Louis Raemaekers

“ Marble and bronze will record it, and imperishable verse—of that we may be sure; for the nation that has defended Verdun against the might of Germany holds the seeds of magistral art. Art must spring quickened, enlarged, and ennobled from these furnace fires; and it will happen, as of old, that a people great enough to do great deeds lack not for children of genius to record their immortality in achievements themselves immortal. ”

“ Prussia is barbarism attempting to trample on law and education, brutality beating down humanity, a grim figure, the incarnation of "frightfulness." I can imagine the feelings with which all Germans must regard the picture that the Dutch artist always gives of their country, if they regard Prussia as their country. "For every cartoon of Raemaekers," said a German newspaper, "the payment will be exacted in full, when the reckoning is made up." To this painter the Prussian ruling power is incapable of understanding what nobility of nature means. ”

“ But a Nation that has consented to its own slavery cannot value freedom, or be supposed to respect the life or liberty of the innocent and weak. With her neck under Prussia’s heel, tamed Germany strives in word and deed to reflect the spirit of her masters, and so far succeeds that she can contemplate the atrocities of this war with satisfaction, and from pulpit, school, and press applaud each new manifestation in turn. ”

“ The men of ’76 have stood for American valor, American military skill, American statesmanship. Now has come a time when “a decent respect for the nations of mankind requires” that Americans shall again stand for their portrait in history. This time we are standing among the civilized nations not for independence, but for interdependence! Where once we stood for a nation consecrated to freedom, now we stand for a community of nations consecrated to justice. Perhaps when the new portraits are painted in this great hour of crisis all the nations of the world will appear in history with new faces. ”

“ For human memory is weak, and as mind of man cannot grasp the meaning of a million, so may it well fail to keep steadily before itself the measure of Belgium—the rape and murder, the pillage and plunder, the pretences under which perished women and priests and children, the brutal tyranny—the left hand that beckoned in friendly fashion, the right hand, hidden with the steel. ”

“ France, whose heroism beggars description, has to reckon with her embusqués. The serene cheerfulness with which the bitterest sacrifices are faced daily by the mass of the nations engaged in the terrible conflict, bring into powerful relief the obliquity and depravity of the handful of men who seek to escape the heavy burden that lies upon all. There is no possibility of exaggerating the mean infamy of the men who seek their own safety by skulking behind the broad backs of the defenders of their country, when every call of duty and right demands their presence in the fighting-line. ”

“ Service of Humanity “WE have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been as secure as the faith and the freedom of the nation can make them.” ”

“ It oddly suggests what Raemaekers has set down here: the face a skull, the staring eyes those of a lost soul. But the skeleton has grown fat since Frederick's day—fat on the blood and plunder of nations. Only there is no living flesh on its bones, nothing of humanity about it.
"Can these dry bones live?" was the question asked of the prophet. It might have been asked of Frederick: "Can this nation live, created of your foul witchcraft, without honour, without charity, without human brotherhood or fellowship, without all that which is the flesh and blood of mankind?" ”

“ Before the outbreak of war, in those far-off days when we talked so glibly of human progress and civilization, the machinery which controlled and coördinated life seemed to be a bigger thing than life itself. The Machine in politics, in our myriad industries, in our moments of relaxation was scrapping men relentlessly. The very few perceived this and protested vigorously, but quite in vain. Even in religion, using the word in its highest sense, the Machine held human souls in its grip and ground them out to an approved pattern. ”

“ Amid a national rejoicing, a waving of flags and ringing of bells, such as are evoked by a great national festival, the Germans celebrated the Lusitania murders—the entire nation suddenly slumping into a barbarism worse than that of their ancestral Huns. The Hun was again triumphant, gloating over his unspeakable crimes, his plunders and piracies, his orgies of crime and lust—a spectacle to make the Genius of Humanity veil her face and weep tears of blood. ”

“ It would be bitter news to the fighting men that any peace had been patched up on any terms but those the Allies soon or late will be in a position to dictate, to lay down and say flatly, "Take them and have Peace; or leave them and go on getting licked." The Front doesn't like War. No man who has endured the horrors and savagery and "blood, mud, and misery" of civilized warfare could pretend to like it. No man who has endured the long-drawn misery of manning the waterlogged trenches for days and weeks and months can look forward with anything but apprehension to another winter of war. ”

“ The German of to-day relinquishes that freedom and is content to be herded under a political system that denies him his independent manhood. He sacrifices responsibility and liberty alike to a race which he still suffers to inherit the privilege of directing his State; he prostitutes his own reasoning faculties and ignores the evolution of morals by applauding Prussia’s reactionary ideals at the expense of every modern movement for the progress of humanity. He knows the right and does the wrong—a willing slave to an archaic autocracy. ”

