The Massacre of the Innocents

THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS"Wemustdo everything in good order—so men to the right, women to the left."

Some "neutrals," and even some of the people here in England, still doubt the reality of the German atrocities in Belgium, but Raemaekers has seen and spoken with those to whom the scene depicted in this cartoon is an ugly reality. One who would understand it to the full must visualize the hands behind the thrusting rifle butts, and the faces behind the hands, as well as the praying, maddened, despairing, vengeful women of the picture—and must visualize, too, the men thrust back another way, to waittheirfate at the hands of these apostles of a civilization of force.

Yet even then full realization is impossible; the man whose pencil has limned these faces has only caught a far-off echo of the reality, and thus we who see his picture are yet another stage removed from the full horror of the scene that he gives us. Not on us, in England, have the rifle butts fallen; not for us has it chanced that we should be shepherded "men to the right, women to the left"; not ours the trenched graves and the extremity of shame. Thus it is not for us to speak, as the people of Belgium and Northern France will speak, of the limits of endurance, and of war's last terrors imposed on those whom war should have passed by and left untouched. We gather, dimly and with but a tithe of the feeling that experience can impart, that these extremities of shame and suffering have been imposed on a people that has done no wrong, and we may gain some slight satisfaction from the thought that to this nation is apportioned a share in the work of vengeance on the criminals.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN.

Bernhardiism

BERNHARDIISM"It's all right. If I hadn't done it some one else might."

It is the most bestial part of this most bestial thing that it is calculated and a matter of orders. The private soldier takes his share of the loot, and is generally the instrument of the cold and ordered killing; but it is the officer-class which most profits in goods, and it is the higher command which dictates the policy. It was so in 1870. It is much more so to-day.

This note of calculation is particularly to be seen in the fluctuations through which that policy has passed. When the enemy was absolutely certain of victory, outnumbering the invader by nearly two to one and sweeping all before him, we had massacres upon massacres: Louvain, Aerschot, the wholesale butchery of Dinant, the Lorraine villages (and in particular the hell of Guébervilliers). Even at the very extremity of his tide of invasion, and in the last days of it, came the atrocities and destruction of Sermaize. In the very act of the defeat which has pinned him and began the process of his destruction he was attempting yet a further repetition of these unnameable things at Senlis under the very gates of Paris.

Then came the months when he felt less secure. The whole thing was at once toned down by order. Pillage was reduced to isolated cases, and murder also. Few children suffered.

A recovery of confidence throughout his Eastern successes last summer renewed the crimes. Poland is full of them, and the Serbian land as well.

In general, you have throughout these months of his ordeal a regular succession, of excess in vileness when he is confident, of restraint in it when he is touched by fear.

This effect of fear upon the dull soul is a characteristic familiar to all men who know their Prussian from history, particularly the wealthier governing classes of Prussia. It is a characteristic which those who are in authority during this war will do well to bear in mind. Properly used, that knowledge may be made an instrument of victory.

HILAIRE BELLOC.

From Liège to Aix-La-Chapelle

FROM LIÈGE TO AIX-LA-CHAPELLE

Moreover, by the means of Wisdom I shall obtain immortality, and leave behind me an everlasting memorial to them that come after me.

"I shall set the people in order, and the nations shall be subject unto me.

"Horrible tyrants shall be afraid, when they do but hear of me; I shall be found good among the multitude, and valiant in war." (Wisdom viii. 13, 14, 15.)

Wisdom and Wisdom alone could have painted this terrible picture the most terrible perhaps which Raemaekers has ever done and yet the simplest. That he should have dared to leave almost everything to the imagination of the beholder is evidence of the wonderful power which he exercises over the mind of the people. Each of us knows what is in that goods-van and we shudder at its hideous hidden freight, fearing lest it may be disclosed before our eyes. Wisdom is but another name for supreme genius. So apposite are the verses which are quoted here from "The Wisdom of Solomon" in the "Apocrypha" that they seem almost to have been written on Louis Raemaekers.

Moreover, this picture brings home to all of us in the most forcible manner possible the full reality of the horror of war.

FRANCIS STOPFORD.

Spoils for the Victors

SPOILS FOR THE VICTORS"We must despoil Belgium if only to make room for our own culture."

The feature that will stamp Prussian War forever, and make this group of campaigns stand out from all others, is thecharacterof its murder and pillage.

