Part 26

Is the fate of L19 the fruit of our artist's stinging reminder that Holland once had nobler spirits and braver days?

ARTHUR POLLEN.

"So long as you permit Zeppelins to cross our land you surely should cease to boast of our deeds."

Whenever a Dutchman wishes to speak of the great past of his country he calls to mind the names of these heroes.]

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WAR AND CHRIST

The deliberate war made by Prussia in all those areas which she can reach or occupy against the symbols and sacred objects of the Christian faith is a phenomenon in every way worthy of consideration. It is clearly not a matter of accident. The bombardment at Rheims Cathedral, for example, can be proved to have been deliberate. It had no military object; and the subsequent attempts to manufacture a military reason for it only produced a version of the occurrence not only incredible but in flat contradiction to the original admissions of the Germans themselves. But such episodes as those of Rheims and Louvain merely attract the attention of the world because of the celebrity of the outraged shrines. All who are familiar with the facts know that deliberate sacrilege no less than deliberate rape and deliberate murder has everywhere marked the track of the German army.

The offence has been malignant. That does not, of course, mean that it has been irrational; quite the contrary. One fully admits that Prussia, being what she is, has every cause to hate the Cross, and every motive to vent the agonized fury of a lost soul upon things sacred to the God she hates.

The moral suggested by this cartoon of Raemaekers' must not be confused with the ridiculous and unhistoric pretence that war itself is essentially unchristian. When Mr. Bernard Shaw, if I remember right, drew from the affair of Rheims the astonishing moral that we cannot have at the same time "glorious wars and glorious cathedrals," he might surely have remembered that the age in which Rheims Cathedral was built, whatever else it was, was not an age of Pacifism. The insult to Jesus Christ is not in the sword (which in His own words He came to bring), but in the profanation of the sword. It is in cruelty, injustice, treachery, unbridled lust, the worship of unrighteous strength--in fact, in all that can be summed up in the single word "Prussia."

CECIL CHESTERTON.

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BARBED WIRE

Save for the spiked helmets, the gruesome figures in the foreground of this cartoon might have belonged in life to any one of the warring nationalities. It is a noteworthy fact, however, that not one of the nations at war has shown so little care for its dead as Germany, whose corpses lie and rot on every front on which they are engaged.

The world cannot blame Germany for the introduction of barbed wire as an accessory of war, though it is well known that German wire surpasses any other in sheer devilish ingenuity; not that it is more effective as an entanglement, but its barbs are longer, and are set more closely together, than in the wire used by other nationalities; it is, in short, more frightful, and thus is in keeping with the rest of the accessories of the German war machine.

But this in the cartoon is normal barbed wire, with its normal burden. One may question whether the All-Highest War Lord, who in the course of his many inspections of the various fronts must have seen sights like this, is ever troubled by the thought that these, his men, lie and hang thus for his pleasure, that their ghastly fate is a part of his glorious plan. He set out to remake the world, and here is one of the many results--broken corpses in the waste.

Part of the plan, broken corpses in the waste. By the waste and the corpses that he made shall men remember the author and framer of this greatest war.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN.

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THE HIGHER POLITICS

There is a significance in this cartoon which I believe will appeal much more strongly to the firing line than to Home. The Front distrusts politics, and especially the higher politics. That means the juggling and wire-pulling of the Chancelleries, and the Front has an uneasy conviction that at the subtleties and craftiness and cunning of the diplomatic game we cannot compete with "The Bosche." Hard knocks and straight fighting the Front does understand, and at that game are cheerfully confident of winning in the long run.

It would be bitter news to the fighting men that any peace had been patched up on any terms but those the Allies soon or late will be in a position to dictate, to lay down and say flatly, "Take them and have Peace; or leave them and go on getting licked." The Front doesn't like War. No man who has endured the horrors and savagery and "blood, mud, and misery" of civilized warfare could pretend to like it. No man who has endured the long-drawn misery of manning the waterlogged trenches for days and weeks and months can look forward with anything but apprehension to another winter of war. No man who has attacked across the inferno of the shell-and-bullet-swept "neutral ground," or has hung on with tight-clenched teeth to the battered ruins of the forward fire trench under a murderous rain of machine-gun and rifle bullets, a howling tempest of shells, an earth-shaking tornado of high explosives, can but long for the day when Peace will be declared and these horrors will be no more than a past nightmare.

But the Front will "stick it" for another winter or several winters, will go through many bitter attacks and counter-attacks to win the complete victory that will ensure, and alone will ensure, lasting peace. We know our limitations and our weaknesses. We admit that, as the American journalist bluntly put it, we are "poor starters," but we know just as surely he was right in completing the phrase, "but darn good finishers." Let the "higher politicians" on our side stand down and leave the fighting men to finish the argument. Let them keep the ring clear, and let the Front fight it out. The Front doesn't mind "taking the responsibility," and it will give "Kaiser Bill" and "Little Willie" all the responsibilities they can handle before the Great Game is over.

BOYD CABLE.

THE KAISER "We will propose peace terms; if they accept them, we are the gainers, if they refuse them, the responsibility will rest with them."]

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THE LOAN GAME

Raemaekers is pitiless, but never oversteps the truth. National Debts are ever national millstones, worn around the neck. They are worn unwillingly, and they are not ornamental; they are a burden, and the weight is sometimes crushing. A prospect of that sort seems to be the lot of several of the "Great Powers" of Europe for the remainder, and the greater portion, of the Twentieth Century. Though German "civilization" were more worthy of such a term and its associations as Kultur ten times over, would it become any Potentate and his advisers to impose it on so many countries at such a cost in suffering as all this--and more?

But Kaiser Wilhelm and his crew of State-at-any-price men impose not on other peoples only: they impose on their own kith and kin. Look at these three sad and apprehensive figures playing the Loan Game--the first, the second, the third Loan! Children, says the artist, passing the coin from one hand to another's, and getting richer at each pass!! Yes, children, the German people treated so by a few dominies. State dominies and the Director (or dupe!) at Berlin! No people gains, every people loses by incurring a Debt; but in Germany, and to-day! to incur an indebtedness, contract a loss, does not suffice; the people must not know it.