LAND AND WATER. 
February 24, 1916. 
ARTISTS AS WAR RECORDERS. 
IT is a remarkable fact that the pageantry of war aad 
the clash of arms has all through the ages failed at the 
time of enactment to arouse the artist's talent to 
portray them. Even during the centuries when 
internecine strife was incessant and when men of genius 
abounded, capable of using the magnificent scenic material 
at tlieir disposal, inspiration never seems to have impelled 
them to hand down verisimilitudes of subjects that must 
have been present at their very doors. Even Velasquez, 
the greatest artist of all time, could only depict with courtly 
dignity a scene devoid of all action, " The Surrender of 
Breda." Turner, who was in his prime during the Napoleonic 
era (a landscapa and seascape painter, it is true, but one by no 
means devoid of the idea that he could limn the human figure) 
never put on to canvas what might have been triumphs in 
colour, both earthly and aerial, but rested content with a 
very uninspired " Battle of Trafalgar." 
Of reputations founded on the painting of warlike 
themes there have been many, but with few exceptions 
none have been gained contemporaneously with the event. 
Meissonier arose half a century after his " 1815," and Miss 
Thompson a quarter of a century after the " Roll Call. ' 
De Neu\ille, the greatest of all battle painters, Detaille and 
X'erestchagin are practically the only artists of renown who 
participated in the events which they chronicled or have 
had anything more to insure their accuracy and trutli in 
detail than hearsay evidence. 
And now it would seem as if even to-day the greatest 
war scenes that the world has ever witnessed would pass 
away without any of the great combatant nations producing 
an artist whose genius would impel him to hand on to 
posterity the unriyallcd feats of heroism and gallantry, let 
alone the tragic sides, that have marked its progress. As- 
suredly had one such been forthcoming the compelling 
spirit would have caused his appearance ere the war had gone 
so far into its second year. 
A Great Exception. 
It would really appear as little less than certain that the 
only mantle that has fallen has alighted on the shoulders of 
a denizen of a country and a race less likely than almost 
any other to produce an artist of fiery impetuosity and de- 
nunciation, and on a man whp has not had innate in his blood 
the great incentive of patriotism to impel him forward, as 
has been the case with Mr. Louis Raemaekers, the Dutch 
artist, since the very outset of the war. 
The public of every nation on whose behalf he has taken 
up his pencil, owes him a debt of gratitude that can only be 
repaid by furthering the propaganda which he so earnestly 
strives to disseminate, and this can in no wise be better done 
than by .encouraging the reproduction in their most accurate 
forms of the grim realities, the scenes of rapine, slaughter, 
and desolation, and the indictment that he has brought against 
those who are answerable for them. 
It is fortunate that not only do his cartoons lend them- 
selves admirably to the reproducer's skill, but that that 
skill has never been so capable as to-day of translating work 
created by the pencil, the crayon, or the flat tints of colour. 
Meissonier, Miss Thompson and others owed their vast 
popularity to the skill of engravers who were able to repro- 
duce in their thousands pictures which would otherwise have 
been seen only in public galleries or private collections. 
But present processes of reproduction allow of its l-,eing done 
witiiout the intervention of another's hand ; iience their 
groat merit. It is no exaggeration to say that tlic thousands 
of visitors who still flock to the Exhibition of Raemaekers' 
Cartoons at the Fine Art Society's in New Bond Street, and 
who have the opportunity of comparing originals with repro- 
ductions side by side, cannot distinguish b.-twecn them save 
by a slight reduction in size. 
The enterprise of Raemaekers' publishers wliichhas pro- 
duced these fascimiles, enables the public to obtain practically 
all of them that are deemed desirable for publication at a cost 
for one iiundred of two shillings each ; for that number of 
subjects, selected by the artist, will be published very shortly 
for tlie sum of ten guineas, in a sum{)tuous volume which 
will furnish not only to the present day, but to the future, 
the most unexampled record of an altogether unexampled 
event in the world's history 
SOME BOOK REVIEWS. 
