Raemaekers' Cartoons Part 14

While a world of mourners is plaintively asking, "What has become of our brave dead, where are they? Alas! how dark is the world without them, how silent the home, how sad the heart"; whilst the mourner is groping like the blind woman for her lost treasure, the Belgian mother, and the Belgian widow, and the Belgian orphan are on their knees, praying, "Eternal rest give to them, O Lord; let a perpetual light s.h.i.+ne upon them," the Christian plea that has echoed down the ages from the day of the Maccabees till now, exhorting us to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins. I would remind the broken-hearted mother beseeching me to tell her where can her brave boy be gone, adding, "His was such a lonely journey; did he find his way to G.o.d?" of the words of the poet, who finds his answer to her question in the flight of a sea bird sailing sunward from the winter snows:

There is a Power whose care Teaches thy way along the pathless coast, The desert and illimitable air, Lone, wandering but not lost:

He who from zone to zone Guides, through the boundless sky, thy certain flight, In the lone way which thou must tread alone Will lead thy steps aright.

The brave soldier, who in the discharge of high duty has been suddenly shot into eternity by the fire of the enemy, will surely, far more easily than the migrating bird, wing his flight to G.o.d, Who, let us pray, will not long withhold him the happy-making vision of Heaven.

Pilgrims homeward-bound, as you readily understand, at different stages of their journey will picture Heaven to themselves differently, according as light or darkness, joy or sorrow encompa.s.s them. Some will picture Heaven as the Everlasting Holiday after the drudgery of school life, others as Eternal Happiness after a life of suffering and sorrow, others again as Home after exile, and some others as never-ending Rapture in the sight of G.o.d.

But to-day, when " frightfulness" is the creed of the enemy, and warfare with atrocities is his gospel, very many amongst us, weary with the long-drawn battle, sick with its ever-recurring horrors, and broken by its ghastly revelations, will lift up their eyes to a land beyond the stars.

FATHER BERNARD VAUGHAN.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WIDOWS OF BELGIUM]

MILITARY NECESSITY

It may be a.s.serted that the plea of "Frightfulness" will not be recognized a "military necessity" when Germany is judged, and that this enemy of civilization, even as the enemy of society, will be held responsible for its crimes, though they stand as far above the imagination as beyond the power of a common felon. Bill Sikes may justly claim "military necessity" for his thefts and murders, if Germany can do so for hers.

Under Article No. 46 of the Regulations of The Hague, we learn that "Family honour and rights, individual life and private property must be respected," and, under Article No. 47, "all pillage is expressly forbidden." But while it was a political necessity to subscribe to that fundamental formula of civilization, Germany's heart recognized no real need to do so, and secretly, in cold blood, at the inspiration of her educated and well-born rulers, she plotted the details of a campaign of murder, rape, arson, and pillage, which demanded the breaking of her oath as its preliminary. Well might her Chancellor laugh at "the sc.r.a.p of paper," which stood between Germany and Belgium, when he reflected on the long list of sacred a.s.surances his perjured country had already planned to break.

No viler series of events, in Northern France alone, can be cited than those extracted from the note-books of captured and fallen Germans. Such blood-stained pages must be a t.i.the of those that returned to Germany, but they furnish a full story of what the rank and file accomplished at the instigation and example of their officers. s.p.a.ce precludes quotation; but one may refer the reader to "Germany's Violations of the Laws of War,"[A] published under the auspices of the French Foreign Office. It is a book that should be on the tables at the Peace Conference.

We cannot hang an army for these unspeakable offences, or treat those who burn a village of living beings as we would treat one who made a bonfire of his fellow-man; nor can we condemn to penal servitude a whole nation for b.e.s.t.i.a.l outrages on humanity, ordered by its Higher Command and executed by its troops; but at least we may hope soon to find the offending Empire under police supervision of Europe, with a ticket-of-leave, whose conditions shall be as strict as an outraged earth knows how to draw them.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS.

[Footnote A: English translation. Heinemann.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ON TICKET-OF-LEAVE

CONVICT: "The next time I'll wear a German helmet and plead 'military necessity.'"]

LIBERTe! LIBERTe, CHeRIE!

There have been many surprises in this war. The evil surprises, patiently, scientifically, diabolically matured in the dark for the upsetting and downcasting of a too-trusting world by the enemy of mankind, whose "Teuton-faith" will surely forever outrival that "Punic-faith" which has. .h.i.therto been the by-word for perfidious treachery. The heartening surprises of gallant little Belgium and Serbia; the renascence of Russia; the wonderful upleap to the needs of the times by Great, and still more by Greater Britain; and, not least, the bracing of the loins of our closest Allies just across the water.

In the very beginning, when the Huns tore up that sc.r.a.p of paper which represented their honour and their right to a place among decent dwellers on the earth, and came sweeping like a dirty flood over Belgium and Northern France, the overpowering remembrance of 1870 still lay heavy on our sorely-tried neighbours. They had not yet quite found themselves. The Huns had a mighty reputation for invincibility. It seemed impossible to stand against them. There were waverings, even crumplings. There were said to be treacheries in high places.

The black flood swept on. Von Kluck was heading for Paris, and seemed likely to get there. Then suddenly, miraculously as it seemed, his course was diverted. He was tossed aside and flung back.

And it is good to recall the reason he himself is said to have given for his failure.

"At Mons the British taught the French how to die."

That is a great saying and worthy of preservation for all time. Whether Von Kluck said it or not does not matter. It represents and immortalizes a mighty fact.

France was bending under the terrible impact. Britain stood and died.

France braced her loins and they have been splendidly braced ever since.

