Raemaekers' Cartoons Part 25

Here the artist has depicted the Kaiser in one of his favourite roles, that of a sportsman. In pre-war times it was one of "The All Highest's"

chief ambitions to be taken for an English sportsman! We believe there were people in those now seemingly remote days who took him at his own valuation in this regard. Our picture papers were full of photographs of him shooting at this or that n.o.bleman's estate, lunching after the morning's battue, in the act of shooting, inspecting the day's "bag,"

etc.; and other pictures were reproduced from the German papers from time to time of a similar character showing him as a sportsman in his native land.

There is still, thank G.o.d, something clean about British sport and sportsmen of which the Kaiser never caught the inwardness and spirit. It has come out on the battlefields to-day as it has on those of past generations. It has taught the British soldier to fight clean, and even chivalrously though the foe may be a past master in "knavish tricks,"

and steeped in unspeakable methods of cruelty in warfare.

How thin the veneer of a sportsmans.h.i.+p was upon the Kaiser, which is after all but symbolic of the higher and sterner virtues, all the world has had a chance of judging. And in this remarkable and arresting drawing the genius of the artist has taken and used a sporting incident with telling and even horrifying effect.

In the old days it was pheasants, partridges, grouse, hares, rabbits, and other feathered game, with the n.o.bler stags and boars that formed "the Butcher of Potsdam's 'bag.'" To-day he has his battues by proxy on sea, land, and from the air. Thousands of victims, as innocent as the feathered folk he slaughtered of yore; and women and little children form the chief items of the bag; and especially is this true of the "fruit of the Zeppelin raids."

He counts the bag and rewards the slayers of the innocent as he doubtless did the beaters, huntsmen, and keepers of the estates over which he formerly shot. It has been his ambition to make Europe one vast Kaiserdom estate. But the sands are running out, and each "bag," whether by Zeppelin or submarine, serves but to stiffen the backs of the Allies and horrify neutral nations. Some day the acc.u.mulated horrors of the Kaiser's ideas of sportsmans.h.i.+p will have taught the latter the lesson that Kaiserdom with Europe as a Kaiser estate means the death of liberty, the extinction of the smaller nations, and the setting up of a despotism as cruel as that of Attila and his Huns--the self-accepted and preached examples of William II of Germany.

CLIVE HOLLAND.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ZEPPELIN BAG]

"COME IN, MICHAEL, I HAVE HAD A LONG SLEEP"

Yes--a long and rejuvenating sleep! The expression upon John's face indicates an amazing determination and alertness. It is told of certain remarkable men--De Lesseps amongst the number--that they had the faculty of sleeping for several days and nights and then remaining wide awake and at full tension for an equally long period of time. We may confidently predict that John has this faculty. He is not likely to slumber again till his work is done, and done thoroughly. Michael's expression, I regret to note, is not quite so pleasing as John's. It gives "furiously to think," as our gallant and beautiful France puts it, that when Michael climbs through the window of the Happy Fatherland, he may, perchance, inspire terror in the heart of the Hun, who doubtless expects that his enemies, if they do invade the sacred soil, will display those Christian qualities of Mercy and Forbearance which have been so conspicuous, by their absence, in the treatment of unfortunate prisoners upon whom they inflicted the extreme rigour of "Kultur."

Our cartoonist, it will be noticed, has placed sledge hammers in the hands of both John and Michael, rather primitive weapons, but most admirably adapted for "crus.h.i.+ng." And nothing short of crus.h.i.+ng will satisfy the Allies, despite the futile wiles and whines of Messrs.

Trevelyan, Ponsonby, Morel, and Macdonald. Crushed they will and must be to fine powder. The hammer strokes are falling now with a persistence and force which, at long last, reverberates in the cafes and beer gardens of Munich and Berlin. The Teuton tongue--a hideous concatenation of noise at its best--must be almost inarticulate to-day in its guttural chokings and splutterings. "Frightfulness" is coming home to roost.

With all our hearts we hold out the glad hand to Michael.

Come in, and stay in--bless you!

HORACE ANNESLEY VACh.e.l.l.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "COME IN, MICHAEL, I THINK I'M AWAKE NOW."]

FIVE ON A BENCH

All visions and poems of justice have been full of the refrain of _deposuit potentes de sede_; but the bracing reality of such a revolution is lost by certain effects of antiquity, by the mists which make the past somewhat monochrome, and by the exalted equality of death.

To say that Belisarius became a beggar means little to us when it seems only the difference between a rich and a tattered toga. We do not picture Belisarius in a patched pair of trousers: but then we have no reason to be angry with Belisarius. But whenever real tyranny and honest wrath are reborn among men, there will always be an instant necessity to represent the great reversal in the graphic colours of contemporary fact. Raemaekers' cartoon, representing the tyrants of Europe reduced to that very hopeless modern beggary to which they have driven many thousands of very much better men, is perhaps of all his pictures the most grim, or what would be called vindictive. I think that such revenge is in truth merely realization. The victims of the war have to sit on such real benches in such real rags. And being one of the fiercest, it is also one of the most delicate of the Dutch artist's studies. Nothing could be truer than the insolent and swollen decay of the Jew Ferdinant; or the more effeminate collapse of the Kaiser, the very spike on whose helmet droops with sentiment.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIVE ON A BENCH

In a year and a half.]

