[Illustration: THE VERY STONES CRY OUT]
The cartoon bears the quotation from Bernhardi “War is as divine as
eating and drinking.” Yes; and German war is as divine as German
eating and drinking. Anyone who has been in a German restaurant during
that mammoth midday meal which generally precedes a sleep akin to a
hibernation, will understand how the same strange barbarous solemnity
has ruined all the real romance of war. There is no way of conveying
the distinction, except by saying vaguely that there is a way of
doing things, and that butchering is not necessary to a good army any
more than gobbling is necessary to a good dinner. In our own insular
shorthand it can be, insufficiently and narrowly but not unprofitably,
expressed by saying that it is possible both to fight and to eat like
a gentleman. It is therefore highly significant that Mr. Raemaekers
has in this cartoon conceived the devil primarily as a kind of ogre.
It is a matter of great interest that this Dutch man of genius, like
that other genius whose pencil war has turned into a sword, Will Dyson,
tends in the presence of Prussia (which has been for many moderns their
first glimpse of absolute or positive evil) to depriving the devil of
all that moonshine of dignity which sentimental sceptics have given
him. Evil does not mean dignity, any more than it means any other good
thing. The stronger caricaturists have, in a sense, fallen back on the
medieval devil; not because he is more mystical, but because he is more
material. The face of Raemaekers’ Satan, with its lifted jowl and bared
teeth, has less of the half-truth of cynicism than of mere ignominious
greed. The armies are spread out for him as a banquet; and the war
which he praises, and which was really spread for him in Flanders, is
not a Crusade but a cannibal feast.