“The Burden of the Intolerable Day”
Most people have wondered from time to time what the Kaiser thinks in his inmost heart and in the solitude of his own chamber about the condition of Germany and about the War. What impression has been made on him by the alternation of victories and failures during the last twenty months? After all he has staked everything—he has everything to lose. What does he feel? What impression do the frightful losses of his own people make on him?
Raemaekers tells in this cartoon. The Kaiser has this moment been wakened from sleep by the entrance of a big gorgeously dressed footman, carrying his morning tea. The panelling of the royal chamber in the palace at Potsdam is faintly indicated. The Kaiser sits up in bed, and a look of agony gathers on his face as he realises that he has wakened up to the grim horror of a new day, and that the delightful time which he has just been living through was only a dream. He had dreamed that the whole thing was not true—that the War had never really occurred, and that he could face the world with a conscience clear from guilt; and now he has wakened up to bear the burden for another day. It is written in his face what he thinks. You see the deep down-drawn lines in the lower part of the face, the furrows upon the forehead, and the look almost of terror in the eyes. But a smug-faced flunkey offers him a cup of tea with buttered toast, and he must come back to the pretence of that tragi-comedy, the life of the King-Emperor.
The Dutch artist is fully alive to the comic element which underlies that tragedy. The King-Emperor, as he awakes from sleep and sits forward from that mountain of pillows, would be a purely comic figure were it not for the terrible tragedy written in his face. A footman in brilliant livery is a comic figure. The splendour of this livery brings out the comic element by its contrast to, and yet its harmony with, the stupid self-satisfaction of the countenance and the curls of the powdered hair.
The Kaiser, however, awakens to more than the pretences and shams of court life. The vast dreams which he cherished before the War of world-conquest and an invincible Germany are fled now, and he must face, open-eyed and awake, the stern reality.
WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY
THE AWAKENING
“I had such a delightful dream that the whole thing was not true.”