Part 39

Our cartoonist, it will be noticed, has placed sledge hammers in the hands of both John and Michael, rather primitive weapons, but most admirably adapted for "crushing." And nothing short of crushing will satisfy the Allies, despite the futile wiles and whines of Messrs. Trevelyan, Ponsonby, Morel, and Macdonald. Crushed they will and must be to fine powder. The hammer strokes are falling now with a persistence and force which, at long last, reverberates in the cafes and beer gardens of Munich and Berlin. The Teuton tongue--a hideous concatenation of noise at its best--must be almost inarticulate to-day in its guttural chokings and splutterings. "Frightfulness" is coming home to roost.

With all our hearts we hold out the glad hand to Michael. Come in, and stay in--bless you!

HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL.

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FIVE ON A BENCH

All visions and poems of justice have been full of the refrain of deposuit potentes de sede; but the bracing reality of such a revolution is lost by certain effects of antiquity, by the mists which make the past somewhat monochrome, and by the exalted equality of death. To say that Belisarius became a beggar means little to us when it seems only the difference between a rich and a tattered toga. We do not picture Belisarius in a patched pair of trousers: but then we have no reason to be angry with Belisarius. But whenever real tyranny and honest wrath are reborn among men, there will always be an instant necessity to represent the great reversal in the graphic colours of contemporary fact. Raemaekers' cartoon, representing the tyrants of Europe reduced to that very hopeless modern beggary to which they have driven many thousands of very much better men, is perhaps of all his pictures the most grim, or what would be called vindictive. I think that such revenge is in truth merely realization. The victims of the war have to sit on such real benches in such real rags. And being one of the fiercest, it is also one of the most delicate of the Dutch artist's studies. Nothing could be truer than the insolent and swollen decay of the Jew Ferdinant; or the more effeminate collapse of the Kaiser, the very spike on whose helmet droops with sentiment.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

In a year and a half.]

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WHAT ABOUT PEACE, LADS?

War--so certain of their own prophets have said--is a "national industry of Germany." Here we see a German chevalier d' industrie attempting to escape with his swag. Never in modern times has a nation gone to war with a more cynical and shameless determination to make the campaign pay for itself by the plunder of private property. Quite recently an order was found on the body of a German, enjoining all officers to assist in the "patriotic duty" of "draining financially the occupied territories." We are dealing, not with an honourable and civilized nation, but with a band of murdering brigands. The keepers of the national conscience have devised a monstrous and barbarous code of ethics, in which "patriotism" is the sole duty, and the tribal god the only arbiter of right and wrong. As in Roman law, the property of an enemy is for a German res nullius--it has no owner. And now the prospect of any further loot on a large scale seems remote. The speculation has turned out badly, and the robber would be glad to cut his losses. The guardians of the law are at his heels, and do not mean to let him escape. But will they be able to make him disgorge? That will not be easy; and what atonement can be made for the innocent blood which drops from those pitiful spoils?

W. R. INGE.

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THE LIBERATORS

This is one of those cartoons in which the neutral in Raemaekers speaks with peculiar force. Such a picture by a Britisher would reasonably be discounted as unduly prejudiced, for it is none too easy for us in our present stresses to see the other fellow's point of view--in this difficult business of the blockade for an instance.

That friendly championing of the rights of neutrals suffering under the outrageous tyranny of the British Navy is a thing to which only the detached humour of a neutral can do justice. He can testify to the way in which the giant strength of that navy, whether in peace or war, has been used in the main not in the giants' tyrannous way; he can make allowance for the exigencies which have caused occasional arbitrariness under the stress of war or even in some untactful moment of peace; he can contrast the two main opposing navy's notions of justice, courtesy, seamanship--which is sportsmanship.

He can recall that no single right whether of combatant or neutral, of state or individual, guaranteed by international law, which the Germans have found it convenient or "necessary" to violate has been left unviolated; that there is no single method or practice of war condemned by the common consent of civilization but has been employed by men who even have the candour to declare that they stand above laws and guarantees.

And therefore he can make grim, effective fun of the sinister bandit with his foot planted on the shackled prisoner that lies between two murdered victims fatuously taking in vain the name of freedom.

JOSEPH THORP.

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TOM THUMB AND THE GIANT

The reference in this cartoon is to an incident which, at the time of its occurrence, is said to have caused considerable indignation in Germany. A Zeppelin, having been on a raiding expedition to England, was hit on the return journey, and dropped into the North Sea. The crew, clinging to the damaged airship, besought the captain of a British trawler to take them off, but the captain, seeing that the Zeppelin crew far outnumbered his own, declined to trust them, and left them to their fate. Whether the trawler's captain actually "put his thumb unto his nose and spread his fingers out" is a matter for conjecture, but under the circumstances it is scarcely likely.

The whole point lies in the German view of the trawler's captain and his inhuman conduct. He knew, perfectly well, that if he rescued the crew of the Zeppelin, the probable reward for himself and crew would be a voyage to the nearest German port and interment in a prison camp for the remainder of the war--and plenty of reliable evidence is forthcoming as to the treatment meted out to men in German prison camps. He knew, also, that these men who besought his aid were returning from one of the expeditions which have killed more women and children in England than able-bodied men, that they had been sharing in work which could not be described as even of indirect military value, but was more of the nature of sheer murder. And Germany condemned his conduct by every adjective that implied brutality and barbarity.

The unfortunate thing about the German viewpoint is that it takes into consideration only such points as favour Germany, a fact of which this incident affords striking evidence.

E. CHARLES VIVIAN.

"Come and save me. You know I am so fond of children."]

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"WE HAVE FINISHED OFF THE RUSSIANS"