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RAEMAEKERS'
CARTOON
HISTORY OF THE WAR
[Illustration: Louis Raemaekers]
RAEMAEKERS'
CARTOON
HISTORY OF THE WAR
COMPILED BY
J. MURRAY ALLISON
Editor of _Raemaekers' Cartoons_, _Kultur in Cartoons_,
_The Century Edition de Luxe Raemaekers' Cartoons_, _etc._
VOLUME ONE
THE FIRST TWELVE MONTHS OF WAR
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1918
Copyright, 1918, by
THE CENTURY CO.
FOREWORD
In all the welter of the tragic upheaval which is shattering
institutions once thought immutable, condemning millions to physical
death and awakening other millions to spiritual life, making staggering
discoveries of unexpected human strength or weakness, thrusting men into
fame one day or to oblivion the next, there has been nothing more
dramatic than the sudden manifestation of the genius of the Dutchman,
Louis Raemaekers, who, as Europe recoiled from the first shock of German
barbarity, threw down his brush for his pencil and by the intensity of
his spirit aroused the compassion and fired the anger of the world with
his cartoons of the Belgian violation.
He, more than any other individual, has made intensely clear to
the people the single issue upon which the war is joined. More than
cartoonist, he is teacher and preacher, with the vision, faith, and
intensity of a St. Francis, a Luther, or a Joan of Arc.
On August 1, 1914, we find him a quiet, gentle man, the son of a country
editor, happy in his family, devout, contemplative, loving beauty and
peace, contentedly painting the good and lovely things he saw among the
tulip-fields and waterways, the cattle and the wind-mills of his own
native Holland before the gray-clad millions of the Kaiser burst into
the low countries with fire and sword.
Then comes the miracle of his transformation; the idyllic is thrust
aside by the hideous reality; beauty is drowned in a bestial orgy of
force; and in place of the passive painter arises the fiery preacher;
the brush is discarded for the pencil, and the pencil in his hands
becomes an avenging sword, because by it millions of people have been
aroused to a clear-cut realization of the fact that the issue of this
war is no less than Slavery and Autocracy versus Freedom and Democracy.
The very first of his war cartoons indicated the prophetic vision of
the man, and gave the first evidence of his inspiration and genius. It
is called "Christendom after Twenty Centuries" and shows a bowed and
weeping figure crouching under the sword and lash. It was drawn on that
fateful day August 1st, 1914. The intensity of emotion shown in this
drawing revealed his power for the first time. To Raemaekers himself it
came as a vision and a summons. The landscape painter disappeared, and
in his place arose a champion of civilization, throbbing with sublime
rage and pity, clothed with authority, and invested with a weapon more
powerful than the ruthlessness it indicts.
When the stories of the Belgian horror began to circulate in Holland,
Raemaekers, like the rest of the humane world, refused to credit them.
His own mother was German; he had spent many happy years in Germany; he
knew the German peasant as a kindly and happy, if rather stupid fellow;
it was incredible that such men could have done the awful things
alleged. But the tales persisted, and although the evidence of the
wracked and broken refugees who poured into his country by tens of
thousands seemed irrefutable, he could not believe it, and readily
seized upon the common supposition that the terrible stories were the
product of the imagination of an overwrought and panic-stricken people.
At length he could remain in doubt no longer, and quietly slipped over
the frontier to verify for himself the truth or falsehood of the
accusations that had already made Germany guilty of the foulest crimes
ever perpetrated in the name of war since the dawn of civilization.
What he actually saw with his own eyes he does not tell. But a hundred
of his early cartoons bear witness to the burning impression made upon
his soul. Raemaekers, like others who have seen them, cannot speak of
these unnamable horrors, but can only express his consuming pity or
his white-hot rage in the medium that lies nearest his hand. On one
occasion only has he publicly referred to his experiences in Belgium. It
was at a dinner given him by the artists and literary men of London at
the Savage Club, where, pointing to the portraits and trophies of Peary,
Scott, Nansen, Shackleton, and other explorers which hang on the walls,
he said: "I, too, have been an explorer, Gentlemen. I have explored a
hell, and it was terror unspeakable."
It did not take long for the High Command in Berlin to learn through its
agents in Holland of the impression that was being created in the public
mind by Raemaekers' cartoons. The publication of his first series of
cartoons in the _Amsterdam Telegraaf_, reflecting the unspeakable horror
of the atrocities in Belgium and denouncing with burning scorn the
Kaiser and his infamous captains, gave such offense to the "All-Highest"
in Potsdam that the German Government offered twelve thousand guilders
for his body dead or alive! Further magnificent testimony to the hurt he
inflicted on our common adversaries lies in the fact that the German
Government, not content with offering a reward for his body, induced
the Dutch Government to prosecute him for endangering the neutrality
of Holland! He was actually tried on this charge, but although he had
not spared the burghers and junkers of his own country for what he
considered their criminal laxity in the matter of preparedness and their
greed in aiding Germany by the smuggling of foodstuffs, etc., across the
frontier, the jury acquitted him and the court tacitly confirmed his
right to express his opinions.
