Arf a mo Kaiser

Taking up the theme of ‘Fighting the Kaiser’, I’ve been doing a little exploring on the internet and found some very interesting material. 

Courtesy National Museum of Australia, Object number 1986.0117.4003

This image by British artist Bert Thomas was widely used in fund raising for tobacco for the troops.

Courtesy Imperial War Museum, London. IWM PST 10799

And staying with the tobacco for the troops theme, here's a cigarette lighter in the form of a caricature of the Kaiser from the Australian War Memorial collection.

Image courtesy AWM. REL31809

Must it come to this?

Australians couldn't fail to understand the implications of not enlisting, at least according to the recruiting authorities. I couldn't find an exact date for this poster, but it's the sort of thing you'd expect to find in the lead up to the two conscription campaigns in 1916 and 1917.

Image courtesy Australian War Memorial. ARTV06030. Artist B.E. Pike.

Many of the images I found were far more menacing than the Arf a Mo, Kaiser cartoon.

‘Destroy this mad brute’: A US Army recruitment poster, c. 1917. The dribbling ape, club in hand and wearing the pickelhaube helmet walks onto American soil, a half-naked women (Liberty, perhaps?) in his grasp.

Saint Valentine’s Day in the Fatherland.

It chanced that on the fourteenth day of February the boy Cupid strayed into the precincts of Potsdam, and came all unawares upon the War Lord; who deeming him to be an alien babe essayed to make a characteristic end of him.

Punch, vol.150, 16 Feb 1916, p.114