The "Land & Water" edition of Raemaekers' cartoons, volume 1

Very happily and very graphically has Raemaekers here pointed the contrast between the Gargantuan hopes with which the Kaiser and his Junker army embarked on the War, and the exiguous and shadowy fruits of their boasted victories up to the present. They foretold a triumphal entry into the conquered capital of France within a month of the opening of hostilities. Yet the irony of Fate has, slowly but surely, cooled the early fever of anticipation. The only captured town where the All-Highest has found an opportunity of lifting his voice in exultant pæan is Nish, a secondary city of the small kingdom of Serbia. There, too, he perforce delayed his jubilation until the lapse of some eighteen months after the date provisionally and prematurely fixed in the first ebullition of over-confidence, for his triumphal procession through Paris.

Nish is a town of little more than 20,000 inhabitants; about the size of Taunton or Hereford—smaller than Woking or Dartford. Working on a basis of comparative populations, the Emperor would have to repeat without more delay his bravery at Nish in 150 towns of the same size before he could convince his people that he is even now on the point of fulfilling his first rash promises to them of the rapid overthrow of his foes. Pursuing the same calculation, he is bound to multiply his present glories 350 times before he can count securely on spending a night as conquering hero in Buckingham Palace.

Even the Kaiser must know in his heart that woefully, from his own and his people’s point of view, did he overestimate his strength at the outset. For the time he contents himself with the backwater of Nish for the scene of his oratory of conquest. His vainglorious words may well prove in their environment the prelude of a compulsory confession of failure, which is likely to come at a far briefer interval than the eighteen months which separate the imaginary hope of Paris from the slender substance of Nish.

SIDNEY LEE