Louis Raemaekers will stand out for all time as one of the supreme
figures which the Great War has called into being. His genius has
been enlisted in the service of mankind, and his work, being entirely
sincere and untouched by racial or national prejudice, will endure;
indeed, it promises to gain strength as the years advance. When the
intense passions, which have been awakened by this world struggle, have
faded away, civilisation will regard the war largely through these
wonderful drawings. By them, not only the methods of German warfare
will be judged, but the resolution will surely be begotten and nurtured
that never again, so far as it is humanly possible, shall a recurrence
of Teuton inhumanity and barbarism be permitted.
* * * * *
Before the war had been in progress many weeks the cartoons in the
Amsterdam _Telegraaf_ attracted attention in the capitals of Europe,
many leading newspapers reproducing them. The German authorities, quick
to realise their full significance, did all in their power to suppress
them. Through German intrigue Raemaekers has been charged in the Dutch
Courts with endangering the neutrality of Holland--and acquitted. A
price has been set on his head, should he ever venture over the border.
When only a week or two ago he crossed to England, his wife received
anonymous post-cards, warning her that his ship would certainly be
torpedoed in the North Sea. The _Cologne Gazette_, in a leading article
on Holland, threatens that country that “after the War Germany will
settle accounts with Holland, and for each calumny, for each cartoon of
Raemaekers, she will demand payment with the interest that is due to
her.” Not since Saul and the men of Israel were in the valley of Elah
fighting with the Philistines has so unexpected a champion arisen. With
brush and pencil this Dutch painter will do even as David did with the
smooth stone out of the brook; he will destroy the braggart Goliath,
who, strong in his own might, defies the forces of the living God.
When Mr. Raemaekers came to London in December, he was received by the
Prime Minister, and was entertained at a complimentary luncheon by the
Journalists of the British capital. Similar honour was conferred on him
on his second visit. He was the guest of honour at the Savage Club; the
Royal Society of Miniature Painters elected him an Honorary Member. But
it has been left to France to pay the most fitting recognition to his
genius and to his services in the cause of freedom and truth. The Cross
of the Legion of Honour has been presented to him, and on his visit to
Paris this month a special reception is to be held in his honour at La
Sorbonne, which is the highest purely intellectual reward Europe can
confer on any man.
* * * * *
The great Dutch cartoonist is now in his forty-seventh year. He was
born in Holland, his father, who is dead, having been the editor of a
provincial newspaper. His mother, who is still alive and exceedingly
proud of her son’s fame, is a German by birth, but rejoices that she
married a Dutchman and thus escaped from the debasing influences of
her native land. Mr. Raemaekers, who is short, fair, and of a ruddy
countenance, looks at least ten years younger than his age. He took up
painting and drawing when quite young and learnt his art in Holland and
in Brussels. All his life he has lived in his own country, but with
frequent visits to Belgium and Germany, where, through his mother,
he has many relations. Thus he knows by experience the nature of the
peoples whom he depicts.
For many years he was a landscape painter and a portrait painter, and
made money and local reputation. Six or seven years ago he turned his
attention to political work, and became a cartoonist and caricaturist
on the staff of the Amsterdam _Telegraaf_, thus opening the way to a
fame which is not only world-wide but which will endure as long as the
memory of the Great War lasts. His ideas come to him naturally and
without effort. Suggestions do not assist him; they hinder him when
he endeavours to act on them. He is an artist to his finger-tips and
throws the whole force of his being into his work. Some years ago he
married a Dutch lady, who is devoted to music, and they have three
children, two girls and a boy (the youngest); the eldest is now twelve.
Very happy in his home, Mr. Raemaekers has no ambitions outside it,
except to go on with his work and to continue the fight against the
German Evil. A Teuton paper has declared that Raemaekers’ cartoons are
worth at least two Army Corps to the Allies. This saying has pleased
him greatly; he only wishes they were worth four Army Corps.
The strong religious tendency which so often distinguishes his work
makes one instinctively ask to what Church does the artist belong. He
replies that he belongs to none, but was brought up a Catholic, and
his wife a Protestant, and the differences which in later life severed
each from their early teaching caused them to meet on common ground.
But the intense Christian feeling of these drawings is beyond cavil or
dispute: they again and again bring home to the heart the vital truths
of the Faith with irresistible force, and the artist ever expresses
the Christianity, not perhaps of the theologian, but of the honest and
kindly man of the world.
Praise has been bestowed upon his work by several German
papers--qualified praise. The _Leipziger Volkszeitung_ has declared
that Raemaekers’ cartoons show unimpeachable art and great power of
execution, but that they all lack one thing. They have no wit, no
spirit. Which is true--in a sense. They do lack wit--German wit; they
do lack spirit--German spirit. And what German wit and German spirit
may be one can comprehend by a study of Raemaekers’ cartoons.
* * * * *
The cartoons by Louis Raemaekers properly need no introduction, since
they explain themselves in every line. But it might be usefully pointed
out that, so far, our Fleet has saved us from actual sight of Germany’s
war methods. What shells and bombs we know have arrived from the blue,
lacking the personality of the despatchers. Raemaekers lives on the
other side of an electrified wire within a very short distance of
the slaughter-houses at work. He has dealt with people still bloody,
sweating, and dusty from their flight. He knows, or he knows friends
who know men and women dead or dishonoured, or in present peril of
murder or rape. He understands, as well as all his countrymen, that
Belgium is being vivisected on Holland’s doorstep, that Holland may
take warning. He is more than any resident in Great Britain _of_ that
tragedy. His evidence then is as unimpeachable as his art.
