Obituary

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MR. LOUIS

RAEMAEKERS

A FIERCE SATIRIST I

Mr. Louis Raemaekers, the biting antiGerman cartoonist of the 1914-18 War, died yesterday at Scheveningen, near The Hague, at the age of 87.

It has been said of Raemaekers that he was the one private individual who exercised a real and great influence on the course of the 1914-18 War. There were a dozen or so people-Emperors, Kings, statesmen, and commanders-in-chief-who obviously, and notoriously, shaped policies and guided events. Outside that circle of the great, Louis Raemaekers stands conspicuous as the one man who, without any assistance of title or office, indubitably swayed the destinies of peoples.

At the outbreak of war in 1914 Germany made enormous efforts to win Holland to her side by attempts to purchase the sympathy of the Dutch Press, and by endeavouring to influence the minds of the Dutch people through the pens and platform speeches of a whole corps of professors. That the effort was a failure was chiefly due to the courage of the Telegraaf, of Amsterdam, in which Raemaekers's cartoons were published, and especially to those cartoons themselves. In those early months of the war Raemaekers's influence was confined to Holland; but gradually the power and passion of his drawings in the Telegraaf began to attract the attention of the editors of newspapers in other countries, and early in 1915 albums of reproductions of his first cartoons, 'published in Holland, were already beginning to make their way in the Allied and neutral countries of Europe. By the end of