Читать книгу Kultur in Cartoons - Louis Raemaekers - Страница 5

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THIS cartoon is not in the least allegorical, and it is far less terrible than the reality. For the simple reason is that children torn to pieces by high explosives are far more horrible to look at than children with their throats cut.

Had these blood cartoons of Raemaekers been published in the spring of 1914, the artist would have been considered a maniac.

But in the spring of 1916 we know him to be a man portraying the truth, giving us the doings of the German Emperor and his satellites in colored pictures, and a very mild interpretation of them at that. For it is a fact that no man could bear to look at or consider the real truth of what William of Germany has done through the hands of others, of the horrors that he has committed against women who cannot here accuse him, against children of whose very names he knows nothing.

But their accusations are heard and their names remembered by those whose eternal business it is to hear and record, and the silence of those civilized nations who have said nothing before the doings of the infamous One has spoken where silence is heard as well as speech.

Just as St. Paul stood by in silence at the martyrdom of St. Stephen, so have they stood at the martyrdom of these Innocents, and just as he uttered that lamentable cry in the Temple of Jerusalem, so will they cry in his very words, but without his justification of holiness:

“I stood by and consented.”

H. DE VERE STACPOOLE.