Raemaekers also realises in his presentments what we do not--that the
German foulness in war is an integral part of the German philosophy
of life, and when the armies give themselves up to their reasoned
abominations, it is no more than Germany going joyously to the
realisation of the depraved dreams which have been instilled into
its mind in peace. He does not lose his temper over the fact. His
line cuts as deeply as possible because he knows not only the visible
act, but the life-tendency which made the act inevitable. We do
not. We still keep the idea that certain things “are not done.” Our
geographical position prevents us feeling the pressure that keeps the
neutral nations quiet and useful to Germany. Our caricaturists only see
the outside of things. So it happens that we who would be most affected
by defeat are the least affected now in our own minds.
* * * * *
The abomination of frightfulness in Belgium recalls the sufferings
and degradations which English women and children endured nearly
sixty years ago when a section of the Indian army rebelled, and the
mutineers, being joined by certain disaffected Indian princes and
landowners, overcame small and isolated British communities and
perpetrated identically the same barbarities as have been deliberately
practised by the German troops during the present war. It was then
that Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the distinguished American essayist,
gave utterance to the following opinion in the _Atlantic Monthly_; it
is now embodied in his well-known work “The Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table.” Although the official voice of the United States has uttered no
such protest, there is reason to believe that these words written by an
American pen nine-and-fifty years ago do still represent the reasoned
opinion of the bulk of American men and women:
Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying
that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with
the higher? No matter who he was. Now look at what is going on in
India--a white, superior “Caucasian” race, against a dark-skinned,
inferior, but still “Caucasian” race--and where are English and
American sympathies? We can’t stop to settle all the doubtful
questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure to come
out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general law that
the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as it does
the same nature in the inferior animals--tame it, or crush it.
The Indian mail brings stories of women and children outraged and
murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers.
England takes down the Map of the World, which she has girdled with
empire, and makes a correction thus: Delhi, _Dele!_ The civilised
world says, Amen.
* * * * *
_Dele!_ Destroy utterly! Wipe off the face of the world--not Germany,
or the German capital, or the German people, but the German philosophy
of life as it has been expounded by its chief evangels, Treitschke,
Bernhardi, and others. _Dele!_ That should be the motto of each one
of us. It is the message which Louis Raemaekers speaks with the whole
strength of his genius. It has to be accomplished by the individual
in his own sphere; it is a duty which cannot be deputised. Germany
has proclaimed: “War is war; no treaty too sacred, no human right too
divine, no woman too weak, no babe too tender to escape from the blind,
brutal violence of war.” We must fight to the death. Either German
philosophy is to be established, and freedom of body, mind, and soul
crushed beneath the iron heel of Prussian Kultur, or else, at whatever
the cost, this fearful menace to the peace and liberty of nations and
individuals has to be destroyed root and branch. “I came not to send
peace but a sword,” said the Saviour. Are we, who boast ourselves
Christians and have heretofore rejoiced in Christianity, too weak or
too fearful in this day of battle to take up the Saviour’s sword and to
war for the eternal principles and ideals of right, justice, mercy, and
loving-kindness?
This struggle is not merely a matter for the fighting men. It has to be
carried into our counting-houses, our shops, our schools, and, if need
be, our homes. Wherever we encounter the insidious presence of Germany
and German ideas, there must they be overthrown, no matter how costly,
difficult, or disagreeable the work may prove personally. The German
has been taught that duty to his own State outweighs the laws of God
and man. To betray hospitality, to be false to both written and spoken
word, to be full of deceit, lying, and treachery--these are esteemed
honourable actions even in times of peace where German interests are
concerned by all her people from the Kaiser downwards. And the reverse
is equally true. They who are not Germans, and who refuse to subscribe
to the canons of Kultur, are reckoned beyond the pale of civilisation.
* * * * *
Nothing has been stated here which cannot be proved by independent
testimony. The literature of the war and of the events antecedent to
the war has grown apace, and this short prefatory note is not the place
to review it. But attention may be profitably drawn to the testimony,
borne by another neutral, to German methods. Dr. Anton Nyström, one
of the most distinguished sons of Sweden, a historian of high repute,
who has travelled widely throughout Europe, in his book “Before,
During, and After 1914,” written only last summer, establishes that
public feeling has been deliberately created in Germany during the
last fifty years that that country should assume the mastery of all
nations related to Germany without regard to material and historical
factors. And wherever this mastery has been assumed, whether in
Schleswig-Holstein, Poland, or Alsace and Lorraine, a systematic and
ruthless suppression of the mother-tongue has been attempted, and the
peoples have been persecuted for any tokens of affection for their own
nationality. As it has been, so it will be again, if Germany triumphs.
Furthermore, we know well to-day that the mastery of the Germanic
peoples was intended only to be the beginning of the mastery of the
world.
* * * * *
When complete these portfolios of Louis Raemaekers’ cartoons will
constitute the most marvellous record of the horrible realities of
this vast world-struggle, and will have a historical value which will
grow greater with time. Already the originals have been purchased, and
their present owners, in most instances, would not part with them for
ten times the price they have paid. It has been well said that no man
living amidst these surging seas of blood and tears has come nearer to
the rôle of Peacemaker than Raemaekers. The peace which he works for is
not a matter of arrangement between diplomatists and politicians: it
is the peace which the intelligence and the soul of the Western world
shall insist on in the years to be. God grant it be not long delayed,
but it can only come when the enemy is entirely overthrown and the
victory is overwhelming and complete.
FRANCIS STOPFORD,
EDITOR, _Land and Water_.
EMPIRE HOUSE,
KINGSWAY, LONDON.
_February, 1916._
[Illustration:
_Photograph by Miss D. Compton Collier._