WW1 Political Cartoons

In this cartoon the Germans are portrayed as a bull running amok in a "neutral china shop" bearing the flags of the neutral nations. The caption reads: "I shall tell everybody that I was goaded into it." The point of the cartoon is that the Germans would attack neutral countries, such as Belgium, with the excuse that they had been provoked by the actions of the victims. The original cartoon appeared in the British satirical magazine Punch, during the early part of the War.

In this cartoon, a British soldier laden with his heavy kit and weapons offers to help a lady with her shopping bags. The cartoon, like many others like it, glorifies the self sacrifice and gentility of the Allied troops, in contrast to the rapacious German soldiers. This cartoon appeared in Punch.

In this cartoon the German Kaiser is seen mocking the Belgian King, telling him that he has lost everything. The Belgian replies that he has not lost his soul. The cartoon refers to the fact that neutral Belgium has been invaded and largely overrun by the Germans as they sought to outflank the French and British armies by pushing along the English Channel towards Paris. The Belgians were vastly outnumbered but fought bravely against the Germans.

In this cartoon a Doctor is seen examining a British ship captain's sore throat and recommending that he gargle with salt water. The skipper replies that he has been gargling because he has already been torpedoed six times. The cartoon alludes to the success of the German u-boats in sinking British shipping. It portrays the British seamen as stoic in the face of danger.

This is a cartoon by Louis Raemaekers.

The artist writes: "The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few": here is only one, but he is quite sufficient—"the reaper whose name is Death," a skeleton over whose bones the peasant's dress—a shirt and a pair of ragged trousers—hangs loose. The shirt-sleeves of the skeleton are turned well up, as if for more active exertion, as he grasps the two holds of the huge scythe with which he is sweeping down the harvest.

This is not war of the old type, with its opportunities for chivalry, its glories, and its pride of manly strength. The German development of war has made it into a mere exercise in killing, a business of slaughter. Which side can kill most, and itself outlast the other? When one reads the calculations by which careful statisticians demonstrate that in the first seventeen months of the war Germany alone lost over a million of men killed in battle, one feels that this cartoon is not exaggerated. It is the bare truth.

The cartoon depicts a dead nurse being thrown to the swine. The cartoon refers to the execution of American Nurse Edith Cavell who was working in Belgium at the time of the German occupation. She was tried, convicted and executed for spying, although there was little evidence to support the charge and the American government protested. Although millions died in this war, the execution of this single civilian nurse was seized upon by Allied propagandists and cartoonists as the epitome of German barbarity. Note that the swine in the cartoon are wearing monocles and pointed helmets typical of German Prussian officers.

In this cartoon by Raemaekers, a young British girl cries at the bedside of her dead mother, killed in a zeppellin air raid on London. The cartoonist very effectively turns the "triumph" of the successful German bombing raid into a lament for all innocent civilians killed in the war. The answer to the little girl's question is, of course, that her mother had done nothing wrong and did not deserve her fate.