[Illustration: VAN TROMP AND DE RUYTER
“So long as you permit Zeppelins to cross our land you surely should
cease to boast of our deeds.”
Whenever a Dutchman wishes to speak of the great past of his country he
calls to mind the names of these heroes.]
War and Christ.
The deliberate war made by Prussia in all those areas which she can
reach or occupy against the symbols and sacred objects of the Christian
faith is a phenomenon in every way worthy of consideration. It is
clearly not a matter of accident. The bombardment at Rheims Cathedral,
for example, can be proved to have been deliberate. It had no military
object; and the subsequent attempts to manufacture a military reason
for it only produced a version of the occurrence not only incredible
but in flat contradiction to the original admissions of the Germans
themselves. But such episodes as those of Rheims and Louvain merely
attract the attention of the world because of the celebrity of the
outraged shrines. All who are familiar with the facts know that
deliberate sacrilege no less than deliberate rape and deliberate murder
has everywhere marked the track of the German army.
The offence has been malignant. That does not, of course, mean that it
has been irrational; quite the contrary. One fully admits that Prussia,
being what she is, has every cause to hate the Cross, and every motive
to vent the agonised fury of a lost soul upon things sacred to the God
she hates.
The moral suggested by this cartoon of Raemaekers’ must not be confused
with the ridiculous and unhistoric pretence that war itself is
essentially unchristian. When Mr. Bernard Shaw, if I remember right,
drew from the affair of Rheims the astonishing moral that we cannot
have at the same time “glorious wars and glorious cathedrals,” he might
surely have remembered that the age in which Rheims Cathedral was
built, whatever else it was, was not an age of Pacifism. The insult
to Jesus Christ is not in the sword (which in His own words He came
to bring), but in the profanation of the sword. It is in cruelty,
injustice, treachery, unbridled lust, the worship of unrighteous
strength--in fact, in all that can be summed up in the single word
“Prussia.”