be fighting--will call for many martyrs behind the fighting lines, and
we may suppose that the middle classes of the fatherland as little like
the sacrifices demanded from them as any other members of the community,
whose savings are the result of their own energy and enterprise. That
Germany is subscribing to her loans with generosity and self-denial we
have no reason to doubt; but since there is no free press, the nation as
a whole remains under delusion as to the value of its securities. The
dust, however, cannot be in every eye much longer, and before another
spring is spent, Germany’s people will know that she is powerless to
keep her paper promises.
For the one hope that a victorious trade war would instantly break out
upon the arrival of peace is destined to be disappointed.
As Mr. Kitson recently and very effectively showed, economic power is
the basis of political power, the root from which all national power,
which can be interpreted into force, must spring. “Trade warfare is
therefore a struggle for economic power, for the control of men and of
all factors of wealth production.”
The British Empire seems to be grasping this fact for the first time in
her national history; and though we have far to go, and the panacea of
free trade will doubtless be vended again after the war--by those who,
before it, knew so well that Germany would never fight--a growing
conviction is none the less apparent that only by a direct and strenuous
offensive shall we win the war after the war.
Let us banish inter-tariffs, as Germany did, and unite the nation in a
closer economic understanding; and let us not leave our frontiers open
to the legions of German and Austrian bagmen, who only await peace to
swarm over them.
It depends largely upon us whether the gentleman in the picture will get
his money back.
The grand total of the fatherland’s indebtedness, were war to go on
until last April, has been calculated in Germany to represent
£4,500,000,000, which would demand in annual interest a sum near
£800,000,000.
One does not desire to be vindictive, but let no man forget the
barefaced villainy and devilish brutality with which the Central Nations
prosecuted war. It is not for us to forward the peaceful penetration of
such a people through the length and breadth of our empire if we desire
to preserve that empire as an entity.
Let Germany redeem her pledges if she can; it will be no part of our
post-war activities to assist her task.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
[Illustration]
“_Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Dass ist der Vater mit seinem
Kind_” (_Erlkönig_)
Not only the father and his sick child ride storm-foundered and lost
through night, with the phantom king steadily gaining upon both: the
frantic, over-driven brute they ride should also be conscious of
approaching doom. But is it?
We may take their steed to be the nation of the royal fugitives, and
wonder when Germany--a kingdom whose native qualities had won such ample
recognition among her elder sisters on the road to civilization--will
awaken into consciousness of her accursed load and perceive that the
Hohenzollerns ride only to death. They started on their gallop when
Bismarck fell, and now the end is in sight.
Great must be the subjugation before a practical people can reach this
pass, or still fail to perceive, if on a material basis only, where the
legend of world-power and world-trade has brought them. As sleepwalkers
they pursued their dream and have not yet awakened to see where now they
stand. Still they believe the issue undetermined; still is it hidden
from them that their might is broken, that roughly half their foreign
trade, which lay with the Allies, has vanished. Only ignorance and the
tradition of servility postpone inevitable revolution.
Of Germany’s evil-genius and arch-enemy, now far advanced on the road
that leads to his destruction, an illuminating picture has just been
flashed to us. One who was long a publicist in the capitals of Europe
has spoken of “Things I remember,” and he quotes a German author--a
woman--who spoke thus of the “War Lord” before the war. None is a more
shrewd and subtle student of character than a woman, when she holds an
object worthy of her study.
“I can assure you that he extirpates, as of fell purpose, every
independent character, root and branch. Think of the number of poor
devils in prison for the crime of _lèse majesté_, not one instance of
which he has ever pardoned; while there is not a case of a man having
killed his opponent in a duel, however disgraceful might have been its
cause, whom he has not pardoned, or at least remitted the sentence.
Never has a monarch encouraged Byzantine servility to such a degree as
this man. No sunbeam but it must radiate from him; no incense but it
must fill his nostrils.”
