THE calculated brutality of German and Austrian “frightfulness,” its cowardice and cold-blooded evil, are already familiar to all impartial students of Teutonic warfare. But a Nation that has consented to its own slavery cannot value freedom, or be supposed to respect the life or liberty of the innocent and weak. With her neck under Prussia’s heel, tamed Germany strives in word and deed to reflect the spirit of her masters, and so far succeeds that she can contemplate the atrocities of this war with satisfaction, and from pulpit, school, and press applaud each new manifestation in turn. Blind obedience to command has brought the Germans to a state where even their thinking is done for them; they grovel before the brute power that drives them and kiss and sanctify the bloody hands that hold the whip.
Luther said the justification of liberty was that man could only truly serve God and his fellow-man if freedom of choice of means were permitted to him. The German of to-day relinquishes that freedom and is content to be herded under a political system that denies him his independent manhood. He sacrifices responsibility and liberty alike to a race which he still suffers to inherit the privilege of directing his State; he prostitutes his own reasoning faculties and ignores the evolution of morals by applauding Prussia’s reactionary ideals at the expense of every modern movement for the progress of humanity. He knows the right and does the wrong—a willing slave to an archaic autocracy. Thus servile obedience to physical power is the noblest principle that United Germany has yet attained, and the consequences permeate the people in a spiritual indifference to elementary honor displayed alike on her battlefields and in her council chambers.
The lie is accepted as her first diplomatic weapon; “frightfulness” is developed as an invaluable ally of conquest; cruelty and treachery are praised by the scholar and pastor, practised as a matter of course by the soldier and politician. None sees what dishonor is thus heaped upon his country and how her history has been defiled by this generation on the precepts of the last.
Ignoring, as she always does, every contact with other cultures, Germany, out of a congenital megalomania, has evolved her own; and in her eyes it is no doubt as beautiful and precious as the ugly treasure of the child in the perambulator, who discards the most delightful modern toys for its own battered and hideous doll.
In this regard she is indeed still a child; but a study of comparative cultures, following upon the destruction of her present rulers and their doctrine of force, should create a larger-minded nation wherein the civilized concepts of older States shall find recognition.
“Until that final consummation,” as Francis Stopford has well said, “Europe dare not rest secure, and the horrors of Belgium and Serbia will be repeated for the next generation if Germany be left the freedom to reëstablish her might and to reorganize the life of her peoples with the sole object of crushing her neighbors at the first favorable opportunity.”
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
THOUGH a year and more has passed since the great tragedy of theLusitania, 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 theLusitania—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.
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.
“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.
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, busybourgeoisie; mediæval and modern at once, with her churches and her quays, her florid “Rubenses” her Van Dycks, her Teniers, herMaison 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.
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 bewhite.
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 (videGerman Presspassim) 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.
FULL half a million men, yet not enoughTo break this township on a winding stream;More yet must fall, and more, ere the red stuffThat built a nation’s manhood may redeemThe Highest’s hopes and fructify his dream.They pave the way to Verdun; on their dustThe Hohenzollern mount and, hand in hand,Gaze haggard south; for yet another thrust,And higher hills must heap, ere they shall standTo 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 clayJustice of myriad men, still in the womb,Shall heave two crosses; crucify and flayTwo memories accurs’d; then in the tombOf world-wide execration give them room.Verdun! Thy name is holy evermore;In thine heroic ruin the nations seeA monument, upon whose living shoreIn vain the evil breaks; we bend the knee,Thou symbol of all human liberty.EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
FULL half a million men, yet not enoughTo break this township on a winding stream;More yet must fall, and more, ere the red stuffThat built a nation’s manhood may redeemThe Highest’s hopes and fructify his dream.They pave the way to Verdun; on their dustThe Hohenzollern mount and, hand in hand,Gaze haggard south; for yet another thrust,And higher hills must heap, ere they shall standTo 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 clayJustice of myriad men, still in the womb,Shall heave two crosses; crucify and flayTwo memories accurs’d; then in the tombOf world-wide execration give them room.Verdun! Thy name is holy evermore;In thine heroic ruin the nations seeA monument, upon whose living shoreIn vain the evil breaks; we bend the knee,Thou symbol of all human liberty.EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
FULL half a million men, yet not enoughTo break this township on a winding stream;More yet must fall, and more, ere the red stuffThat built a nation’s manhood may redeemThe Highest’s hopes and fructify his dream.
They pave the way to Verdun; on their dustThe Hohenzollern mount and, hand in hand,Gaze haggard south; for yet another thrust,And higher hills must heap, ere they shall standTo 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 clayJustice of myriad men, still in the womb,Shall heave two crosses; crucify and flayTwo memories accurs’d; then in the tombOf world-wide execration give them room.
