Willy-Nilly
The question uppermost in most of our minds at the present moment is, I take it, what are the Huns thinking? And, in particular, what are the Willies thinking?
Raemaekers answers the question with his wonderful pencil in this cartoon.
We know that the Huns prepared for and started this war with a bee in their bonnets, a bee which buzzed about Xerxes, Hannibal, Alexander and Napoleon. The two Willies were avowedly “out” for what they call “Weltmacht,” or world dominion. Bernhardi put it in tabloid form:—“Weltmacht oder niedergang.”
If one fact shines out conspicuously after these dreadful months of slaughter it is this—that the Willies will not achieve world dominion.
What are their inmost thoughts—now?
Raemaekers pourtrays the All Highest with snow white hair and a dyed moustache still pointing upwards. The dyed moustache seems to me the keynote of the cartoon—la petite note qui chante. It should be white to match the hair, and drooping. What an effort to keep a stiff upper lip, when day after day the War Lord scans the casualty lists, and realises—as he must—that sooner or later the deluded Fatherland will know what he knows, and draw from that knowledge conclusions which he is powerless to modify or avert!
They have drunk to “Der Tag.” And that Day is about to dawn, the DAY which will present them to their own people as discredited rulers and humiliated schemers.
The Ramsay Macdonalds, the Charles Trevelyans, the Arthur Ponsonbys—et id genus omne—have prattled about the inexpediency of humiliating Germany. What a waste of foolish words! Can the imagination of Man conceive of any greater humiliation than that which Destiny, not the Allies, must inflict upon Hunland? That humiliation, inevitably, will come from within, and prey like a hideous cancer upon the body politic. No publicist, however prescient, can measure its ravages, for they are hidden from our sight. But none can doubt that, like a cancer, these ravages will grow and spread till the world gapes aghast at them. Whatever punishment we may be able to inflict upon these Baby-Killers and Pirates will be as nothing compared with the humiliation which, pede claudo, dogs the steps of failure and bankruptcy.
In this cartoon, the younger of the two Weary Willies is fitly habited in sable. He is in deepest mourning for the last of his dynasty—HIMSELF.
HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL
The Crown Prince: “Isn’t it an enjoyable war?”
William: “Perhaps, but hardly as much so as I anticipated.”