_War_
Pictures of a terrible evil, and denunciations of it, which
will be found especially timely at the present hour.
I Sing the Battle
(_From "The Cry of Youth"_)
BY HARRY KEMP
(See pages 37, 351)
I sing the song of the great clean guns that belch forth death at will.
Ah, but the wailing mothers, the lifeless forms and still!
I sing the songs of the billowing flags, the bugles that cry before.
Ah, but the skeletons flapping rags, the lips that speak no more!
I sing the clash of bayonets and sabres that flash and cleave.
And wilt thou sing the maimed ones, too, that go with pinned-up sleeve?
I sing acclaimèd generals that bring the victory home.
Ah, but the broken bodies that drip like honey-comb!
I sing of hearts triumphant, long ranks of marching men.
And wilt thou sing the shadowy hosts that never march again?
War
(_From "Beyond the Breakers"_)
BY GEORGE STERLING
(See page 504)
The night was on the world, and in my sleep
I heard a voice that cried across the dark:
"Give steel!" And gazing I beheld a red,
Infernal stithy. There were Titans five
Assembled, thewed and naked and malign
Against the glare. One to the furnace throat,
Whence issued screams, fed shapes of human use--
The hammer, axe and plow. Those molten soon,
Another haled the dazzling ingot forth
With tongs, and gave it to the anvil. Two,
With massy sledges throbbing at the task,
Harried the gloom with unenduring stars
And poured a clangorous music on the dark,
With loud, astounding shock and counter-shock
Incessant. And the fifth colossus stood
The captain of that labor. From his form
Spread wings more black than Hell's high-altar--ribbed
As are the vampire-bat's. The night grew old,
And I was then aware they shaped a sword....
In that domain and interval of dream
'Twas dawn upon the headlands of the world,
And I, appalled, beheld how men had reared
A mountain, dark below the morning star--
A peak made up of houses and of herds,
Of cradles, yokes and all the handiwork
Of man. Upon its crest were gems and gold,
Rare fabrics, and the woof of humble looms.
Harvests and groves and battlements were made
Part of its ramparts, and the whole was drenched
With oil and wine and honey. Then thereon
Men bound their sons, the fair, alert and strong,
Sparing no household. And when all were bound,
Brands were brought forth: the mount became a pyre.
Black from that red immensity of flame,
A tower of smoke, upcoiling to the sky,
Was shapen by the winds, and took the form
Of him who in the stithy gave command.
A shadow between day and men he stood;
His eyes looked forth on nothingness; his wings
Domed desolations, and the scarlet sun
Glowed through their darkness like a seal that God
Might set on Hell forever. Then the pyre
Shrank, and he reeled. Whereat, to save that shape
Their madness had evoked in death and pain,
Men rose and made a second sacrifice.
Sartor Resartus
BY THOMAS CARLYLE
(See pages 31, 74, 133, 488)
What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net-purport
and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there
dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually
some five hundred souls. From these, by certain "Natural
Enemies" of the French, there are successfully selected, during
the French war, say thirty able-bodied men: Dumdrudge, at
her own expense, has suckled and nursed them: she has, not
without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even
trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build,
another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone
avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing,
they are selected; all dressed in red, and shipped away, at
the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to
the south of Spain; and fed there till wanted. And now to that
same spot, in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French
artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending;
till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come
into actual juxtaposition, and Thirty stands fronting Thirty,
each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word "Fire!" is
given and they blow the souls out of one another, and in place
of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead
carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had
these men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest!
They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers;
nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even, unconsciously,
by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then?
Simpleton! their Governors had fallen out; and, instead of
shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor
blockheads shoot.--Alas, so is it in Deutschland, and hitherto
in all other lands; still as of old, "what devilry soever Kings
do, the Greeks must pay the piper!"--In that fiction of the
English Smollett, it is true, the final Cessation of War is
perhaps prophetically shadowed forth; where the two Natural
Enemies, in person, take each a Tobacco-pipe, filled with
Brimstone; light the same, and smoke in one another's faces,
till the weaker gives in: but from such predicted Peace-Era,
what blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may
still divide us!
The Soldier's Oath
BY KAISER WILHELM OF GERMANY
(Speech delivered in 1891)
Recruits! Before the altar and the servant of God you have
given me the oath of allegiance. You are too young to know
the full meaning of what you have said, but your first care
must be to obey implicitly all orders and directions. You have
sworn fidelity to me, you are the children of my guard, you
are my soldiers, you have surrendered yourselves to me, body
and soul. Only one enemy can exist for you--my enemy. With the
present Socialist machinations, it may happen that I shall
order you to shoot your own relatives, your brothers, or even
your parents--which God forbid--and then you are bound in duty
implicitly to obey my orders.
The Coming of War
BY LEO TOLSTOY
(See pages 88, 110, 148, 276, 374, 416)
The bells will peal, long-haired men will dress in golden sacks
to pray for successful slaughter. And the old story will begin
again, the awful customary acts.
The editors of the daily Press will begin virulently to stir
men up to hatred and manslaughter in the name of patriotism,
happy in the receipt of an increased income. Manufacturers,
merchants, contractors for military stores, will hurry joyously
about their business, in the hope of double receipts.
