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 visualise 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 visualise, too, the men thrust back another way, to waittheirfate at the hands of these apostles of a civilisation of force.
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 visualise 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 visualise, too, the men thrust back another way, to waittheirfate at the hands of these apostles of a civilisation of force.
Yet even then full realisation 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
THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS“Wemustdo everything in good order—so men to the right, women to the left.”
THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS“Wemustdo everything in good order—so men to the right, women to the left.”
THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS
“Wemustdo everything in good order—so men to the right, women to the left.”