The very first of his war cartoons indicated the prophetic vision of the man, and gave the first evidence of his inspiration and genius. It is called "Christendom after Twenty Centuries" and shows a bowed and weeping figure crouching under the sword and lash. It was drawn on that fateful day August 1st, 1914. The intensity of emotion shown in this drawing revealed his power for the first time. To Raemaekers himself it came as a vision and a summons. The landscape painter disappeared, and in his place arose a champion of civilization, throbbing with sublime rage and pity, clothed with authority, and invested with a weapon more powerful than the ruthlessness it indicts. When the stories of the Belgian horror began to circulate in Holland, Raemaekers, like the rest of the humane world, refused to credit them. His own mother was German; he had spent many happy years in Germany; he knew the German peasant as a kindly and happy, if rather stupid fellow; it was incredible that such men could have done the awful things alleged. But the tales persisted, and although the evidence of the wracked and broken refugees who poured into his country by tens of thousands seemed irrefutable, he could not believe it, and readily seized upon the common supposition that the terrible stories were the product of the imagination of an overwrought and panic-stricken people. At length he could remain in doubt no longer, and quietly slipped over the frontier to verify for himself the truth or falsehood of the accusations that had already made Germany guilty of the foulest crimes ever perpetrated in the name of war since the dawn of civilization. What he actually saw with his own eyes he does not tell. But a hundred of his early cartoons bear witness to the burning impression made upon his soul. Raemaekers, like others who have seen them, cannot speak of these unnamable horrors, but can only express his consuming pity or his white-hot rage in the medium that lies nearest his hand. On one occasion only has he publicly referred to his experiences in Belgium. It was at a dinner given him by the artists and literary men of London at the Savage Club, where, pointing to the portraits and trophies of Peary, Scott, Nansen, Shackleton, and other explorers which hang on the walls, he said: "I, too, have been an explorer, Gentlemen. I have explored a hell, and it was terror unspeakable."