Louis Raemaekers 'Armed with pen and pencil" : How a Dutch cartoonist became world famous during the First World War

Arguably the most important man during the First World War gave no speeches, fired no bullets and yet changed the course of the most brutal conflict the world had ever seen armed only with a pen and pencil. LOUIS RAEMAEKERS (1869-1956) was a Dutch-born editorial cartoonist, hailed by The Times as ‘the one private individual who exercised a real and great influence on the course of the 1914-18 War’. In a time before television and mass media, Raemaekers’ cartoons in magazines and newspapers vividly brought the horrors of war to the attention of the public throughout the world. ‘Louis Raemaekers was instrumental in bringing the U.S. into the war, featuring the horrors, massacres and excesses, the suffering of small nations, which became associated with the German army,’ says Anita O'Brien, director and head curator of London’s Cartoon Museum.