May Germany use her waking hour to be rid forever of this archaic
incubus; and if, at the end, she still cries for the domination of
Prussia, then it is to be hoped that, when they have won the war, the
Allies will save her from her own blindness and themselves perform the
act of liberation.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
[Illustration]
_The Voices of the Guns_
One may characterize the figures in this cartoon as not altogether
imaginary. In the villages behind the lines of the Somme, and in the
tumbled country north of Verdun, there must be many such little homes as
that in which the old man is pictured, homes befouled and desecrated by
the presence of these hard-faced men who look on contemptuously while
the old man listens. He and his kind know the voices of the guns, for
they have heard them before. What memories of ’70 and his own fighting
days must come to him and to all his kind as they wait the coming of the
guns that shall drive out this scourge of France--this vileness that for
nearly half a century has poisoned the life of all Europe, and on France
especially has set an abiding mark? What hopes must be his for the day
when Prussianism shall be no more than a vague name, and the sons of
those sons of his who fight to-day shall work content in the knowledge
that their fathers have freed them from this Damoclean threat?
How these people in the conquered territories have endured, how they
have waited and hoped, even when there seemed no ground for hope, in the
darkest of the days, we shall perhaps know when peace comes again. Yet
even then we in Britain can never know all, for there is given to us a
shield that France has never known--our shield, and in a measure our
danger. For no man in Britain sits and listens for the guns that shall
free his house and his land, and in that fact is possible lack of
comprehension and consequent great danger; as once it has been, so it
may be again.
Yet it may be that, when the stories of these old men behind the enemy
lines are told, they will waken the whole of the world, not only to the
need for destruction of such a thing as the militarism of Prussia, but
to the knowledge that only the strong man armed may keep his house. Had
_all_ realized this in time----
Meanwhile, as this third year of the war ends, the guns that speak
freedom come nearer.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN
[Illustration]
_The Death’s-Head Hussar_
In Greek mythology Nemesis personified the moral law which chastises
arrogance and wanton excess by the inexorable consequences of their own
wrong-doing. So none who had offended could escape her.
The Death’s-Head Hussars are a perfect example of that boastful pride
and transgression of the bounds of due proportion which it is the
function of Nemesis to punish. By their name and their device they make
a mock of the most solemn tragedy--of Death itself. Whether their emblem
threatens death to others or signifies their own contempt for death it
is a wanton and arrogant jest. The skull and cross-bones were the
traditional device of pirates, and it well became those grim outlaws who
declared a ruthless war against all mankind. There was no jest about it,
but a dreadful seriousness, and their proper end was the yard-arm. But
the Death’s-Head Hussars are what is called a “crack” regiment, one
officered by rich, aristocratic, and elegant young men, who have not set
themselves against the world, but are very much of it. Nor are they any
braver or more formidable than other regiments. The Death’s-Head
business is a silly and boastful affectation.
Here is the just sentence of chastising Nemesis. The last of the
Death’s-Head Hussars, its imperial colonel, is being shot over the head
of his skeleton charger on to the heaped ranks of dead soldiers which
ring him round. He has his fill of skulls and cross-bones now. The Crown
Prince of Germany has confessed it to the world.
A. SHADWELL.
[Illustration]
_The “Franc-tireur” Excuse_
It is well sometimes, despite all that has happened since, to turn back
to Belgium and remember the rape, rapine, and arson of 1914. There will
be plenty of time to let bygones be bygones when might and right are
found on the same side and Justice, who is using her sword just now,
resumes her impartial scales; but until the Central Nations experience a
defeat of magnitude sufficient to penetrate to the hearts and heads of
their people, we may continue to keep in the forefront of our minds the
story of Belgium under Germany’s heel.
That tale of brutal tyranny is not even yet told, for, short of selling
the deported Belgians as slaves, Germany would seem still to be doing
all that Hun and Vandal ever accomplished. But Raemaekers gives us a
glimpse from the past, when conquest was still in progress and the
German obsession of _franc-tireurs_ reached its height. How far they
pretended this fear to excuse their own murder of the defenseless, or
how far they really felt it, matters little; for it has been shown that
the cry was deliberately excited--by fabrication and circulation through
Germany of countless “fearful” falsehoods. Soldiery about to pass from
the Fatherland to Belgium were inflamed, as with drink, by lies of the
horrible treatment they must expect and endure from civil populations
and non-combatants. They were warned by calculated propaganda at home
that their eyes would be gouged out, their legs sawn off, their wounded
men murdered, with fiendish details of suffering by the Belgians.
