Raemaekers' Cartoons Part 9

THOU ART THE MAN!

The Man of Sorrows is flogged, and thorn-crowned, and crucified, and pierced afresh, by this other man of sorrows, who has brought greater bitterness and woe on earth than any other of all time. And in his soul--for soul he must have, though small sign of it is evidenced--he knows it. Deceive his dupes as he may--for a time--his own soul must be a very h.e.l.l of broken hopes, disappointed ambitions, shattered pride, and the hideous knowledge of the holocaust of human life he has deliberately sacrificed to these heathen G.o.ds of his. No poorest man on earth would change places with this man-that-might-have-been, for his time draws nigh and his end is perdition.

Let That Other speak:

"Their souls are Mine.

Their lives were in thy hand;-- Of thee I do require them!

"The fetor of thy grim burnt-offerings Comes up to Me in clouds of bitterness.

Thy fell undoings crucify afresh Thy Lord--who died alike for these and thee.

Thy works are Death:--thy spear is in My side,-- O man! O man!--was it for this I died?

Was it for this?-- A valiant people harried to the void,-- Their fruitful fields a burnt-out wilderness,-- Their prosperous country ravelled into waste,-- Their smiling land a vast red sepulchre,-- --Thy work!

"Thou art the man! The scales were in thy hand.

For this vast wrong I hold thy soul in fee.

Seek not a scapegoat for thy righteous due, Nor hope to void thy countability.

Until thou purge thy pride and turn to Me,-- As thou hast done, so be it unto thee!"

JOHN OXENHAM.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THOU ART THE MAN

"We wage war on Divine principles."]

SYMPATHY

The cartoon requires no words to tell the story. It holds chapter upon chapter of tragedy. "I will send you to Germany after your father!"

Where is the boy's father in Germany? In a prison? Mending roads? Lying maimed and broken in a rude hospital? Digging graves for comrades about to be shot? Or, more likely still, in a rough unknown stranger's grave?

Was the father dragged from his home at Louvain, or Tirlemont, or Vise, or one of the dozen other scenes of outrage and murder--a harmless, hard-working citizen-dragged from his hiding-place and made to suffer "exemplary justice" for having "opposed the Kaiser's might," but in reality because he was a Belgian, for whose nasty breed there must be demonstrations of Germany's frightfulness _pour encourager les autres_?

And the child's mother and sisters--what of them? He is dejected, but not broken. There is dignity in the boy's defiant pose. The scene has, perhaps, been enacted hundreds of times in the cities of Belgium, where poignant grief has come to a nation which dared to be itself.

Follow this boy through life and observe the stamp of deep resolve on his character. Though he be sent "to Germany after your father," though he be for a generation under the German jack-boot, his spirit will sustain him against the conqueror and will triumph in the end.

RALPH D. BLUMENFELD.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SYMPATHY

"If I find you again looking so sad, I'll send you to Germany after your father."]

THE REFUGEES

The wonder is not that women went mad, but that there are left any sane civilians of the ravished districts of Belgium after all those infamies perpetrated under orders by the German troops after the first infuriating check of Liege and before the final turning of the German line at the battle of the Marne. We have supped full of horrors since, and by an insensible process grown something callous. But we never came near to realizing the Belgian agony, and Raemaekers does us service by helping to make us see it mirrored in the eyes of this poor raving girl.

This indeed is a later incident, but will serve for reminder of the earlier worse.

It is really _not_ well to forget. These were not the inevitable horrors of war, but a deliberately calculated effect. There seems no hope of the future of European civilization till the men responsible for such things are brought to realize that, to put it crudely and at its lowest, they don't pay.

What the att.i.tude of Germany now is may be guessed from the blank refusal even of her bishops to sanction the investigation which Cardinal Mercier asks for. It is still the gentle wolf's theory that the truculent lamb was entirely to blame.

JOSEPH THORP.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE REFUGEES FROM GHEEL

Gheel has a model asylum for the insane. On the fall of Antwerp the inmates were conveyed across the frontier. The cartoon ill.u.s.trates an incident where a woman, while wheeling a lunatic, herself developed insanity from the scenes she witnessed.]

