Remember Belgium is a 1918 Fourth Liberty Loan poster signed by Ellsworth Young. A spiked-helmet soldier in silhouette pulls a girl by the hand past a burning town, and the only text is the slogan and the loan.
What the sheet prints
Content note: the picture implies the abduction of a child by a soldier. It is described because that implication is how the poster works.
The soldier is a black shape with a pickelhaube. The girl is small, and he holds her hand. Behind them a town burns. Nothing is said about what happens next. The viewer is meant to supply it.
REMEMBER BELGIUM
Buy Bonds
Fourth
Liberty
Loan
Who issued it
The record names the U.S. Treasury Department, Fourth Liberty Loan, artist Ellsworth Young, 1918. The image is the Library of Congress copy, LC-USZC4-4441, public domain in the United States as a pre-1931 publication. The color bars around the scan are archival calibration strips, not part of the sheet.
How to read it
"Remember Belgium" pointed at something real. The FRAME record ties the slogan to the German army's conduct in Belgium in 1914. A poster that asked people to remember that was asking them to remember a fact, four years and an ocean away.
What the poster adds is the girl. It does not show a ruined library, a requisition order, or a relief ship. It shows one implied crime against one child, and makes it stand for the whole enemy and for the whole reason to lend money. A specific, documented wrong is turned into a generic threat, and the generic threat is aimed at the viewer's own family. That is a fear appeal, and it is weaker history than the plain memory of the invasion would have been.
Compare Halt the Hun! from the Third Loan and Hun or Home?, which put a mother or a child in the same place in the composition. The quieter alternative is the President's word on the Second Liberty Loan sheet. The Treasury tried both. The Wilson administration essay reads the Treasury's "Hun" posters beside Creel's own warning that unprovable atrocity tales would backfire.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Remember Belgium. Buy Bonds. Fourth Liberty Loan, 1918. U.S. Treasury Department; artist Ellsworth Young.
- Library of Congress, item 96507603, LC-USZC4-4441, retrieved by the archive 27 September 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain in the U.S. (published before 1931).