German valets of the type of Houston Chamberlain and Sven Hedin spread
these stories; Pastor Conrad wrote a little book and sold it to the
school children that they, too, might read about their fathers’
gouged-out eyes in Belgium.
The result was certain when German soldiers found themselves with a free
hand among unarmed women and their little ones; for Germany in Belgium
and Poland, and Austria in Serbia, have not been content to destroy the
manhood of weak nations: they have striven to stamp out their virginity
and their childhood also.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
[Illustration]
_The Entry Into Constantinople_
Nowhere has the caricaturist proved more effectively his command of
caustic satire.
It is characteristic of the Kaiser and his family to claim Christian
sanction for all his sinister schemes.
None of the many goals which the Kaiser confidently set out to win in
this war has he yet secured. The triumphal progress through the capital
city of Constantinople loomed large in his early programme. His vaulting
ambition still seeks the hegemony of the Mahomedan world no less than of
the Christian world.
The Kaiser habitually appeals to religious authority. He garbles
Scripture to serve his turn. Nothing that the world regards as sacred is
safe from his profanation. His miscalculations are so colossal, his
hopes are so tangled, that the blasphemous dream which the artist
depicts may well have visited the imperial couch. The pious Mahomedan
might possibly find some specious compensation for submission to the
Prussian yoke were the Kaiser to enter the Turkish capital at the head
of his barbarian hordes flaunting in triumph the banner of the crescent,
while Christ rode on an ass at the imperial side, in bonds and wearing
the crown of thorns. It is a revolting piece of pictorial imagery, but
it is a legitimate interpretation of the imperial megalomania, which
enlists blasphemy in the service of the imperial propaganda.
SIDNEY LEE.
[Illustration]
_Come Away, My Dear!_
Only historic interest now attaches to the activities of German
diplomacy which sought, by misplaced flattery, to prevent Italy from
joining the Powers of the Entente in the Great War. Prince von Bülow for
many months employed all his wiles to distract Italy from the pursuit of
a hostile policy. He had some good cards in his hand, and, after the
manner of all German diplomatists, he overestimated their strength,
while he underrated the skill and enthusiasm of the players against him.
The influences of German finance worked on his side, but
characteristically he ignored the spiritual forces of the Italian
national sentiment, on which bribes and blandishments could make no
impression. Italy’s traditional hatred of Austria was only speciously
held in check by the conventions of the old Triple Alliance. The perils
which Austria invited by engaging in the present war were bound to set
ancient memories fully aflame. It is a mangled unity of which Italy can
boast so long as the Italian peoples of the Trentino and Dalmatia live
under Austrian sway.
The cry of the Trentino for release from a foreign servitude overcame
all those predilections for peace, which some material considerations
fostered in Italy in the early stages of the war. Von Bülow undertook a
thankless task when he sought by pretty speeches to deafen Italian ears
to the piercing appeals of Italy’s compatriots under alien sway. He may
cherish the delusion that he scored a minor success by postponing for a
season Italy’s declaration of war on Germany. For a short while Italy
was content with her defiance of Austria alone, but even this small
triumph on the prince’s part proved a phantasm. To-day all the prince’s
diplomatic adventures are seen to be empty mockeries and snares.
SIDNEY LEE.
[Illustration]
_The “Harmless” German_
We may pause to wonder whether Germany ever considers her relations with
the weak neutral nations after the war.
In the case of America, she preserves some show of explicit courtesy,
while performing actions of implicit insult. Where it matters not, she
conforms; where it does matter, she ignores; but she has no desire to
quarrel openly with the United States and has long since found that she
can do pretty much what she pleased without risking more than verbal
remonstrances. In the case of Norway and Sweden, Denmark and Holland,
she is not even at the pains to be civil; but treats them with her usual
indifference to all things physically weak. Sometimes she will add
insult to injury, as in the case of this cartoon, and needlessly pretend
an innocence that would not deceive a child; more often, as in her
pirate procedure against Holland, she cares nothing what the weak may
have to say while her own strength is paramount.