In a four volume work entitled The War Manual, Lieut. - 
Col. C. C. Anderson has set out to combine the various military 
text books in existence into one single manual. Two volumes 
have already been published by Messrs. T. Fisher Unwin 
at five shillings each ; the first of these deals with the 
theoretical side of war, strategy, the laws and usages of war, 
martial law, and general information concerning the British 
Empire and other nations from the military point of view, 
as well as a section devoted to first aid to the wounded. 
The second volume, just published, is devoted to recon- 
naissance, strategical concentration, marches, intercom- 
munication, the attack, the defence, and field work generally. 
It must be said that the author has done his work well, 
extracting from the dry bones of text books the essence of 
their matter, and presenting it in such a form that the junior 
officer, in search of a method for getting at his work in the 
quickest and best possible way, cannot do better than take 
these two volumes to help him in his study. 
We await the following volumes of the series with con- 
siderable interest, and trust that the high level set by the 
first two parts of the work may be maintained to its end, 
for by that means a concise cyclop;edia of military informa- 
tion, of extreme value to the soldier, will have been produced. 
" War Letters of an American Woman." By Marie van Vorst 
(John Lane.) 6s. 
These letters are addressed to various friends, and they 
all concern the writer's experiences of the war, in France, 
in England, and in Italy. Since the writing is often done from 
the American .Ambulance in Paris, there is much of the extreme 
pathos of the hospital wards expressed— and much of the 
writer's sympathy with the Allied cause and realisation of 
German infamies in the first days of the war. Thus — " We 
speak of the German system. What is it ? Within the con- 
fines of a single country, a forced, autocratic materialism. 
Whereas, as you see, this wide response of the British 
Empire from shore to shore . . . this mighty answer, 
this evidence of affection, this consolidation without com- 
pulsion, why. it seems to me, that it is one of the finest 
things in history ... 1 believe it all comes from a certain 
idealism." 
And again, with regard to the Crown Prince — " He packed 
up boxes full of her treasures, tliem marked with the Red 
Cross to ensure their resjxjct by the .'Mlied armies, and shipped 
them to Germany, a robber who should have been a prince, 
a murderer wlio should have been a knight." 
Such expressions of opinion are numerous throughout 
the book, and the temptation to quote is hard to resist. There 
is, on every page, a broad understanding and depth of sym- 
pathy that comes of having seen and experienced the rcall ics 
of war, The letters as a whole form one of the best and most 
human stories that the war has produced. 
Lovers of detective fiction will probably not have for- 
gotten Cleek, the " man of forty faces." In The Riddle 
of the Night (Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 6s.), Mr. T. W. Han- 
shew recalls CIcek for the solving of a murder mystery that 
takes us little farther than Wimbledon Common, and yet 
for breathless excitement and complexity will be hard to beat. 
Unhke most detectives of fiction, Cleek is human enough to 
acknowledge himself at fault more than once in the course 
of his work, though the clues that lead nowhere are so many, 
and the possibilities of this particular crime are so great, that 
the most perfect detective would be forced to confess himself 
bafiled at times. The identity of the miscreant is well con- 
cealed to the end, and, save that there are almost too many 
characters and too many false scents, a fault that many readers 
will commend, the story is thrilling enough to satisfy the most 
exacting. 
There is much to amuse in Youth Unconquerable, by 
Percy Ross (Heincmann, 6s. net), although the book consists 
of frankly impossible situations and a good proportion of the 
characters are' impossible people. The main exponent of 
unconquerable youth is Cherry Hawthorn, who is introduced 
to the reader in the midst of her Oxford career, just as she is 
faced by the knowledge that, owing to her father's impro\'i- 
dence, she will be compelled to earn her own living. \ 
delightful Scotch duke, an extremely witty aviator, and a 
guardian with ideas of coercion more attuned to the middle 
ages tlian to these times, are incidental to Cherry's career 
and development. The cliief attraction of the book lies 
in the interest attendant on happenings which we know to 
have been quite impossible ; this, and the witty method of 
writing, maintain the " grip " of the work to its end, and, 
for the rest, it is a pleasure to meet with a book utterly devoid 
of immorals, and frankly designed to amuse rather than to 
point a lesson, 
