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, _aneantissement_, 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 retort content
to endure it.