Part 9

"Has it come to this?" Well may the Goddess ask this question. Times are indeed changed since the heroic days. Germany has still her great Greek scholars, one or two of them among the greatest living, men who know, and can feel, the spirit, as well as the letter, of the old Classics. Do they remember to-day what the relation of the Goddess of Wisdom was to the God of War, in Homer, when, to use the Latin names which are perhaps more familiar, to the general reader than the Greek, Mars "indulged in lawless rage," and Jove sent Juno and Minerva to check his "frightfulness?"

"Go! and the great Minerva be thine aid; To tame the monster-god Minerva knows, And oft afflicts his brutal breast with woes."

and how the hero Diomede, with Minerva's aid, wounded the divine bully and sent him bellowing and whimpering back, only to hear from his father the just rebuke:

"To me, perfidious! this lamenting strain? Of lawless force shall lawless Mars complain? Of all the gods who tread the spangled skies, Thou most unjust, most odious in our eyes! Inhuman discord is thy dear delight, The waste of slaughter, and the rage of fight!"

It is most true. Such has ever been War for War's sake, and when the Germans themselves are wounded and beaten, they complain like Mars of old of "lawless force."

But Raemaekers has introduced another touch more Roman than Greek, and reminding us perhaps of Tacitus rather than of Homer.

Who was Caligula, and what does his name mean? "Little Jack-boots," in his childhood the spoiled child of the camp, as a man, and Caesar, the first of the thoroughly mad, as well as bad, Emperors of Rome, the first to claim divine honours in his lifetime, to pose as an artist and an architect, an orator and a _litterateur_, to have executions carried out under his own eyes, and while he was at meals; who made himself a God, and his horse a Consul.

Minerva blacking the boots of Caligula--it is a clever combination!

But there is an even worse use of Pallas, which War and the German War-lords have made. They have found a new Pallas of their own, not the supernal Goddess of Heavenly Wisdom and Moderation, but her infernal counterfeit, sung of by a famous English poet in prophetic lines that come back to us to-day with new force.

Who loves not Knowledge, who shall rail Against her beauty, may she mix With men and prosper, who shall fix Her pillars? let her work prevail----

Yes, but how do the lines continue?

What is she cut from love and faith But some wild Pallas from the brain

Of Demons, fiery hot to burst All barriers in her onward race For power? Let her know her place, She is the second, not the first.

Knowledge is power, but, unrestrained by conscience, a very awful power.

This is the Pallas whom the "Demons," from whose brain she has sprung, are using for their demoniac purposes. She too might have her portrait painted--and they. Perhaps Raemaekers will paint them both before he has done.

HERBERT WARNER.

THE WONDERS OF CULTURE

Of all forms of "Kultur" or "frightfulness" that which materializes in the "the terror which flieth by night" is to the intelligent mind at one and the same time the most insensate and damnable. It fails to accomplish, either in Paris or in London, the subjugation by terror of the people for which Germans seem to hope. It is only in German imagination that it accomplishes "material and satisfactory damage to forts, camps, arsenals, and fortified towns." In reality it inflicts misery and death upon a mere handful of people (horrible as that may be) and destroys chiefly the homes of the poor. It serves no military end, and the damage done is out of all proportion to the expenditure of energy and material used to accomplish it.

The fine cartoon which Raemaekers has drawn to bring home to the imagination what this form of "Kultur" stands for makes it easy for us in London to sympathize with our brothers and sisters in Paris. We have as yet been spared daylight raids in the Metropolitan area, and so we needed this cartoon to enable us to realize fully what "Kultur" by indiscriminate Zeppelin bombs means.

Who cannot see the cruel drama played out in that Paris street? The artist has assembled for us in a few living figures all the actors. The dead woman; the orphaned child, as yet scarcely realizing her loss; the bereaved workman, calling down the vengeance of Heaven upon the murderers from the air; the stern faces of the _sergents de ville_, evidently feeling keenly their impotence to protect; and in the background other _sergents_, the lines of whose bent backs convey in a marvellous manner and with a touch of real genius the impression of tender solicitude for the injured they are tending. And faintly indicated, further still in the background, the crowd that differs little, whether it be French or English, in its deeper emotions.

CLIVE HOLLAND.

"FOLK WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND THEM"

How often have I been asked by sorrow-stricken mothers and wives: "Why does not Providence intervene either to stop this war, or at least to check its cruelties and horrors?" If for many amongst us not yet bereaved this European massacre is a puzzle, it should not cause us dismay or surprise, if the widow or son-bereaved mother lifts up her hands exclaiming: "Why did not God save him? Why did He let him be shot down by those Huns?"