“ It adds fuel to the flame to know that the only great period of German literature—the period of Heine himself—was when it was under the complete influence and inspiration of France.
In a true sense the whole civilized world is fighting for France, to decide whether it is to lose all that France stands for, or whether the future is to be dominated by the ugly bestial force, without conscience and without heart, which Germany represents. The world knows that if it is a case of alternatives, civilization can do without Germany, but would be eternally poor without la belle France. ”

“ The Kaiser has those terrible haunted eyes that have marked the seer's presentment of him from quite an early stage of the war. There can be no ultimate escape from the dreadful vision that has set the seal of despair on this fine and handsome visage. He is shown, not as a sea monster, but as some rabid, evasive, impatient thing, dashing from point to point—as from policy to policy—with the angry swish that tells the unspoken anger failure everywhere compels. For the victories do not bring surrender, nor does frightfulness inspire terror. ”

“ It is true that nothing was more certain than that Italy would break her manacles. Strong in the virile force of a people sentient with national purpose and every day more truly finding themselves, no greater blow has been struck at the military despots of Berlin than the breaking free of Italy. The war has brought into being the real, new Italy—serious of purpose and ardent of aspiration—who till now has been unable to show herself, cramped and fettered by the medieval military chains of Germany and Austria. ”

“ The Dungeon of Autocracy THERE is a part of Germany that longs for freedom; but that is not the Prussian part. The soul of Germany is not entirely killed by her mortal sins of money and land-lust; and Raemaekers here paints the remorseful soul, crowned with the blurred cross. Germany turns her back to the sky; she prefers to look at the dark ground of her dungeon rather than to face that light. She is chained by her own will, and yet her inmost soul revolts. ”

“ In the small pig-eyes, in the gross, sensual lips, the mandril-like jaw, the misshapen ear, I see not merely a lifelike portrait of a Hun but a composite photograph of all Huns, something which should hang in every house in the kingdom until the terms of such a peace have been imposed which will make the shambles in Belgium, Poland, and Serbia an eternal nightmare of the past, never to be repeated in the future. ”

“ The holy, classical, breakfast gloom of the British family is shattered by machine-gun fire of questions, of anxiety, of hope, of anguish, of pride, of horror, of hope again. Those folded sheets of printing, less clear than it used to be, on paper less good than it was, have even eclipsed that domestic Mercury, the postman! Letters lie unopened till the news has been scanned. That alone represents a revolution in British family life, and the same thing obtains in all the Allied western countries. ”

“ The German workingmen, it is suggested, lend themselves blindly to this work of enslavement also—naturally, for it is no different for their Kaiser to rule by force and lies over non-Germans than to rule by force and lies over Germans. The face of the Kaiser shows a subconscious realization of these lies. The workers show utter unconsciousness. The rule of autocracy over themselves and the extension of that autocracy over others by means of their blood is to them as much a part of nature as the motions of sun and moon or the rise and fall of the tides! ”

“ Corruption is not sensible corruption when it is a secret in earth where no eye, no hand, no breathing can be aware of it. There is no offence in the grave. But the lover of war, the Power that loved war so much as to break its oath for the love of war, and for the love of war to strike aside the hand of the peace-maker, Arbitration, that Power has chosen thus to expose and to betray the multitude of the dead. ”

“ Vain to pray that no humiliation or indignity fall to her lot when peace returns, for who have brought them upon her? She has outraged herself and stands humiliated before her own conscience. “Let no wound fall upon her inviolate land,” cry the peacemakers. As well might they pray that a man shall escape the harvest he has sown. Not Belgium, not Serbia, not Armenia stream with innocent blood and lie polluted under the filthiness of these premeditated crimes; but Germany, Austria, Turkey reek to the hearts of their capitals. ”

“ This is what Woodrow Wilson gives. He comes as a leader, as a nucleating force, as a clear, rallying cry to the almost mystic passions that are peculiarly the dominant note of the day. He fits the need of the bloodless revolution as skin fits the hand, bringing purpose and courage to the struggle for nobler fulfilment of the hopes and aspirations that thrilled those who first sought refuge in the New World from the oppressions of the Old—the struggle for real democracy. ”

“ If Germany had chosen to use, instead of brute force, moral force, what a great, grand, and glorious mission might have been hers to-day. If, instead of trying the impossible task of dominating the whole world with her iron hand upon its throat and her iron heel upon its foot, she had been satisfied with the portion of the map already belonging to her, and had not by processes of bureaucratic tyranny driven away millions of her subjects who preferred liberty to slavery, America to Germany, by this date she might have consolidated an Empire second in the world to none but one. ”