Here the artist has depicted the Kaiser in one of his favourite roles,
that of a sportsman. In pre-war times it was one of "The All Highest's"
chief ambitions to be taken for an English sportsman! We believe there
were people in those now seemingly remote days who took him at his own
valuation in this regard. Our picture papers were full of photographs of
him shooting at this or that nobleman's estate, lunching after the
morning's battue, in the act of shooting, inspecting the day's "bag,"
etc.; and other pictures were reproduced from the German papers from
time to time of a similar character showing him as a sportsman in his
native land.
There is still, thank God, something clean about British sport and
sportsmen of which the Kaiser never caught the inwardness and spirit. It
has come out on the battlefields to-day as it has on those of past
generations. It has taught the British soldier to fight clean, and even
chivalrously though the foe may be a past master in "knavish tricks,"
and steeped in unspeakable methods of cruelty in warfare.
How thin the veneer of a sportsmanship was upon the Kaiser, which is
after all but symbolic of the higher and sterner virtues, all the world
has had a chance of judging. And in this remarkable and arresting
drawing the genius of the artist has taken and used a sporting incident
with telling and even horrifying effect.
In the old days it was pheasants, partridges, grouse, hares, rabbits,
and other feathered game, with the nobler stags and boars that formed
"the Butcher of Potsdam's 'bag.'" To-day he has his battues by proxy on
sea, land, and from the air. Thousands of victims, as innocent as the
feathered folk he slaughtered of yore; and women and little children
form the chief items of the bag; and especially is this true of the
"fruit of the Zeppelin raids."
He counts the bag and rewards the slayers of the innocent as he
doubtless did the beaters, huntsmen, and keepers of the estates over
which he formerly shot. It has been his ambition to make Europe one vast
Kaiserdom estate. But the sands are running out, and each "bag," whether
by Zeppelin or submarine, serves but to stiffen the backs of the Allies
and horrify neutral nations. Some day the accumulated horrors of the
Kaiser's ideas of sportsmanship will have taught the latter the lesson
that Kaiserdom with Europe as a Kaiser estate means the death of
liberty, the extinction of the smaller nations, and the setting up of a
despotism as cruel as that of Attila and his Huns--the self-accepted and
preached examples of William II of Germany.