Raemaekers' Cartoon History of the War, Volume 1: The First Twelve Months of War
History
Raemaekers' Cartoon History of the War, Volume 1: The First Twelve Months of War
World War, 1914-1918 -- Caricatures and cartoons; World War, 1914-1918 -- Humor
A two-line advertisement announced his arrival in the British
metropolis. "Exhibition of war-cartoons by Raemaekers, Fine Arts
Galleries, Bond Street, admission one shilling," was all it said. While
Londoners are generally interested in new artists, Raemaekers appeared
at an inopportune time. For one thing, the public had been rather
surfeited with war-literature and war-pictures and the work of an
unknown foreign artist was scarcely likely to attract them, and for
another, it was within a few days of Christmas, everybody was leaving
London, and those who remained in town were bent on giving the troops
and the war-sufferers as merry a time as possible.
It was quite by chance that the art critic of the _London Times_ visited
the Bond Street Galleries a day or so before Christmas, and Raemaekers'
world-wide fame as it exists to-day may be said to date from the day
that the _Times_ in a two-column notice said, among other things, "this
neutral is the only genius produced by the war."
The campaign of publicity launched by the _Times_ was taken up by the
British and French press. The public flocked to view, and were stunned
as they had never been before by the damning record. The cumulative
effect of such pictures as "The Shields of Rosselaere," showing men,
women, and children forced to march in front of the German armies, "Men
to the right, women to the left," in which women and children are being
beaten with the butts of rifles; "The Exodus from Antwerp," "The Mothers
of Belgium," "The Widows of Belgium," and others which revealed
unimaginable depths of human agony, impressed the London crowd as by
a solemn ritual. They saw with a vividness hitherto unapproached the
hideousness of the war, the unequivocal brutality of the German method,
and the naked, insatiable greed in the German purpose. Not now could the
timidest soul believe that Germany was fighting a war of defense. Here
was the fact inescapable that civilization itself was threatened; here
was the whole carnival of lust and conquest as mercilessly depicted on
the faces of its agents as they themselves had trampled onward to their
shocking goal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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