All sorts of Government officials will buzz about, foreseeing
a possibility of purloining something more than usual. The
military authorities will hurry hither and thither, drawing
double pay and rations, and with the expectation of receiving
for the slaughter of other men various silly little ornaments
which they so highly prize, as ribbons, crosses, orders, and
stars. Idle ladies and gentlemen will make a great fuss,
entering their names in advance for the Red Cross Society, and
ready to bind up the wounds of those whom their husbands and
brothers will mutilate; and they will imagine that in so doing
they are performing a most Christian work.
And, smothering despair within their souls by songs,
licentiousness, and wine, men will trail along, torn
from peaceful labor, from their wives, mothers and
children--hundreds of thousands of simple-minded, good-natured
men with murderous weapons in their hands--anywhere they may be
driven.
They will march, freeze, hunger, suffer sickness, and die from
it, or finally come to some place where they will be slain by
thousands or kill thousands themselves with no reason--men whom
they have never seen before, and who neither have done nor
could do them any mischief.
And when the number of sick, wounded, and killed becomes so
great that there are not hands enough left to pick them up,
and when the air is so infected with the putrefying scent
of the "food for powder" that even the authorities find it
disagreeable, a truce will be made, the wounded will be picked
up anyhow, the sick will be brought in and huddled together in
heaps, the killed will be covered with earth and lime, and once
more all the crowd of deluded men will be led on and on till
those who have devised the project, weary of it, or till those
who thought to find it profitable receive their spoil.
And so once more men will be made savage, fierce, and brutal,
and love will wane in the world, and the Christianizing of
mankind, which has already begun, will lapse for scores and
hundreds of years. And so once more the men who reaped profit
from it all, will assert with assurance that since there has
been a war there must needs have been one, and that other wars
must follow, and they will again prepare future generations for
a continuance of slaughter, depraving them from their birth.
Slavery
BY WILLIAM COWPER
(English poet, 1731-1800)
O for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumor of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more. My ear is pained,
My soul is sick, with every day's report
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.
There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart,
It does not feel for man; the natural bond
Of brotherhood is severed as the flax
That falls asunder at the touch of fire.
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not colored like his own; and having power
To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
Lands intersected by a narrow frith
Abhor each other. Mountains interposed
Make enemies of nations, who had else
Like kindred drops been mingled into one.
Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys;
And, worse than all, and most to be deplored,
As human nature's broadest, foulest blot,
Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat
With stripes, that Mercy, with a bleeding heart,
Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast.
The Biglow Papers
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
(These poems, first published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in
1846, voiced the bitter opposition of New England to the
Mexican war as a slave-holders' enterprise)
Thrash away, you'll _hev_ to rattle
On them kittle-drums o' yourn,--
'Tain't a knowin' kind o' cattle
Thet is ketched with mouldy corn;
Put in stiff, you fifer feller,
Let folks see how spry you be,--
Guess you'll toot till you are yeller
'Fore you git ahold o' me!...
Ez fer war, I call it murder,--
There you hev it plain an' flat;
I don't want to go no furder
Than my Testyment fer that;
God hez sed so plump an' fairly,
It's ez long ez it is broad,
An' you've got to git up airly
Ef you want to take in God.
'Tain't your eppyletts an' feathers
Make the thing a grain more right;
'Tain't afollerin' your bell-wethers
Will excuse ye in His sight;
Ef you take a sword an' dror it,
An' go stick a feller thru,
Guv'mint ain't to answer for it,
God'll send the bill to you.
Wut's the use o' meetin'-goin'
Every Sabbath, wet or dry,
Ef it's right to go amowin'
Feller-men like oats an' rye?
I dunno but wut it's pooty
Trainin' round in bobtail coats,--
But it's curus Christian dooty
This 'ere cuttin' folks's throats....
Tell ye jest the eend I've come to
Arter cipherin' plaguey smart,
An' it makes a handy sum, tu,
Any gump could larn by heart;
Laborin' man an' laborin' woman
Hev one glory an' one shame.
Ev'y thin' thet's done inhuman
Injers all on 'em the same.
'Tain't by turnin' out to hack folks
You're agoin' to git your right,
Nor by lookin' down on black folks
Coz you're put upon by white;
Slavery ain't o' nary color,
'Tain't the hide thet makes it wus,
All it keers fer in a feller
'S jest to make him fill its pus.
To a Nine-inch Gun
BY P. F. MCCARTHY
(This poem came to the New York _World_ office on a crumpled
piece of soiled paper. The author's address was given as Fourth
Bench, City Hall Park)
Whether your shell hits the target or not,
Your cost is Five Hundred Dollars a Shot.
You thing of noise and flame and power,
We feed you a hundred barrels of flour
Each time you roar. Your flame is fed
With twenty thousand loaves of bread.
Silence! A million hungry men
Seek bread to fill their mouths again.
Kruppism
(_From "The Present Hour"_)
BY PERCY MACKAYE
(American poet and dramatist, born 1875)
Crowned on the twilight battlefield, there bends
A crooked iron dwarf, and delves for gold,
Chuckling: "One hundred thousand gatlings--sold!"
And the moon rises, and a moaning rends
The mangled living, and the dead distends,
And a child cowers on the chartless wold,
Where, searching in his safety vault of mold,
The kobold kaiser cuts his dividends.
We, who still wage his battles, are his thralls,
And dying do him homage; yea, and give
Daily our living souls to be enticed
Into his power. So long as on war's walls
We build engines of death that he may live,
So long shall we serve Krupp instead of Christ.
BY THE EMPRESS CATHERINE II OF RUSSIA
(1729-1796)
The only way to save our empires from the encroachment of
the people is to engage in war, and thus substitute national
passions for social aspirations.