Of all the historical ignorance upon which the foolish Pacifist's case is founded, perhaps the worst is the conception that these abominations are the natural accompaniment of war. Theyhaveattached to war when war was ill organised in type. But the more subject to rule it has become, the more men have gloried in arms, the more they have believed the high trade of soldier to be a pride, the more have they eliminated the pillage of the civilian and the slaughter of the innocent from its actions. Those things belong to violent passion and to lack of reason. Modern war and the chivalric tradition scorned them.

The edges of the Germanies have, in the past, been touched by the chivalric tradition: Prussia never. That noblest inheritance of Christendom never reached out so far into the wilds. And to Germany, now wholly Prussianized—which will kill us or which we shall kill—soldier is no high thing, nor is their any meaning attached to the word "Glorious." War is for that State a business: a business only to be undertaken with profit against what is certainly weaker; to be undertaken without faith and with a cruelty in proportion to that weakness. In particular it must be a terror to women, to children, and to the aged—for these remain unarmed.

This country alone of the original alliance has been spared pillage. It has not been spared murder. But this country, though the process has perhaps been more gradual than elsewhere, is very vividly alive to-day to what would necessarily follow the presence of German soldiery upon English land.

HILAIRE BELLOC.

The Very Stones Cry Out

THE VERY STONES CRY OUT

If the highly organized enemy with whom we are at grips in a life-and-death struggle would only play the war game in accordance with the rules drawn up by civilized peoples, he would, indeed, command our admiration no less than our respect. Never on this earth was there such a splendid fighting machine as that "made in Germany." The armies against us are the last word in discipline, fitness, and equipment; and are led by men who, born in barracks, weaned on munitions, have but one aim and end in view "World-Dominion or Downfall."

As a matter of fact, instead of winning our admiration they have drawn our detestation. Not content with brushing aside all international laws of warfare, they have trampled upon every law, human and divine, standing in their way of conquest. Indeed, Germany's method of fighting would disgrace the savages of Central Africa.

Prussianized Germany has the monopoly of "frightfulness." When not "frightful," Prussian troopers are not living down to the instructions of their War-lords to leave the conquered with nothing but eyes to weep with. Not content to crucify Canadians, murder priests, violate nuns, mishandle women, and bayonet children, the enemy torpedoes civilian-carrying liners, and bombs Red Cross hospitals. More, sinning against posterity as well as antiquity, Germans stand charged before man and God with reducing to ashes some of the finest artistic output of Christian civilization. When accused of crimes such as these, Germany answers through her generals: "The commonest, ugliest stone put to mark the burial-place of a German grenadier is a more glorious and venerable monument than all the cathedrals of Europe put together" (General von Disfurth inHamburger Nachrichten). "Thus is fulfilled the well-known prophecy of Heine: 'When once that restraining talisman, the Cross, is broken ... Thor, with his colossal hammer, will leap up, and with it shatter into fragments the Gothic cathedrals'"(Religion and Philosophy in Germany in the Nineteenth Century).

What, I ask, can you do with such people but either crush or civilize them?

The very stones cry out against them.

BERNARD VAUGHAN, S.J.

Satan's Partner

SATAN'S PARTNERBernhardi: "War is as divine as eating and drinking."Satan: "Here is a partner for me."

The cartoon bears the quotation from Bernhardi "War is as divine as eating and drinking." Yes; and German war is as divine as German eating and drinking. Any one who has been in a German restaurant during that mammoth midday meal which generally precedes a sleep akin to a hibernation, will understand how the same strange barbarous solemnity has ruined all the real romance of war. There is no way of conveying the distinction, except by saying vaguely that there is a way of doing things, and that butchering is not necessary to a good army any more than gobbling is necessary to a good dinner. In our own insular shorthand it can be, insufficiently and narrowly but not unprofitably, expressed by saying that it is possible both to fight and to eat like a gentleman. It is therefore highly significant that Mr. Raemaekers has in this cartoon conceived the devil primarily as a kind of ogre. It is a matter of great interest that this Dutch man of genius, like that other genius whose pencil war has turned into a sword, Will Dyson, lends in the presence of Prussia (which has been for many moderns their first glimpse of absolute or positive evil) to depriving the devil of all that moonshine of dignity which sentimental sceptics have given him. Evil does not mean dignity, any more than it means any other good thing. The stronger caricaturists have, in a sense, fallen back on the medieval devil; not because he is more mystical, but because he is more material. The face of Raemaekers' Satan, with its lifted jowl and bared teeth, has less of the half-truth of cynicism than of mere ignominious greed. The armies are spread out for him as a banquet; and the war which he praises, and which was really spread for him in Flanders, is not a Crusade but a cannibal feast.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

