LAND AND WATER 
RAEMAEKERS' INDICTMENT. 
December ii, 1915. 
The Kaiser : "At the command 'Gott mitt Uns' you will go forward. 
A SIGHT of Raemaekers' War Cartoons is a 
public duty. They arc now to be seen at 
the Fine Arts Gallery, 148, New Bond Street. 
Mr. Louis Raemaekers is a native of Holland, 
and his cartoons have been appearing twice and thrice 
weekly in the Telegraaf of Amsterdam ever since hostili- 
ties beg an. They are the most awful indictment of Ger- 
many 's methods of war. " Frightfulness " is represented 
here in its ghastly reality. These pictures, with their 
haunting sense of beauty and their biting satire, might 
almost have been drawn by the finger of the Accusing 
Angel. As the spectator gazes on them the full weight 
of the horrible cruelty and senseless futility of war over- 
whelms the soul, and sinking helplessly beneath it, he 
feels inclined to as.^um2 the same attitude of despair as 
is shown in tha cartoon on the opposite page : 
" Christendom after Twenty Centuries." 
We are told that the German General Staff has seta 
price on the hsad of the artist, and we know he has been 
charged in the Dutch Courts with endangering the 
neutrality of Hollaid. We are not surprised. Never so 
long as "these pictures endure will the punishment of 
Germany cease for her crimes against Belgium first and 
forenn^t, but also for h3r studied brutality towards 
womc 1 and children. For the most part there is nothing 
horrible in these pictures in the usual sense of the word ; 
the horror lies in the vivid impression which thedraught- 
manship and, as we have said before, the sad beauty of 
the art leave on the mind. An exception perhaps would 
be made in No. 16, " From Liege to Ai.x-la-Chapelle" ; 
it is just a goods van on the railway, from under the 
closed doors of which red blood drips. We know what 
is inside it. Raemaekers' grim sense of humour is well 
depicted in No. 148, " The Marshes of Pinsk," which 
carries the legend, " The Kaiser said last spring, ' When 
the leaves fall you'll have peace.' They have it." Here is 
the desolate landscape of the marshes, the last leaves 
flutter down from the all but bare trees, and as far as 
the eye can reach the sodden land is littered with the 
corpses of German soldiers. 
The Kaiser is nearly always represented as a man 
of handsome, rather fine features, while his precious Heir 
is shown to be the inane bounder he is in real life. One 
laughs in sheer joy at the picture published just after 
the French success in Champagne, the Crown Prince being 
bowled over by a punch in the eye by a gay and gallant 
French infantry-man. Contrast the two types — German 
soldier and French soldier, and you behold as by a 
lightning flash the soni of the two nations. It is this 
extraordinary power of~" awakening the emotions, and 