BY FREDERICK THE GREAT OF PRUSSIA
(1712-1786)
If my soldiers were to begin to reflect, not one of them would
remain in the ranks.
Our Father Which Art in Heaven
(_From "The Human Slaughter-House"_)
BY WILHELM LAMSZUS
(A novel by a Hamburg school-teacher, published in 1913.
Although banned by the authorities in some places, over 100,000
copies were sold in Germany in a few weeks)
We rejoined the Colors on Friday. On Monday we are to move out.
Today, being Sunday, is full-dress Church Parade.
I slept badly last night, and am feeling uneasy and limp.
And now we are sitting close-packed in church.
The organ is playing a voluntary.
I am leaning back and straining my ears for the sounds in the
dim twilight of the building. Childhood's days rise before my
eyes again. I am watching a little solemn-faced boy sitting
crouched in a corner and listening to the divine service. The
priest is standing in front of the altar, and is intoning the
Exhortation devoutly. The choir in the gallery is chanting
the responses. The organ thunders out and floods through the
building majestically. I am rapt in an ecstasy of sweet terror,
for the Lord God is coming down upon us. He is standing before
me and touching my body, so that I have to close my eyes in a
terror of shuddering ecstasy....
That is long, long ago, and is all past and done with, as youth
itself is past and done with....
Strange! After all these years of doubt and unbelief, at this
moment of lucid consciousness, the atmosphere of devoutness,
long since dead, possesses me, and thrills me so passionately
that I can hardly resist it. This is the same heavy
twilight--these are the same yearning angel voices--the same
fearful sense of rapture--
I pull myself together, and sit bolt upright on the hard wooden
pew.
In the main and the side aisles below, and in the galleries
above, nothing but soldiers in uniform, and all, with level
faces, turned toward the altar, toward that pale man in his
long dignified black gown, toward that sonorous, unctuous
mouth, from whose lips flows the name of God.
Look! He is now stretching forth his hands. We incline our
heads. He is pronouncing the Benediction over us in a voice
that echoes from the tomb. He is blessing us in the name of
God, the Merciful. He is blessing our rifles that they may not
fail us; he is blessing the wire-drawn guns on their patent
recoilless carriages; he is blessing every precious cartridge,
lest a single bullet be wasted, lest any pass idly through the
air; that each one may account for a hundred human beings, may
shatter a hundred human beings simultaneously.
Father in Heaven! Thou art gazing down at us in such terrible
silence. Dost Thou shudder at these sons of men? Thou poor and
slight God! Thou couldst only rain Thy paltry pitch and sulphur
on Sodom and Gomorrah. But we, Thy children, whom Thou hast
created, we are going to exterminate them by high-pressure
machinery, and butcher whole cities in factories. Here we
stand, and while we stretch our hands to Thy Son in prayer,
and cry Hosannah! we are hurling shells and shrapnel in the
face of Thy Image, and shooting the Son of Man down from His
Cross like a target at the rifle-butts.
And now the Holy Communion is being celebrated. The organ is
playing mysteriously from afar off, and the flesh and blood of
the Redeemer is mingling with our flesh and blood.
There He is hanging on the Cross above me, and gazing down upon
me.
How pale those cheeks look! And those eyes are the eyes as of
one dead! Who was this Christ Who is to aid us, and Whose blood
we drink? What was it they once taught us at school? Didst Thou
not love mankind? And didst Thou not die for the whole human
race? Stretch out Thine arms toward me. There is something I
would fain ask of Thee.... Ah! they have nailed Thy arms to the
Cross, so that Thou canst not stretch out a finger toward us.
Shuddering, I fix my eyes on the corpse-like face and see that
He died long ago, that He is nothing more than wood, nothing
other than a puppet. Christ, it is no longer Thee to whom we
pray. Look there! Look there! It is he. The new patron saint
of a Christian State! Look there! It is he, the great Genghis
Khan. Of him we know that he swept through the history of the
world with fire and sword, and piled up pyramids of skulls.
Yes, that is he. Let us heap up mountains of human heads, and
pile up heaps of human entrails. Great Genghis Khan! Thou, our
patron saint! Do thou bless us! Pray to thy blood-drenched
father seated above the skies of Asia, that he may sweep with
us through the clouds; that he may strike down that accursed
nation till it writhes in its blood, till it never can rise
again. A red mist swims before my eyes. Of a sudden I see
nothing but blood before me. The heavens have opened, and the
red flood pours in through the windows. Blood wells up on the
altar. The walls run blood from the ceiling to the floor,
and--God the Father steps out of the blood. Every scale of his
skin stands erect, his beard and hair drip blood. A giant of
blood stands before me. He seats himself backward on the altar,
and is laughing from thick, coarse lips--there sits the King
of Dahomey, and he butchers his slaves. The black executioner
raises his sword and whirls it above my head. Another moment
and my head will roll down on the floor--another moment and the
red jet will spurt from my neck.... Murderers, murderers! None
other than murderers! Lord God in Heaven!
Then--
The church door opens creaking--
Light, air, the blue of heaven, burst in.
I draw a breath of relief. We have risen to our feet, and at
length pass out of the twilight into the open air.
My knees are still trembling under me.
We fall into line, and in our hob-nailed boots tramp in step
down the street toward the barracks. When I see my mates
marching beside me in their matter-of-fact and stolid way,
I feel ashamed, and call myself a wretched coward. What a
weak-nerved, hysterical breed, that can no longer look at blood
without fainting! You neurasthenic offspring of your sturdy
peasant forebears, who shouted for joy when they went out to
fight!
