The story brought back from Europe by Miss Jane Addams about the
“doping” of charging soldiers, naturally amazes all who have had any
experience on the firing line. She said in her speech at Carnegie Hall,
on July 9th, that in the present war, in order to get soldiers to charge
with the bayonet, all nations are forced first to make the men drunk.
“In Germany,” she said, “they have a regular formula for it. In England
they use rum, and the French resort to absinthe. In other words,
therefore, in the terrible bayonet charges they speak of with dread, the
men must be doped before they start.”
This outgiving shows the folly of sending an hysterical and credulous
woman to the front to get reliable information of war conditions. It is
quite probable that the story was told to Miss Addams as she relates it,
but that a woman of her intelligence should accept it as true and retail
it on her own authority is to be regretted. It gives a misleading
picture of war conditions and is an insult to the best manhood of all
the nations engaged in the war. Denials have come from all the nations
and friends of all the nations, but these denials are hardly needed by
those who know about war.
Whatever may be thought of the war, and much as we may deplore its
horrors nobody can truthfully deny the courage and hardihood of the men
engaged in it, whether they are Germans, English, French or other
nationals. It requires just as much courage to endure the wearing danger
of the trenches as it does to participate in a bayonet charge. In fact,
most soldiers would feel it as a relief to substitute the excitement and
activity of an attack for the grinding peril of lying still under fire.
If the men would need to be doped to get them to charge, they would need
to be constantly doped to endure the sodden and bloody carnage of the
trenches.
The work of war requires, more than any other, physical and mental
fitness as well as resolution of soul. Every military commander knows
that strong liquor would impair the physical strength and endurance of
men for the time being, if not permanently. When a line of men start
upon a bayonet charge they need every ounce of strength and endurance
they possess to give them any chance of success. To send a line of doped
men upon a bayonet charge would be to invite their almost certain
destruction and the failure of the movement. Even if commanders were
brutal enough to adopt the dope tactics specified by Miss Addams they
would not be such fools.
Richard Harding Davis, in commenting on Miss Addams’s amazing
“revelation,” says: “I have seen more of this war and other wars than
Miss Addams, and against this insult, flung by a complacent and
self-satisfied woman at men who gave their lives for men, I protest.”
There is enough material for genuine and truthful indictment of war
without resorting to silly falsehood. How would the descendents of the
men who gave up their lives in our civil war from a sense of imperious
duty and patriotism like to have the slander placed upon their graves
that the only way they could be induced to go into battle was to stupify
them with intoxicants? Our war was a small one as compared with this
twentieth century war, but it was just as perilous to the men engaged in
it as this is to the soldiers of the present. An eminent military
authority recently published a statement to the effect that in our civil
war the casualties, in proportion to the number of men engaged, was ten
times greater than the proportional casualties now. We do not know that
this estimate is accurate, but we do know that our casualties were
proportionately greater, in spite of the superior effectiveness of the
modern machinery of war. The science of defense has kept pace with the
science of destruction. Our war required just as much courage and
hardihood and endurance on the part of the men engaged in it as this war
does, and we know that it was not necessary to dope our men with strong
liquor, on either side, to get them to fight.