CHAPTER XXXII

THE BOER WAR AND THE DREYFUS CASE

A cartoon which was a forerunner of the Transvaal War and the railway between Capetown and Cairo was that entitled "The Rhodes Colossus," which appeared in _Punch_ December 10, 1892. It was by the hand of Linley Sambourne. It shows a colossal figure of Cecil Rhodes standing on a map of Africa with one foot planted in Egypt and the other at the Cape. In his hands he holds a line suggesting the telegraph wire connecting the two places.

Although the German Government refused to interfere in the protracted struggle in the Transvaal, the sympathy of Germany with the Boers found expression in a host of cartoons, bitterly inveighing against British aggression. Thoroughly characteristic is one which appeared in the _Lustige Blätter_ entitled "English World-Kingdom; or, Bloody Cartography." A grossly distorted caricature of Victoria is standing before a map of the world, and dipping her pen in a cup of blood, held for her by an army officer. Chamberlain, at her elbow, is explaining that "the lowest corner down yonder, must be painted red!" Another of the _Lustige Blätter's_ grim cartoons, alluding to the terrible price in human life that England paid for her ultimate victory in the Transvaal, depicts Britannia, as Lady Macbeth, vainly trying to wash the stain from her bloody hands. "Out, damned spot!" In lighter vein is the cartoon which is here reproduced from the _Wiener Humoristische Blätter_ showing "Oom Paul at His Favorite Sport." Kruger, rakishly arrayed in tennis garb, is extracting infinite enjoyment from the congenial exercise of volleying English soldiers, dressed up as shuttlecocks, over the "Transvaal net" into the watery ditch beyond.

Judged by the manner it was mirrored in the caricature of Europe and America, the Dreyfus Case assumed the magnitude of a great war or a crisis in national existence. During the last two or three years that the degraded Captain of Artillery was a prisoner at Devil's Island, when Zola was furiously accusing, and the General Staff was talking about "the Honor of the Army," and France was divided into two angry camps, one had only to glance at the current cartoons to realize that Dreyfus was, as the late G. W. Steevens called him, "the most famous man in the world." For a time the great personages of the earth were relegated to the background. The monarchs and statesmen of Europe were of interest and importance only so far as their careers affected that of the formerly obscure Jewish officer.

Perhaps the most famous of all the admirable cartoons dealing with _l'Affaire_ was the "Design for a New French Bastile," which was of German origin and which caused the paper publishing it to be excluded from French territory. It appeared just after Colonel Henry had cut his throat with a razor in his cell in the Fortress of Vincennes, when suspicions of collusion were openly expressed, and some went so far as to hint that the prisoner's death might be a case of murder and not suicide. The "Design for a New French Bastile" showed a formidable fortress on the lines of the famous prison destroyed in the French Revolution with a row of the special cells beneath. In one of these cells a loaded revolver was placed conspicuously on the chair; in the next was seen a sharpened razor; from a stout bar in a third cell dangled a convenient noose. The inference was obvious, and the fact that the cells were labeled "for Picquart," "for Zola," "for Labori" and the other defenders of Dreyfus gave the cartoon an added and sinister significance. In caricature the Dreyfus case was a battle between a small number of Anti-Dreyfussard artists on the one hand, and the Dreyfus press with all the cartoonists of Europe and the United States as its allies on the other. The opportunity to exalt the prisoner, to hold him up as a martyr, to interpret pictorially the spirit of Zola's ringing "_la vérité est en marche, et rien ne l'arrêtera_!" offered a vast field for dramatic caricature. On the other hand the cartoon against Dreyfus and his defenders was essentially negative, and the wonder is that the rout of the minority was not greater--it should have been a veritable "_sauve qui peut_."

The spirit of anti-Dreyfussard caricature was Anti-Semitism. One of the most striking of the cartoons on this side purported to contrast France before 1789 and France at the end of the Nineteenth Century. In the first picture we were shown a peasant toiling laboriously along a furrow in the ground, bearing on his shoulders a beribboned and beplumed aristocrat of the old régime, whose thighs grip the neck of the man below with the tenacity of the Old Man of the Sea. That was France before the Revolution came with its bloody lesson. In the picture showing France at the end of the Nineteenth Century there was the same peasant toiling along at the bottom, but the burden under which he tottered was fivefold. Above him was the petty merchant, who in turn carried on his shoulders the lawyer, and so on until riding along, arrogantly and ostentatiously, at the top was the figure of the foreign-born Jew, secure through the possession of his tainted millions.

The dangerous straits through which the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry was obliged to pass were hit off in a cartoon appearing in the _Humoristische Blätter_ of Berlin, entitled "Between Scylla and Charybdis." On one side of the narrow waterway a treacherous rock shows the yawning jaws of the Army. On the other side, equally hideous and threatening, gleam the sharpened teeth of the face typifying the Dreyfus Party. Waldeck-Rousseau, appreciating the choppiness of the sea and the dangerous rocks, calls to his gallant crew: "Forward, dear friends, look neither to the right nor to the left, and we will win through at last." Many of the cartoons dealing with the Dreyfus case were mainly symbolic in their nature; full of figures of "Justice with her Scales," "Justice Blindfolded and with Unsheathed Sword," "Swords of Damocles" and so on. A Dutch cartoon in _Amsterdammer_, entitled "The Last Phase of the Dreyfus Case," showed Justice taking the unfortunate captain into her car. The horses drawing the car were led by Scheurer-Kestner and Zola, while following the chariot, to which they are linked by ignominious chains, were the discredited Chiefs of the Army. The same paper humorously summed up the condition of the French General Staff in a picture showing a falling house of which the occupants, pulling at cross-purposes, were accelerating the downfall. The decision upon Revision and the dispatching of the Spax to Cayenne to bring Dreyfus back to France was commemorated in London _Punch_ in a dignified cartoon called "Toward Freedom." Madame la République greeted Dreyfus: "Welcome, M. le Capitaine. Let me hope I may soon return you your sword." The same phase of the case was more maliciously interpreted by _Lustige Blätter_ of Berlin in a cartoon entitled "At Devil's Island," which showed the Master of the Island studying grinningly a number of officers whom he held in the hollow of his hand, and saying: "They take away one captain from me: but look here, a whole handful of generals! Oh, after all, the arrangement is not so bad."