I pull myself together and throw my head back.
I never was a coward, and eye for eye I have always looked my
man in the face, and will so do this time, too, happen what
may.
The War Prayer[A]
[A] (Quoted by special permission of Harper & Brothers.)
BY MARK TWAIN
(American humorist. See page 265. This "War Prayer," withheld from
publication until after Mark Twain's death, pictures the assembling
of soldiers in church, and the prayer of the chaplain for victory.
In answer to the prayer, God sends down a white-robed messenger, who
voices the unspoken meaning of the prayer.)
"O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody
shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields
with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown
the thunder of the guns with the wounded, writhing in pain;
help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of
fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows
with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with
their little children to wander unfriended through wastes of
their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sport of
the sun-flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken
in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of
the grave and denied it--for our sakes, who adore Thee, Lord,
blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter
pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their
tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded
feet! We ask of one who is the Spirit of love and who is the
ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset, and
seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Grant our prayer,
O Lord, and Thine shall be the praise and honor and glory now
and ever, Amen."
(After a pause.) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it,
speak!--the messenger of the Most High waits."
The Illusion of War
BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
(American poet, born in England, 1866)
War I abhor, and yet how sweet
The sound along the marching street
Of drum and fife, and I forget
Wet eyes of widows, and forget
Broken old mothers, and the whole
Dark butchery without a soul.
Without a soul, save this bright drink
Of heady music, sweet as hell;
And even my peace-abiding feet
Go marching with the marching street--
For yonder, yonder goes the fife,
And what care I for human life!
The tears fill my astonished eyes,
And my full heart is like to break;
And yet 'tis all embannered lies,
A dream those little drummers make.
O, it is wickedness to clothe
Yon hideous grinning thing that stalks,
Hidden in music, like a queen,
That in a garden of glory walks,
Till good men love the thing they loathe.
Art, thou hast many infamies,
But not an infamy like this--
Oh, snap the fife, and still the drum,
And show the monster as she is!
Lay Down Your Arms
BY BARONESS BERTHA VON SUTTNER
(Austrian novelist and peace advocate, 1850-1914. Her protest against
war, published in 1889, made a deep impression throughout Europe. In
the following scene a woman is taken to visit a field of battle with
the hospital-corps)
No more thunder of artillery, no more blare of trumpets, no
more beat of drum; only the low moans of pain and the rattle
of death. In the trampled ground some redly-glimmering pools,
lakes of blood; all the crops destroyed, only here and there a
piece of land left untouched, and still covered with stubble;
the smiling villages of yesterday turned into ruins and
rubbish. The trees burned and hacked in the forests, the hedges
torn with grape-shot. And on this battle-ground thousands and
thousands of men dead and dying--dying without aid. No blossoms
of flowers are to be seen on wayside or meadow; but sabres,
bayonets, knapsacks, cloaks, overturned ammunition wagons,
powder wagons blown into the air, cannon with broken carriages.
Near the cannon, whose muzzles are black with smoke, the ground
is bloodiest. There the greatest number and the most mangled
of dead and half-dead men are lying, literally torn to pieces
with shot; and the dead horses, and the half-dead which raise
themselves on their feet--such feet as they have left--to sink
again; then raise themselves up once more and fall down again,
till they only raise their head to shriek out their pain-laden
death-cry. There is a hollow way quite filled with corpses
trodden into the mire. The poor creatures had taken refuge
there no doubt to get cover, but a battery has driven over
them, and they have been crushed by the horses' hoofs and the
wheels. Many of them are still alive--a pulpy, bleeding mass,
but "still alive".
And yet there is still something more hellish even than
all this, and that is the appearance of the most vile scum
of humanity, as it shows itself in war--the appearance and
activity of "the hyenas of the battlefield." "Then slink on
the monsters who grope after the spoils of the dead, and bend
over the corpses and over the living, mercilessly tearing off
their clothes from their bodies. The boots are dragged off the
bleeding limbs, the rings off the wounded hands, or to get the
ring the finger is simply chopped off, and if a man tries to
defend himself from such a sacrifice, he is murdered by these
hyenas; or, in order to make him unrecognizable, they dig his
eyes out."
I shrieked out loud at the doctor's last words. I again saw the
whole scene before me, and the eyes into which the hyena was
plunging his knife were Frederick's soft, blue, beloved eyes.
"Pray, forgive me, dear lady, but it was by your own wish----"
"Oh, yes; I desire to hear it all. What you are now describing
was the night that follows the battle; and these scenes are
enacted by the starlight?"
"And by torchlight. The patrols which the conquerors send out
to survey the field of battle carry torches and lanterns, and
red lanterns are hoisted on signal poles to point out the
places where flying hospitals are to be established."
"And next morning, how does the field look?"
"Almost more fearful still. The contrast between the bright
smiling daylight and the dreadful work of man on which it
shines has a doubly-painful effect. At night the entire picture
of horror is something ghostly and fantastic. By daylight it
is simply hopeless. Now you see for the first time the mass
of corpses lying around on the lanes, between the fields,
in the ditches, behind the ruins of walls. Everywhere dead
bodies--everywhere. Plundered, some of them naked; and just
the same with the wounded. Those who, in spite of the nightly
labor of the Sanitary Corps, are still always lying around in
numbers, look pale and collapsed, green or yellow, with fixed
and stupefied gaze, or writhing in agonies of pain, they beg
any one who comes near to put them to death. Swarms of carrion
crows settle on the tops of the trees, and with loud croaks
announce the bill of fare of the tempting banquet. Hungry dogs,
from the villages around, come running by and lick the blood
from wounds. Further afield there are a few hyenas to be seen,
who are still carrying on their work hastily. And now comes the
great interment."