But the war will end and what sort of relations will these insulted and
outraged kingdoms seek with Germany when the bully is beaten? One might
ask them another question. Is it beyond the power of the Northern
neutrals to assume a more hortatory tone and courageous attitude? Might
they not sensibly forward all rational hopes of civilization by taking a
stronger line with the enemy of Europe? Whining and grumbling serve no
good purpose; but a somewhat stronger and cleaner-cut expression of
opinion before the insulting scorn poured upon their protests would
increase general respect for Holland and the rest.
Why are they so frightened? Is it from force of habit? They might surely
begin to perceive with sufficient distinctness that the Power that sank
the “Tubantia” and “Blommersdijk” is on the way herself to be sunk. Why
then this abject attitude? It is easy to guess.
Meantime Holland’s recent protest to America was hardly worth making.
She may well ask what would have happened had the sinkings off Newport,
on the American coast, occurred off Ymuiden, on her own. But she will
receive no satisfactory reply to that question. Nor does it help
civilization to hear Holland say, “Submarine warfare cannot go on any
longer.” Germany laughs. She knows how much of her gold has crossed into
Holland of late, and that our Dutch friends doubtless have more to gain
in wealth than lose in honor by “taking it lying down.”
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.
[Illustration]
_The Propagandist in Holland_
Raemaekers is never more pungent in his satire than when he deals with
the efforts of Germany to penetrate the conscience and persuade the will
of Holland. In the cartoon opposite we see the typical German
propagandist--half-professor, half-merchant, and wholly the servile
ambassador of his Government--exhibiting to the equally typical Dutch
peasant the recommendations and persuasions of Germany. These are
printed in Dutch for his behoof, and they declare that it can be proved
by the testimony of the Ninety-Three Intellectuals that all men who are
not enthusiastic about German _Kultur_ and all who are rash enough to
accuse German statesmen of breaking their word or behaving like
barbarians are worthless persons of no character. He tells the Dutchman
that “We Germans are fighting for the liberty of the sea, guaranteed as
Prussian.” Another belt of propaganda offers advice gratis to smugglers,
and urges the Dutch, in exchange for aniline dyes, to supply the German
Government with tin, oil, fat, leather, india-rubber, and other such
“peaceful” articles. The lowest line assures the Dutchman that the book
called “J’Accuse”--which is phonetically spelt “Sjakkuus” that the
Dutchman may have no doubt about it--is a vulgar production. The
“Toekomst”--a virulently pro-German newspaper, subventioned from
Berlin--is a genuine expression of Dutch feeling.
Thus the fat missionary in spectacles volubly attempts to seduce the
grave and rather sardonic Dutch peasant, whose face is a triumph of
non-committal. He holds him long in conversation, while from behind
steal up the German soldiers and sailors waiting for the attention of
the peasant to be wholly absorbed in the propaganda, suddenly to capture
and to bind him, beyond all power of self-release. Here the satire of
Raemaekers is directed against the intrigues of German diplomacy at The
Hague, and the rumors which have of late been rife concerning a party of
politicians in the Dutch State who have been persuaded into recommending
a studied neutrality now, indeed, but a secret agreement with Germany
that shall not come into force until after the declaration of peace. The
draftsman warns his countrymen that they are not, in their simplicity,
capable of holding their own against a combination of Teutonic violence
and Teutonic guile. It may be that these Dutch disciples of
Wilhelmstrasse have not the naïveté which Raemaekers sees proper to
attribute to them. Their attitude has something more ignoble than
simple, and they remind us not a little of the particularists of the
seventeenth century, whose selfish and senseless anti-Orange policy left
the Dutch without a friend in Europe. But we can confidently believe
that general public opinion in Holland to-day will be too wholesome and
too intelligent to pursue the suicidal path which the “Toekomst” and its
German inspirers indicate.
EDMUND GOSSE.
[Illustration]
_Tetanus_
Here Raemaekers draws aside from his fierce mood of indictment of the
aggressor and, touched with a neutral’s pity, tries to express something
of the agony that comes impartially to those who fight for and those who
fight against the right. The candid critic must confess that this mood
has not the interest of his satire and invective. But it is natural for
the imaginative artist to be deeply moved by these, as it were,
impartial horrors and good for us stay-at-homes to be helped to realize
them.
