Part 23

France was bending under the terrible impact. Britain stood and died. France braced her loins and they have been splendidly braced ever since.

The Huns were found to be resistible, vulnerable, breakable. The old verve and elan came back with all the old fire, and along with these, new depths of grim courage and tenacity, and, we are told, of spirituality, which may be the making of a new France greater than the world has ever known.

And that we shall welcome. France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia have suffered in ways we but faintly comprehend on this side of the water. When the Great Settling Day conies, this new higher spirit of France will, it is to be devoutly hoped, make for restraint in the universal craving for vengeance, and prove a weighty factor in the righteous re-adjustment of things and the proper fitting together of the jig-saw map of Europe.

JOHN OXENHAM.

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I--"A KNAVISH PIECE OF WORK"

There can be no defence of the spirit of hatred in which the Germans have, so fatally for their future, carried on this amazing mad war of theirs, in violation of all human instincts of self-respect and self-preservation, to say nothing of the obligations of religion and morality observed among mankind from the first dawnings of civilization. The knavery, the villainy, and the besotted bestiality of it can never be forgotten, and must never be forgiven, and Louis Raemaekers, gifted as he is with the rare dramatic genius that discriminates his Cartoons, has but discharged an obvious patriotic duty in publishing them to the world at large, as true and faithful witnesses to the unspeakable and inexpiable abominations wrought throughout Belgium and French Flanders by the Germans--which, already, in the course of Divine retribution, have involved their own country in material losses it will take from three to four generations to repair; and their once honoured name in contempt, and reprobation, and infamy, wherefrom it can never be redeemed.

Nevertheless, as an Englishman, I shrink from giving any emphasis there may be in my "hand and signature" to these righteously condemnatory and withering cartoons; and because, each one of them, as I turn to it, brings more and more crushingly home to me the transcending sin of England--of every individual Englishman with a vote for Members of Parliament--in not having prepared for this war; a sin that has implicated us in the destruction of the whole rising generation of the flower of our manhood; and, before this date, would have brought us under subjection to Germany but for the confidence placed by the rank and file of the British people and nation in Lord Kitchener of Khartum.

Now--face to face with enemies--from the Kaiser downward to his humblest subjects--animated by the highest, noblest ideals, but again perverted for a time--as in the case of their ancestors in the Middle Ages--by a secular epidemic of "Panmania," they are to be faced not with idle reproaches and revilings, still less with undignified taunts and gibes, but with close-drawn lips and clenched teeth, in the determination that, once having cast Satan out of them, he shall be bound down to keep the peace of Christendom--"for a thousand years."

GEORGE BIRDWOOD.

The new Governor has had the title of Mpret given to him, the same that was given to the ill-starred Prince of Wied when made ruler of Albania in 1914.]

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II--"SISYPHUS,--HIS STONE"

Sisyphus, as the story goes, was a King who widely extended the commerce, and largely increased the wealth, of Corinth, but by avaricious and fraudful ways; for the sin whereof he was sentenced after death to the unresting labour of rolling up a hill in Tartarus, a huge unhewn block of stone, which so soon as he gets it to the hill top, for all his efforts, rolls down again. In classical representation of the scene he is associated with Tantalus and Ixion; Tantalus, who, presuming too much on his relations with Zeus, was after death afflicted with an unquenchable thirst amidst flowing fountains and pellucid lakes--like the lakes of "The Thirst of the Antelope" in the marvellous mirages of Rajputana and Mesopotamia--that ever elude his anguished approaches; and with Ixion, the meanest and basest of cheats, and most demoniac of murderers, whose posthumous punishment was in being stretched, and broken, and bound, in the figure of the svastika, on a wheel which, self-moved--like the wheels of the vision of Ezekiel--whirls forevermore round and round the abyss of the nether world. The moral of these tortures is that we may well and most wisely leave vengeance to "the high Gods." They will repay!

GEORGE BIRDWOOD.

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CONCRETE FOUNDATIONS

Nothing has damned the Germans more in the eyes of other nations, belligerent and neutral alike, and nothing will have a more subtle and lasting influence on future relations, than the revelation of stealthy preparation for conquest under a mask of innocent and friendly intercourse. The whole process of "peaceful penetration," pursued in a thousand ways with infernal ingenuity and relentless determination, is an exhibition of systematic treachery such as all the Macchiavellis have never conceived. Germany has revealed herself as a nation of spies and assassins. To take advantage of a neighbour's unsuspecting hospitality, to enter his house with an air of open friendship, in order to stab him in the back at a convenient moment, is an act of the basest treachery, denounced by all mankind in all ages. No one would be more shocked by it in private life than the Germans themselves. But when it is undertaken methodically on a national scale under the influence of Deutschland ueber Alles, the same conduct becomes ennobled in their eyes, they throw themselves into it with enthusiasm and lose all sense of honour. Such is the moral perversion worked by Kultur and the German theory of the State.

An inevitable consequence is that in future the movements and proceedings of Germans in other countries will be watched with intense suspicion, and if Governments do not prevent the sort of thing depicted by Mr. Raemaekers the people will see to it themselves. The cartoon is not, of course, intended to reflect personally on the owner of Krupp's works, who is said to be a gentle-minded and blameless lady. It is her misfortune to be associated by the chance of inheritance with the German war machine and one of the underhand methods by which it has pursued its aims.

A. SHADWELL.

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PALLAS ATHENE

"Has it come to this?" Well may the Goddess ask this question. Times are indeed changed since the heroic days. Germany has still her great Greek scholars, one or two of them among the greatest living, men who know, and can feel, the spirit, as well as the letter, of the old Classics. Do they remember to-day what the relation of the Goddess of Wisdom was to the God of War, in Homer, when, to use the Latin names which are perhaps more familiar, to the general reader than the Greek, Mars "indulged in lawless rage," and Jove sent Juno and Minerva to check his "frightfulness?"

"Go! and the great Minerva be thine aid; To tame the monster-god Minerva knows, And oft afflicts his brutal breast with woes."

and how the hero Diomede, with Minerva's aid, wounded the divine bully and sent him bellowing and whimpering back, only to hear from his father the just rebuke:

"To me, perfidious! this lamenting strain? Of lawless force shall lawless Mars complain? Of all the gods who tread the spangled skies, Thou most unjust, most odious in our eyes! Inhuman discord is thy dear delight, The waste of slaughter, and the rage of fight!"

It is most true. Such has ever been War for War's sake, and when the Germans themselves are wounded and beaten, they complain like Mars of old of "lawless force."

But Raemaekers has introduced another touch more Roman than Greek, and reminding us perhaps of Tacitus rather than of Homer.