"Who does that--the Sanitary Corps?"
"How could they suffice for such a mass of work? They have
fully enough to do with the wounded."
"Then troops are detailed for the work?"
"No. A crowd of men impressed, or even offering themselves
voluntarily--loiterers, baggage people, who are supporting
themselves by the market-stalls, baggage-wagons and so forth,
and who now have been hunted away by the force of the military
operations, together with the inhabitants of the cottages
and huts--to dig trenches--good large ones, of course--wide
trenches, for they are not made deep--there is no time for
that. Into these the dead bodies are thrown, heads up or heads
down just as they come to hand. Or it is done in this way:
A heap is made of the corpses, and a foot or two of earth
is heaped up over them, and then it has the appearance of a
tumulus. In a few days rain comes on and washes the covering
off the festering dead bodies! but what does that matter? The
nimble, jolly grave-diggers do not look so far forward. For
jolly, merry workmen they are, that one must allow. Songs are
piped out there, and all kinds of dubious jokes made--nay,
sometimes a dance of hyenas is danced round the open trench.
Whether life is still stirring in several of the bodies that
are shovelled into it or are covered with the earth, they give
themselves no trouble to think. The thing is inevitable, for
the stiff cramp often comes on after wounds. Many who have been
saved by accident have told of the danger of being buried alive
which they have escaped. But how many are there of those who
are not able to tell anything! If a man has once got a foot or
two of earth over his mouth he may well hold his tongue."
Before Sedan
BY AUSTIN DOBSON
(English poet and essayist, born 1840)
Here in this leafy place
Quiet he lies,
Cold, with his sightless face
Turned to the skies;
'Tis but another dead;
All you can say is said.
Carry his body hence,--
Kings must have slaves;
Kings climb to eminence
Over men's graves;
So this man's eye is dim;--
Throw the earth over him.
Doubt
(_From "The Present Hour"_)
BY PERCY MACKAYE
(One of a group of six sonnets, entitled "Carnage," written in
September, 1914)
So thin, so frail the opalescent ice
Where yesterday, in lordly pageant, rose
The monumental nations--the repose
Of continents at peace! Realities
Solid as earth they seemed; yet in a trice
Their bastions crumbled in the surging floes
Of unconceivable, inhuman woes,
Gulfed in a mad, unmeaning sacrifice.
We, who survive that world-quake, cower and start,
Searching our hidden souls with dark surmise:
So thin, so frail--is reason? Patient art--
Is it all a mockery, and love all lies?
Who sees the lurking Hun in childhood's eyes?
Is hell so near to every human heart?
The Wife of Flanders
BY GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
(See page 180)
Low and brown barns, thatched and repatched and tattered,
Where I had seven sons until to-day--
A little hill of hay your spur has scattered....
This is not Paris. You have lost your way.
You, staring at your sword to find it brittle,
Surprised at the surprise that was your plan;
Who, shaking and breaking barriers not a little,
Find never more the death-door of Sedan.
Must I for more than carnage call you claimant,
Pay you a penny for each son you slay?
Man, the whole globe in gold were no repayment
For what you have lost. And how shall I repay?
What is the price of that red spark that caught me
From a kind farm that never had a name?
What is the price of that dead man they brought me?
For other dead men do not look the same.
How should I pay for one poor graven steeple
Whereon you shattered what you shall not know?
How should I pay you, miserable people?
How should I pay you everything you owe?
Unhappy, can I give you back your honor?
Tho' I forgave, would any man forget?
While all our great green earth has, trampled on her,
The treason and terror of the night we met.
Not any more in vengeance or in pardon,
One old wife bargains for a bean that's hers,
You have no word to break; no heart to harden.
Ride on and prosper. You have lost your spurs.
Buttons
BY CARL SANDBURG
(Contemporary American poet)
I have been watching the war map slammed up for advertising in
front of the newspaper office.
Buttons--red and yellow buttons--blue and black buttons--are
shoved back and forth across the map.
A laughing young man, sunny with freckles,
Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd,
And then fixes a yellow button one inch west
And follows the yellow button with a black button one inch west.
(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in a red soak
along a river edge,
Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling death in
their throats.)
Who by Christ would guess what it cost to move two buttons one
inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper office where
the freckle-faced young man is laughing to us?
The Wine Press
BY ALFRED NOYES
(English poet, born 1880)
A Murdered man, ten miles away,
Will hardly shake your peace,
Like one red stain upon your hand;
And a tortured child in a distant land
Will never check one smile to-day,
Or bid one fiddle cease.
_The News_
It comes along a little wire,
Sunk in a deep sea;
It thins in the clubs to a little smoke
Between one joke and another joke,
For a city in flames is less than the fire
That comforts you and me.
_The Diplomats_
Each was honest after his way,
Lukewarm in faith, and old;
And blood, to them, was only a word,
And the point of a phrase their only sword,
And the cost of war, they reckoned it
In little disks of gold.
They were cleanly groomed. They were not to be bought.
And their cigars were good.
