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 wait _their_ fate 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.