The "Land & Water" edition of Raemaekers' cartoons, volume 1Raemaekers, Louis
History
The "Land & Water" edition of Raemaekers' cartoons, volume 1
Raemaekers, Louis
World War, 1914-1918 -- Caricatures and cartoons
Here in the artist’s pencil is a monument to those heroes greater than
pinnacles of marble, of beaten brass and carven stone; a monument that
has travelled over the world, has spoken to posterity more clearly,
more convincingly, and more rememberingly than ever written or
word-of-mouth speech could do. It is to the everlasting honour of the
people of the Anzacs that they refrained from echoing the idle tales
which ran whispering in England that the Dardanelles campaign was a
cruel blunder, that the blood of the Anzacs’ bravest and best had been
uselessly spilt, that their splendid young lives had been an empty
sacrifice to the demons of Incompetence and Inefficiency. To those in
Australia who in their hearts may feel that shreds of truth were woven
in the rumours--that the Anzacs were spent on a forlorn hope, were
wasted on a task foredoomed to failure--let this simple drawing bring
the comfort of the truth.
The artist has seen deeper and further than most. The Turkish armies
held from pouring on Russia and Serbia, from thumping down the scales
of neutrality in Greece and Roumania perhaps, from massing their troops
with the Central Powers; the Kaiser chained on the East and West for
the critical months when men and munitions were desperately lacking
to the Allies, when the extra weight of the Turks might have freed
the Kaiser’s power of fierce attack on East and West--this is what we
already know, what the artist here tells the wide world of the part
played by the heroes of the Dardanelles. In face of this, who dare hint
they suffered and died in vain?
BOYD CABLE
[Illustration: “Just a moment--I’m coming.”]
The Holy War
Surely the artist when he drew this was endowed with the wisdom of the
seer, the vision of the prophet. For it was drawn before the days in
which I write, before the Russian giant had proved his greatness on
the body of the Turk, before the bludgeon-strokes in the Caucasus, the
heart-thrust of Erzerum, the torrent of pursuit of the broken Turks to
Mush and Trebizond.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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