Louis Raemaekers

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Raemaekers shows us the sturdy Dutch soldier, with his back turned to wheedling German whisperers, guarding the long eastern frontier beyond the Maas. Holland has been roused out of her opiate dream of non-resistance, and she vibrates with heroic echoes from Ypres and from Dixmude. She is fully aware that she is called upon to be the arbiter of her own destiny, and that she must meet force with force. Holland is safe so long as she prepares her own defense, for Germany never attacks unless she believes herself to be sure of victory. ”

“ For such a task there was needed not only physical strength, but spiritual strength, ideals as well as machinery, and soul as well as brain. By his methods of war this soulless barbarian has added to the weights that he must hold up; he has misinterpreted the meaning of civilization, misunderstood the aims common to humanity outside Germany. The weight that he must hold up and away is not merely that of Britain, Russia, France, and the rest of the Allies; it is the weight of all men who understand freedom rightly, steadily crushing freedom’s antithesis. ”

“ Let us hear no more cant that Germany is a great and noble nation, that the Turk is an honorable, clean fighter and a good friend. We cannot see one or other of them for the blood and tears of their defenseless victims; nor do we desire to see them, nor breathe the same air with them until the lustral waters have washed and the cleansing fires have purged. We must know with whom we are called to make peace before the word can touch our lips ”

“ For one, I say that if Germany can be dragged in the dust; if her rulers can be made to eat the bread of humiliation; if her bestial-minded military officials, who have deported women and girls from Belgium and France to God only knows where and to what end, can be brought to adequate punishment, then there is still some justice left in this warring world and some hope for poor, struggling, vexed, and fearful humanity. ”

“ Only from a vanquished Germany may the remaining vital conditions of peace follow. With her defeat she must be called upon to scrap the fatal poisons that led to her insanity, and take her daily food no more from the hands of war lords, hireling professors, and publicists. She must be cleansed, freed of her seven devils, and taught that the only sovereign power human progress can henceforth recognize is the sovereignty of a people’s will. ”

“ Unless Germany is conquered and humiliated, unless the wrongs of Belgium and the other devastated territories are avenged, we and the millions of our Allies will have suffered, fought, and died for the greatest cause the world has ever known—and in vain.
From the welter of battle, after the shouts of the fighting men have died away, must emerge a new basis of society and a set of new ideals in international conduct. ”

“ But Germany had at any rate made Belgium a belligerent, before beginning them. Now that similar horrors should fall on men, women, and children of Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and America, surprises no more: it has become a mere matter of course.
It is the business of the prophet, the seer, and the poet to awaken the world when it is worshipping false gods, when from fear, or self-interest, or sheer bewilderment, it fails to see the things that are in their naked horror and their awful shame. ”

“ The first use of the submarine against a merchant ship may have been made in the hope that a mere demonstration of frightfulness would save her from the necessity of repeating it, by frightening every trading ship off the sea. But indulgence in blood brought upon our enemy the cruellest of all punishments. It brought an insatiable appetite, until the killing of old men and boys, but particularly of women and small children, has become a thing necessary to the men that do it and to the nation that sends them on their mission of murder. ”

“ Germany, who understands everything but humanity, has been even more backward than France. To Germany John has figured as a robber grown fat on plunder, soft, flabby, and only waiting to be plundered. To Germany and to the Kaiser John has not figured as a power, simply because he has not figured as a military power. ”

“ George NOT only those who are fighting the battle of tyranny and defending force against the arms of civilization have failed to see this dazzling white light in which they stand. Many who now support the Central Kingdoms, to the extent of desiring an indecisive peace, are similarly blind to the pure ray which bathes these allegorical figures. The foulness of the shadowed protagonists comes from within. It belongs to their spirits; and yet those who desire peace can survey facts and, in the name of righteousness, wish that no humility or indignity should fall upon them. ”

“ But not one of these sketches ever ventures near the subject of the Lusitania, the Arabic, the Scarborough bombardment, or Louvain—or any other of those horrors that are established beyond question in the minds of men. And wherever these German efforts at lulling the world’s conscience by sophistries appear, there should this cartoon appear also, as a corrective. Throughout half the world these murdered children lie under earth and water, and to forget them in the day when Germany fears to add more to their number would be to share this modern Herod’s infamy. ”

“ None has known and felt the meaning of that awful word; none has fought to expunge the fact from civilization as she did. But her Note met the fate of all her Notes. She was told that Germany, and not America, is Belgium’s true friend and that an all-wise and prevenient Government has torn out the remaining adult population of conquered territory into the bosom of the fatherland—for its own sake. Such transparent insults to the intelligence of a great nation were flung at America for two years; but one must rejoice that the day of reckoning has come. ”

“ Shall one man ever be given the power to seek his ends, using the people as his pawns? We cannot look at the cartoons and remain in ignorance of exactly what is the basis of truth on which they are built.”
The “Philadelphia American” likens Raemaekers to a sensitized plate upon which the spirit which brought on the war has imprinted itself forever, and adds: “What he gives out on that subject is as pitilessly true as a photograph. They look down upon us in their naked truth, those pictures which are to be, before the judgment-seat of history, the last indictment of the German nation. ”

“ For no man in Britain sits and listens for the guns that shall free his house and his land, and in that fact is possible lack of comprehension and consequent great danger; as once it has been, so it may be again.
Yet it may be that, when the stories of these old men behind the enemy lines are told, they will waken the whole of the world, not only to the need for destruction of such a thing as the militarism of Prussia, but to the knowledge that only the strong man armed may keep his house. ”

