Part 15

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THOU ART THE MAN!

The Man of Sorrows is flogged, and thorn-crowned, and crucified, and pierced afresh, by this other man of sorrows, who has brought greater bitterness and woe on earth than any other of all time. And in his soul--for soul he must have, though small sign of it is evidenced--he knows it. Deceive his dupes as he may--for a time--his own soul must be a very hell of broken hopes, disappointed ambitions, shattered pride, and the hideous knowledge of the holocaust of human life he has deliberately sacrificed to these heathen gods of his. No poorest man on earth would change places with this man-that-might-have-been, for his time draws nigh and his end is perdition.

Let That Other speak:

"Their souls are Mine. Their lives were in thy hand;-- Of thee I do require them!

"The fetor of thy grim burnt-offerings Comes up to Me in clouds of bitterness. Thy fell undoings crucify afresh Thy Lord--who died alike for these and thee. Thy works are Death:--thy spear is in My side,-- O man! O man!--was it for this I died? Was it for this?-- A valiant people harried to the void,-- Their fruitful fields a burnt-out wilderness,-- Their prosperous country ravelled into waste,-- Their smiling land a vast red sepulchre,-- --Thy work!

"Thou art the man! The scales were in thy hand. For this vast wrong I hold thy soul in fee. Seek not a scapegoat for thy righteous due, Nor hope to void thy countability. Until thou purge thy pride and turn to Me,-- As thou hast done, so be it unto thee!"

JOHN OXENHAM.

"We wage war on Divine principles."]

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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 Vise, 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.

"If I find you again looking so sad, I'll send you to Germany after your father."]

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THE REFUGEES

The wonder is not that women went mad, but that there are left any sane civilians of the ravished districts of Belgium after all those infamies perpetrated under orders by the German troops after the first infuriating check of Liege and before the final turning of the German line at the battle of the Marne. We have supped full of horrors since, and by an insensible process grown something callous. But we never came near to realizing the Belgian agony, and Raemaekers does us service by helping to make us see it mirrored in the eyes of this poor raving girl. This indeed is a later incident, but will serve for reminder of the earlier worse.

It is really not well to forget. These were not the inevitable horrors of war, but a deliberately calculated effect. There seems no hope of the future of European civilization till the men responsible for such things are brought to realize that, to put it crudely and at its lowest, they don't pay.

What the attitude of Germany now is may be guessed from the blank refusal even of her bishops to sanction the investigation which Cardinal Mercier asks for. It is still the gentle wolf's theory that the truculent lamb was entirely to blame.

JOSEPH THORP.

Gheel has a model asylum for the insane. On the fall of Antwerp the inmates were conveyed across the frontier. The cartoon illustrates an incident where a woman, while wheeling a lunatic, herself developed insanity from the scenes she witnessed.]

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"THE JUNKER"

There were few things that Junkerdom feared so much in modern Germany as the growth and effects of Socialism; and it is certain that the possible attitude of the German Socialists--who were thought by some writers to number somewhere in the neighbourhood of two million--in regard to the War at its outset greatly exercised the minds of Junkerdom and the Chancellor. A few days after the declaration of War a well-known English Socialist said to us, "I believe that the Socialists will be strong enough greatly to handicap Germany in the carrying on of the War, and possibly, if she meets with reverses in the early stages, to bring about Peace before Christmas."

That was in August, 1914, and we are now well on in the Spring of 1916. We reminded the speaker that on a previous occasion, when Peace still hung in the balance, he had declared with equal conviction that there would be no War because "the Socialists are now too strong in Germany not to exercise a preponderating restraining influence." He has proved wrong in both opinions. And one can well imagine that the Junker class admires Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg for the astute manner in which he has succeeded in shepherding the German Socialist sheep for the slaughter, and in muzzling their representatives in the Reichstag.

CLIVE HOLLAND.