But they had pulled so many strings
In the tinselled puppet-show of kings
That, when they talked of war, they thought
Of sawdust, not of blood;
Not of the crimson tempest
Where the shattered city falls:
They thought, behind their varnished doors,
Of diplomats, ambassadors,
Budgets, and loans and boundary-lines,
Coercions and re-calls.
_The Charge_
_Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter!_
The cold machines whirred on.
And strange things crawled amongst the wheat
With entrails dragging round their feet,
And over the foul red shambles
A fearful sunlight shone....
The maxims cracked like cattle-whips
Above the struggling hordes.
They rolled and plunged and writhed like snakes
In the trampled wheat and the blackthorn brakes,
And the lightnings leapt among them
Like clashing crimson swords.
The rifles flogged their wallowing herds,
Flogged them down to die.
Down on their slain the slayers lay,
And the shrapnel thrashed them into the clay,
And tossed their limbs like tattered birds
Thro' a red volcanic sky.
War
(_From "Songs of Joy"_)
BY WILLIAM H. DAVIES
(An English poet whose "Autobiography of a Super-tramp" was
given to the world with an introduction by Bernard Shaw)
Ye Liberals and Conservatives,
Have pity on our human lives,
Waste not more blood on human strife;
Until we know some way to use
This human blood we take or lose,
'Tis sin to sacrifice our life.
When pigs are stuck we save their blood
And make puddings for our food,
The sweetest and the cheapest meat;
And many a woman, man and boy
Have ate those puddings with great joy,
And oft-times in the open street.
Let's not have war till we can make,
Of this sweet life we lose or take,
Some kind of pudding of man's gore;
So that the clergy in each parish
May save the lives of those that famish
Because meat's dear and times are poor.
In Praise of the Warrior
(_From "Don Quixote"_)
BY MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
(Best known of Spanish novelists, 1547-1616; himself a soldier,
captured and made a galley-slave in Algiers)
I am not a barbarian, and I love letters, but let us beware
of according them pre-eminence over arms, or even an equality
with arms. The man of letters, it is very true, instructs and
illuminates his fellows, softens manners, elevates minds, and
teaches us justice, a beautiful and sublime science. But the
warrior makes us observe justice. His object is to procure us
the first and sweetest of blessings, peace, gentlest peace, so
necessary to human happiness. This peace, adorable blessing,
gift divine, source of happiness, this peace is the object of
war. The warrior labors to procure it for us, and the warrior
therefore performs the most useful labor in the world.
Song of the Exposition
BY WALT WHITMAN
(See pages 184, 268)
Away with themes of war! away with War itself!
Hence from my shuddering sight, to never more return, that show
of blacken'd, mutilated corpses!
That hell unpent, and raid of blood--fit for wild tigers, or
for lop-tongued wolves--not reasoning men!
And in its stead speed Industry's campaigns!
With thy undaunted armies, Engineering!
Thy pennants, Labor, loosen'd to the breeze!
Thy bugles sounding loud and clear!
Woman and War
(_From "Woman and Labor"_)
BY OLIVE SCHREINER
(See pages 240, 246, 504)
In supplying the men for the carnage of a battlefield, women
have not merely lost actually more blood, and gone through a
more acute anguish and weariness, in the months of bearing and
in the final agony of child-birth, than has been experienced
by the men who cover it; but, in the months of rearing that
follow, the women of the race go through a long, patiently
endured strain which no knapsacked soldier on his longest
march has ever more than equalled; while, even in the matter
of death, in all civilized societies, the probability that the
average woman will die in child-birth is immeasurably greater
than the probability that the average male will die in battle.
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 young
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 faces, 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 lain, or that the sand of a
plain may have the glint of white bones!" And we cry, "Without
an inexorable cause, this must not be!" No woman who is a woman
says of a human body, "It is nothing!"
The Arsenal at Springfield
BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
(Probably the most popular of American poets, 1807-1882)
This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling,
Like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms;
But from their silent pipes no anthem pealing
Startles the villages with strange alarms.
Ah! what a sound will rise--how wild and dreary--
When the death-angel touches those swift keys!
What loud lament and dismal Miserere
Will mingle with their awful symphonies!
I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus--
The cries of agony, the endless groan,
Which, through the ages that have gone before us,
In long reverberations reach our own....
Is it, O man, with such discordant noises,
With such accursed instruments as these,
Thou drownest Nature's sweet and kindly voices,
And; arrest the celestial harmonies?
Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals or forts.
War and Peace
BY BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
(American statesman, 1706-1790)
I join with you most cordially in rejoicing at the return of
peace. I hope it will be lasting, and that mankind will at
length, as they call themselves reasonable creatures, have
reason enough to settle their differences without cutting
throats; for, in my opinion, there never was a good war or a
bad peace. What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts
of life might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in
wars had been employed in works of utility! What an extension
of agriculture, even to the tops of the mountains; what
rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges,
aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices and
improvements, rendering England a complete paradise, might not
have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good,
which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief--in
bringing misery into thousands of families, and destroying the
lives of so many working people, who might have performed the
useful labors.
A Prayer of the Peoples
(_From "The Present Hour"_)
BY PERCY MACKAYE
(See pages 561, 572)
God of us who kill our kind!
Master of this blood-tracked Mind
Which from wolf and Caliban
Staggers toward the star of Man--
Now, on Thy cathedral stair,
God, we cry to Thee in prayer!
Where our stifled anguish bleeds
Strangling through Thine organ reeds,
Where our voiceless songs suspire
From the corpses in Thy choir--
Through Thy charred and shattered nave,
God, we cry on Thee to save!
