Kultur in Cartoons / With accompanying notes by well-known English writers

THE true story of what happened in Montenegro, when the Austrians reported that the country had submitted to superior force and accepted the domination of the Central Powers, and that it was abandoning the hopeless task of resisting their united strength, will perhaps be revealed in the future. At present it is unknown. Probably it will turn out to have been a great personal disappointment to the Kaiser and another instance where his diplomacy failed. It would have been a triumph to induce Montenegro to submit peaceably, and to have King Nicholas accept the position of a client king at Berlin. But the resistance of Montenegro was not wholly overcome. The king and the people who had fought for freedom with success against all the forces of Turkey and afterward of Austria during so many years could not submit to being deluded by the blandishments of Hadji Wilhelm.

Here the artist shows Nicholas with his bag packed for the journey to France, and labelled “Lyon,” turning away from the Kaiser, who looks toward him with seductive entreaty, and presses his hands in a gesture of petition. He is making a last attempt to induce the king to submit to fate and to himself; to come to Berlin, and to be received with royal honors and enrolled alongside the many princely families of Germany.

The Kaiser set great store by success in this negotiation. It would have been the beginning, as he hoped, of the breaking up of the alliance among his foes. Even though it was only the small and poor Montenegro that abandoned the Allied cause, still it was to be the first stage of a general break-up, which would have been hailed with triumph as the beginning of the end. The Kaiser wanted Nicholas badly, but Nicholas was not going alone to Berlin, and his last word is that “we will all come later.” 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. Raemaekers had lived too close to Germany to be ignorant of her enormous strength; but he judges as a prophet, who bears witness to the moral quality of the world, despite of the apparent balance of probabilities.

GERMANY’s practical attitude to small countries has always given the lie to her expressed benevolence. Her proposal at the beginning of the war to localize conflict and leave Austria’s sixty millions to settle with the four millions of Serbia will be remembered. Then, after solemn assurance that her neutrality would be respected, “necessity” demanded Germany’s broken oaths and unspeakable outrage upon an innocent nation. It was merely a choice between Belgium and Switzerland; and convenience decided for Belgium. Abroad we have seen the treatment of uncivilized races and observed with what thanksgiving the indigenous peoples of West Africa, East Africa, and the Cameroons have welcomed Germany’s downfall as the first step to restoration of liberty and recognition of human rights. Those fiends—Prince Arenberg, Carl Peters, Chancellor Leist—are not forgotten, nor the Herero massacres.

Belgium has been sacrificed by the Cain of nations. He, who has talked most loudly about the rights of small kingdoms and his unbreakable resolution to protect them against the threat of the mighty and the tyranny of the strong; he, who desired to be his brother’s keeper, has Belgium murdered on her pyre. Within two days of the promise to leave her inviolate, she lay battered and bleeding under the club of the oath-breaker. But the smoke of the burning is beaten back into the assassin’s eyes. Even from the tribal god of the Huns this sacrifice has won no smiles.

It has been left for a Christian emperor in the twentieth century to emulate the neolith barely emancipated from brutedom, and set an example that the stone men of old might have hesitated to copy.

We have so long grown accustomed to the spectacle of martyred Belgium, and are so familiar with the whole story of her rape and massacre by this royal savage of Prussia, that the grief is like to be deadened and the pang grown dull; but let no such narcotic drift over our spirits until the war is won. 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.

THE fortress of Verdun will stand forever, a bastion cut against the sky, and behind and above, like a flaming cresset, will burn Douaumont.

Verdun in March of 1916 was the name of a fortress and a town; to-day it is no longer a name. It has become a word lifted among the star words common to all languages and all times. Valor, splendor, devotion, endurance, patriotism,—how grand are these words! Yet Verdun is the grandest of them all, for it includes them all.

It is the word that France has flung to the world not from her fleshly lips, but from the lips of her soul.

To the cringing neutrals; to Swiss waiters, and Dutch hucksters and English sedition-mongers, and Irish hole-and-corner men, and Swedish marketmen. To the hordes of the Beast and the powers of darkness France has flung the light of that one burning word, just as the Spartans, four hundred and eighty years before the birth of Christ, flung to us the light of the word Thermopylæ.

