity. By choosing these savage creatures to be his companions and to do his pleasure he proclaims himself far lower than they, because he might have chosen otherwise.

We know those favorite satellites of his. One flies overhead--a vulture with gore dripping from beak and claws. Two others walk behind their master in docile servitude and ape his bearing as well as their dull senses and uncouth forms allow. One is a gorilla, with bared fangs and the glare of senseless destructiveness in his eyes; the other is a whiskered wolf, sly, murderous and ruthless. They bear the hero’s train and wear the marks of approbation he has bestowed upon them for the services they have rendered by the exercise of the qualities proper to their kind.

And there is one other. Ever as he goes, there wriggles along by his side a snake--that old serpent, the devil and the father of lies.

So accompanied and swelling with pride the conquering hero swaggers on over the bleached bones that bear witness to his triumph. He has decked his repulsive form with the incongruous trappings of civilization, and his foul visage wears an air of ineffable self-satisfaction and arrogant disdain. In his own conceit he cuts a splendid figure and is the object of universal admiration. From his girdle hang the heads of his latest victims and in his right hand he carries, delicately poised as a scepter and sign of sovereignty, a cudgel tipped with the hand of a child hacked off at the wrist. This is his title of honor. The savage beasts that accompany him cannot aspire to such majesty; they do not prey on their own kind.

And that is how a neutral sees the German hero.

ARTHUR SHADWELL.

_Belgium_

It appears to me that Raemaekers’ wonderful cartoons more often than not fall naturally into two main classes: the subtle and the direct. In both methods of appeal he is a past-master, and his message never fails to drive itself home, either through the medium of one’s intellect or one’s heart. Here we have a good and vivid example of the direct method of gaining our sympathy. An appeal to the emotional rather than to the intellectual within us.

The woes of devastated Belgium, of its starving population, of its desolate homes, of its orphaned children, may be said by some to be an “oft told tale.” But surely none looking upon this most poignant drawing can fail to understand much of the tragedy and misery brought about by the German occupation of Belgian soil and the methods of _Kultur_ which for a period of three years now have held sway in that unhappy land.

Those of us who know the facts--the things which do not always get into the papers, as the phrase is--the wilful starvation of the poor by their relentless conquerors, can best understand and appreciate the artist’s message.

What a pathetic picture this is! The starved woman--all the roundness and beauty of womanhood and motherhood brutally stamped out of her face and figure by the state of things brought about by the rule of the Hun; the child clinging to her mother with the terror and amazement which is the most piteous of all expressions that can come into and be graven upon the face of childhood. Both bear in their faces and forms the cruel marks of starvation and suffering.

And yet there are those abroad in the land who can talk and write of “saving Germany from too much humiliation.” Too much humiliation! For one, I say that if Germany can be dragged in the dust; if her rulers can be made to eat the bread of humiliation; if her bestial-minded military officials, who have deported women and girls from Belgium and France to God only knows where and to what end, can be brought to adequate punishment, then there is still some justice left in this warring world and some hope for poor, struggling, vexed, and fearful humanity. Unless Germany is conquered and humiliated, unless the wrongs of Belgium and the other devastated territories are avenged, we and the millions of our Allies will have suffered, fought, and died for the greatest cause the world has ever known--and in vain.

From the welter of battle, after the shouts of the fighting men have died away, must emerge a new basis of society and a set of new ideals in international conduct. And it is up to all of us to see to it that this comes about.

CLIVE HOLLAND.

_The Giant’s Task_

“I see you can hold them up, but----”

The whole world sees that Germany can hold them up. Strength is concentrated first on one side, and then on the other, and at the time this cartoon was first published the little figure sitting up on the Western side watched, unmoved alike by German promises and German threats. It watched while the days of the Marne went by and proved that German efforts in the West would be confined to “holding up”--that the capture of Paris and of Calais were mere dreams that must pass unfulfilled. It watched the steady thrusting back of Russia, the apparent success in building an Eastern defense that could be held up indefinitely. Then it added its weight to the Western boulder, and the holding up process went on.

Neither boulder has yet fallen; the strong man is not yet exhausted, but the whole world knows what the end must be. Germany could not afford a mere defensive war--from the outset she knew that decision must be won in the first months, and that the alternative to this was defeat. This grim figure, bent on “holding up” the two main fronts, is typical of Germany to-day, a raging barbarian, wearying under the impossible task. For such a task there was needed not only physical strength, but spiritual strength, ideals as well as machinery, and soul as well as brain. By his methods of war this soulless barbarian has added to the weights that he must hold up; he has misinterpreted the meaning of civilization, misunderstood the aims common to humanity outside Germany. The weight that he must hold up and away is not merely that of Britain, Russia, France, and the rest of the Allies; it is the weight of all men who understand freedom rightly, steadily crushing freedom’s antithesis.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN.

“_I Must Have Something for My Trouble_”

You shall, Germany, you shall!

You shall have even more than ever you expected--but not after the manner of your expectation.