WHAT ABOUT PEACE, LADS?

War--so certain of their own prophets have said--is a "national industry of Germany." Here we see a German _chevalier d' industrie_ attempting to escape with his swag. Never in modern times has a nation gone to war with a more cynical and shameless determination to make the campaign pay for itself by the plunder of private property. Quite recently an order was found on the body of a German, enjoining all officers to a.s.sist in the "patriotic duty" of "draining financially the occupied territories."

We are dealing, not with an honourable and civilized nation, but with a band of murdering brigands. The keepers of the national conscience have devised a monstrous and barbarous code of ethics, in which "patriotism"

is the sole duty, and the tribal G.o.d the only arbiter of right and wrong. As in Roman law, the property of an enemy is for a German _res nullius_--it has no owner. And now the prospect of any further loot on a large scale seems remote. The speculation has turned out badly, and the robber would be glad to cut his losses. The guardians of the law are at his heels, and do not mean to let him escape. But will they be able to make him disgorge? That will not be easy; and what atonement can be made for the innocent blood which drops from those pitiful spoils?

W. R. INGE.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHAT ABOUT PEACE, LADS?]

THE LIBERATORS

This is one of those cartoons in which the neutral in Raemaekers speaks with peculiar force. Such a picture by a Britisher would reasonably be discounted as unduly prejudiced, for it is none too easy for us in our present stresses to see the other fellow's point of view--in this difficult business of the blockade for an instance.

That friendly championing of the rights of neutrals suffering under the outrageous tyranny of the British Navy is a thing to which only the detached humour of a neutral can do justice. He can testify to the way in which the giant strength of that navy, whether in peace or war, has been used in the main not in the giants' tyrannous way; he can make allowance for the exigencies which have caused occasional arbitrariness under the stress of war or even in some untactful moment of peace; he can contrast the two main opposing navy's notions of justice, courtesy, seamans.h.i.+p--which is sportsmans.h.i.+p.

He can recall that no single right whether of combatant or neutral, of state or individual, guaranteed by international law, which the Germans have found it convenient or "necessary" to violate has been left unviolated; that there is no single method or practice of war condemned by the common consent of civilization but has been employed by men who even have the candour to declare that they stand above laws and guarantees.

And therefore he can make grim, effective fun of the sinister bandit with his foot planted on the shackled prisoner that lies between two murdered victims fatuously taking in vain the name of freedom.

JOSEPH THORP.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Freedom of the land is ours--why should we not have freedom of the sea?"]

TOM THUMB AND THE GIANT

The reference in this cartoon is to an incident which, at the time of its occurrence, is said to have caused considerable indignation in Germany. A Zeppelin, having been on a raiding expedition to England, was. .h.i.t on the return journey, and dropped into the North Sea. The crew, clinging to the damaged airs.h.i.+p, besought the captain of a British trawler to take them off, but the captain, seeing that the Zeppelin crew far outnumbered his own, declined to trust them, and left them to their fate. Whether the trawler's captain actually "put his thumb unto his nose and spread his fingers out" is a matter for conjecture, but under the circ.u.mstances it is scarcely likely.

The whole point lies in the German view of the trawler's captain and his inhuman conduct. He knew, perfectly well, that if he rescued the crew of the Zeppelin, the probable reward for himself and crew would be a voyage to the nearest German port and interment in a prison camp for the remainder of the war--and plenty of reliable evidence is forthcoming as to the treatment meted out to men in German prison camps. He knew, also, that these men who besought his aid were returning from one of the expeditions which have killed more women and children in England than able-bodied men, that they had been sharing in work which could not be described as even of indirect military value, but was more of the nature of sheer murder. And Germany condemned his conduct by every adjective that implied brutality and barbarity.

The unfortunate thing about the German viewpoint is that it takes into consideration only such points as favour Germany, a fact of which this incident affords striking evidence.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TOM THUMB AND THE GIANT

"Come and save me. You know I am so fond of children."]

"WE HAVE FINISHED OFF THE RUSSIANS"

a.s.suming that the statement with regard to finis.h.i.+ng off the Russians was actually written--and there is every reason to a.s.sume it--one may conjecture what memories it recalled. The great battles of the Warsaw salient, the drive that lasted for many months through the flats of Poland, the struggles of the Vilna salient, and all the time the knowledge that mechanism, the guns in which Germany put her trust, were shattering Russian legions day after day. Then the gradual settling of the eastern line, well into Russia, with all the industrial districts of Poland firmly gripped in German hands, and the certainty that though Russia had not been utterly broken and forced to a peace, yet so much had been accomplished that there was no longer any eastern menace, but both Germany and Austria might go about their business of conquest in the west, having "finished off" in the east.

But that strong figure with the pistol pointed at the writer, that implacable, threatening giant, is a true type of Russia the unconquerable. It is a sign that the guns in which Germany put her trust have failed her, that the line which was to hold firm during the business of conquest in the west has broken--more, it is a sign of the doom of the aggressor. The writing of that fat, complacent figure--sorry imitator of the world's great conquerors--is arrested, and in place of stolid self-conceit there shows fear.

Well-grounded fear. History can show no crimes to equal the rape of Belgium and the desolation of Poland at the hands of Germany. The giant with the pistol stands not only as a returned warrior, but also as an avenger of unspeakable crimes.