The artist spreads before you a view such as you would have on the
great wheat-growing plains of Hungary, or on the level plateau of
Asiatic Turkey--the vast, unending, monotonous, undivided field of
corn. In the background the view is interrupted by two villages from
which great clouds of flame and smoke are rising--they are both on
fire--and as you look closer at the harvest you see that, instead of
wheat, it consists of endless regiments of marching soldiers.
“The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few”: here is only
one, but he is quite sufficient--“the reaper whose name is Death,” a
skeleton over whose bones the peasant’s dress--a shirt and a pair of
ragged trousers--hangs loose. The shirt-sleeves of the skeleton are
turned well up, as if for more active exertion, as he grasps the two
holds of the huge scythe with which he is sweeping down the harvest.
This is not war of the old type, with its opportunities for chivalry,
its glories, and its pride of manly strength. The German development
of war has made it into a mere exercise in killing, a business of
slaughter. Which side can kill most, and itself outlast the other? When
one reads the calculations by which careful statisticians demonstrate
that in the first seventeen months of the War Germany alone lost over
a million of men killed in battle, one feels that this cartoon is not
exaggerated. It is the bare truth.
The ease with which the giant figure of Death mows down the harvest of
tiny men corresponds, in fact, to the million of German dead, probably
as many among the Russians, to which must be added the losses among
the Austrians, the French, the British, the Belgians, Italians, Serbs,
Turks, and Montenegrins. The appalling total is this vast harvest which
covers the plain.