Verdun! Thy name is holy evermore;In thine heroic ruin the nations seeA monument, upon whose living shoreIn vain the evil breaks; we bend the knee,Thou symbol of all human liberty.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
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.
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.
EVEN a dragon’s teeth decayAnd then there comes a painful timeWhen morsels won’t be made away:Hence spring this picture and this rhymeOf dragons rather past their prime.A varied menu spread beforeThe hungry Kaiser and his son,From which the royal epicureWith other courses chose this one—Paris to follow when ’twas done.A dainty dish the waiter thoughtTo set before a king, or clown;Yet though they gulped and chewed and foughtNot 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.
EVEN a dragon’s teeth decayAnd then there comes a painful timeWhen morsels won’t be made away:Hence spring this picture and this rhymeOf dragons rather past their prime.A varied menu spread beforeThe hungry Kaiser and his son,From which the royal epicureWith other courses chose this one—Paris to follow when ’twas done.A dainty dish the waiter thoughtTo set before a king, or clown;Yet though they gulped and chewed and foughtNot 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.
EVEN a dragon’s teeth decayAnd then there comes a painful timeWhen morsels won’t be made away:Hence spring this picture and this rhymeOf dragons rather past their prime.
A varied menu spread beforeThe hungry Kaiser and his son,From which the royal epicureWith other courses chose this one—Paris to follow when ’twas done.
A dainty dish the waiter thoughtTo set before a king, or clown;Yet though they gulped and chewed and foughtNot 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.
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.
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.
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. TheBocheis 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.
“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.”
Thus the Rev. Gerhard Tolzien preaching in Schwerin Cathedral last autumn at the harvest festival held on the 19th Sunday after Trinity. We must suppose he believed it. One of the stock attributes of Kultur, proclaimed by its apostles and obediently repeated by their pupils, is the beneficent influence it sheds on other lands. It showers gratuitous benefits on all, but only those fortunate enough to be brought under German sway reap the full harvest of its blessings. So the domination of the world by Germany is justified. It is for the people’s good; it would be the millennium.
Raemaekers shows it to us at work in Belgium. We see the Germans who have conquered the land carrying out those beneficent functions described by the German preacher. Having brought agriculture, commerce, and industry to a state of unprecedented prosperity, they are watching, with benevolent satisfaction, the signs of gain and comfort among the inhabitants. If the emaciated peasants, leaving their roofless cottage, limping down the empty street with the few odds and ends of rubbish not worth looting which they still possess, or stopping to poke about in the gutter for a scrap of food—if they seem to be at the last extremity of misery, that is, no doubt, because they are too dull to appreciate the blessings of Kultur.
Truly this is a terrible picture, a veritable nightmare. There is nothing more poignant in the whole series. It would be a relief to be able to believe Herr Tolzien’s account, but we fear that the ghastly contrast drawn by the neutral artist is only too well founded on fact.
A. SHADWELL.
AN old English proverb, disdaining to be cramped by so feeble and academic a thing as grammar, tells us that “courtesy is cumbersome to him that kens it not.” It is one of the essential signs of breeding that courtesy is natural and not cumbersome; and if we may take the saying of the German naval officer as true, that the English will always be fools and the Germans will never be gentlemen (though it is true that the maker of such a saying must be a gentleman himself), we shall be able to understand much about the Central Powers that is otherwise puzzling. Despite their aristocracies and their history, and this applies especially to Austria, those Powers have a streak of cheapness running through them. They are cads. They snarl and bicker with each other like a grocer’s family in a back parlor. Unlike Lamb’s “party in a parlor,” they are not all silent; possibly the rest of the sentence holds true. Where was Wilhelm? Why doesn’t Franz Joseph do better? But for him we’d have done such and such. Why didn’t the fellow do better?
They growl about each other to all the winds of heaven. Some of their griefs are legitimate. Between allies of different race there must always be grounds of difference and even of acute divergence of opinion. For generations the Austrians have disliked the Germans with a hearty and vigorous dislike. If ten years ago you called a German an Austrian, he corrected you with superciliousness; if you called an Austrian a German, he corrected you with fury. Germans called Austrians “stuck-up”; Austrians called Germans merely “those Germans.” And now that they are fighting side by side for their existence, now that their whole history and homogeneity as European Powers are at stake, they carp and snap like fretful sick puppies.
We—the Allies—are Latin and Slav and Saxon and Celt, and we shall never understand each other really well. The friendship of England with France is new, and has been grafted on centuries of clean warfare and honorable hostility; but on the many points on which we think differently, do we reproach each other? We have all retreated since the war began, and in each case our Allies have hurried up to tell us that our retreat was a masterpiece, as honorable as a victory. Why?
Because:Noblesse oblige.
