Kultur in Cartoons: With accompanying notes by well-known English writersRaemaekers, Louis
History
Kultur in Cartoons: With accompanying notes by well-known English writers
Raemaekers, Louis
World War, 1914-1918 -- Caricatures and cartoons
The Roman Emperor Tiberius, that gloomy tyrant, is said to have remarked
that governing the Roman people was like holding a wolf by the ears.
Here the position is reversed. The patient, obedient, and faithful
German people, for such, however infatuated, we must allow it has been,
is represented as by no means like a wolf, but more like the traditional
opposite, a sheep. But even the sheep may turn if driven beyond measure.
Meanwhile, this caricature may help to bring home to it the true
position.
The Kaiser, stout, with all his heavy, comfortable clothes, his military
cloak, his helmet, and boots and spurs, one of which he digs into his
beast of burden, rides comfortably on the back of “German Michael,” the
common soldier, and cheerfully bids him “hold out” and struggle up the
toilsome hill of victory, with its shifting, clogging soil.
The desperate agony and pain of the poor victim, the drops of sweat
falling from his brow, his eyes starting from his head, are well
depicted, and also the complacency of the emperor, blended with senile
vanity and self-glorification. His aspiration not long ago was to be the
“Young Man of the Sea.” Here he is depicted as the “Old Man” of that
element.
HERBERT WARREN.
[Illustration]
_The Satyr of the Sea_
It is always difficult, after a series of catastrophic events, to go
back to one’s mental outlook of the time before they happened. But if
the civilized world could recapture its pre-war view, I believe it would
realize the most startling of all the results of Armageddon to be that
we now take Germany’s outrages on neutrals for granted. At first the
bulk of us simply could not believe the tale of the horrors inflicted on
non-combatant men, women, and children of innocent and neutral Belgium.
But Germany had at any rate made Belgium a belligerent, before beginning
them. Now that similar horrors should fall on men, women, and children
of Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and America, surprises no more: it
has become a mere matter of course.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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