Thrown to the Swine

THROWN TO THE SWINEThe Martyred Nurse

The Germans have committed many more indefensible crimes than the military execution of the kind-hearted nurse who had helped war-prisoners to escape. They have murdered hundreds of women who had committed no offence whatever against their military rules. But though not the worst of their misdeeds, this has probably been the stupidest. It gained us almost as many recruits as the sinking of theLusitania, and it made the whole world understand—what is unhappily the truth—that the German is wholly destitute of chivalry. He knows indeed that people of other nations are affected by this sentiment; but he despises them for it. Woman is the weaker vessel; and therefore, according to his code, she must be taught to know her place, which is to cook and sew, and produce "cannon-fodder" for the Government. Readers of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche will remember the advice given by those philosophers for the treatment of women. Nietzsche recommends a whip. It never occurred to German officialdom that the pedantic condemnation of one obscure woman, guilty by the letter of their law, would stir the heart of England and America to the depths, and steel our soldiers to further efforts against an enemy whose moral unlikeness to ourselves becomes more apparent with every new phase in the struggle.

THE DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S.

The Land Mine

THE LAND MINE

What does this cartoon suggest? I am asked and I ask myself. At first very little, almost nothing, only uninteresting, ugly death, gloomy, ghastly, dismal, but dull and largely featureless, blank and negative. Has the artist's power failed him? No, it is strongly drawn. Has his inspiration? What does it mean? Is it indeed meant? As I gaze and pore on it longer, I seem to see that it is just in this blank negation that its strength and its suggestion lie. It is meant. It has meaning. A blast has passed over this place, and this is its sequel, its derelict rubbish.

It is death unredeemed, death with no very positive suggestion, with no hint of heroism, none of heroic action, little even of heroic passion; just death, helpless, hopeless, pointing to nothing but decomposition, decay, disappearance,anéantissement, reduction of the fair frame of life to nothingness. That is the peculiar horror of this war. Were the picture, as it well might be, even more hideous, and did it suggest something more definite, a story of struggle, say, recorded in contortion, or by wounds and weapons, it might be better.

But men killed by machines, men killed by natural forces unnaturally employed, are indeed a fact and a spectacle squalid, sorry, unutterably sad.

All wars have been horrible, but modern wars are more in extremes. Heroism is there, but not always. It is possible only in patches. There is much of the mere sacrifice of numbers. Strictly, there are scenes far worse than this, for death unredeemed is not the worst of sufferings or of ills. But few are sadder. This is indeed war made by those who hold it and will it to be "not a sport, but a science." There is no sport here. Men killed like this are like men killed by plague or the eruption of a volcano. And, indeed, what else are they? They are victims of a diseased humanity of the eruption—literal and metaphorical—of its hidden fires. And wars will grow more and more like this. What can stop them and banish these scenes? Only the hate of hate, only the love that can redeem even such a sight as this when at last we remember that it is for love's sake only that flesh and blood are in the last retort content to endure it.

HERBERT WARREN.

"For Your Motherland"

"MY SON, GO AND FIGHT FOR YOUR MOTHERLAND!"

England's your Mother! Let your life acclaimHer precious heart's blood flowing in your heart;Take ye the thunder of her solemn nameUpon your lips with reverence; play your partBy word and deedTo shield and speedThe far-flung splendour of her ancient fame.England's your Mother! Shall not you, her child,Quicken the everlasting fires that glowUpon your birthright's altar? England smiledBeside your cradle, trusting you to show,With manhood's might,The undying lightThat points the road her free-born spirits go.England's your Mother! Man, forget it notWherever on the wide-wayed earth your fateCalls you to labour; whatsoe'er your lotIn service, or in power, in stress or state—Whate'er betide,With humble pride,Remember! By your Mother you are great.England's your Mother! What though dark the dayAbove the storm-swept frontier that you tread?Her vanished children throng the glorious way;A myriad legions of her living deadThose starry trainsThat shared your painsShall set their crown of light upon your head.England's your Mother! When the race is runAnd you are called to leave your life and die,Small matter what is lost, so this be won:An after-glow of blessed memory,Gracious and pure,In witness sure"England was this man's Mother: he, her son."

