The cartoon bears the quotation from Bernhardi "War is as divine as
eating and drinking." Yes; and German war is as divine as German eating
and drinking. Any one who has been in a German restaurant during that
mammoth midday meal which generally precedes a sleep akin to a
hibernation, will understand how the same strange barbarous solemnity
has ruined all the real romance of war. There is no way of conveying the
distinction, except by saying vaguely that there is a way of doing
things, and that butchering is not necessary to a good army any more
than gobbling is necessary to a good dinner. In our own insular
shorthand it can be, insufficiently and narrowly but not unprofitably,
expressed by saying that it is possible both to fight and to eat like a
gentleman. It is therefore highly significant that Mr. Raemaekers has in
this cartoon conceived the devil primarily as a kind of ogre. It is a
matter of great interest that this Dutch man of genius, like that other
genius whose pencil war has turned into a sword, Will Dyson, lends in
the presence of Prussia (which has been for many moderns their first
glimpse of absolute or positive evil) to depriving the devil of all that
moonshine of dignity which sentimental sceptics have given him. Evil
does not mean dignity, any more than it means any other good thing. The
stronger caricaturists have, in a sense, fallen back on the medieval
devil; not because he is more mystical, but because he is more material.
The face of Raemaekers' Satan, with its lifted jowl and bared teeth, has
less of the half-truth of cynicism than of mere ignominious greed. The
armies are spread out for him as a banquet; and the war which he
praises, and which was really spread for him in Flanders, is not a
Crusade but a cannibal feast.