Part 28

"The world has suffered much too long. O wonder of the ages-- O marvel of all time-- This wonderful great patience of the peoples! How long, O Lord, how long?"

The answer cannot come too soon for the good of the world.

JOHN OXENHAM.

The Kaiser: "Don't bother about your people, Tino. People only have to applaud what we say."]

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THE CHRISTMAS OF KULTUR, A.D. 1915

Mary, worn with grief and fear, covers her emaciated face with scarred hands, as she kneels in prayer before the infant Jesus. Joseph, grown old and feeble, nails up a barricade of planks to strengthen the door against the missiles of Kultur already bursting through it and threatening the sleeping child. So in that first Christmas, nineteen centuries ago, he saved Mary's child from the baby-massacre ordered by Herod to preserve his own throne.

Kultur, the gathered wisdom of the ages, has brought us back to the same Holy War. What a Christmas! What a Festival of Peace and goodwill towards men!

People ask: Why does God allow it? Is God dead? Foolish questions. When I was at school I had the good fortune to be under a great teacher whose name is honoured to-day. He used to tell us that the most terrible verse in the Bible was: "So He gave them up unto their own hearts' lust and they walked in their own counsels" (Ps. lxxxi, 13).

Man has the knowledge of good and evil; he has eaten of the tree and insists on going his own way. He knows best. Is not this the age of science and Kultur? We must not cry out if the road we have chosen leads to disaster.

Yet still the Child of Christmas lives and a divine light shines round His head. He sleeps.

A. SHADWELL.

JOSEPH: "The Holy War is at the door!"]

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SERBIA

Genius has set forth the most brutal characteristic of the Hun. In moments of triumph, invariably he is the bully, and, as invariably, he wallows in brutality--witness Belgium under his iron heel and, in this cartoon, stricken Serbia impotent to ward off the blow about to be dealt by a monstrous fist. That is the Teuton conception of War, Merry War (Lustige Krieg)! In the English prize-ring we have an axiom indelibly impressed upon novices--"Follow up one stout blow with another--quick!" That, also, is the consummate art of war. But when a man is knocked out we don't savage him as he lies senseless at our feet. The Hun does. His axiom is--"As you are strong, be merciless!"

In the small pig-eyes, in the gross, sensual lips, the mandril-like jaw, the misshapen ear, I see not merely a lifelike portrait of a Hun but a composite photograph of all Huns, something which should hang in every house in the kingdom until the terms of such a peace have been imposed which will make the shambles in Belgium, Poland, and Serbia an eternal nightmare of the past, never to be repeated in the future. And over the anaemic hearts of the Trevelyans, the Ramsay MacDonalds, the Arthur Ponsonbys, who dare to prattle of a peace that shall not humiliate Germany, I would have this cartoon tattooed, not in indigo, but in vermilion.

If Ulysses Grant exacted from the gallant Robert Lee "Unconditional Surrender," and if our generation approves--as it does--that grim ultimatum, what will be the verdict of posterity should we as a nation--we who have been spared the unspeakable horrors under which other less isolated countries have been "bled white"--descend to the infamy of a compromise between the Powers of Darkness and Light? The Huns respect Force, and nothing else. Mercy provokes contempt and laughter. I hold no brief for reprisals upon helpless women and children; I am not an advocate of what is called the "commercial extermination of Germany"; but it is my sincerest conviction that criminals must be punished. The Most Highest War Lord and his people, not excluding the little children who held high holiday when the Lusitania was torpedoed, are--CRIMINALS.

HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.

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THE LAST OF THE RACE

Raemaekers, the master of an infinite variety of moods and touch, reserves a special category of scorn for Von Tirpitz. Savage cruelty in war, the wanton destruction of life and property, the whole gospel of frightfulness--these things have been abandoned (so the historians tell us), not because savagery was bad morals but because it was the worst way of making war. It was wiser to take the enemy's property--and put it to your own use than to destroy it. If it was plundered it was wasted. It was wiser to spare men, women, and children, so that they should be better subjects if they remained conquered, less irreconcilable enemies, if they were restored to their old allegiance. Besides, murder, plunder, and rapine demoralized your men. They made them less efficient troops for fighting. Doubtless the argument is sound. But it would never have been accepted had not the horrors of savagery been utterly loathsome and repulsive to the nations that abandoned them.

Conventions in the direction of humanity are not, then, artificial restrictions in the use of force. They are natural restrictions, because all Christian and civilized people would far rather observe them than not. Germany has revelled in abandoning every restraint. Raemaekers shows the cruelty, the wickedness of this in scores of his drawings. Here it is its folly that he emphasizes.

The submarine is no longer a death-dealing terror. It has become a blubbering fish. And the author of its crimes is no diabolical triton, but a semi-imbecile old dotard, round whom his evil--but terrified--brood have clustered; they fawning on him in terror, he fondling them in shaky, decrepit fondness. Note the flaccid paunch, the withered top, and the foolish, hysterical face. How the full-dress cocked hat shames his nakedness!

And this, remember, is the German High Admiral as history will know him, when the futility of his crimes is proved, their evil put out of memory, and only their foolishness remains!

ARTHUR POLLEN.

VON TIRPITZ: No, my dears, I'm not sending any more of you to those wicked English; the survivors shall go to the Zoo."]

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