Truth to tell, God has, so to speak, tied up His own hands in setting ours free. When He placed the human race upon the surface of this planet He dowered them with freedom, giving to each man self-determining force, by the exercise of which he was to become better than a man or worse than a beast. Good and evil, like wheat and cockle, grow together, in the same field. The winnowing is at harvest-time, not before. Meanwhile, we ourselves have lived to see the fairest portions of this fair creation of God changed from a garden into a desert--pillaged, ravaged, and brought to utter ruin by shot and shell, sword and fire. When I have said this, I have but uttered a foreword to the hideous story, spoken the prologue only of the "frightful" tragedy. We are all familiar with at least some of the revolting facts and details with which the German soldiery has been found charged and convicted by Commissions appointed to investigate the crimes and atrocities adduced against them. The verdicts of French, Belgian, and English tribunals are unanimous. They all agree that Germany has been caught redhanded in her work of dyeing the map of Europe red with innocent blood.

When you bend your eyes to the pathetic cartoon standing opposite this letterpress, is there not brought home to you in a way, touching even to tears, the "frightful" consequences of the misuse of human powers, more especially of the attribute of freedom? If Germany had chosen to use, instead of brute force, moral force, what a great, grand, and glorious mission might have been hers to-day. If, instead of trying the impossible task of dominating the whole world with her iron hand upon its throat and her iron heel upon its foot, she had been satisfied with the portion of the map already belonging to her, and had not by processes of bureaucratic tyranny driven away millions of her subjects who preferred liberty to slavery, America to Germany, by this date she might have consolidated an Empire second in the world to none but one. Alas! in her over-reaching arrogance she has, on the contrary, set out to de-Christianize, de-civilize, and even de-humanize the race for which Christ lived and died.

Our high mission it is to try to save her from herself. Already I can read written in letters of blood carved into the gravestone of her corrupted greatness,

"Ill-weaved ambition, How much art thou shrunk!"

BERNARD VAUGHAN.

ON THE WAY TO CALAIS

They are coming, like a tempest, in their endless ranks of gray, While the world throws up a cloud of dust upon their awful way; They're the glorious cannon fodder of the mighty Fatherland, Born to make the kingdoms tremble and the nations understand.

Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! the cannon fodder come Along their way to Calais, (God help the hearth and home) They'll do his will who taught them, on the earth and on the waves, Till land and sea are festering with their unnumbered graves.

The garrison and barrack and the fortress give them vent; They sweep, a herd of winter wolves, upon the flying scent; For all their deeds of horror they are told that death atones, And their master's harvest cannot spring till he has sowed their bones.

Into beasts of prey he's turned them; when they show their teeth and growl. The lash is buried in their cheeks; they're slaughtered if they howl; To their bloody Lord of Battles must they only bend the knee, For hard as steel and fierce as hell should cannon fodder be.

Scourge and curses are their portion, pain and hunger without end, Till they hail the yell of shrapnel as the welcome of a friend; They drink and burn and rape and laugh to hear the women cry, And do the devil's work to-day, but on the morrow die.

Drift! Drift! Drift! the cannon fodder go Upon their way to Calais, (God feed the carrion crow.) They've done his will who taught them that the Germans shall be slaves, Till land and sea are festering with their unnumbered graves.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS.

VON BETHMANN-HOLLWEG AND TRUTH

_"Incorrupta Fides, nudaque Veritas"_ HORACE

"Good Faith unstained, and Truth all-unadorned"

_Nuda veritas_: it was Horace who in a famous Ode first presented the figure of Truth thus. And whom did he make her companions and sisters? They were three, and their names were "Modesty," "Fair Dealing," and "Good Faith." The four sisters do indeed go together in a quadruple alliance and _entente_, and when one is flouted or estranged, the others are alienated and become enemies too.

The Germans were believed to be--some few still believe them to be--a "truth-loving nation." They had a passion, we were told, for truth, for accuracy, for scientific exactness. Theirs might be a blunt and brutal frankness, but they were at least downright and truthful.

Well, they first flouted Modesty--they bragged and blustered, bluffed and "bounded." They could not keep it up. They had to act. Fair Dealing went by the board. Then Good Faith became impossible, for, as this very von Bethmann-Hollweg declared, "Necessity knew no law." Now they have forsaken Truth. They must deceive their own people. The "lie" has entered into their soul. Never was so systematic a use made of falsehoods small and great.