The old heroic times seemed dead, littleness seemed everywhere, till the light of this war showed the soul of man great as in the days of Alexander.

The counter-attack at Douaumont is but an incident, a crystallized moment out of the endless battle on the Meuse.

THE Kaiser said “his heart bled” when the Allies raided Carlsruhe from the air. The hemorrhage was not serious, but it had a value as tending to show that the heart was there. Or was it that the Allies had performed the classic feat of drawing blood from a stone? It was more than his own airmen could do when they killed children and women in London and Paris.

Perhaps some day a poet will arise who will be able to write for us the epic of the Morning Paper during this war. It used to lie under doors till wanted, and then Father had it, and Mother didn’t want it till after lunch, and George got it after Father, and Arthur must therefore buy an “evening” paper at the station where he caught the 9:19 to the City. And it really didn’t matter much, after all, except that it was something to talk about, and the Other Side was taking the country to the dogs (a trip on which it has been entering any time these last five hundred years), and one must know the latest entries for the Thousand Guineas, anyway, and yesterday’s goals.

And now! “Hasn’t the paper come yet? Where’s the paper? Is there any news? What are We doing? Have the French advanced? What about Verdun? Why’s the paper late? How’s Russia this morning? Read it out, Father, or else order a copy each!” 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.

And what it represents is the change of focus in our minds. We are all living more or less intensely in an impersonal and selfless atmosphere, where what others are doing matters more than what our friends are doing, and where we are blatantly, flagrantly, despite all our national traditions, sure of an Ideal. We can even talk about it! I believe this cartoon by Raemaekers has a special appeal to the British for this reason; that the morning paper has come to mean so much to us, and now rouses in us such large, splendid feelings, such a magnificence of pain, such a glory of anxiety, such a pride of suffering—has made possible to us expression of so much which we thought it right and decent to hide in our hearts before—that this spectacle of the Kaiser and his dame gloating over innocent deaths has a force and a drive which the British are bound to recognize in a special degree. And the faces of the maniac and his senile wife, glowering at their “good news,” cannot help but recall to us Father’s look when he read that we had taken La Boisselle, Mother’s face when she heard that casualties were “comparatively” light. The paper is something more than paper and ink nowadays.

This is rather the attitude we should have expected of the all-highest, whom, of course, the seasons ought to obey. It is hard on him that we should have had such a late summer, and that his “Zeppers” should have had to wait so long and, after all, done so little.

For the “gentle Zeppers” from the east to-day, like those from the west of old, come with fair weather and serene skies. They may find an exceptional night in winter when “the moon is hid,” for, like all evil-doers, “they love darkness rather than light,” and “the night is still,” but it is in the calm of summer and autumn that they look to make their best harvest and their boldest onslaughts. Equinoctial gales, sleet and snow do not suit them, so brave are they. They are not keen to face either the battle or the breeze, so brave are they.

It would be unfair to deny bravery altogether to the Boches. They have shown it in their own “book of arithmetic” way on land, on sea, and in the air. (H)immelmann, as the Tommies of course called him, certainly showed himself “at ’ome in his native (h)element, as bold as a ’awk,” though brought down by a half-fledged eagle at the finish. But he was an aviator and took risks. The brave “Zepps” have not taken many; we do not blame them. There is no reason why they should, and every reason why they should not. They are delicate and expensive birds to rear. When they are on the wing there are a good many “marks over,” and when the anti-aircraft gun finds those “marks,” light currency though they be, they fall even faster than on the Exchange.

Formidable, no doubt, the Zepps are. It is our good luck more than our good management that they have not done more damage. But brave, as bravery goes in this war, hardly that, so far. We should have expected the Kaiser to curse them and the weather, not to weep. Weeping? Kaisers and Kaiserins and Count Zeppelins should be made of sterner stuff. We do not hear that Herod and Herodias were seen weeping because the attack on Rachel cost them an assassin or two. Yet that is the picture Raemaekers gives us here, scathingly, sarcastically, graphic as ever.