EDEN PHILLPOTTS.

The German Loan

THE GERMAN LOAN"Don't breathe on the bubble or the whole will collapse"

The bubble is very nicely balanced, for German "kultur," which is in reality but another word for "system" or "organization," rather than that which English-speaking people understand by "culture," has built up a system of internal credit that shall ensure the correct balance of the bubble—for just as long as the militarist policy of Germany can endure the strain of war. But money alone is not sufficient for victory; the peasant hard put to it to suppress his laugh, and the crowned Germania that built up the paper pedestal of the bubble, needed many other things to make that pedestal secure; there was needed integrity, and the respect of neighbouring nations, and the understanding of other points of view beside the doctrine of force, and liberty instead of coercion of a whole nation, and many other things that the older civilizations of Europe have accepted as parts of their code of life—the things this new, upstart Germany has not had time to learn. Thus, with the paper credit—and even with the gold reserve of which Germany has boasted, the pedestal is but paper. And the winds that blow from the flooded, corpse-strewn districts of the Yser, from Artois, from Champagne and the Vosges hills and forests, and from the long, long line of Russia's grim defences—these winds shall blow it away, leaving a nation bankrupt not only in money, but in the power to coerce, in the power to inspire fear, and in all those things out of which the Hohenzollern dynasty has built up the last empire of force.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN.

Europe, 1916

EUROPE, 1916"Am I not yet sufficiently civilized?"

There are some English critics who have not yet considered so simple a thing as that the case against horrors must be horrible. In this respect alone this publication of the work of the distinguished foreign cartoonist is a thing for our attention and enlightenment. It is the whole point of the awful experience which has to-day swallowed up all our smaller experiences, that we are in any case confronted with the abominable; and the most beautiful thing we can hope to show is only an abomination of it. Nevertheless, there is horror and horror. The distinction between brute exaggeration and artistic emphasis could hardly be better studied than in Mr. Raemaekers' cartoon, and the use he makes of the very ancient symbol of the wheel. Europe is represented as dragged and broken upon the wheel as in the old torture; but the wheel is that of a modern cannon, so that the dim background can be filled in with the suggestion of a wholly modern machinery. This is a very true satire; for there are many scientific persons who seem to be quite reconciled to the crushing of humanity by a vague mechanical environment in which there are wheels within wheels. But the inner restraint of the artist is suggested in the treatment of the torment itself; which is suggested by a certain rending drag in the garments, while the limbs are limp and the head almost somnolent. She does not strive nor cry; neither is her voice heard in the streets. The artist had not to draw pain but to draw despair; and while the pain is old enough the particular despair is modern. The victim racked for a creed could at least cry "I am converted." But here even the terms of surrender are unknowable; and she can only ask "Am I civilized?"

G. K. CHESTERTON.

The Next to Be Kicked Out—Dumba's Master

THE NEXT TO BE KICKED OUT—DUMBA'S MASTER]

Uncle Sam is no longer the simple New England farmer of a century ago. He is rich beyond calculation. His family is more numerous than that of any European country save Russia. His interests are world-wide, his trade tremendous, his industry complex, his finance fabulous. Above all, his family is no longer of one race. The hatreds of Europe are not echoed in his house; they are shared and reverberate through his corridors. It is difficult, then, for him to take the simple views of right and wrong, of justice and humanity, that he took a century ago. He is tempted to balance a hundred sophistries against the principles of freedom and good faith that yet burn strongly within him. He is driven to temporize with the evil thing he hates, because he fears, if he does not, that his household will be split, and thus the greater evil befall him. But those that personify the evil may goad him once too often. Dumba the lesser criminal—as also the less dexterous—has betrayed himself and is expelled. When will Bernstorff's turn come? That it will come, indeedmustcome, is self-evident. The artist sees things too clearly as they are not to see also what they will be. He therefore skips the ignoble interlude of prevarication, quibble, and intrigue, and gives us Uncle Sam happy at last in his recovered simplicity. So we see him here, enjoying himself, as only a white man can, in a wholehearted spurning of lies, cruelty, and murder.

