Louis Raemaekers

“ 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?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ Heroism is there, but not always. It is possible only in patches. There is much of the mere sacrifice of numbers. Strictly, there are scenes far worse than this, for death unredeemed is not the worst of sufferings or of ills. But few are sadder. This is indeed war made by those who hold it and will it to be "not a sport, but a science." There is no sport here. Men killed like this are like men killed by plague or the eruption of a volcano. And, indeed, what else are they? They are victims of a diseased humanity of the eruption—literal and metaphorical—of its hidden fires. ”

“ Imperial eagle mask with half-mad military quasi-deity inside and dove of peace, on the German model, with calculating miscalculating statesman, you rang the curtain up, you cannot ring it down, either to the music of the Hymn of Hate or the Te Deum for peace—the eagle can no longer look boldly straight into the sun, looking for his place in it; the dove has taken permanent quarters in the German ark as it whirls round and round in the whirlpool of impotent effort, ever drawing nearer to the final crash. ”

“ Beneath the Kaiser's heel in bloody reality lie at the present time Belgium and unprotected Luxemburg every whit as much as is shown by the powerful pencil of the artist.
The reign of lust, cruelty, and destruction is not yet done, though the signs and portents of the end are not now a-wanting. The blood of men, women, and little children shall not cease to cry aloud for vengeance until the Prussian eagle is humbled in the dust, and its power for evil is utterly destroyed. This is a good cartoon to bear in mind and look upon should "War weariness" ever overtake one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Yet every one with a separate life and separate death is in conscious relation with him, knows him for the tyrant who has taken his youth, his hope, his love, his fatherhood.
What a multitude to meet, whether in thought, in conscience, or in another world! We all, no doubt, try to make the thought of massacre less intolerable to our minds by telling ourselves that the sufferers suffer one by one, to each his own share, and not another's; that though the numbers may appeal, they do not make each man's part more terrible. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even the dumb, senseless fish shoots from the scene in mute and terrified protest, while from these poor corpses there rise surfaceward the silver bubbles of their expiring breath. One seems to see crying human souls prisoned in these spheres. And it is, indeed, such sins as these that cry to Heaven for vengeance. Blood-guiltiness must rest upon the heads of those that do them, upon the heads of their children—aye, and of their children's children too. This exquisite and tender drawing is something more than the record of inexpiable crime. ”

“ The evil surprises, patiently, scientifically, diabolically matured in the dark for the upsetting and downcasting of a too-trusting world by the enemy of mankind, whose "Teuton-faith" will surely forever outrival that "Punic-faith" which has hitherto been the by-word for perfidious treachery. The heartening surprises of gallant little Belgium and Serbia; the renascence of Russia; the wonderful upleap to the needs of the times by Great, and still more by Greater Britain; and, not least, the bracing of the loins of our closest Allies just across the water. ”

“ Wisdom and Wisdom alone could have painted this terrible picture the most terrible perhaps which Raemaekers has ever done and yet the simplest. That he should have dared to leave almost everything to the imagination of the beholder is evidence of the wonderful power which he exercises over the mind of the people. Each of us knows what is in that goods-van and we shudder at its hideous hidden freight, fearing lest it may be disclosed before our eyes. Wisdom is but another name for supreme genius. ”

“ He presents the German monster as a menace to all freedom, and not least to the freedom of the Dutch people. Germany's allies have sold theirs; they are harnessed to the Prussian war chariot, and must drag it whither the driver bids them, whip in hand. The nations in arms against Germany are fighting for their own and each other's freedom; and the neutrals stand looking anxiously on. Raemaekers warns them that their freedom too is at stake. He sees that it will disappear if the Allies fail in the struggle, and he shows his countrymen what they may expect. ”

“ The venerable quip that what is firmness in ourselves is obstinacy in our opponents is illustrated with a ludicrous explicitness in the whole tenor of German official utterance since the failure of the great drives. The obtuseness of the Allies is so abysmal (it is again and again complained in the Reichstag and through Wolff) that they are unable to see that Germany is the permanently triumphant victor. Whereas for Germany, whose cause even the neutrals judge to be lost, to hold out at the cost of untold blood and treasure is merely the manifestation of heaven-conferred German steadfastness. ”

“ The artist makes us feel that such a war as this is an act of moral madness, a disgrace to our common humanity. It is true that some of the nations engaged are guiltless, and others almost guiltless; but there is a solidarity of European civilization which obliges us all to share the shame and sorrow of this monstrous crime. Universal war is the reductio ad absurdum of false political theories and false moral ideals; and the reductio ad absurdum is the chief argument which Providence uses with mankind. Perhaps it is the only argument which mankind in the mass can understand. ”

“ These words of Emerson's express exactly the thought of this cartoon. The Netherlands is a country that has been slowly won from the ocean; the cruel sea has always been its enemy, at first completely triumphant, then gradually resisted and driven forth by the enterprise and toil of men; but it is always an enemy to be dreaded. Its inroads have to be guarded against by great dykes and by the never-ceasing care and industry of the nation. Now and again the floods come, and people barely escape in boats from the waters. Yet time and again the enemy has been the best friend of the Netherlands. ”

“ Thus it is not for us to speak, as the people of Belgium and Northern France will speak, of the limits of endurance, and of war's last terrors imposed on those whom war should have passed by and left untouched. We gather, dimly and with but a tithe of the feeling that experience can impart, that these extremities of shame and suffering have been imposed on a people that has done no wrong, and we may gain some slight satisfaction from the thought that to this nation is apportioned a share in the work of vengeance on the criminals. ”

“ We can very safely leave France to remember Northern France and Russia not to forget Poland; but let Belgium and Serbia be at the front of the British mind and conscience; let her lift her eyes to these scorching pictures when Germany fights with all her cunning for a peace that shall leave Prussia scotched, not killed.
Already one reads despondent articles, that the English tradition, to forgive and forget, is going to wreck the peace; and students of psychology fear that within us lie ineradicable qualities that will save the situation for Germany at the end. ”

“ Their foresight gave them an initial success in the field; it slew a handful of men with additions of unspeakable agony—and rekindled the execration and contempt of Civilization.
As an arm, poison gas cannot be considered conspicuously successful, since it is easily encountered; but for the Allies it had some value, since it weighted appreciably the scale against Germany in neutral minds and added to the universal loathing astir at the heart of the world. Only fear now holds any kingdom neutral: there is not an impartial nation left on earth. ”

“ For here is pure humanity, which none can escape, the primal instinct without which man that is born of woman would not be. Before this weak, bowed, and homely figure Knowledge is silent, Pride and Passion are rebuked. Strength is shamed. Motherhood and mother-love transcend them all.
There is here nothing of anger, no thought of hostility or revenge, no trace of evil passion. Only a mother yearning after her son and pleading to another mother, the Divine type of motherhood, the Mother of God. ”

“ No man who has attacked across the inferno of the shell-and-bullet-swept "neutral ground," or has hung on with tight-clenched teeth to the battered ruins of the forward fire trench under a murderous rain of machine-gun and rifle bullets, a howling tempest of shells, an earth-shaking tornado of high explosives, can but long for the day when Peace will be declared and these horrors will be no more than a past nightmare. ”

“ The courage and heroism which they have shown are an honour to human nature. The world is richer for it; and the sacrifices which they have bravely faced and nobly borne may have a greater effect in convincing mankind of the wickedness and folly of aggressive militarism than all the eloquence of peace advocates.
We must not forget that the war has made about six German widows for every one in our country. With these we have no quarrel; we know that family affection is strong in Germany, and we are sorry for them. ”