“They were brave.” “They fought against odds unnumbered” (of women and children and men 10,000 feet below them). “They fell with their tails to the foe.” Yes, the Zepps are very brave. They’ll have to be braver still before they’re done!

HERBERT WARREN.

P.S.—This was written before September 2. Yes, they’ll have to take more risks, and they and their friends will have to be braver yet.

HOLLAND has acted a rather more than neutral part in this war. Cocoa and bacon, butter and potatoes, lard and oil, beef, fish, sugar, and rice—the amount she has eaten of these has been truly astounding. She has eaten so much and slept so soundly that she has not heard the Zeppelins flying over her, bound for England.

Should aeroplanes fly over her, bound for Germany, would she wake up?

She has also eaten rubber and dry-goods, and so many other indigestible things that if she doesn’t sulfer from somnolence, for decency’s sake and as a proof that she still belongs to the human family, she ought to pretend to suffer from it—when the aeroplanes fly over her, bound for Germany.

One wonders what her opinions are on this cartoon presented to her by her most illustrious son.

WE were inclined at the beginning of this war to be a little unreasonable in our demands on the sympathy of the neutral nations. This was particularly the case with Holland, whose geographical position with regard to Belgium and to ourselves is a most delicate one. We did not always consider sufficiently what too lively an expression of opinion friendly to the Allies might cost the Dutch. They saw themselves, three years ago, watched through the peep-holes of their eastern frontier by a neighbor without pity, without scruple, and without decency. To have given the Germans an opportunity of attacking them unawares would have been to see the tulips of Haarlem trampled into mud and the church-windows of Gouda smashed; to let the libraries of Leyden be pillaged and the art-treasures of The Hague be carried off to Berlin; to find the cathedral tower of Utrecht used as a target for cannon, and the canals of Amsterdam choked with the corpses of Dutch women and children. What Belgium has endured would be poured out in fourfold horror upon Holland. No wonder that the Dutch are prudent in their language, circumspect in their actions.

Moreover, till the autumn of 1914, Holland had cultivated a pacific spirit. She did not believe in military danger, and through the masses of the people there ran a kind of resentment against the army, as a body of men paid out of the taxes for doing nothing. In all this Holland was wittingly the opposite of her ferocious and gigantic neighbor. But all this is over now. 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. She knows that the Dutch have “increased their army,” and that the hour of “easy” and insolent conquest is over.

THIS horrible war that has been sprung upon us has taught the Empire many useful lessons. It has been a revelation in character value. In the long piping time of peace, before grim-visaged war broke in upon us, we were much too self-centered. Colonials and others returning from our overseas dominions to the “Old Country” did not hesitate to say how appalled they were by the wealth and how shocked they were by the uses to which it was being put in England.

It seemed to them, coming home from the simple life to the lap of luxury, that men and women in England were living to pile up colossal wealth and to bask in the sunshine of newspaper notoriety. I might continue in this strain for pages more, but that is not my purpose. What I do want to say is that, as soon as the tocsin of war was heard across the silver sea, and the bugle-call of duty was sounded, these same club-loungers and society-loafers rolled up, rallying to the flag as though they had been born for nothing else. In the story of England’s life only will the headline “Five Millions of Volunteers to the Colors” be read, topping the chapter telling of this European war to our children’s children.

Not only have those on the highest rung of the social ladder responded to the King’s call for service, but those on the lowest rung also—never was there such a fellowship in arms by land and on sea.

But if England with her overseas peoples stands out in such fine relief against the dark war background, we must not forget that our Allies have shone out as conspicuously as ourselves as fighting patriots, resolved to do or die.

Chaplains, too, have done fine work for country as well as for religion. Conspicuous among all Churchmen rises the lithe, imposing, ascetic figure of His Eminence Cardinal Mercier. If ever there was a follower of the Good Shepherd, ready to lay down his life for his sheep, it is the Cardinal Archbishop of Malines. “The Good Shepherd giveth his life for his sheep.” Nothing could have pleased the Cardinal better than to have escaped the sights forced upon him by sacrificing his own life for his flock. But it was not to be; his life has been spared that all the world might find in this good shepherd its object lesson in true religion and in true patriotism.