It was after this that the _Cologne Gazette_ in an editorial addressed
to the Dutch people, obviously seeking to intimidate what its government
could not suppress, said: "After the war Germany will settle accounts
with Holland, and for each calumny, for each cartoon of Raemaekers, she
will demand payment with the interest that is her due." German wrath
followed him further. His life was constantly endangered at the hands of
German agents infesting Holland, and he had to be always on his guard,
especially during his periodical excursions into Belgian territory
occupied by the enemy. Even before he crossed to England, his wife
received anonymous letters warning her that any ship he might sail on
would surely be torpedoed.
As late as November, 1916, an exhibition of his cartoons in Madrid was
forbidden by the Spanish Government upon the insistence of the German
embassy in that capital.
It is significant to note that these attempted persecutions had an
effect directly opposite to that intended. They not only failed to stop
the publication of his cartoons but were largely instrumental in drawing
the attention of the Allies and neutrals to the great champion that had
arisen.
For eighteen months his cartoons had been appearing in the Amsterdam
_Telegraaf_ without exciting a more than mild interest outside Holland.
American and British war-correspondents returning to London from
Amsterdam talked enthusiastically of the "Great Raemaekers" and a few
stray cartoons appeared in the press of London and Paris. But he was
practically unknown outside of Holland until Christmas week in December,
1915, a year and a half after his first war-cartoon had appeared.
A two-line advertisement announced his arrival in the British
metropolis. "Exhibition of war-cartoons by Raemaekers, Fine Arts
Galleries, Bond Street, admission one shilling," was all it said. While
Londoners are generally interested in new artists, Raemaekers appeared
at an inopportune time. For one thing, the public had been rather
surfeited with war-literature and war-pictures and the work of an
unknown foreign artist was scarcely likely to attract them, and for
another, it was within a few days of Christmas, everybody was leaving
London, and those who remained in town were bent on giving the troops
and the war-sufferers as merry a time as possible.
It was quite by chance that the art critic of the _London Times_ visited
the Bond Street Galleries a day or so before Christmas, and Raemaekers'
world-wide fame as it exists to-day may be said to date from the day
that the _Times_ in a two-column notice said, among other things, "this
neutral is the only genius produced by the war."
The campaign of publicity launched by the _Times_ was taken up by the
British and French press. The public flocked to view, and were stunned
as they had never been before by the damning record. The cumulative
effect of such pictures as "The Shields of Rosselaere," showing men,
women, and children forced to march in front of the German armies, "Men
to the right, women to the left," in which women and children are being
beaten with the butts of rifles; "The Exodus from Antwerp," "The Mothers
of Belgium," "The Widows of Belgium," and others which revealed
unimaginable depths of human agony, impressed the London crowd as by
a solemn ritual. They saw with a vividness hitherto unapproached the
hideousness of the war, the unequivocal brutality of the German method,
and the naked, insatiable greed in the German purpose. Not now could the
timidest soul believe that Germany was fighting a war of defense. Here
was the fact inescapable that civilization itself was threatened; here
was the whole carnival of lust and conquest as mercilessly depicted on
the faces of its agents as they themselves had trampled onward to their
shocking goal.
The exhibition was crowded daily for twenty weeks. From nine in the
morning till six at night the galleries were packed with people of every
grade of society. It is not too much to say that no oration, no
literature, no art had brought the real meaning of the war home so
convincingly to Londoners as these cartoons. Parents who had already
given their sons, wives who had given husbands, were strengthened in
their resignation and comforted in their sorrow; those who yet had the
sacrifice to make were fortified in their resolve. As I have said, the
cumulative effect of these hundred and fifty cartoons on the emotions
of a people just awakening to and suffering from the desperate realities
of the war was almost overwhelming, and many a man and woman quivered
and cried under this pitiless revelation of the stupendous suffering
that had been and was yet to be.
The exhibition was carried from London to the principal English and
Scottish cities, and thence to Paris. Everywhere the story was the same.
Crowds flocked to see and heed the artist's fiery records; statesmen,
soldiers, artists did him honor. In London he was received by the Prime
Minister and the artistic and learned societies; in Paris he was made
a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor and given a reception at the
Sorbonne--the highest purely intellectual honor that can be bestowed
upon any man. France, equally with England, acclaimed him as the new
champion of humanity. In the provincial cities of England, as in London,
crowds thronged the galleries daily for weeks at a time. In Liverpool
alone five thousand persons visited the exhibition in one afternoon;
Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh told the same story of
the people being aroused and inspirited as though a new evangel had come
to tell them that their cause was sacred and their sacrifice not vain.
