The question uppermost in most of our minds at the present moment is, I
take it, what are the Huns thinking? And, in particular, what are the
Willies thinking?
Raemaekers answers the question with his wonderful pencil in this
cartoon.
We know that the Huns prepared for and started this war with a bee in
their bonnets, a bee which buzzed about Xerxes, Hannibal, Alexander
and Napoleon. The two Willies were avowedly “out” for what they
call “Weltmacht,” or world dominion. Bernhardi put it in tabloid
form:--“Weltmacht oder niedergang.”
If one fact shines out conspicuously after these dreadful months of
slaughter it is this--that the Willies will not achieve world dominion.
What are their inmost thoughts--now?
Raemaekers pourtrays the All Highest with snow white hair and a dyed
moustache still pointing upwards. The dyed moustache seems to me the
keynote of the cartoon--la petite note qui chante. It should be white
to match the hair, and drooping. What an effort to keep a stiff upper
lip, when day after day the War Lord scans the casualty lists, and
realises--as he must--that sooner or later the deluded Fatherland will
know what he knows, and draw from that knowledge conclusions which he
is powerless to modify or avert!
They have drunk to “Der Tag.” And that Day is about to dawn, the DAY
which will present them to their own people as discredited rulers and
humiliated schemers.
The Ramsay Macdonalds, the Charles Trevelyans, the Arthur Ponsonbys--et
id genus omne--have prattled about the inexpediency of humiliating
Germany. What a waste of foolish words! Can the imagination of Man
conceive of any greater humiliation than that which Destiny, not the
Allies, must inflict upon Hunland? That humiliation, inevitably, will
come from within, and prey like a hideous cancer upon the body politic.
No publicist, however prescient, can measure its ravages, for they are
hidden from our sight. But none can doubt that, like a cancer, these
ravages will grow and spread till the world gapes aghast at them.
Whatever punishment we may be able to inflict upon these Baby-Killers
and Pirates will be as nothing compared with the humiliation which,
pede claudo, dogs the steps of failure and bankruptcy.
In this cartoon, the younger of the two Weary Willies is fitly
habited in sable. He is in deepest mourning for the last of his
dynasty--HIMSELF.