AMONG the suggestions for treating our German prisoners, the public has misunderstood that emanating from the Government. To utter the word “reprisals,” when we know right well that the whole sense and tradition of this country would rise in rebellion against any such system, is to speak in vain. Moreover, other and juster lines of action are within our reach. It has been suggested that we should treat our prisoners exactly as Germany treats hers; but since her system is beneath the accepted standards of humanity, and such as no civilized country could practise without loss of self-respect, that course remains unjustified. A worthier way would seem to be that those responsible for the crime are made to suffer, and that, instead of doing injustice now by punishing men not to blame for our enemy’s cruelties, we exact justice after the war is ended and then look to it that all—chiefs and subordinates alike—who have tortured and starved the Allied prisoners, in military or internment camps, should be brought to pay the penalty for their cowardly villainies. That will lie within our power; and did Germany clearly understand the intention, it is reasonable to hope she might take steps to save herself from the consequences of her brutality. Moreover, the threat is no mere thunder, for though the country is still in ignorance, still buoyed by false news and fatuous communiqués, those at the helm know well enough the Central Empires are on a lee shore of ultimate defeat.

With some truth these boys, spectacled students and stunted human failures swept into the net of France’s prisoners, may echo their “all-highest” and say: “We did not want to do it.” They, indeed, did not, and who can feel for them much more than pity? Such men are not even good cannon fodder; and no more striking comment on the passes to which Germany is coming in her efforts to fill the failing lines need be sought than in the material our prisoners often reveal. She has, indeed, many thousands more of the cream of her manhood to destroy before the end; but to offer such feeble stuff as this to the combustion of war cannot long delay the final need.

Señor Gomez Garrillo, writing as a neutral in the “Gaulois,” has told us how the British, though fully realizing the hatred of the German people, do not echo it; for they see in their prisoners only unhappy men, to be treated with compassion and respect. That is not a spirit that will be found on the losing side of the World War.

THIS picture represents two men whom the accidents of diplomacy and intrigue have placed upon the thrones of two small nations of southeastern Europe. The peoples whom they respectively rule have every conceivable reason for desiring the triumph of that principle of international right for which the Allies stand in this war, and which is the only possible defense of small nationalities. They have also special obligations toward those who are to-day championing that principle, for the Bulgarians owe their liberation from Turkish tyranny primarily to Russia, while the Greeks owe the restoration of their national independence to that very combination of Great Britain, France and Russia which at Navarino nearly a century ago half-foreshadowed the present Great Alliance.

But of these men one is an intriguer of mean origin, vile antecedents, and corruptly personal aims, while the other is the husband of a Hohenzollern. Therefore, in the one case the intriguer sells his people to the enemy, while in the other the semi-German princeling deserts not only his natural allies, but those to whom he is pledged by treaty. Of the Balkan States, Serbia alone is faithful to the cause of nationality; and it is not unimportant to note that of these states Serbia alone possesses a native dynasty. It is to be hoped that after the war princes will no longer figure among the exports of the German Empire.

RAEMAEKERS has here selected two typical naval officers, and has placed them on the quay in Kiel Harbor, pacing along in sight of the water and some of the ships of the High Seas Fleet lying at anchor.

The expressions on the two faces are worth careful study. On that of the taller and nearer man one has a cleverly caught and underlying indication of doubt. He seems to say: “Of course, we are blockading the British Fleet, which has taken shelter from our invincible warships in the Thames Estuary. And, of course, since the Battle of Jutland, we have swept the seas and wrested the trident from the grasp of Britain. But....” At the back of his mind is evidently at all events the germ of a question. “Why, if this be so, do our ships lie at anchor, and our people go short of the imported necessities of life?” And in the mind of that type of man no amount of inspired press accounts of fictitious victories, and no thanks of the Kaiser and profusion in the decoration of “naval heroes,” can lull to rest the suspicion that all is not as it should be.