Note that Bernstorff—the victim of a gesture "fortunately rare amongst gentlemen"—is already in full flight through the air, while Uncle Sam's left foot has still fifteen inches to travel. The promise of an added velocity indicates that the flight of the unmasked diplomatist will be far. The sketched vista of descending steps gives us the satisfaction of knowing that the drop at the end will be deep. Every muscle of our sinewy relative is tense, limp, and projectile—the mouthpiece of Prussia goes to his inevitable end. There is no need of a sequel to show him shattered and crumpled at the bottom of the stairway.

ARTHUR POLLEN.

The Friendly Visitor

THE FRIENDLY VISITORThe German: "I come as a friend."Holland: "Oh, yes. I've heard that from my Belgian sister."

Raemaekers is never false, and he never works for effect alone. That is what makes him so terrible to the people he criticises, and so effective.

When he wants to depict the sturdy Dutch soul he draws a sturdy Dutch Body—ready to defend her home. No flags, no highfalutin, no symbolical figure posed for show; just cleanliness, determination, and good sense facing bestiality and oppression.

The figure that stands for the Freedom of the Home opposed to the figure that stands for the Freedom of the Seas.

Many an Englishman might take this picture to heart.

H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.

"To Your Health, Civilization!"

"TO YOUR HEALTH, CIVILIZATION!"

This terrible cartoon points its own lesson so forcibly that its effect is more likely to be weakened than strengthened by any verbal comment. Death quaffs a goblet of human blood to the health of Civilization. Death has never enjoyed such a carnival of slaughter before, and it is Civilization that has made the holocaust possible. The comparatively simple methods of killing employed by barbarians could not have destroyed so many lives; nor could barbarian states have raised such huge armies. The artist makes us feel that such a war as this is an act of moral madness, a disgrace to our common humanity. It is true that some of the nations engaged are guiltless, and others almost guiltless; but there is a solidarity of European civilization which obliges us all to share the shame and sorrow of this monstrous crime. Universal war is thereductio ad absurdumof false political theories and false moral ideals; and thereductio ad absurdumis the chief argument which Providence uses with mankind. Perhaps it is the only argument which mankind in the mass can understand.

THE DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S.

Fox Tirpitz Preaching to the Geese

FOX TIRPITZ PREACHING TO THE GEESE>"You see, my little Dutch geese, I am fighting for the freedom of the seas." (The Germans illegally captured several Dutch ships)

There is nothing more pathetic in some ways to-day than the position of the small neutral countries in Europe, and especially those which directly adjoin Germany. And there is nothing more galling than the inability of the Allies to give them any help. For the hour they are absolutely at the mercy of Germany, or would be, if she had any, and they know it. They are certainly liable and exposed to all her flouts and cuffs and to any displays of bad temper or bullying or terrorism it may please her to exercise. And none perhaps is worse off in this respect than Holland. It suits Germany to be fairly civil to Switzerland, who could give her a good deal of trouble by joining France and Italy; and no doubt it suits her too to some extent to consider Denmark, for Denmark commands the entrance to the Baltic; and, further, Germany does not wish to bring all Scandinavia down upon herself just at present. That can wait; but Holland is in the worst plight of all. She has the terrible spectacle of Belgium, ruined and ravaged, just on the other side of the way. And she has a very considerable and valuable mercantile marine.

The great and good Germany cannot be troubled to distinguish between Dutch and other boats, and if occasionally a Dutch ship is captured or sent to the bottom, it is a useful reminder of what she might do to her "poor relation" if she really let herself go. Fighting for the freedom of the seas! Holland has fought for them herself. Holland has a great naval tradition. She knows quite well what England has been and is. She knows too, and can see, how her sons and brothers in South Africa were treated by the British in England's last war, and how they regard England and Germany now.

Raemaekers' cartoon is very skilful. If we had not seen it done, we should not have believed it possible to produce at once so clever a likeness of Von Tirpitz and so excellent an old fox. But the goose is by no means a foolish bird, though its wisdom may sometimes be shown in knowing its own weakness. It was they, and not the watchdogs, that saved the Capitol. In old days it was the custom to call the Germans the "High Dutch" and the inhabitants of Holland the "Low Dutch." It was a geographical distinction. The contrast in moral elevation is the other way.

HERBERT WARREN.