In a few months his genius was universally recognized and his position
as the supreme cartoonist of the war firmly established. And now that he
had the appreciation and the scope that were his due, he threw himself
into his work with even greater ardor. He made recruiting posters for
the army and navy; he depicted the shortage of shells and called on men
and women to man the munition factories; he contributed posters to
stimulate thrift and industry and contributions to the Government funds;
he worked for both the British and the French Red Cross, and for private
and public charities innumerable; his pen never flagged. While the
wrongs of Belgium had been the first incentive to his genius, he now
dealt with the war in all its later phases, and found subjects wherever
the blight of Kaiserism traveled--in France, Russia, Serbia, Rumania,
Italy, and the Far East; and in the Zeppelin raids, the Armenian
massacres, the Belgian and French deportations, the Red Cross outrages,
and the submarine infamies.
As a mere material record of industry, Raemaekers' is probably unique in
the world's history. Since the beginning of the war he has drawn nearly
1000 cartoons. There is not a single phase of the war,--military, naval,
or political,--that has not formed a basis for his artistic comment.
Some three hundred of the cartoons have been reproduced in facsimile
form, and in that state have been exhibited in hundreds of cities
throughout the world.
In book form his work exists already in a dozen editions, from the
sumptuous edition-de-luxe at one hundred dollars to the popular
(British) edition at four cents.
Post-card editions of the cartoons run into many millions; his cartoons
have been filmed, exist as lantern-slides, and leading actors and
actresses have reproduced them in the form of tableaux. But it is in the
world's press that the greatest distribution has taken place. He is
cartoonist to half a hundred newspapers, and literally thousands of
different publications have reproduced his pictures at one time or
another. He has been translated into a score of languages, the writer
having seen one edition in Basque and another in Arabic. In the United
States alone his cartoons in one year have reached a newspaper
circulation of over 300,000,000, and exhibitions have been held in
over one hundred of the leading cities.
And all this gigantic distribution has grown during the two years that
have passed since his cartoons were first exhibited in London. It is a
record that has never yet been equalled. What is the secret of this
man's appeal to men and women in all stations of life, to people of
every creed and nationality? In Europe nearly all, and in America a
great many, of the leading writers and thinkers have acclaimed the
genius of Raemaekers, but none have been able to tell us why it is that
his pictures appeal with equal intensity to the Briton, the Latin, the
Slav, and the American. A writer in the _Boston Transcript_ perhaps
comes nearest to the truth. He says: "The mantle of Dante has fallen
upon Raemaekers; he leads the conscience of the world to-day through an
inferno of wrong."
This world-wide recognition is conclusive testimony to the universality
of his genius. Raemaekers appeals to all mankind. The value of his
contribution to the cause of civilization in this war lies in the fact
that he has seen and depicted with the directness and clarity of genius
the truth that the issue is joined between the forces of evil and good.
For him there are no other considerations, no qualifications, no
compromises. He has but one enemy, and that is the destroyer of peace
and civilization; he has but one hero, and that is the defender of them.
He sees in war itself no pomp and glitter, but only the burning village,
the devastated home, the agonized women and children, and the brave and
faithful dead. He depicts militarism as hideous, brutal, coarse, and
cunning. His one thought seems to be that those things which all kindly
and gentle men and women hold dear and sacred are being trampled upon
and threatened by a monstrous wrong; and that the ideals of justice,
order, and human liberty which have been established in the conscience
of humanity after centuries of painful struggle are in danger of
annihilation. In thus narrowing the issue, in thus resolving all
doubt, he has, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, "rendered the most
powerful of the honorable contributions by neutrals to the cause of
civilization." Raemaekers' name and work will live long after many of
the men and their achievements in this war have faded from the general
mind. Future generations will look at his cartoons and will find in them
at once the cause and the justification of the rising of the world's
free peoples to give their lives for freedom and the safety of
democracy.
* * * * *
The historical value of the cartoons have frequently been insisted upon
by critics and reviewers and I have been urged to publish them in the
form of a cartoon History of the War. The present attempt is the outcome
of these suggestions.
It has not been possible to adhere to any very definite method of
arrangement. Many of the cartoons were drawn long after the events with
which they deal took place, as, for instance, the Wittenberg pictures.
The typhus outbreak amongst the prisoners at Wittenberg happened in
December, 1914, but the facts were not made public until May, 1916. On
the other hand, the cartoon depicting Count von Bernstorff's dismissal
from Washington was published two years before he was handed his
passports. It was a cartoon based upon the activities of Dumba. A great
number of cartoons, particularly those published during the early months
of the war, have no direct historical significance. The Belgian cartoons
constitute a general indictment of the German method of warfare, while
the Nurse Cavell drawings (Vol. II.) represent a specific comment upon
an actual example of that method. The letterpress has been compiled
mainly from official _communiques_ and reports, and from the speeches
and public statements of the leading men of the belligerents and some of
the neutrals. I have also quoted freely from newspapers, magazines, and
books, and whenever possible I have made acknowledgment of these
sources. My object has been not to explain the cartoons, but to show
their great value as historical documents and to make sure, so far as is
possible, that the basis of truth upon which they rest shall not be
forgotten.