Part 2

* * * * *

It has been well said that no man living amidst these surging seas of blood and tears has come nearer to the role of Peacemaker than Raemaekers. The Peace which he works for is not a matter of arrangement between diplomatists and politicians: it is the peace which the intelligence and the soul of the Western world shall insist on in the years to be. God grant it be not long delayed, but it can only come when the enemy is entirely overthrown and the victory is overwhelming and complete.

Empire House, FRANCIS STOPFORD, Kingsway, London. Editor, Land and Water. February, 1916.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

AN APPRECIATION FROM THE PRIME MINISTER Downing Street, Whitehall, S. W.

Mr. Raemaekers' powerful work gives form and colour to the menace which the Allies are averting from the liberty, the civilization, and the humanity of the future. He shows us our enemies as they appear to the unbiassed eyes of a neutral, and wherever his pictures are seen determination will be strengthened to tolerate no end of the war save the final overthrow of the Prussian military power.

Signed H. H. ASQUITH.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

CHRISTENDOM AFTER TWENTY CENTURIES

These pictures, with their haunting sense of beauty and their biting satire, might almost have been drawn by the finger of the Accusing Angel. As the spectator gazes on them the full weight of the horrible cruelty and senseless futility of war overwhelms the soul, and, sinking helplessly beneath it, he feels inclined to assume the same attitude of despair as is shown in "Christendom After Twenty Centuries."

"War is war," the Germans preached and practised, and no matter how clement and correct may be the humanity of the Allies, we realize through these pictures what the human race has to face and endure once peace be broken. Is "Christendom After Twenty Centuries" to be even as Christianity was in the first century--an excuse for the perpetration of mad cruelties by degenerate Caesars or Kaisers (spell it as you will) at their games? Cannot the higher and finer attributes of mankind be developed and strengthened without this apparently needless waste of agony and life? Is human nature only to be redeemed through the Cross, and must Calvary bear again and again its heavy load of human anguish?

One cannot escape from this inner questioning as one gazes on Raemaekers' cartoons.

FRANCIS STOPFORD.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

A STABLE PEACE

Were I privileged to have a hand at the Peace Conference, my cooperation would take the part of deeds and I should only ask to hang the walls of the council chamber with life-size reproductions of Raemaekers in blood-red frames. For human memory is weak, and as mind of man cannot grasp the meaning of a million, so may it well fail to keep steadily before itself the measure of Belgium--the rape and murder, the pillage and plunder, the pretences under which perished women and priests and children, the brutal tyranny--the left hand that beckoned in friendly fashion, the right hand, hidden with the steel.

We can very safely leave France to remember Northern France and Russia not to forget Poland; but let Belgium and Serbia be at the front of the British mind and conscience; let her lift her eyes to these scorching pictures when Germany fights with all her cunning for a peace that shall leave Prussia scotched, not killed.

Already one reads despondent articles, that the English tradition, to forgive and forget, is going to wreck the peace; and students of psychology fear that within us lie ineradicable qualities that will save the situation for Germany at the end.

To suspect such a national weakness is surely to arm against it and see that our contribution to the Peace Conference shall not stultify our contribution to the War.

The Germans have been kite-flying for six months, to see which way the wind blows; and when the steady hurricane broke the strings and flung the kites headlong to earth, those who sent them up were sufficiently proclaimed by their haste to disclaim.

But when the actual conditions are created and the new "Scrap of Paper" comes to light, since German honour is dead and her oath in her own sight worthless, let it be worthless in our sight also, and let the terms of peace preclude her power to perjure herself again. Make her honest by depriving her of the strength to be dishonest. There is only one thing on earth the German will ever respect, and that is superior force. May Berlin, therefore, see an army of occupation; and may "peace" be a word banished from every Allied tongue until that preliminary condition of peace is accomplished, and Germany sees other armies than her own.

Reason has been denied speech in this war; but if she is similarly banished from the company of the peace-makers, then woe betide the constitution of the thing they will create, for a "stable peace" must be the very last desire of those now doomed to defeat.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS.

THE KAISER: "And remember, if they do not accept, I deny altogether."]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS

Some "neutrals," and even some of the people here in England, still doubt the reality of the German atrocities in Belgium, but Raemaekers has seen and spoken with those to whom the scene depicted in this cartoon is an ugly reality. One who would understand it to the full must visualize the hands behind the thrusting rifle butts, and the faces behind the hands, as well as the praying, maddened, despairing, vengeful women of the picture--and must visualize, too, the men thrust back another way, to wait their fate at the hands of these apostles of a civilization of force.

Yet even then full realization is impossible; the man whose pencil has limned these faces has only caught a far-off echo of the reality, and thus we who see his picture are yet another stage removed from the full horror of the scene that he gives us. Not on us, in England, have the rifle butts fallen; not for us has it chanced that we should be shepherded "men to the right, women to the left"; not ours the trenched graves and the extremity of shame. Thus it is not for us to speak, as the people of Belgium and Northern France will speak, of the limits of endurance, and of war's last terrors imposed on those whom war should have passed by and left untouched. We gather, dimly and with but a tithe of the feeling that experience can impart, that these extremities of shame and suffering have been imposed on a people that has done no wrong, and we may gain some slight satisfaction from the thought that to this nation is apportioned a share in the work of vengeance on the criminals.