Sympathy
The cartoon requires no words to tell the story. It holds chapter upon chapter of tragedy. “I will send you to Germany after your father!” Where is the boy’s father in Germany? In a prison? Mending roads? Lying maimed and broken in a rude hospital? Digging graves for comrades about to be shot? Or, more likely still, in a rough unknown stranger’s grave? Was the father dragged from his home at Louvain, or Tirlemont, or Visé, or one of the dozen other scenes of outrage and murder—a harmless, hard-working citizen—dragged from his hiding-place and made to suffer “exemplary justice” for having “opposed the Kaiser’s might,” but in reality because he was a Belgian, for whose nasty breed there must be demonstrations of Germany’s frightfulness pour encourager les autres?
And the child’s mother and sisters—what of them? He is dejected, but not broken. There is dignity in the boy’s defiant pose. The scene has, perhaps, been enacted hundreds of times in the cities of Belgium, where poignant grief has come to a nation which dared to be itself.
Follow this boy through life and observe the stamp of deep resolve on his character. Though he be sent “to Germany after your father,” though he be for a generation under the German jack-boot, his spirit will sustain him against the conqueror and will triumph in the end.
RALPH D. BLUMENFELD
SYMPATHY
“If I find you again looking so sad, I’ll send you to Germany after your father.”