The Prisoners

THE PRISONERS

A Vile feature of German "frightfulness" is this: that she mixes poison with her prisoners' rations. Not content with starving their bodies, she hides truth from them and floods their minds with lies. Those in command—officers, educated men, claiming the service of their soldiers and civil guard and the respect of their nation—deliberately hash a daily meal of falsehood and serve up German victories and triumphs on land and sea as sauce to the starvation diet of their defenceless captives.

In the earlier months of the war, while yet the spiritual slough into which Germany had sunk was unguessed, and the mixture of child and devil exemplified by "frightfulness" continued unfathomed, these daily lies undoubtedly answered their cowardly purpose, cast down the spirit of thousands, and added another pang to their captivity. But our armies know better now, and those diminishing numbers likely to be taken prisoner in the future see the end more clearly than the foe can. Lies will be met with laughter henceforth, for our enemies have put themselves beyond the pale. They may starve and insult our bodies; but their power to poison our brains has passed from them forever. We know them at last. They have spun a web of barbed villainy between their souls and ours; and the evil committed for one foul purpose alone—to terrify free men and break the spirit of the sons of liberty—has produced results far different and created a situation more terrible for them than for their outraged enemies.

For in this matter of misrepresentation and lying, born of Prussia and by her spoon-fed pack of martinets, professors, and Churchmen, mingled with Germany's daily bread for a generation, it is she and not we who will reap the whirlwind of that sowing; it is she and not we who must soon pant and tear the breast in the pangs of the poison.

Between the mad and the sane there can be only one victor; and when the time comes, may Germany's robe of repentance be a strait-waistcoat of the Allies' choosing. For she has drunk deep of the poison, and those who anticipate a speedy cure will be as mad as she. When the escaped tigress is back in her cage, men look to the bars, for none wants a second mauling.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS.

It's Unbelievable

IT'S UNBELIEVABLEDutch Officer: "How can they have soiled their hands by such atrocities?"She: "Can they have done it, my dear? German officers are so nice."

I am not sure that in this cartoon of Raemaekers the most pleasing detail is not the servant's right eye. You will observe in that servant's right eye an expression familiar in those who overhear this sort of comment upon the peculiar bestialities of the Prussian in Belgium and Poland, this extenuation of his baseness. When the war was young the opportunity for giving that glance was commoner than it is now. There were many even in a belligerent country who would tell you in superior fashion how foolishly exaggerated were the so-called "atrocities." The greater number of such men (and women) talked of "two Germanies"—one the nice Germany they knew and loved so well, and the other apparently nasty Germany which raped, burned, stole, broke faith, tortured, and the rest. Their number has diminished. But there is a little lingering trace of the sort of thing still to be discovered: men and women who hope against hope that the Prussian will really prove good at heart after all. And it is usually just after some expression of the kind that the most appalling news arrives with a terrible irony to punctuate their folly. It reminds one a little of the man in the story who was sure that he could tame a wild cat, and was in the act of recording its virtues when it flew in his face. To an impartial observer who cared nothing for our sufferings or the enemy's vices, there would be something enormously comic in the vision of these few remaining (for there are still some few remaining) that approach the wild beast with soothing words and receive as their only reward a very large bomb through the roof of their house, or the news that some one dear to them has been murdered on the high seas. But to those actively suffering in the struggle the comic element is difficult to seize, and it is replaced by indignation. This fantastic misconception of the thing that is being fought is bound to be burned right out by the realities of the enemy acts in belligerent countries. It will be similarly destroyed—and that in no very great space of time—in all neutral countries as well. Prussia will have it so. She is allowing no moral defence to remain for her future. It is almost as though the men now directing her affairs lent ear carefully to every word spoken in praise of them abroad, and met it at once by the tremendous denial of example. It is almost as though the Prussian felt it a sort of personal insult to receive the praise of dupes and fools, and perhaps it is.

HILAIRE BELLOC.

Kreuzland, Kreuzland Über Alles

KREUZLAND, KREUZLAND ÜBER ALLESBelgium, 1914: "Where are our fathers?"

This war has produced examples of every kind of misery which human beings can inflict upon each other, except one. Europe has mercifully been spared long sieges of populous towns, ending in the surrender of the starving population. But many towns and villages have been burnt; and masses of refugees have fled before the invader, knowing too well the brutal treatment which they had to expect if they remained. Very many of the unhappy Belgians have taken refuge in Holland; a considerable number have found an asylum in this country. They are homeless and ruined; if the war were to end to-morrow, many of them would not know where to go or how to live. Families have been broken up; husbands and wives, parents and children, are ignorant of each other's fate. In this picture we see a crowd of children, herded together like a flock of sheep, with nobody to take care of them. Theirvia dolorosais marked by long rows of crosses on either side, emblems of suffering, death, and sacrifice. In the distance rise the smoke and flames from one of the innumerable incendiary fires which the Germans, like the cruel banditti of the Middle Ages, have kindled wherever they go.

