So accompanied and swelling with pride the conquering hero swaggers on over the bleached bones that bear witness to his triumph. He has decked his repulsive form with the incongruous trappings of civilization, and his foul visage wears an air of ineffable self-satisfaction and arrogant disdain. In his own conceit he cuts a splendid figure and is the object of universal admiration. From his girdle hang the heads of his latest victims and in his right hand he carries, delicately poised as a scepter and sign of sovereignty, a cudgel tipped with the hand of a child hacked off at the wrist. This is his title of honor. The savage beasts that accompany him cannot aspire to such majesty; they do not prey on their own kind. And that is how a neutral sees the German hero. ARTHUR SHADWELL. [Illustration] _Belgium_ It appears to me that Raemaekers’ wonderful cartoons more often than not fall naturally into two main classes: the subtle and the direct. In both methods of appeal he is a past-master, and his message never fails to drive itself home, either through the medium of one’s intellect or one’s heart. Here we have a good and vivid example of the direct method of gaining our sympathy. An appeal to the emotional rather than to the intellectual within us. The woes of devastated Belgium, of its starving population, of its desolate homes, of its orphaned children, may be said by some to be an “oft told tale.” But surely none looking upon this most poignant drawing can fail to understand much of the tragedy and misery brought about by the German occupation of Belgian soil and the methods of _Kultur_ which for a period of three years now have held sway in that unhappy land. Those of us who know the facts--the things which do not always get into the papers, as the phrase is--the wilful starvation of the poor by their relentless conquerors, can best understand and appreciate the artist’s message. What a pathetic picture this is! The starved woman--all the roundness and beauty of womanhood and motherhood brutally stamped out of her face and figure by the state of things brought about by the rule of the Hun; the child clinging to her mother with the terror and amazement which is the most piteous of all expressions that can come into and be graven upon the face of childhood. Both bear in their faces and forms the cruel marks of starvation and suffering.