H. PEARL ADAM.
THERE are some points in Germany’s attitude toward the neutrals which are ambiguous. Others are only too tragically clear. If we consider in its general character the German submarine crusade, we find that its original intention—to damage not only ships of war but the merchantmen of Great Britain, including passenger boats—involves also a studied neglect of the rights of neutral ships. Everything that might conceivably help Great Britain, either in respect to food-stuffs, commerce, or international trade, or the voyage of harmless tourists on the seas, was, from the point of view of Berlin, to be exposed to the fury of submarine attacks without any nice discrimination between enemies and neutrals. Clearly at one stage of the war the submarine commanders had their orders to stop and overhaul whatever they met on the seas, to give very inadequate time for the crews to escape, and to refuse all assistance to the victims struggling in the water.
The crisis of this submarine crusade was reached in the sinking of the “Lusitania.” Thereupon the American Government took action, and the Notes interchanged between President Wilson and the Wilhelmstrasse eventually, after much correspondence, brought about a temporary cessation of the more violent methods of the Teuton pirates. For it became clear that the patience of President Wilson was almost exhausted, and the possibility of a rupture of diplomatic relations gave some pause to the German Higher Command. The leading principles, however, of the enemy’s crusade have never been altered. Indeed, many observers have foreseen the recrudescence of submarine attacks, with the aid of newer and more formidable vessels with a wider range of action and a stronger armament.
The Berlin contention is that Great Britain, through her preponderance of naval power, is a despot on the seas, infringing the liberties of other nations. To restore freedom by limiting the activity of British vessels has been a constant parrot-cry of the Teutonic enemy. The real truth, of course, is that the blockade is having such serious effects on Germany that she is almost bound to initiate new movements, if only to shake off the fatal grasp of the British ships of war.
Probably the neutrals understand the position quite as well as we do, but for various reasons it is difficult for them to make an effective protest. Meanwhile the innate brutality of submarine warfare is as obvious as ever it was, and in Raemaekers’ cartoon the hideous gorilla which represents the Teuton power is gloating over its victims and breathing out defiance against all who attempt to curb it in its reckless cruelty. The legend “Gott mit Uns” adds a biting irony to the picture.
W. L. COURTNEY.
THE English have always been misunderstood by foreign peoples, and I think one of the most beneficial effects of this war will be the better understanding of John Bull by the Slavs, by the Gauls—and by the Teutons.
The Slavs up to this time have not known us at all. In France till very recently the Englishman has been the Englishman of the old Palais Royal farces, a creature with red whiskers, front teeth like the double blank in dominoes, shepherd’s plaid trousers, and a disengaging manner. Read Daudet, read Hugo, read Loti and you will see that even the highest intelligences in France have failed to appreciate John Bull at his true worth, failed even to understand him.
Germany, who understands everything but humanity, has been even more backward than France. To Germany John has figured as a robber grown fat on plunder, soft, flabby, and only waiting to be plundered. To Germany and to the Kaiser John has not figured as a power, simply because he has not figured as a military power. They believed him effete.
The first seven divisions cut into this comfortable belief in a cruel manner. The handful of English who drove the Hun hordes back from Calais did not put balm on the wound. Slowly and by degrees the Kaiser has seen his last hopes broken by the English.
“Those Horrible Britons.”
Raemaekers, as always, has touched the truth.
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.
OF benevolent neutrality we have all heard; and of the existence of the malevolent kind, too, we are quite frequently reminded. The Allied countries failed to perceive the benevolence of the Vatican’s utterance that the violation of Belgium “happened in the time of my predecessor,” and so apparently called for no comment from the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Since that interview the inaction of the Vatican, which had till then been almost complete, and has since been troubled by one or two tentative mentions of olive branches and no more, has appeared in more than a dubious light to the Allied nations. In France, where the opening of the war brought about something like a religious revival, the Pope’s inaction and the Pope’s speech caused a cold Gulf Stream of suspicion and disappointment to flow steadily Romeward. The spectacle of a Protestant premier of a two thirds Protestant country favoring a mission to the Vatican is one which would in any case have troubled Protestants, and in this case does not even please Roman Catholics. Then who does it please? Raemaekers knows.
Alas for the days when we associated screens with “little French milliners”; what a Lady Teazle have we here! And what a school of something worse than scandal holds its classes in the seminaries of war-politics! Dr. Kuyper, “the snowy-breasted pearl” of the drawing, is, perhaps, guilty of hoping a thing he does not avow; of working for it; but at least even Raemaekers, a stern critic, admits that without being a villain (we know the mark Raemaekers sets on the brow of his villains) he may be still quite pleased with himself. But the two behind the screen are furtive, are anxious, are unable to enjoy even an act that should further their plans; they are pleased, but their pleasure is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of a thought which turns ever more eagerly to the future, and turns back ever more anxiously to the present.
H. PEARL ADAM.