so that from all the peoples of the civilized world there will be a great cry of rage and horror if the spirit of militarism raises its head again and demands new sacrifices of blood and life's beauty. The Germans have revealed the meaning of war, the devilish soul of it, in a full and complete way, with a most ruthless logic. The chiefs of their great soldier caste have been more honest than ourselves in the business, with the honesty of men who, knowing that war is murder, have adopted the methods of murderers, wholeheartedly, with all the force of their intellect and genius, not weakened by any fear of public opinion, by any prick of conscience, or by any sentiment of compassion. Their logic seems to me flawless, though it is diabolical. If it is permissible to hurl millions of men against each other with machinery which makes a wholesale massacre of life, tearing up trenches, blowing great bodies of men to bits with the single shot of a great gun, strewing battlefields with death, and destroying defended towns so that nothing may live in their ruins, then it is foolish to make distinctions between one way of death and another, or to analyse degrees of horror. Asphyxiating gas is no worse than a storm of shells, or if worse then the more effective." ¶ In a review of " Georgian Poetry " published in The Cambridge Magazine, Professor Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has a few refreshingly vigorous sentences which deserve reproduction: "Our new poets scarcely touch on this beastly war; as it seems to me, for the sufficient reason that it is beastly. I don't know if readers of The Cambridge Magazine will agree, but I for one have no use at all for patriotic lyricism in this business. When it is over, indeed, no words shall be too solemn, as no thoughts can be too sad and holy, for the young who so blithely accepted their fate and went out to suffer and die for us all. Their recollected laughter is the noblest song we shall hear in our time. But the lads known to me, of all ranks, went off nursing no such pretty romantic bloodthirsty illusions about war as seem to be clung to by some of their elders at home. I only know That as he turned to go, And waved his hand, In his young eyes a sudden glory shone. -Yes but it was the glory of gay sacrifice, not of gay ambition. In fact (pace Professor Ridgeway) the youth of France and England had found War out even before this inferno started. They have had to accept it as the alternative to the ruination of better things: but I shall be surprised if they come back with any high opinion of War for War's sake-War as a "purifier," "degeneracy's antiseptic," ," "toughener of the moral fibre "or indeed are not impatient of all the maudlin disguises under which our pulpiteers and journalists present it. The stuffing had oozed out of that idol some while before August 1914; and, since poetry is not concerned with rubbish, I respect these younger poets for spurning it and occupying themselves with things of permanent value.”1 Only when you see it Will you dare to think you know it. And the more you see, the more you'll know That no man e'er can know it. It's only when you sense it in each fibre of your being;- Is God's all-wise decreeing. For at the most 'tis but the crust The awful whole would crush his soul, I. THE COST OF WAR. 1. The immediate effects are destruction and massacre, ruin and death, the negation of all the elementary and essential blessings of life. In addition to the lives directly destroyed on the field of battle, there are the multitudes who perish from wounds, disease, or other inevitable hardships and privations of war, or are irre1 A. Quiller-Couch, in Goodwill, vol. ii. No. 1, p. 22. J. Oxenham, Hearts Courageous, 53. parably unfitted thereby for the useful toils of life, and there are the further multitudes linked with these by social or family ties who are indirectly but cruelly smitten by this terrible scourge. Even for the conquerors war is a tremendous misfortune. There must be included also in the reckoning the immense economic loss which it occasions. It means the destruction of crops and homesteads, the devastation of town and country, the loss of historic treasures and monuments that cannot be replaced, the disturbance of industry, the drying up of the very springs of wealth. And the preparation for war, the burden of armaments, the withdrawal of priceless human faculties from fruitful use, the direction of large masses of labour into essentially barren toils-all this is an alarming waste of energy and an immense obstacle to progress. The economic aspect of the evil is not only that we suffer incalculable loss through the cessation and crippling of industry, but that wealth, represented by hundreds of millions of pounds, which would otherwise be devoted to productive uses, is as completely wasted as if the wealth had been destroyed by fire or flung into the sea. It has been powerfully argued by Mr. Norman Angell that even