"And the fool, he called her his lady fair" / C.D. Gibson

Gibson draws Kaiser Wilhelm II—identifiable by his medals and imperial bearing—lurching back in horror as he leans over a grand bed to discover that his paramour 'War,' whom he courted so eagerly, is a skeletal corpse in evening dress, jewels draped over bare bones, cigarette still raised in bony fingers. Medicine bottles clutter the nightstand; smoke curls through a palatial background. The title, drawn from the medieval trope of the loathsome lady, frames Wilhelm as the self-deceived romantic fool who mistook a seductive war-fever for glory. Published weeks after the U.S. entered World War I, the image aligns Gibson's magazine squarely with the Allied cause, depicting Germany's militarism as a fatal infatuation with Death herself—vain, bejeweled, and already rotting.