[Illustration: BETTER A LIVING DOG THAN A DEAD LION
THE DRIVER: “You are a worthy Dutchman. He who lies there was a foolish
idealist.”]
“The Burden of the Intolerable Day”
Most people have wondered from time to time what the Kaiser thinks
in his inmost heart and in the solitude of his own chamber about the
condition of Germany and about the War. What impression has been made
on him by the alternation of victories and failures during the last
twenty months? After all he has staked everything--he has everything to
lose. What does he feel? What impression do the frightful losses of his
own people make on him?
Raemaekers tells in this cartoon. The Kaiser has this moment been
wakened from sleep by the entrance of a big gorgeously dressed footman,
carrying his morning tea. The panelling of the royal chamber in the
palace at Potsdam is faintly indicated. The Kaiser sits up in bed, and
a look of agony gathers on his face as he realises that he has wakened
up to the grim horror of a new day, and that the delightful time which
he has just been living through was only a dream. He had dreamed that
the whole thing was not true--that the War had never really occurred,
and that he could face the world with a conscience clear from guilt;
and now he has wakened up to bear the burden for another day. It is
written in his face what he thinks. You see the deep down-drawn lines
in the lower part of the face, the furrows upon the forehead, and the
look almost of terror in the eyes. But a smug-faced flunkey offers him
a cup of tea with buttered toast, and he must come back to the pretence
of that tragi-comedy, the life of the King-Emperor.
The Dutch artist is fully alive to the comic element which underlies
that tragedy. The King-Emperor, as he awakes from sleep and sits
forward from that mountain of pillows, would be a purely comic figure
were it not for the terrible tragedy written in his face. A footman in
brilliant livery is a comic figure. The splendour of this livery brings
out the comic element by its contrast to, and yet its harmony with,
the stupid self-satisfaction of the countenance and the curls of the
powdered hair.
The Kaiser, however, awakens to more than the pretences and shams
of court life. The vast dreams which he cherished before the War of
world-conquest and an invincible Germany are fled now, and he must
face, open-eyed and awake, the stern reality.