Save us from our tribal gods!
From the racial powers, whose rods--
Wreathed with stinging serpents--stir
Odin and old Jupiter
From their ancient hells of hate
To invade Thy dawning state....
Lord, our God! to whom, from clay,
Blood and mire, Thy peoples pray--
Not from Thy cathedral's stair
Thou hearest:--Thou criest _through_ our prayer
For our prayer is but the gate:
We, who pray, ourselves are fate.
War
BY THE GREAT INDIAN, CHIEF JOSEPH
Hear me, my warriors; my heart is sick and sad;
Our chiefs are killed,
The old men are all dead,
It is cold and we have no blankets;
The little children are freezing to death.
Hear me, my warriors; my heart is sick and sad;
From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever!
A Project for a Perpetual Peace
BY JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
(A document published 1756 in which the French philosopher
outlined in detail a plan for a European federation, which
seems in 1915 to have become the next step in civilization)
As a more noble, useful, and delightful Project never engaged
the human mind, than that of establishing a perpetual peace
among the contending nations of Europe, never did a writer
lay a better claim to the attention of the public than he who
points out the means to carry such a design into execution. It
is indeed very difficult for a man of probity and sensibility,
not to be fired with a kind of enthusiasm on such a subject;
nay, I am not clear that the very illusions of a heart truly
humane, whose warmth makes everything easily surmountable, are
not in this case more eligible than that rigid and forbidding
prudence, which finds in its own indifference and want of
public spirit, the chief obstacle to everything that tends to
promote the public good.
I doubt not that many of my readers will be forearmed with
incredulity, to withstand the pleasing temptation of being
persuaded; and indeed I sincerely lament their dullness in
mistaking obstinacy for wisdom. But I flatter myself, that
many an honest mind will sympathize with me in that delightful
emotion, with which I take up the pen to treat of a subject so
greatly interesting to the world. I am going to take a view, at
least in imagination, of mankind united by love and friendship:
I am going to take a contemplative prospect of an agreeable
and peaceful society of brethren, living in constant harmony,
directed by the same maxims, and joint sharers of one common
felicity; while, realizing to myself so affecting a picture,
the representation of such imaginary happiness will give me the
momentary enjoyment of a pleasure actually present.
Let the People Vote on War
BY ALLEN L. BENSON
(American Socialist writer, born 1871)
Each voter should sign his or her name to the ballot that is
voted. In counting, the ballots for war should be kept apart
from the ballots against war. In the event of more than half of
the population voting for war, those who voted for war should
be sent to the front in the order in which they appeared at
their respective polling places. Nobody who voted against war
should be called to serve until everybody who voted for war had
been sent to the front.
[Illustration: WAR
ARNOLD BÖCKLIN
(_German painter, 1827-1901. Painting in the Dresden Gallery_)]
[Illustration:
LONDON
PAUL GUSTAVE
DORÉ
_French illustrator,
1833-1883._
(_His pictures for
Dante's "Inferno"
are well known_)
]
Anti-Militarism
(_From "The Red Wave"_)
BY JOSEPH-HENRY ROSNY, THE ELDER
(French novelist, member of the Académie des Goncourts; born 1856.
A novel of revolutionary Syndicalism. The present scene describes
a debate organized between champions of the revolutionary and the
conservative labor unions, the "Reds" and the "Yellows"; a grand
Homeric combat of ideas, in which the audience is wrought to a furious
pitch of excitement, and does as much talking as the orators. In the
following extract, from about forty pages of mingled eloquence and
humor, the champion of the "Reds" announces "the grave and dreadful
problem of anti-militarism")
A long shudder agitated the hostile crowds. All the wild beasts
quivered in their cages. Rougemont, immobile, scarcely raised
his hand; never before had his voice sounded more grave and
more pathetic.
"Ah, yes! Question profound and dreadful. No one has been
troubled by it more than I, for I am not among those bold
internationalists who deny their country. I love my land of
France. To make our happiness perfect, we must have the land
of France. But who would dare to say that we, the poor, are
any other thing upon that land than food for suffering and
food for barracks? The worst Prussian, provided that he owns
a coin of a hundred sous--is he not superior to the unhappy
wretch who rummages in empty pockets? All the pleasures, all
the beauty, all the luxury, our most beautiful daughters,
belong to the rich cosmopolitan: he possesses the enchanter's
ring. If you have nothing, you will live more a stranger in
your country than the dog of a swindling millionaire. If you
have nothing, you will be insulted, scorned, hunted, locked in
prison for vagabondage. _La patrie!_ _La patrie_ of the poor!
It is a fable, a symbol, an inscription upon a military-list or
a school-book--the most bitter derision! Your right, unhappy
ones--it is to suffer and defend the soil, which belongs to
your master, to him who possesses. For him, for him alone, our
France devotes each year a billion francs for army and navy....
"It is necessary purely and simply to suppress the budget of
the army and navy," thundered Rougemont, with such force that
he broke the tumult. "France must give all at once, without
hesitation, the example of disarmament. And that would be a
thing so grand and so beautiful that the entire universe would
applaud, that all humanity would turn toward her. From that day
alone we should be at the head of the nations, and our country
would become the country of free men!"
"Under the heel of Wilhelm!"
"A Poland!"
"Guts for the cats!"
"Sold! Rubbish! Meat for sheenies!"
"... living in boiling water like lobsters!"