Even the burglar who, after long and arduous and risky training in his profession, and careful plotting and planning, and detailed hard work with jimmies and blowpipes and center-bits, has collared the swag and been caught in the act, does not whine like this. If he is a wise man he surrenders at discretion, puts a philosophic face on it, and plans more artistic work while in confinement. If he is a hothead, he puts up a fight and gets it in the neck.

But he never whines for recompense for the nefarious trouble he has gone to.

Germany has not yet learned her lesson. She has burglariously and treacherously broken into her neighbors’ houses and seized them and their contents.

The cost to herself, in life, money--and, more than all, in the estimation of the world at large--is as yet hidden from her. When the bill is presented and her bloodshot eyes are opened to it, it will astound her.

For--somehow or other--it will have to be paid--to the last farthing. And while she is in confinement for her diabolical misdeeds, the world, it is to be fervently hoped, will see to it that all further power for mischief will be taken from her forever.

This burglar has intrenched himself among his plunder. He would negotiate with the besieging police to be allowed to keep something at all events for all his trouble.

He shall. He shall keep what he has earned--the loathing and contempt of every honest man under the sun.

JOHN OXENHAM.

“_Cinema Chocolate_”

It seems to be the irony of fate that Germany possesses everything good in an inverted, it may perhaps be said a “perverted,” form.

We all know the charms of the “Chocolate Soldier,” who originated, if we remember rightly, like the best flavored chocolate, in France.

Here we have a “Chocolate Soldier” of a very different kind. A young officer, of the familiar decadent Lothario type, is presenting a handsome stick of chocolate to a little Belgian or French girl.

At the side is an old man, evidently got up as a stage property, his face exceedingly cross as though he disliked the job, but his attitude rather ambiguous.

In the distance is the official military “filmer,” smug and grinning, waiting to turn the handle in order to obtain a “moving” picture for the German “movies.”

Mr. Raemaekers’ satire is most strongly displayed in the child’s face and clenched fists, fully visible to the spectator, but which _will not appear_ in the film. It appears also, though less obviously, in the cross old gentleman who will come out there as a benevolent pastor blessing the whole proceeding.

It is another instance of the systematic deception practised on the German people and the neutrals.

Monsieur Forain, the French Raemaekers, has something like it in his “_Haltez-la, et souriez_.” It is not quite the same, but suggests that both cartoons are based on fact, as doubtless they are.

HERBERT WARREN.

_The Doctrine of Expediency_

At the beginning of his reign Ferdinand was, or pretended to be, an ardent Russophile. Then something happened which made him think that he had been backing the wrong horse. Perhaps it was the result of the Russo-Japanese War; perhaps it was because little Prince Boris did not receive the usual decoration from St. Petersburg when he was made honorary colonel of the Russian Regiment of Minsk. We may be sure, at any rate, that the motive was not affection for Germany or the German Empire. That great nation has not the gift of inspiring affection, least of all in small peoples within reach of her claws.

Ferdinand was bribed, and bribed heavily, we may be certain; and, like the rulers of other Balkan States, he and his advisers thought for a time that the Central Powers were going to win. He thought he saw his way to an increase of territory at the expense of Serbia, perhaps also of Greece. Some say that he dreamed of reigning at Constantinople. These hopes must be wearing rather thin now. The time has not yet come for turning his coat; but if, or when, it seems to him safe and expedient to leave the Kaiser in the lurch, he will do it without the slightest scruple.

Meanwhile, there was no danger in making the Emperor of Austria his confidant; the poor old gentleman, if he understood what was said to him, probably thought the idea a very sensible one, and wished heartily that he had come to terms with Russia.

W. R. INGE.

_Murder on the High Seas_

Germany stands convicted of such bestial crime upon land and sea that one can only come to the conclusion her offence results not from passing aberration or the ebriety of war, but indicates an infection deep-seated and chronic. Her recent Imperial Government statistics of crime before the war indicated very surely that some deep, moral distemper was conquering the German character and running like a plague through her spiritual and sociological life.

It has been said that the problem is one for the anthropologist rather than the lawyer; yet even if the Prussian be not a Teuton, but a Tatar, his indifference to every human instinct would still remain inexplicable. For others of the Tatar stock are amenable to the evolution that time brings, and now pursue the business of war under modern conditions that embrace respect for prisoners and wounded, non-combatants, women and children.

Among the numberless instances of murder and piracy on the high seas space permits here but to dwell upon one, which has by no means received the attention it deserves. International problems involved by the destruction of American citizens have tended to focus public opinion on the “Lusitania” and “Essex” murders; but consider again a crime in the Black Sea and the depraved temper it implies.

On the thirtieth day of March, while lying motionless off Cape Fathia, the Russian hospital ship “Portugal” was destroyed in broad daylight by a submarine, despite the fact that she bore all necessary marks demanded by the Geneva Convention and Hague Covenant.

There perished fourteen ladies of the Red Cross; fifty surgeons and physicians; many male and female nurses; many Russian and French sailors. But for the fact that a Russian destroyer was in the vicinity, the fatalities must have been larger. A great hospital equipment was also lost to humanity.

Well might the Russian Government declare this outrage a flagrant infraction of the rights of man and an act of common piracy, while asking the judgment of all civilized countries on such barbarism.