Produced by Chris Curnow, Anne Storer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) RAEMAEKERS' CARTOON HISTORY OF THE WAR [Illustration: Louis Raemaekers] RAEMAEKERS' CARTOON HISTORY OF THE WAR COMPILED BY J. MURRAY ALLISON Editor of _Raemaekers' Cartoons_, _Kultur in Cartoons_, _The Century Edition de Luxe Raemaekers' Cartoons_, _etc._ VOLUME ONE THE FIRST TWELVE MONTHS OF WAR NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1918 Copyright, 1918, by THE CENTURY CO. FOREWORD In all the welter of the tragic upheaval which is shattering institutions once thought immutable, condemning millions to physical death and awakening other millions to spiritual life, making staggering discoveries of unexpected human strength or weakness, thrusting men into fame one day or to oblivion the next, there has been nothing more dramatic than the sudden manifestation of the genius of the Dutchman, Louis Raemaekers, who, as Europe recoiled from the first shock of German barbarity, threw down his brush for his pencil and by the intensity of his spirit aroused the compassion and fired the anger of the world with his cartoons of the Belgian violation. He, more than any other individual, has made intensely clear to the people the single issue upon which the war is joined. More than cartoonist, he is teacher and preacher, with the vision, faith, and intensity of a St. Francis, a Luther, or a Joan of Arc. On August 1, 1914, we find him a quiet, gentle man, the son of a country editor, happy in his family, devout, contemplative, loving beauty and peace, contentedly painting the good and lovely things he saw among the tulip-fields and waterways, the cattle and the wind-mills of his own native Holland before the gray-clad millions of the Kaiser burst into the low countries with fire and sword. Then comes the miracle of his transformation; the idyllic is thrust aside by the hideous reality; beauty is drowned in a bestial orgy of force; and in place of the passive painter arises the fiery preacher; the brush is discarded for the pencil, and the pencil in his hands becomes an avenging sword, because by it millions of people have been aroused to a clear-cut realization of the fact that the issue of this war is no less than Slavery and Autocracy versus Freedom and Democracy.