"Their souls are Mine. Their lives were in thy hand;-- Of thee I do require them!
"The fetor of thy grim burnt-offerings Comes up to Me in clouds of bitterness. Thy fell undoings crucify afresh Thy Lord--who died alike for these and thee. Thy works are Death:--thy spear is in My side,-- O man! O man!--was it for this I died? Was it for this?-- A valiant people harried to the void,-- Their fruitful fields a burnt-out wilderness,-- Their prosperous country ravelled into waste,-- Their smiling land a vast red sepulchre,-- --Thy work!
"Thou art the man! The scales were in thy hand. For this vast wrong I hold thy soul in fee. Seek not a scapegoat for thy righteous due, Nor hope to void thy countability. Until thou purge thy pride and turn to Me,-- As thou hast done, so be it unto thee!"
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The cartoon requires no words to tell the story. It holds chapter upon chapter of tragedy. "I will send you to Germany after your father!" Where is the boy's father in Germany? In a prison? Mending roads? Lying maimed and broken in a rude hospital? Digging graves for comrades about to be shot? Or, more likely still, in a rough unknown stranger's grave? Was the father dragged from his home at Louvain, or Tirlemont, or Vise, or one of the dozen other scenes of outrage and murder--a harmless, hard-working citizen-dragged from his hiding-place and made to suffer "exemplary justice" for having "opposed the Kaiser's might," but in reality because he was a Belgian, for whose nasty breed there must be demonstrations of Germany's frightfulness _pour encourager les autres_?
And the child's mother and sisters--what of them? He is dejected, but not broken. There is dignity in the boy's defiant pose. The scene has, perhaps, been enacted hundreds of times in the cities of Belgium, where poignant grief has come to a nation which dared to be itself.
Follow this boy through life and observe the stamp of deep resolve on his character. Though he be sent "to Germany after your father," though he be for a generation under the German jack-boot, his spirit will sustain him against the conqueror and will triumph in the end.
"If I find you again looking so sad, I'll send you to Germany after your father."]