Part 14

THE WIDOWS OF BELGIUM

This deeply pathetic picture evokes the memory of many sad and patient faces which we have seen during the last eighteen months. It is the women, after all--wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters--who have the heaviest load to bear in war-time.

The courage and heroism which they have shown are an honour to human nature. The world is richer for it; and the sacrifices which they have bravely faced and nobly borne may have a greater effect in convincing mankind of the wickedness and folly of aggressive militarism than all the eloquence of peace advocates.

We must not forget that the war has made about six German widows for every one in our country. With these we have no quarrel; we know that family affection is strong in Germany, and we are sorry for them. They, like our own suffering women, are the victims of a barbarous ideal of national glory, and a worse than barbarous perversion of patriotism, which in our opponents has become a kind of moral insanity.

These pictures will remain long after the war-passion has subsided. They will do their part in preventing a recrudescence of it. Who that has ever clamoured for war can face the unspoken reproach in these pitiful eyes? Who can think unmoved of the happy romance of wedded love, so early and so sadly terminated?

THE DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S.

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THE HARVEST IS RIPE

The artist spreads before you a view such as you would have on the great wheat-growing plains of Hungary, or on the level plateau of Asiatic Turkey--the vast, unending, monotonous, undivided field of corn. In the background the view is interrupted by two villages from which great clouds of flame and smoke are rising--they are both on fire--and as you look closer at the harvest you see that, instead of wheat, it consists of endless regiments of marching soldiers.

"The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few": here is only one, but he is quite sufficient--"the reaper whose name is Death," a skeleton over whose bones the peasant's dress--a shirt and a pair of ragged trousers--hangs loose. The shirt-sleeves of the skeleton are turned well up, as if for more active exertion, as he grasps the two holds of the huge scythe with which he is sweeping down the harvest.

This is not war of the old type, with its opportunities for chivalry, its glories, and its pride of manly strength. The German development of war has made it into a mere exercise in killing, a business of slaughter. Which side can kill most, and itself outlast the other? When one reads the calculations by which careful statisticians demonstrate that in the first seventeen months of the war Germany alone lost over a million of men killed in battle, one feels that this cartoon is not exaggerated. It is the bare truth.

The ease with which the giant figure of Death mows down the harvest of tiny men corresponds, in fact, to the million of German dead, probably as many among the Russians, to which must be added the losses among the Austrians, the French, the British, the Belgians, Italians, Serbs, Turks, and Montenegrins. The appalling total is this vast harvest which covers the plain.

WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY.

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"UNMASKED"

The "Yellow Book," it may be remembered, was the official publication of some of the details of atrocities committed by the Huns on the defenceless women and children of ravished Belgium. It told in cold and unimpassioned sentences, in plain and simple words more terrible than the most fervid outpourings of patriot or humanitarian, the tale of brutalities, of cold-blooded crimes, of murders and rape and mental and physical tortures beyond the capabilities or the imaginings of savages, possible only in their refinements of cruelty to the civilized apostles of Kultur. There are many men in the trenches of the Allies to-day who will say that the German soldier is a brave man, that he must be brave to advance to the slaughter of the massed attack, to hold to his trenches under the horrible punishment of heavy artillery fire.

As a nation we are always ready to admit and to admire physical courage, and if Germany had fought a "clean fight," had "played the game," starkly and straightly, against our fighting men, we could--and our fighting men especially could, and I believe would--have helped her to her feet and shaken hands honestly with her after she was beaten. But with such a brute beast as the unmasking of the "Yellow Book" has revealed Germany to be we can never feel friendship, admiration, or respect.

The German is a "dirty fighter," and to the British soldier that alone puts him beyond the pale. He has outraged all the rules and the instincts of chivalry. His bravery in battle is the bravery of a ravening wolf, of a blood-drunk savage animal. It is only left to the Allies to treat him as such, to thrash him by brute force, and then to clip his teeth and talons and by treaty and agreement amongst themselves to keep him chained and caged beyond the possibility of another outbreak.

BOYD CABLE.

The Yellow Book.]

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THE GREAT SURPRISE

In the note to another picture I have remarked on the farcical hypocrisy of the German Emperor in presenting himself, as he so often does, as the High Priest of several different religions at the same time. They are nearly all of them religions with which he would have no sort of concern, even if his religious pose were as real as it is artificial.

Being in fact the ruler and representative of a country which alone among European countries builds with complete security upon the conviction that all Christianity is dead, he can only be, even in theory, the prince of an extreme Protestant State. Long before the War it was common for the best caricaturists of Europe, and even of Germany, to make particular fun of these preposterous temporary Papacies in which the Kaiser parades himself as if for a fancy-dress ball; and in the accompanying picture Mr. Raemaekers has returned more or less to this old pantomimic line of satire.

The cartoon recalls some of those more good-humoured, but perhaps equally contemptuous, sketches in which the draughtsmen of the French comic papers used to take a particular delight; which made a whole comic Bible out of the Kaiser's adventures during his visit to Palestine. Here he appears as Moses, and the Red Sea has been dried up to permit the passage of himself and his people.

It would certainly be very satisfactory for German world-politics if the sea could be dried up everywhere; but it is unlikely that the incident will occur, especially in that neighbourhood. It will be long before a German army is as safe in the Suez Canal as a German Navy in the Kiel Canal; and the higher critics of Germany will have no difficulty in proving, in the Kiel Canal at all events, that the safety is due to human and not to divine wisdom.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

Moses II leads his chosen people through the Red Sea to the promised (Eng)land.]