What does this cartoon suggest? I am asked and I ask myself. At first
very little, almost nothing, only uninteresting, ugly death, gloomy,
ghastly, dismal, but dull and largely featureless, blank and negative.
Has the artist’s power failed him? No, it is strongly drawn. Has his
inspiration? What does it mean? Is it indeed meant? As I gaze and pore
on it longer, I seem to see that it is just in this blank negation that
its strength and its suggestion lie. It is meant. It has meaning. A
blast has passed over this place, and this is its sequel; its derelict
rubbish.
It is death unredeemed, death with no very positive suggestion, with no
hint of heroism, none of heroic action, little even of heroic passion;
just death, helpless, hopeless, pointing to nothing but decomposition,
decay, disappearance, _anéantissement_, reduction of the fair frame
of life to nothingness. That is the peculiar horror of this war.
Were the picture, as it well might be, even more hideous, and did it
suggest something more definite, a story of struggle, say, recorded in
contortion, or by wounds and weapons, it might be better.
But men killed by machines, men killed by natural forces unnaturally
employed, are indeed a fact and a spectacle squalid, sorry, unutterably
sad.
All wars have been horrible, but modern wars are more in extremes.
Heroism is there, but not always. It is possible only in patches.
There is much of the mere sacrifice of numbers. Strictly, there are
scenes far worse than this, for death unredeemed is not the worst of
sufferings or of ills. But few are sadder. This is indeed war made
by those who hold it and will it to be “not a sport, but a science.”
There is no sport here. Men killed like this are like men killed by
plague or the eruption of a volcano. And, indeed, what else are they?
They are victims of a diseased humanity of the eruption--literal and
metaphorical--of its hidden fires. And wars will grow more and more
like this. What can stop them and banish these scenes? Only the hate of
hate, only the love that can redeem even such a sight as this when at
last we remember that it is for love’s sake only that flesh and blood
are in the last resort content to endure it.