The second type depicted is a more common one in the German Navy. He carries his chin up, while his companion carries his down. He says: “Of course, we have driven the British Battle Fleet to its harbors, and, of course, we won a notable victory off Jutland, and, equally of course, when we bombarded Scarborough and other seaside pleasure resorts we actually destroyed immensely strong fortifications, and did enormous and material damage to military and naval bases.” This type of man could believe anything. And he does! He has assimilated greedily all the mental pabulum that is designed to teach that Germany cannot be beaten because she is Germany, and that the Germans are superior to every other race. He swallowed it as greedily as a small boy, a collegian, or a naval cadet, and it has become part of him. He neither can know, will know, nor wishes to know the truth. There is something pathetic as well as stupid in his blindness and imperviousness to facts. He is of the type which will believe Germany invincible long after she has been beaten. He is of the type that will prolong the war by continuing to celebrate phantom victories even when the fleets of the Allies are hammering at the gates of the Kiel Canal. In this cartoon Raemaekers’ satire is gentler than its wont, but not less effective on that account.

AH, No! Not brigands! Not pirates! They belong to the good days of youth, the “Boys’ Own Annual,” Stevenson, Henty, Kingston, when there were words of pure magic that wrought spells. Is there a boy with soul so dead who never to himself hath said “Sallee Rovers,” “High Barbary,” “Masked Men on Maidenhead Thicket,” “A Toby Man on a Black Horse,” for the sheer pleasure of evoking the little shiver that goes with Romance? Has the deep villainy of Long John Silver anything in common with Tirpitz? Long John would never have allowed the right of Tirpitz to fly the Jolly Roger. Would Claude Duval have taken the Kaiser’s hand? Never!

The skull and crossbones have fallen on evil days, the black flag has had its sable purity rent and torn; no boy is going to stick his nose into a book about the Kaiser and Willie in future days, in order to snuff up sensuously the very smell of such a jolly good tale. Ah, these others were a merry company, and they swung very rightly on creaking gallows, or walked the plank into glittering foreign seas, for crimes which would show saintly white upon the Potsdam flag. They were bad men, but witless, too; they did such petty sins, imagined such small crimes. If they bullied a little boy, we thought them already damnable rascals! One little boy! Anybody could count him on their fingers; but we need the higher mathematics to compute the wrong of Potsdam. It is like weighing Saturn, or measuring Lucifer; we must go outside our world to do either.

Better the lonely gibbet on the heath than the stalled ox of Potsdam; let us walk the plank like the honest murderers we are, and go to the perdition that suits with our knaveries and cruelties and black crimes; but let us from creaking chain and blanched sea-sand enter a protest against having the Berlin brood fathered on us; nay, sirs, must even the good fat swine in his filth be compared with such as these?

IT emphatically does not look so in Serbia. No artist dare portray the infamous truth of it. I have found something of that in the report of an inquiry conducted by Dr. Reiss, of the Lausanne University, in such of the devastated districts as were not left in the actual occupation of the enemy. “Belgium was a mothers’ meeting to it,” as some phrase-maker put it. All that was worst in a nation, of whom a tolerant general opinion held that it was unfortunate rather than unkindly, came out in that second version of the “punitive expedition” of which the first ended so ingloriously.

It is an attribute of chivalry to respect courage, and of civilization to hold under control the passions that blaze up in the furnace of war. Austria has eternally forfeited her reputation for chivalry and culture. She has chosen to range herself with her allies: with the Germans of Aerschot, Termonde, Dixmude; with the Turks of the Armenian holocausts; with that glorious squadron of Bulgarian cavalry that charged and sabred a square of defenseless prisoners.

The first Austrian legions, underestimating their enemy, broke ignominiously against the intrepid mountaineers. They came back in overwhelming force and wreaked their vengeance for their former defeat with a more than German frightfulness.

One dare not take the responsibility of referring readers to Dr. Reiss’s book. Its cold precision, its scientific tabulation, its sickening photographs, make up a nightmare horror which should be thrust upon no one who can avoid it.