THE DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S.

The Ex-convict

THE EX-CONVICT"I was a 'lifer,' but they found I had many abilities for bringing civilization amongst our neighbours, so now I am a soldier."

Prussia in every war has betrayed that peculiar mark of barbarism consisting in using the intellectual weapons of a superior, but not knowing how to use them. It is still a matter of mystery to the directing Prussian mind why the sinking of theLusitaniashould have shocked the world. A submarine cannot take a prize into port. TheLusitaniahappened to be importing goods available in war, therefore theLusitaniamust be sunk. All the penumbræ of further consideration which the civilized man weighs escape this sort of logic. Similarly, the Prussian argues, if an armed man is prepared to surrender, convention decrees that his life should be spared. Therefore, if an armed man be just fresh from the murder of a number of children, he has but to cry "Kamerad" to be perfectly safe. And Prussia foams at the mouth with indignation whenever this strict rule of conduct is forgotten in the heat of the moment. The use of poison in the field which Prussia for the first time employed (and reluctantly compelled her civilized opponents to reply to) is in the same boat. A shell bursts because solid explosive becomes gaseous. To use shell which in bursting wounds and kills men is to use gas in war; therefore if one uses gas in the other form of poison, disabling one's opponent with agony, it is all one. Precisely the same barbaric use of logic—which reminds one of the antics of an animal imitating human gestures—will later apply to the poisoning of water supplies, or the spreading of an epidemic. It is soldierly and excites no contempt or indignation to strike at your enemy with a sword or shoot a pellet of lead at him in such a fashion that he dies. What is all this foolish pother about killing him with bacilli in his cisterns or with a drop of poison in his tea? Men in war have burned groups of houses with the torch in anger or for revenge. Why distinguish between that and the methodical sprinkling of petroleum from a hose by one gang and the equally methodical burning of the whole town house by house with little capsules of prepared incendiary stuff? The rule always applies—but only against the opponent: never to one's self. From that attitude of mind the Prussian will never emerge. We shall, please God, see that mood in all its beauty in later stages of the war, when the coercion of the Prussian upon his own soil leads to acts indefensible by Prussian logic. We have already had a taste of this sort of reasoning when the royalties fled from Karlsruhe and when the murderers upon the sinking Zeppelin received the reward due to men who boast that they will not keep faith.

HILAIRE BELLOC.

Miss Cavell

MISS CAVELLWilliam:"Now you can bring me the American protest."

Most of the English caricaturists are much too complimentary to the German Emperor. They draw his moustaches, but not his face. Now his moustaches are exactly what he, or the whole Prussian school he represents, particularly wishes us to look at. They give him the fierce air of a fighting cock; and however little we may like fierceness, there will always be a certain residual respect for fighting, even in a cock. Now the Junker moustache is a fake; almost as much so as if it were stuck on with gum. It is, as Mr. Belloc has remarked, curled in a machine all night lest it should hang down. Raemaekers, in the sketch which shows the Kaiser as waiting for Nurse Cavell's death to say, "Now you can bring me the American protest," has gone behind the moustache to the face, and behind the face to the type and the spirit. The Emperor is not commanding in a lordly voice from a throne, but with a leer and behind a curtain. In the few lines of the lean, unnatural face is written the real history of the Hohenzollerns, the kind of history not often touched on in our comfortable English humour, but common to the realism of Continental art: the madness of Frederick William, the perversion of Frederick the Great, the hint, mingled with subtler talents, of the mere idiocy that seems to have flowered again in the last heir of that inhuman house. The Hohenzollerns have varied from generation to generation in many things and like many families; some of them have been tyrants, some of them geniuses, some of them merely boobies; but they have shared in something more than that hereditary policy which has been the poison in Christendom for two hundred years. There is a ghost who inhabits these perishing tenements, and in such a picture as this of Raemaekers men can see it looking out of the eyes. And it is neither the spirit of a tyrant nor of a booby; but the spirit of a sly invalid.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

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