The Wonders of Culture
Of all forms of “Kultur” or “frightfulness” that which materialises in “the terror which flieth by night” is to the intelligent mind at one and the same time the most insensate and damnable. It fails to accomplish, either in Paris or in London, the subjugation by terror of the people for which Germans seem to hope. It is only in German imagination that it accomplishes “material and satisfactory damage to forts, camps, arsenals, and fortified towns.” In reality it inflicts misery and death upon a mere handful of people (horrible as that may be) and destroys chiefly the homes of the poor. It serves no military end, and the damage done is out of all proportion to the expenditure of energy and material used to accomplish it.
The fine cartoon which Raemaekers has drawn to bring home to the imagination what this form of “Kultur” stands for makes it easy for us in London to sympathise with our brothers and sisters in Paris. We have as yet been spared daylight raids in the Metropolitan area, and so we needed this cartoon to enable us to realise fully what “Kultur” by indiscriminate Zeppelin bombs means.
Who cannot see the cruel drama played out in that Paris street? The artist has assembled for us in a few living figures all the actors. The dead woman; the orphaned child, as yet scarcely realising her loss; the bereaved workman, calling down the vengeance of Heaven upon the murderers from the air; the stern faces of the sergents de ville, evidently feeling keenly their impotence to protect; and in the background other sergents, the lines of whose bent backs convey in a marvellous manner and with a touch of real genius the impression of tender solicitude for the injured they are tending. And faintly indicated, further still in the background, the crowd that differs little, whether it be French or English, in its deeper emotions.
CLIVE HOLLAND
THE WONDERS OF CULTURE