PIRATICAL WIT

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3189, 13 September 1917, Page 5

PIRATICAL WIT

THE HUN COMIC PRESS AND THE U-BOATS COARSE JESTING If a messenger from Mars read German, and was reduced to the terrible diet of the German comic papers as his sole literary .nourishment, ho would imagine that the war was confined exclusively to U-boats and Britain. A perfect epidemic of U-boat jests, jokes, and caricatures is raging in the journals which tho Germans look upon as their comio Press. Artistic "Jugend," "Miegende Blatter" (tho German "Punch"), "Lustige Blatter," 'TJlk," and "Kladderadatsch" are vying with one another in hurling ironical shafts at John Bull and glorifying .the pirate heroes, who, as Germans are -led to believe, havo set 'every British knee to quaking and every. British stomach to aching. "Lustige Blatter," which is published in Berlin, recently devoted an entire special number to submarines. Tho "U----boat terror" '(which is said te stalk through tho British land) and our "impending starvation" aro tho themes to which practically every professional jokemaker and cartoonist in the Fatherland is now addressing himself. Some of their efforts aro amusing; others are indifferently good; many aro utterly bad. Nearly all aro marked by tho coarseness and bile which are soldom missing from German "humour."

Lloyd George and Shipowner. "Jugend" depict 6 Mr. Lloyd George lolling iii the lap of luxury at No. 10 Downing Street, while receiving a visit from a portly and plutocratic shipowner. Quoth the latter: "I don't want to hurry you, Mi\ Lloyd George, but the fact is my last ship was sunk to-day. I hope by Christmas you'll succeed in finding coun-ter-measures!" , On tho opposite pace "Jugend has a full-page drawing entitled "John Bulls Dream of Cyclops." It shows a-'very much frightened Mr. Bull cowering in i'ear and trembling beneath his coverlets, as he looks out Upon a bedroom floor row become a surging sea of storm-tossed waves. Prom 'their lashed depths protrude countless slender iron masts, on top of' each a "one-eyed- periscope" in the shape of a dragon's head gleaming fire and ra»e In r whatever direction ho turns his'affirlghted gaze Mr.JiJull sees nothing but a, "U-boat Cyclops.' Here is a'another "Jugaad' joke: A Uue-dra-wing harps again on Britain's "hunger" •' and "fears." John Bull is .toasting.a .meagre crust of bread over his "Tate fire.' Enter Death. . Deathi "Greetings, Mr. John Bull!'.' Mr. Bull: "Good heavens! You here! I thought you were in Germany!" • Another merry "Jugend" quip illustrates a tired and haggard Neptune feebly gripping a 'limp trident—emblematic of Britannia's "lost supremacy of the sea." Death, in the guisß of a grinning skeleton, crouches at his back fiddling a fiendish lullaby- of Britain's impending' doom. From out of the waves surging round Neptune's crumbling island domicile tho first of victorious German's sticks forth, in the act of*delivering a final and. annihilating blow.

U-Boats and Cupid. How joy-intoxicated present-day Germany, has become over the feats of Üboats is indicated by the disappearance of the god-like military officer of olden times as the beau ideal of Gorman womankind's heart and fancy. His place has been pre-empted by the U-boat commander. "Lustige Blatter" devotes another page to Love and Piracy. A U-boat commander -is breathing words of passion in the cars of his fair one. Intertwined among drawings showing him at his murderous work for "Kaiser and Empire''—liners and merchantmen plunging ignomimously towards Jones's.locker—is this bit of doggerel:— I. sank the good ship; Marathon, - And' also'transports three. I sank a hundred thousand tons One day in. our North Sea. ■ No spot in all the world is safe ■from our U craft so bold. ', ' Yet I my self, a U-boat man, . Have now been torpe-doed. To make the .-point, of the closing stanzas, Cupid, behind the torpedo tube' of a U-boat, is seen firing a bull's-eye at a target.consisting of a heart! -

America and U-boats. "S'implicissimus," the famous and .caustic Munich ■ periodical, vents its TTbo.it glee mainly at the expense of the United States and «s plan for helping Britain .to check submarine piracy. In the front page of aTecent issue is the inevitable.figure of John Bull, about to drown. Clinging with his last ounce of strength to tho shattered mast of a submarined liner, he holds aloft a bag of gold. President Wilson, trousers rolled up to the knee, is wading through tho ✓aves -/towards the doomed man. "I can't rescue you," he shouts to John Bull, "but perhaps I can still" save the .money!" ' , . . ,', " The alleged excessive slenderness of British women is a generation-old stock-in-trade for German humorists. "Hlk' has a page drawing, entitled "1917 English Fashions." It pictures English women trying on dresses in a modish West End shop, each one of them worn to skin and bones by tho "famine caused bv U-boats. Quoth an old maid, gazing at herself in a mirror: "Oh, well, the German U-boats have done one good thing, anyhow. Never before have tho slender lines of us Englishwomen shown to such advantage!" < "Jugend" digresses from humour to sentiment, in order to idealise the humanity" of U-boats. It devotes a full double-page drawing in *» «"> heartrending snecticle of "A German Üboat Towing Lifeboats Containing the Ptbw-5 of Destroyed Enemy Ships, bonder: says Mr. P W. Wile, the author of the article, if this _ oicture is meant to immortalise the crime whicti Mr. Alfred Noyes relates-of a *f™nne which was actually (owing boatloads of rescued men, but which submerged denly when it scented danger to itself from an avenging destroyer, dragging down to the sea with it two boatloads of men whom it had only a moment before "mercifully" taken prisoner!