But Truth expelled is not powerless. Naked, she is still not weaponless. She has her little "periscope," her magic mirror, which shows the liar himself, as well as the world, what he is like. And she has another weapon, as those who know their "Paradise Lost" will remember:

"Bright Ithuriel's lance Truth kindling truth where'er it glance"

It is not shown here, for it is invisible, but none the less potent. With it Truth can indeed "shame the devil." She not only shows what the liar is like outside, but reveals his inner hideousness, and actual shape, for all to see.

There are many sayings about Truth, and they are all awkward for the liar. "Truth will out," said a witty English judge, "even in an affidavit." It will out, even in a German Chancellor's _dementi_.

The most famous is

"_Magna est veritas et praevalet_"

"Great is Truth and she prevails," in the end.

Yes, "She is on the path, and nothing will stop her." She started on the hills of the little but free republic of Switzerland; she is slowly traversing the plains of the vast free republic of America. Her last contest will be over the Germans themselves.

HERBERT WARREN.

VAN TROMP AND DE RUYTER

A generation ago a little clique of wise men at Oxford patted themselves on the back for having discovered "The Historical Method." But the common people of all countries have always known it. The names of the great dead are not forgotten, nor yet the great things for which they stood. There may be no strict liturgy for the ancestor worship of the West, but that worship is a simple fact, and it is a thing that timorous politicians would do well to remember. Here Raemaekers appeals to his countrymen to regard their past, to be worthy of the great seamen who took the Dutch fleet up the Medway, and lashed brooms to the mast-head of the ships that swept the sea clear of British enemies.

The Dutch were fighting for their liberty then. Great Britain is fighting for liberty in Europe to-day--and for Dutch liberty to boot. The enemy of all liberty uses Holland as a short cut whereby her pirates of the air can get more quickly to their murder work in England. Would the hero ancestors, of whom the Dutch so boast, have tolerated this indignity? The artist seer supplies the answer.

Note the mixture of the ghostly and the real in this vivid and vivacious drawing. But if it is easy to see through the faint outlines of the sailor spirits, it is easier for these gallant ghosts to see through the unrealities of their descendants' fears and hesitations. The anger of the heroes is plainly too great for words. How compressed the lips! How tense the attitude! The hands gripped in the angriest sort of impatience! Mark the subtle mingling of seaman and burgher in the poise and figures. Mark particularly Van Tromp's stiffened forefinger on his staff.

Is the fate of L19 the fruit of our artist's stinging reminder that Holland once had nobler spirits and braver days?

ARTHUR POLLEN.

WAR AND CHRIST

The deliberate war made by Prussia in all those areas which she can reach or occupy against the symbols and sacred objects of the Christian faith is a phenomenon in every way worthy of consideration. It is clearly not a matter of accident. The bombardment at Rheims Cathedral, for example, can be proved to have been deliberate. It had no military object; and the subsequent attempts to manufacture a military reason for it only produced a version of the occurrence not only incredible but in flat contradiction to the original admissions of the Germans themselves. But such episodes as those of Rheims and Louvain merely attract the attention of the world because of the celebrity of the outraged shrines. All who are familiar with the facts know that deliberate sacrilege no less than deliberate rape and deliberate murder has everywhere marked the track of the German army.

The offence has been malignant. That does not, of course, mean that it has been irrational; quite the contrary. One fully admits that Prussia, being what she is, has every cause to hate the Cross, and every motive to vent the agonized fury of a lost soul upon things sacred to the God she hates.

The moral suggested by this cartoon of Raemaekers' must not be confused with the ridiculous and unhistoric pretence that war itself is essentially unchristian. When Mr. Bernard Shaw, if I remember right, drew from the affair of Rheims the astonishing moral that we cannot have at the same time "glorious wars and glorious cathedrals," he might surely have remembered that the age in which Rheims Cathedral was built, whatever else it was, was not an age of Pacifism. The insult to Jesus Christ is not in the sword (which in His own words He came to bring), but in the profanation of the sword. It is in cruelty, injustice, treachery, unbridled lust, the worship of unrighteous strength--in fact, in all that can be summed up in the single word "Prussia."

CECIL CHESTERTON.

BARBED WIRE

Save for the spiked helmets, the gruesome figures in the foreground of this cartoon might have belonged in life to any one of the warring nationalities. It is a noteworthy fact, however, that not one of the nations at war has shown so little care for its dead as Germany, whose corpses lie and rot on every front on which they are engaged.

The world cannot blame Germany for the introduction of barbed wire as an accessory of war, though it is well known that German wire surpasses any other in sheer devilish ingenuity; not that it is more effective as an entanglement, but its barbs are longer, and are set more closely together, than in the wire used by other nationalities; it is, in short, more frightful, and thus is in keeping with the rest of the accessories of the German war machine.