But if there be a recording angel——

THE peacemaker, Ford, is sailing away in a boat, with the flag of the United States at the stern, leaving behind him the four Germanic Powers. On their alliance is inscribed: “Victory! 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. Austria, Bulgaria, and Turkey have enough to do to hold on to the life-buoy and save themselves from death. Turkey has a bad grip, and looks as if he could hardly cling on. Bulgaria is, if possible, worse situated; Ferdinand holds with one hand and with his chin. The Emperor of Austria has his shoulder well over the life-saving buoy, but although the hold is good, his physical strength is failing. The Kaiser alone has a firm hold and plenty of strength left, but he has already been under water, for his helmet is dripping; and his cry for help is addressed to the retreating peacemaker. The boasting words inscribed on the alliance are addressed to the surrounding world, but the word that comes from his heart is a cry for peace.

When this cartoon was published, Germany was apparently going on from victory to victory. Many people feared that the Prussian victory was assured, but Raemaekers never doubted. His confidence in the victory of truth and justice never failed for an instant. In his cartoons he sees, like a prophet or a poet, right into the heart of the great movements in history. It is not that he conveys the impression of mere blind, unreasoning confidence in the victory of any particular nation which he admires, or in which he believes, or which he considers to be most wealthy and most capable of paying the expenses and supplying the “silver bullets” in unceasing abundance. His sublime assurance is based on moral issues; he hates the cruel and the deceitful nation and man, because among other things they are an outrage on nature, a blotch disfiguring the fair face of the world, and he knows that a cause which is based on disregard of international obligations, and buttressed by a policy of “frightfulness” and a general system of imposture and deception, must fail. The world of men will not endure it; the divine order of things has rejected it. He can no more doubt about the issue than could one of the old Hebrew prophets. He has seen, and he knows.

SHELLS! Shells! In the name of the Prophet, shells! Shells for Britain and Belgium, for France and Russia and Italy, for Serbia and Roumania! Shells, shells, and ever more shells! It is a cry with which we are familiar now, terribly familiar. We remember—though events crowd on so fast that we forget much—how a year or two ago it was yet more terrible, for it was a cry unanswered and unanswerable.

Our little army—so little, but so great in heart—“our dauntless army, scattered and so small,” sans machine-guns, sans howitzers, sans shells, sans masks, sans everything, still snatched for us, if not victory, yet time, time for everything. To-day it has grown from hundreds to thousands, and thousands to millions, and its munitions have grown faster still. What were Mr. Montagu’s figures the other day? They were incredible. Britain’s output of “heavy shell” has been multiplied ninety-four, wellnigh one hundred, times. The tale of shells it took a whole weary year to make in 1914 can now be made in four days!

How has it been brought about? Largely by the enthusiasm, the faith and fire, of one man and many women,—by Mr. Lloyd George and the workers who have rallied to his call.

This picture show’s the process. It is a picture truly striking, graphic, beautiful, gladdening yet saddening.

These countless, shapely, well-knit figures bending over their task eagerly, earnestly; the power-bands revolving, the lathes turning unceasingly, the tools biting, polishing, finishing; creation in full swing!

All the rare gifts of womanhood are here, but how strangely used! What a pathetic paradox! It is women’s privilege to be the mothers, the nurses, the ministers, the angels of life. But these are mothers and angels of death. They know what they are doing. It is for their men, their babes, their honor, they transform themselves. All the woman’s love and passion, her enthusiasm, her neat and delicate hand, her docility are here, making, moulding these shining shells, multitudinous as their namesakes of the ocean; and like them each is fashioned nicely to pattern, voluted, enamelled, burnished, with their strange knobs and grooves the product of long evolution, exact and right, and then stacked gross by gross, and thousand by thousand, canned earthquakes, bottled death, to be broken and to break to-morrow in the storms and on the ridges of war.

Dux femina facti! What work to-day is not woman’s?

Shells, shells, ever more shells!

A LONDON snapshot in lighter mood and a pretty compliment to the Australians, who are cutting out Jack, Tommy, and even Sandy in bonnet and kilt, under the shadow of Nelson’s lions. Well, none but the brave deserve the fair, and no one grudges them their success.

But the picture may be read in a different sense. After all, whose is the success here? If there were one Australian and two girls, now, that would be something like success. Too much success, indeed! He might say: “How happy could I be with either!” The girl does not say that; no girl ever does. She wants them both and apparently she has got them. The success is hers, and other girls will certainly grudge it to her, particularly, one fancies, those in Australia, who may have their own reasons for a qualified approval of conquests in Trafalgar Square. So Britannia’s sons may be cut out, but Britannia’s daughter carries off the honors and redresses the balance.

