“My Master Asks You to Look After These Peace Doves”
Raemaekers in this excellent cartoon is not less direct, although he is at the same time more subtle, than in some others. Holland, typified by the seated figure, has an expression of amazement and suspicion, if not actual fear, upon her face. The Boche is not content with merely offering the basket of spurious doves, but has thrust it upon Holland’s lap. The bearer who, in the name of his master, asks the latter to look after the “doves” is obviously trying to look agreeable as well as innocent, but the battered helmet and the leer upon his face serve to betray him.
Holland, says her great artist in this picture, has no use for “peace doves,” or, at least, for those of the breed that wear the spiked helmets of the Prussians. One may suspect, as the artist and Holland herself apparently do, that the “doves,” symbolic of peace, may prove the stormy petrels of war. They may be said to typify the propagandists who, having settled in Holland from the early days of the war, have carried on a crafty campaign of misrepresentation and calumny not alone against the Allies, but against the country which has hitherto preserved neutrality and sacrificed so much in works of benevolence in regard to Belgian and other refugees, and the British airmen and seamen which the accidents and tides of war have brought to or thrown upon her shores.
The “doves of peace,” and there are many Germans now resident in Holland, have probably all of them “Mannlichers” as well as spiked helmets for use if needed.
In regard to all transactions with the Huns or their master, Holland will do well to remember Virgil’s oft-quoted line: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”
Every “dove,” whether in the guise of propagandist, commercial representative, official, or agent for the purchase of foodstuffs, and whether bringing a cage of “peace doves” or bags of gold, is a potential enemy to the peace and independence of Holland. The triumph of the Central Empires means the subjugation of the Dutch people, and the “peace doves” within her borders would soon quit their cooing and be transformed into the “Prussian Eagle’s brood.”
CLIVE HOLLAND.