These pictures, with their haunting sense of beauty and their biting
satire, might almost have been drawn by the finger of the Accusing
Angel. As the spectator gazes on them the full weight of the horrible
cruelty and senseless futility of war overwhelms the soul, and, sinking
helplessly beneath it, he feels inclined to assume the same attitude of
despair as is shown in "Christendom After Twenty Centuries."
"War is war," the Germans preached and practised, and no matter how
clement and correct may be the humanity of the Allies, we realize
through these pictures what the human race has to face and endure once
peace be broken. Is "Christendom After Twenty Centuries" to be even as
Christianity was in the first century--an excuse for the perpetration of
mad cruelties by degenerate Caesars or Kaisers (spell it as you will) at
their games? Cannot the higher and finer attributes of mankind be
developed and strengthened without this apparently needless waste of
agony and life? Is human nature only to be redeemed through the Cross,
and must Calvary bear again and again its heavy load of human anguish?
One cannot escape from this inner questioning as one gazes on
Raemaekers' cartoons.