Some "neutrals," and even some of the people here in England, still
doubt the reality of the German atrocities in Belgium, but Raemaekers
has seen and spoken with those to whom the scene depicted in this
cartoon is an ugly reality. One who would understand it to the full must
visualize the hands behind the thrusting rifle butts, and the faces
behind the hands, as well as the praying, maddened, despairing, vengeful
women of the picture--and must visualize, too, the men thrust back
another way, to wait _their_ fate at the hands of these apostles of a
civilization of force.
Yet even then full realization is impossible; the man whose pencil has
limned these faces has only caught a far-off echo of the reality, and
thus we who see his picture are yet another stage removed from the full
horror of the scene that he gives us. Not on us, in England, have the
rifle butts fallen; not for us has it chanced that we should be
shepherded "men to the right, women to the left"; not ours the trenched
graves and the extremity of shame. Thus it is not for us to speak, as
the people of Belgium and Northern France will speak, of the limits of
endurance, and of war's last terrors imposed on those whom war should
have passed by and left untouched. We gather, dimly and with but a tithe
of the feeling that experience can impart, that these extremities of
shame and suffering have been imposed on a people that has done no
wrong, and we may gain some slight satisfaction from the thought that to
this nation is apportioned a share in the work of vengeance on the
criminals.