The Huns were found to be resistible, vulnerable, breakable. The old verve and elan came back with all the old fire, and along with these, new depths of grim courage and tenacity, and, we are told, of spirituality, which may be the making of a new France greater than the world has ever known.

And that we shall welcome. France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia have suffered in ways we but faintly comprehend on this side of the water. When the Great Settling Day conies, this new higher spirit of France will, it is to be devoutly hoped, make for restraint in the universal craving for vengeance, and prove a weighty factor in the righteous re-adjustment of things and the proper fitting together of the jig-saw map of Europe.

JOHN OXENHAM.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LIBERTe! LIBERTe, CHeRIE!]

I--"A KNAVISH PIECE OF WORK"

There can be no defence of the spirit of hatred in which the Germans have, so fatally for their future, carried on this amazing mad war of theirs, in violation of all human instincts of self-respect and self-preservation, to say nothing of the obligations of religion and morality observed among mankind from the first dawnings of civilization.

The knavery, the villainy, and the besotted b.e.s.t.i.a.lity of it can never be forgotten, and must never be forgiven, and Louis Raemaekers, gifted as he is with the rare dramatic genius that discriminates his Cartoons, has but discharged an obvious patriotic duty in publis.h.i.+ng them to the world at large, as true and faithful witnesses to the unspeakable and inexpiable abominations wrought throughout Belgium and French Flanders by the Germans--which, already, in the course of Divine retribution, have involved their own country in material losses it will take from three to four generations to repair; and their once honoured name in contempt, and reprobation, and infamy, wherefrom it can never be redeemed.

Nevertheless, as an Englishman, I shrink from giving any emphasis there may be in my "hand and signature" to these righteously condemnatory and withering cartoons; and because, each one of them, as I turn to it, brings more and more crus.h.i.+ngly home to me the transcending sin of England--of every individual Englishman with a vote for Members of Parliament--in not having prepared for this war; a sin that has implicated us in the destruction of the whole rising generation of the flower of our manhood; and, before this date, would have brought us under subjection to Germany but for the confidence placed by the rank and file of the British people and nation in Lord Kitchener of Khartum.

Now--face to face with enemies--from the Kaiser downward to his humblest subjects--animated by the highest, n.o.blest ideals, but again perverted for a time--as in the case of their ancestors in the Middle Ages--by a secular epidemic of "Panmania," they are to be faced not with idle reproaches and revilings, still less with undignified taunts and gibes, but with close-drawn lips and clenched teeth, in the determination that, once having cast Satan out of them, he shall be bound down to keep the peace of Christendom--"for a thousand years."

GEORGE BIRDWOOD.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WE'LL GIVE YOU THE t.i.tLE OF MPRET OF POLAND

The new Governor has had the t.i.tle of Mpret given to him, the same that was given to the ill-starred Prince of Wied when made ruler of Albania in 1914.]

II--"SISYPHUS,--HIS STONE"

Sisyphus, as the story goes, was a King who widely extended the commerce, and largely increased the wealth, of Corinth, but by avaricious and fraudful ways; for the sin whereof he was sentenced after death to the unresting labour of rolling up a hill in Tartarus, a huge unhewn block of stone, which so soon as he gets it to the hill top, for all his efforts, rolls down again. In cla.s.sical representation of the scene he is a.s.sociated with Tantalus and Ixion; Tantalus, who, presuming too much on his relations with Zeus, was after death afflicted with an unquenchable thirst amidst flowing fountains and pellucid lakes--like the lakes of "The Thirst of the Antelope" in the marvellous mirages of Rajputana and Mesopotamia--that ever elude his anguished approaches; and with Ixion, the meanest and basest of cheats, and most demoniac of murderers, whose posthumous punishment was in being stretched, and broken, and bound, in the figure of the svastika, on a wheel which, self-moved--like the wheels of the vision of Ezekiel--whirls forevermore round and round the abyss of the nether world. The moral of these tortures is that we may well and most wisely leave vengeance to "the high G.o.ds." They will repay!

GEORGE BIRDWOOD.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SISYPHUS]

CONCRETE FOUNDATIONS

Nothing has d.a.m.ned the Germans more in the eyes of other nations, belligerent and neutral alike, and nothing will have a more subtle and lasting influence on future relations, than the revelation of stealthy preparation for conquest under a mask of innocent and friendly intercourse. The whole process of "peaceful penetration," pursued in a thousand ways with infernal ingenuity and relentless determination, is an exhibition of systematic treachery such as all the Macchiavellis have never conceived. Germany has revealed herself as a nation of spies and a.s.sa.s.sins. To take advantage of a neighbour's unsuspecting hospitality, to enter his house with an air of open friends.h.i.+p, in order to stab him in the back at a convenient moment, is an act of the basest treachery, denounced by all mankind in all ages. No one would be more shocked by it in private life than the Germans themselves. But when it is undertaken methodically on a national scale under the influence of _Deutschland uber Alles_, the same conduct becomes enn.o.bled in their eyes, they throw themselves into it with enthusiasm and lose all sense of honour. Such is the moral perversion worked by Kultur and the German theory of the State.

An inevitable consequence is that in future the movements and proceedings of Germans in other countries will be watched with intense suspicion, and if Governments do not prevent the sort of thing depicted by Mr. Raemaekers the people will see to it themselves. The cartoon is not, of course, intended to reflect personally on the owner of Krupp's works, who is said to be a gentle-minded and blameless lady. It is her misfortune to be a.s.sociated by the chance of inheritance with the German war machine and one of the underhand methods by which it has pursued its aims.

A. SHADWELL.