The cartoon requires no words to tell the story. It holds chapter upon
chapter of tragedy. "I will send you to Germany after your father!"
Where is the boy's father in Germany? In a prison? Mending roads? Lying
maimed and broken in a rude hospital? Digging graves for comrades about
to be shot? Or, more likely still, in a rough unknown stranger's grave?
Was the father dragged from his home at Louvain, or Tirlemont, or Vise,
or one of the dozen other scenes of outrage and murder--a harmless,
hard-working citizen-dragged from his hiding-place and made to suffer
"exemplary justice" for having "opposed the Kaiser's might," but in
reality because he was a Belgian, for whose nasty breed there must be
demonstrations of Germany's frightfulness _pour encourager les autres_?
And the child's mother and sisters--what of them? He is dejected, but
not broken. There is dignity in the boy's defiant pose. The scene has,
perhaps, been enacted hundreds of times in the cities of Belgium, where
poignant grief has come to a nation which dared to be itself.
Follow this boy through life and observe the stamp of deep resolve on
his character. Though he be sent "to Germany after your father," though
he be for a generation under the German jack-boot, his spirit will
sustain him against the conqueror and will triumph in the end.