“ A Genuine Dutchman EVER since the great poet, Willem Bilderdijk, more than a hundred years ago, finding the intellectual life of his country submerged in Teutonic sentimentality, turned the German doves out of the temple of the Dutch Muses, Holland has followed the intellectual example of France more than that of any other country. The Dutch have a passion for individualism which carries them in a direction exactly opposite to the moral and artistic tyranny of Prussian Kultur, and gives a totally different coloring to their respect for mental distinction. ”

“ Victory! Colossal victory!”; but the alliance is only a life-buoy, and the Powers are struggling in the sea of fate, and are in imminent danger of drowning. They strive by loud words to maintain to the world their pretense of victory; but it is all sham, and they know that their lives are at stake. The whole fabric of the German alliance is to this artist a morally gigantic imposture, and rests on an elaborate system for duping the surrounding world. ”

“ His marvellous patience has been worthy of our utmost admiration, and those who would withhold absolute support from him at this critical juncture are certainly not the friends of Greece. That a country of such majestic tradition—a nation that has played her paramount part in the philosophy and art of the world—should be extinguished in this conflagration would not be the least of the tragedies our eyes may yet see; but the danger still exists, unless a sterner and more comprehensive attitude be taken to save Greece from herself and the ruler who is still permitted to occupy her throne. ”

“ Raemaekers, with his unfailing confidence in a final victory, looked forward then, when the cause of the Allies seemed to be at its lowest ebb, to the victory of the future, and to the victorious entrance of the united Allies into Berlin. The artist judged by faith, and not by sight. He was not a mere calculator of chances, and an estimator of military power; for those neutrals who judged on such principles were apparently all so profoundly impressed with the overwhelming military strength of Germany, that their moral judgment was warped. ”

“ Not the onset of poison gas would be more fatal than any emotion of indifference, or inclination to accept the situation now achieved by treachery, falsehood, surprise, and villainy beyond example, as a basis whereon to build any sort of peace. Let the word be anathema while the Hun still sucks the blood of his sacrifice and while Belgium and Serbia fester at the touch of his feet; let none breathe it until the Allies alone, without enemy question or neutral interference, are in a position to impose a peace commensurate with their victory. ”

“ It gained in significance during the second year, for to Belgium must be added Serbia, scene of unspeakable crimes against the civilian populace, and Armenia, of which the full horrors will never be told, since none of the victims remain to tell them.
In these later days, when the whole world can see that Germany is fighting a losing fight, one might admire the grim way in which the victors are made to pay for every step of the path they have yet to tread; if their hands were clean one might call magnificent the dogged courage of the fighting men who resist our own. ”

“ And in this cartoon the artist has sought to depict an outraged conscience pointing the finger of accusation at the world which has looked on, contenting itself with mild protests. Grasped in the hand of this accusing figure is the Hun; a dripping dagger, which has been used to assassinate innocent women, children, and civilians is in one hand, and a bomb containing poison gas in the other. A Hun with his favorite motto inscribed upon his belt. Surely a sight to make angels weep, and the Recording Angel to seek to veil her face. ”

“ Blind obedience to command has brought the Germans to a state where even their thinking is done for them; they grovel before the brute power that drives them and kiss and sanctify the bloody hands that hold the whip.
Luther said the justification of liberty was that man could only truly serve God and his fellow-man if freedom of choice of means were permitted to him. ”

“ One may observe, with a second glance at this cartoon, that though Fritz has reached very nearly to the tops of his two ladders, yet he will never get beyond the last rungs, even if he steadies himself and his supports sufficiently to get on to those rungs. For over his head there outthrusts a ledge. Could he surmount it, he might overlook the world, and one may call that ledge the universal conscience, which the artist has pictured elsewhere in different form. It is the last obstacle, and it is insurmountable. ”

“ Nothing that the world regards as sacred is safe from his profanation. His miscalculations are so colossal, his hopes are so tangled, that the blasphemous dream which the artist depicts may well have visited the imperial couch. The pious Mahomedan might possibly find some specious compensation for submission to the Prussian yoke were the Kaiser to enter the Turkish capital at the head of his barbarian hordes flaunting in triumph the banner of the crescent, while Christ rode on an ass at the imperial side, in bonds and wearing the crown of thorns. ”

“ Together, acting under the ægis of Uncle Sam, with his hundred million children, they could have protested in no uncertain terms against Prussianism and the violation of every principle dear to and honored by them. Prompt action, upon the heels of such a protest, would have ended the war in three weeks. Germany, swollen with insolence and beer, has perpetrated blunders in strategy and policy of which she now is reaping the fruits, but with all her crass, pig-headed, brutal assurance she would not have fought a whole world in arms against her.
It is not for us to throw stones at others. ”

“ For it is open to any man to dream of ruling the world, and of setting nations by the throat for the sake of an ambition that civilization cannot tolerate; it is open to any head of a government to set the machinery in motion which might gratify that ambition—but it is open only to a man, in the very best of that one syllable, to bring his ambition to fruition, and even then only by strict adherence to natural law. And these two, posturing as Raemaekers makes them posture here, have ignored law ”

“ For a sense of humor—or a sense of proportion, which is precisely the same thing—would have given Germany to understand that in these days no nation may aspire to domination over other and different races; it would have given her to understand that there are other forms of culture besides her own Kultur, which, after all, is merely order and discipline, and not a finer perception or a greater development of intellect ”