But this in the cartoon is normal barbed wire, with its normal burden. One may question whether the All-Highest War Lord, who in the course of his many inspections of the various fronts must have seen sights like this, is ever troubled by the thought that these, his men, lie and hang thus for his pleasure, that their ghastly fate is a part of his glorious plan. He set out to remake the world, and here is one of the many results--broken corpses in the waste.

Part of the plan, broken corpses in the waste. By the waste and the corpses that he made shall men remember the author and framer of this greatest war.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN.

THE HIGHER POLITICS

There is a significance in this cartoon which I believe will appeal much more strongly to the firing line than to Home. The Front distrusts politics, and especially the higher politics. That means the juggling and wire-pulling of the Chancelleries, and the Front has an uneasy conviction that at the subtleties and craftiness and cunning of the diplomatic game we cannot compete with "The Bosche." Hard knocks and straight fighting the Front does understand, and at that game are cheerfully confident of winning in the long run.

It would be bitter news to the fighting men that any peace had been patched up on any terms but those the Allies soon or late will be in a position to dictate, to lay down and say flatly, "Take them and have Peace; or leave them and go on getting licked." The Front doesn't like War. No man who has endured the horrors and savagery and "blood, mud, and misery" of civilized warfare could pretend to like it. No man who has endured the long-drawn misery of manning the waterlogged trenches for days and weeks and months can look forward with anything but apprehension to another winter of war. No man who has attacked across the inferno of the shell-and-bullet-swept "neutral ground," or has hung on with tight-clenched teeth to the battered ruins of the forward fire trench under a murderous rain of machine-gun and rifle bullets, a howling tempest of shells, an earth-shaking tornado of high explosives, can but long for the day when Peace will be declared and these horrors will be no more than a past nightmare.

But the Front will "stick it" for another winter or several winters, will go through many bitter attacks and counter-attacks to win the complete victory that will ensure, and alone will ensure, lasting peace. We know our limitations and our weaknesses. We admit that, as the American journalist bluntly put it, we are "poor starters," but we know just as surely he was right in completing the phrase, "but darn good finishers." Let the "higher politicians" on our side stand down and leave the fighting men to finish the argument. Let them keep the ring clear, and let the Front fight it out. The Front doesn't mind "taking the responsibility," and it will give "Kaiser Bill" and "Little Willie" all the responsibilities they can handle before the Great Game is over.

BOYD CABLE.

THE LOAN GAME

Raemaekers is pitiless, but never oversteps the truth. National Debts are ever national millstones, worn around the neck. They are worn unwillingly, and they are not ornamental; they are a burden, and the weight is sometimes crushing. A prospect of that sort seems to be the lot of several of the "Great Powers" of Europe for the remainder, and the greater portion, of the Twentieth Century. Though German "civilization" were more worthy of such a term and its associations as Kultur ten times over, would it become any Potentate and his advisers to impose it on so many countries at such a cost in suffering as all this--and more?

But Kaiser Wilhelm and his crew of State-at-any-price men impose not on other peoples only: they impose on their own kith and kin. Look at these three sad and apprehensive figures playing the Loan Game--the first, the second, the third Loan! Children, says the artist, passing the coin from one hand to another's, and getting richer at each pass!! Yes, children, the German people treated so by a few dominies. State dominies and the Director (or dupe!) at Berlin! No people gains, every people loses by incurring a Debt; but in Germany, and to-day! to incur an indebtedness, contract a loss, does not suffice; the people must not know it.

Even the children know that coin has not left them richer: many, very many Germans know the Kultur War to be ruinous: but Berlin must play the Game still, and assume that the tricks and aims cannot be understood! It is lack of regard for other nations carried into German Finance; and all because the bureaucratic military heart is a stone. The piling up of State paper goes on, but not merrily, as Michael goes from Darlehnkasse to Reichsbank, one, two, three (and is about to go the fourth time!). This game of processions to the Kasse does not increase the available wealth within beleaguered Germany: and the 100-mark Note has no reference to material wealth securing it.

Now, the Commercial magnates of Germany realize the crushing fact--No indemnity possible!! and what of the Notes which are held? When shades of night fall heavily, and the Loan Game can be played no more, will the German people, tricked and impoverished, go to bed supperless and silent? German finance IS "a scrap of paper."

W. M. J. WILLIAMS.

A WAR OF RAPINE

True, O Liebknecht, it is indeed a war of rapine, engendered, planned, and brought about by the nation to which you belong. Yet, foul as is that nation, its foulness is not greater than your futility, by which you show up the strength of that which you oppose with as much effect as our own Snowden and Casement can claim for their efforts to arrest the work of the Allies.