"THE JUNKER"

There were few things that Junkerdom feared so much in modern Germany as the growth and effects of Socialism; and it is certain that the possible att.i.tude of the German Socialists--who were thought by some writers to number somewhere in the neighbourhood of two million--in regard to the War at its outset greatly exercised the minds of Junkerdom and the Chancellor. A few days after the declaration of War a well-known English Socialist said to us, "I believe that the Socialists will be strong enough greatly to handicap Germany in the carrying on of the War, and possibly, if she meets with reverses in the early stages, to bring about Peace before Christmas."

That was in August, 1914, and we are now well on in the Spring of 1916.

We reminded the speaker that on a previous occasion, when Peace still hung in the balance, he had declared with equal conviction that there would be no War because "the Socialists are now too strong in Germany not to exercise a preponderating restraining influence." He has proved wrong in both opinions. And one can well imagine that the Junker cla.s.s admires Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg for the astute manner in which he has succeeded in shepherding the German Socialist sheep for the slaughter, and in muzzling their representatives in the Reichstag.

CLIVE HOLLAND.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE JUNKER

"What I have most admired in you, Bethmann, is that you have made Socialists our best supporters."]

"MILIEU DE FANToMES TRISTES ET SANS NOMBRE"

There is something daunting, even to the mind of one not guilty of war or of ma.s.sacres, in the thought of mult.i.tudes: the mult.i.tude of the dead, of the living, of one generation of men since there have been men on earth. And war brings this horror to us daily, or rather nightly, because such great companies of men have suddenly died together, pa.s.sing in comrades.h.i.+p and community from the known to the unknown. Yet dare we say "together?" The unparalleled solitariness and singleness of death is not altered by the general and simultaneous doom of battle.

And it is with the mult.i.tude, and all the _ones_ in it, that the maker of war is in unconscious relation. He does not know their names, he does not know them by any kind of distinction, he knows them only by thousands. Yet every one with a separate life and separate death is in conscious relation with _him_, knows him for the tyrant who has taken his youth, his hope, his love, his fatherhood.

What a mult.i.tude to meet, whether in thought, in conscience, or in another world! We all, no doubt, try to make the thought of ma.s.sacre less intolerable to our minds by telling ourselves that the sufferers suffer one by one, to each his own share, and not another's; that though the numbers may appeal, they do not make each man's part more terrible.

But this is not much comfort. There is not, it is true, a sum of multiplication; but there is the sum of addition. And that addition--the mult.i.tude man by man--the War Lord has to reckon with: Frederick the Great with his men, Napoleon with his, the German Emperor with his--each one of the innumerable unknown knowing his destroyer.

ALICE MEYNELL.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Mais quand la voix de Dieu l'appela il se voyait seul sur la terre au milieu de fantomes tristes et sans nombre."]

BLUEBEARD'S CHAMBER

The Committee of Enquiry, like another Portia, clothed in the ermine-trimmed robe of Justice and the Law, has unlocked with the key of Truth the door of the closed chamber. The key lies behind her inscribed in Dutch with the name that tells its nature. The Committee then pulls back the curtain, and reveals the horrors that are behind it. Before the curtain is fully drawn back, Enquiry sinks almost in collapse at the terrible sight that is disclosed. There hang to pegs on the wall the bodies of Bluebeard's victims, a woman, an old man, a priest, two boys, and a girl still half hidden behind the curtain. The blood that has trickled from them coagulates in pools on the ground.

Bluebeard himself comes suddenly: he hurries down the steps brandis.h.i.+ng his curved sword, a big, burly figure, with square, thick beard, and streaming whiskers, wearing a Prussian helmet, his mouth open to utter a roar of rage and fury. The hatred and scorn with which the artist inspires his pictures of Prussia are inexhaustible in their variety: Prussia is barbarism attempting to trample on law and education, brutality beating down humanity, a grim figure, the incarnation of "frightfulness." I can imagine the feelings with which all Germans must regard the picture that the Dutch artist always gives of their country, if they regard Prussia as their country. "For every cartoon of Raemaekers," said a German newspaper, "the payment will be exacted in full, when the reckoning is made up." To this painter the Prussian ruling power is incapable of understanding what n.o.bility of nature means. He can practise on and take advantage of the vices and weaknesses of his enemies; he can buy the services of many among them, and have all the worser people in his fee as his servants and agents; but he is always foiled, because he forgets that some men cannot be bought, and that these men will steel their fellow-countrymen's minds to resist tyranny to the last. The ma.s.s of men can be led either to evil or to good.