In the early days of the war, waged as it was over the most intensively
cultivated soil in Europe, the mortality from this dread horror,
Tetanus, was very great. The skill of the bacteriologist and the surgeon
has indefinitely reduced the mortality. And perhaps those of us who are
bowed down by the thought of all the needless pain and incalculable
waste may take a crumb of comfort from the thought that out of all the
suffering and death grow knowledge and skill that will relieve suffering
and prevent death in the future. So the eternal courage and
resourcefulness of man always recapture the citadel he seems to have
lost in the first onset.
JOSEPH THORP.
[Illustration]
_Shakspere’s Tercentenary_
Following out this truly Teutonic line of reasoning, there is no reason
why Beethoven should not be claimed as English, and surely Christopher
Columbus was Russian--or French, or Norwegian. A sense of humor would
have saved Germany from this absurdity of claiming the whole world’s
genius as her own, but that sense is the one thing that Germany lacks
above all others, and from the deficiency has arisen this war and all
its evils.
For a sense of humor--or a sense of proportion, which is precisely the
same thing--would have given Germany to understand that in these days no
nation may aspire to domination over other and different races; it would
have given her to understand that there are other forms of culture
besides her own _Kultur_, which, after all, is merely order and
discipline, and not a finer perception or a greater development of
intellect; it would have given her to understand that which the world’s
history has failed to teach her, that aggression does not pay, and that
essays in tyrannic dominance inevitably fail.
Raemaekers’ satire is unerring, for though no German has yet stated that
Shakspere’s plays are based on the work of a poet who lived two
centuries later, yet the professors and pedants of _Kultur_ have
attempted equal absurdities, even to showing Germany as a country of
simple, kindly people, who abhor a war that has been forced on them. One
is tempted to quote from the world-poet who, in this cartoon, faces his
antithesis with such an air of gentle incredulity, but the temptation,
if yielded to, would lead too far.
Germany has not only claimed Shakspere, but she has claimed control of
all the Western world; one claim is as likely to be conceded as the
other.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
[Illustration]
_Nobody Sees Me_
The Huns have hugged this conviction to their obscene souls. And it is
not the least of a series of preposterous and ridiculous blunders.
Throwing as rubbish to the void the Tables of the Law, they have
cherished what they believe to be the last and greatest commandment:
_Thou shalt not be found out_.
And “found out” they have been!
For the moment this fact does not oppress them too seriously. Indeed, to
the commander of the submarine who sank the _Lusitania_ the Iron Cross
has been awarded. We wonder whether he will wear it, if he happens to
find himself after the war at some great function in any neutral
country?
To the psychologist this Hun attribute, shared with the ostrich, of
hiding his head and believing that the rest of his person is unseen,
provokes some interesting hypotheses. _Inter alia_, it serves to remind
us that birds, however big, stand next to reptiles in the scale of
creation. Hun methods are distinctively reptilian. The Hun, when fully
gorged, becomes lethargic and stupid. In this cartoon, the Hun Eagle,
appropriately emblazoned upon that portion of the Hun body of which we
may confidently hope to see more and more in the near future, reminds me
of that loathsome beast--the Turkey Buzzard. In California, where I
first made his acquaintance, this horrible vulture would have been
exterminated long ago had he not been protected by the law, which
recognized his peculiar usefulness as a scavenger. Hungry, these
buzzards are almost unapproachable; after a carrion meal a child can
despatch them with a stone.
May we not assume that the Huns, however clever and cunning when hungry,
become as boas and buzzards after a surfeit? To-day they are boasting of
what they have absorbed on the map of Europe. Do they realize yet the
dead weight of these temporary conquests? Germania, like some monstrous
viper, has swallowed her own young. Unlike the viper, she cannot
disgorge them alive.
Such reflections are not intended to minimize the task that still
confronts the Allies. But what the Hun has done by land and air and sea
will be the measure of his undoing.
_Nobody sees me and I can always deny it._
Everybody sees him; and if his acts are enough to make angels weep, his
denials of them move the world to inextinguishable laughter.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.
[Illustration]
_The Orient Express_