the victor in a great European war, though he may inflict untold damage upon others, cannot hope to make a profit out of the adventure which will even compensate himself for his own losses in wealth and credit. war. ¶ It is impossible to estimate the material damage caused by In Belgium over 43,000 houses were destroyed. In France 46,000 buildings, and 331 churches were brought to ruins. The cost of the damage done to buildings, agriculture and industry in France and Belgium alone would run into hundreds of millions of pounds. The world's losses in shipping were also enormous. It has been estimated that over twelve million tons were sent to the bottom of the sea, exclusive of German ships. The loss in production by the diversion of men from the workshops, factories, and the land to the battlefields, and the economic value of the lives that have been lost or rendered incapable of any useful work must also be taken into consideration when reckoning up the losses of the war. Here, again, it is utterly impossible to add it all up in pounds, shillings and pence.1 2. But the cost of war is not only in money, it is also in men. We live in an age when the utmost reverence is shown for man 1 Daily Express, June 30, 1919. as man, and every effort is made by public authorities and by medical skill to preserve and prolong life. All the resources of science and of applied science are applied, by the best brains and hands, to compass the mutilation and death of hundreds of thousands of victims. And what heightens the tragedy is that those who are carried off by war are picked men in their prime. A pestilence sweeps away the weak and the unfit, and sometimes leaves the winnowed mass healthier and sounder than before, but war takes the strong and leaves the weaker to make good the blanks. 66 ¶ Some years after the Franco-German war I had a talk with an old man in Bavaria : The worst of it," he said, as a tear coursed down his cheek, "is that it is the flower of the youth that perish." A distinguished American has been lecturing on this aspect of the subject, and has said that it is almost impossible to exaggerate the loss to the higher life of the United States that resulted from their civil war, in which so many who were the hope of their generation were stricken down before their time.1 ¶ I had an interview in the sad days of the Boer War with a widow who had given two sons to the service of the country. They were young men of the finest promise-strong, kindly, fair-minded, honourable. One had died, after horrible suffering, of wounds received in action; one had died of enteric in a field-hospital. The mother was full of noble and unmurmuring resignation; but it made me shudder to think that these two young men, who might have lived long and valued lives, the kindly fathers of strong children, should thus, and for such ends as these, have been lost to the earth.2 ¶ "Under the sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with ག clenched teeth, and hell-fire eyes, hacking one another's flesh; converting precious living bodies, and priceless living souls, into nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnip manure.' 3. To men's lives as the cost of war add the sufferings of women and children. Listen to the tramping! Oh, God of pity, listen! Can we kneel at prayer, sleep all unmolested, 1 W. P. Paterson, In the Day of the Muster, 37. Carlyle, Past and Present, 163. Million upon million fleeing feet in passing Trample down our prayers trample down our sleeping; How the patient roads groan beneath the massing Of the feet in going, bleeding, running, creeping! Clank of iron shoe, unshod hooves of cattle, Pad of roaming hound, creak of wheel in turning, Listen to the tramping!-God of love and pity! How the sullen road echoes to the massing! Little feet of children, running, leaping, lagging, Strong feet of the men loud in passion striding. Hear the lost feet straying, from the roadway slipping, Hear the flying feet! Lord of love and pity! Crushing down our prayers, tramping down our sleeping, Driven by the war out of field and city, Million upon million, running, bleeding, creeping.1 There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne children, or be merely potentially a child-bearer, who could look down upon a battlefield covered with slain, but the thought would rise in her, "So many mothers' sons! So many bodies brought into the world to lie there! So many months of weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shaped within; so many hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be; so many baby mouths drawing life at women's breasts ;-all this, that men might lie with glazed eyeballs, and swollen bodies, and fixed, blue, unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed-this, that an acre of ground might be manured with human flesh, that next year's grass or poppies or karoo bushes may spring up greener and redder, where they have 1 Dora Sigerson, The Sad Years, 12. |