This snapshot, by the way, was evidently taken before London was laid in ruins by Zeppelins (see the Wolff Bureau and German papers passim).

THE Kaiser and the Prussian people doubtless encourage themselves by remembering the tremendous struggle which Frederick, so-called the Great, waged against an almost overwhelming coalition of the neighboring peoples, but they carefully and intentionally forget that Prussia had as its ally throughout that desperate struggle of the Seven Years’ War the power of England, which it hates. It deliberately forgets that the sea was always open then, that its friends could come and go, and that supplies of every kind could be brought in over a friendly “German Ocean.” It has often been said that the Kaiser, when he fixed the date for the beginning of the war, had forgotten to take counsel with the naval command, but there seems no reason to doubt that at least he took counsel with Tirpitz, the responsible head of the navy.

Tirpitz was not a man to be ignored, but neither was he a man whose opinion about naval strategy was to be trusted. He has shown himself a typical German organizer, marvellously excellent in the building of a fleet of ships, but his ignorance of the real principles of naval warfare and of naval power has proved itself to be colossal and truly Germanic. It would surprise no one if history should hereafter disclose that Tirpitz, through some quaint perversion of reasoning power, had come to the conclusion that the time for the war had arrived at the end of July, 1914. The true principle of naval power manifests itself steadily in the course of history, and the artist in this cartoon expresses it through the figure of the hydraulic press, under which the Kaiser is being slowly crushed. Beneath the irresistible weight of its descent his sword is bending and useless; it will soon break. The figure of the hydraulic press is more apt than the phrase which was applied to the Russian armies at the beginning of the war by the English press. The “steam-roller” has proved itself a singularly unsuitable figure to express the strength of the Russian armies, for it is totally unlike the lightning strategy of Brussilof or the enduring blows of the Grand Duke.

To Raemaekers the hydraulic press becomes a sort of compendium of naval power; and a quaint resemblance to the turrets and protruding guns of a fleet of battleships is imparted by the artist to the upper parts of the engine. The sea is the friend of Britain. The sea expresses its friendship in many ways. It is the friend of the Netherlands to save that country from German invasion, and it is the instrument through which Great Britain crushes down the armies of Prussia.

WE know the story of the oracles of Balaam as narrated in chapters XXII and XXIII of “Numbers.” Balaam is sent for by Balak, king of the Moabites, in order that he might curse the children of Israel whose invasion threatened Moab with dire peril. Balaam first refuses to journey to Balak; then, subsequently, he is induced to change his mind. Riding on his ass the prophet accompanies the princes of Moab, and on his way is confronted by the angel of the Lord. The ass, much wiser than his master, dares not pass. Balaam, who could not see the obstacle in the path, struck his ass three times. Thereupon his eyes were opened, and the ass, speaking with the mouth of a man, rebuked the prophet for his senselessness and his brutality. In the sequel, though Balaam meets with Balak, he is not permitted to curse; he can only bless the children of the Lord.

This is the story which is in Raemaekers’ mind in his spirited cartoon. Balaam is, of course, the German emperor; his ass is the long-suffering German people, forced by threats to advance over millions of strewn corpses and rotting skulls, and the angel in the path bears on its shield the words Justice, Liberty, Humanity.

Unlike the prototype whom Raemaekers has selected, the German emperor refuses to recognize that his real opponent in the tremendous war is the civilized conscience of mankind. But the German people is beginning to understand and realize at what appalling cost it is being sent to the shambles. Perhaps in time the eyes of the Kaiser himself may be opened, and when that day of enlightenment comes he will discover that no amount of iron crosses or lying telegrams will induce the German fatherland to fight any longer against the ordinances of God.

Far away on the horizon are to be observed the funeral crosses which reveal so eloquently the history of the war. For, indeed, the best and bravest youth of most of the nations of Europe is being sacrificed to suit the truculent ambition of a blind and reckless autocrat.