All at once, the tumult sank. The voice of the orator forced
itself upon the ear, high as a bell, precise as a clarion.
"Free, superb, and triumphant! Queen of the peoples, goddess
of the unfortunate! If we should disarm, before ten years,
France would become a land of pilgrimage, the Mecca of men.
Before twenty years, the other nations would have followed her
example. As for making of us a Poland, let them try it! Have
you then forgotten the teachings of history? Do you not know
that our grand armies, our innumerable victories--we have won
as many victories as all the rest of Europe together--have only
ended in the crushing of Waterloo and the collapse of Sedan? On
the contrary, Italy, dismembered for centuries, Italy, which
cannot count its defeats, is become a free nation. That is
because it is inhabited by a race, clean and well-defined, upon
which the foreigner has been unable to impress his mark. France
enslaved, she, the most intelligent of nations, she who has had
the most influence upon minds and hearts! Come now, that is
not possible, that will never happen! But the people who would
howl indignation at the dismembering of a disarmed France,
would let a war-like France go down to ruin: she would be only
one country like the others. So, I repeat it without scruple:
it is necessary that we should give the magnificent example of
disarmament. Only then shall we be a nation loved and admired
among nations. Only then will all hearts turn toward us. Only
then will the idea that anyone could touch France seem a
sacrilege such as no tyrant would risk!"
The Dawn
BY ÉMILE VERHAEREN
(In this play the Belgian poet has voiced his hopes for the
regeneration of human society. The city of Oppidomagne is besieged by
a hostile army, and the revolutionists in both armies conspire and
revolt. The gates of the city are thrown open, and the end of war
declared. A captain in the hostile army is speaking over the body of
Hérénian, leader of the revolutionists in the city)
I was his disciple, and his unknown friend. His books were
my Bible. It is men like this who give birth to men like me,
faithful, long obscure, but whom fortune permits, in one
overwhelming hour, to realize the supreme dream of their
master. If fatherlands are fair, sweet to the heart, dear
to the memory, armed nations on the frontiers are tragic and
deadly; and the whole world is yet bristling with nations.
It is in their teeth that we throw them this example of our
concord. (Cheers.) They will understand some day the immortal
thing accomplished here, in this illustrious Oppidomagne,
whence the loftiest ideas of humanity have taken flight, one
after another, through all the ages. For the first time since
the beginning of power, since brains have reckoned time, two
races, one renouncing its victory, the other its humbled
pride, are made one in an embrace. The whole earth must needs
have quivered, all the blood, all the sap of the earth must
have flowed to the heart of things. Concord and good will
have conquered hate. (Cheers.) Human strife, in its form of
bloodshed, has been gainsaid. A new beacon shines on the
horizon of future storms. Its steady rays shall dazzle all
eyes, haunt all brains, magnetize all desires. Needs must we,
after all these trials and sorrows, come at last into port,
to whose entrance it points the way, and where it gilds the
tranquil masts and vessels.
(Enthusiasm of all; the people shout and embrace. The former
enemies rise and surround the speaker. Those of Oppidomagne
stretch their arms towards him.)
The Springtime of Peace
(_From "Studies in Socialism"_)
BY JEAN LÉON JAURÉS
(Editor of _l'Humanité_, and leader of the French Socialist movement,
1859-1914; probably the most eminent of Socialist parliamentarians,
assassinated by a fanatic at the outbreak of the war with Germany. The
following is the peroration of a speech delivered at an Anglo-French
parliamentary dinner, 1903)
The majesty of suffering labor is no longer dumb: it speaks now
with a million tongues, and it asks the nations not to increase
the ills which crush down the workers by an added burden of
mistrust and hate, by wars and the expectation of wars.
Gentlemen, you may ask how and when and in what form this
longing for international concord will express itself to some
purpose.... I can only answer you by a parable which I gleaned
by fragments from the legends of Merlin, the magician, from the
Arabian Nights, and from a book that is still unread.
Once upon a time there was an enchanted forest. It had been
stripped of all verdure, it was wild and forbidding. The trees,
tossed by the bitter winter wind that never ceased, struck one
another with a sound as of breaking swords. When at last, after
a long series of freezing nights and sunless days that seemed
like nights, all living things trembled with the first call of
spring, the trees became afraid of the sap that began to move
within them. And the solitary and bitter spirit that had its
dwelling within the hard bark of each of them said very low,
with a shudder that came up from the deepest roots: "Have a
care! If thou art the first to risk yielding to the wooing of
the new season, if thou art the first to turn thy lancelike
buds into blossoms and leaves, their delicate raiment will be
torn by the rough blows of the trees that have been slower to
put forth leaves and flowers."
And the proud and melancholy spirit that was shut up within the
great Druidical oak spoke to its tree with peculiar insistence:
"And wilt thou, too, seek to join the universal love-feast,
thou whose noble branches have been broken by the storm?"
Thus, in the enchanted forest, mutual distrust drove back the
sap, and prolonged the death-like winter even after the call of
spring.
What happened at last? By what mysterious influence was the
grim charm broken? Did some tree find the courage to act alone,
like those April poplars that break into a shower of verdure,
and give from afar the signal for a renewal of all life? Or did
a warmer and more life-giving beam start the sap moving in all
the trees at once? For lo! in a single day the whole forest
burst forth into a magnificent flowering of joy and peace.
BY MICAH
(Hebrew prophet, B. C. 700)
He shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations
afar off: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a
sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig
tree; and none shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the
Lord of hosts hath spoken it.