In this cartoon Raemaekers has contrived to indicate powerfully what
is after all the dominant and peculiar note of the German people. No
European nation has ever taken war--as people say--so “seriously,” that
is, with so much concentration of attention and elaborate preparation,
as has the German Empire. No people has ever had it so thoroughly
drilled into its collective mind as have the German subjects of that
Empire that war is not only, as all Christian people have always
believed, an expedient lawful and necessary upon occasion, but a thing
highly desirable in itself, nay, the principal function of a “superior”
race and the main end of its being.
And yet after all the actual German is never, like the Frenchman,
a natural and instinctive warrior--any more than he is, like the
Englishman, a natural and instinctive adventurer. The whole business
of Prussian militarism, with the half-witted philosophy by which it is
justified, has to be imposed upon him from without by his masters. He
fights just as he works, just as he tortures, violates and murders,
because he is told to do so by persons in a superior position, holding
themselves stiffly, dressed in uniform, and able to hit him in the face
with a whip.
Long before the war the absurd Koepenick incident gave us a glimpse
of this astonishing docility on its farcical side. Its tragic side is
well illustrated by the droves of helpless and inarticulate barbarians
driven into the shambles daily (as at Verdun) for the sole purpose
of covering up the blunders of their very “efficient” superiors. One
could pity the wretches if there were not so considerable a leaven of
wickedness in their stupidity.