THE HUMAN SLAUGHTER-HOUSE
_Scenes from the War that is Sure to Come_
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF
WILHELM LAMSZUS
BY
OAKLEY WILLIAMS
WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY ALFRED NOYES
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
1913
INTRODUCTION
_There is one thing that will certainly be said about this book by some
of its readers. It will certainly be said to exaggerate the horrors of
modern war; and, just as certainly, that is a thing which this book does
not do. It is appallingly reticent; and, for every touch of horror in
its pages, the actual records of recent warfare could supply an obscure
and blood-stained mass of detail which, if it were once laid before the
public, would put an end to militarism in a year. It is not the
opponents of militarism who are given over to "cant" and "hypocrisy" and
"emotionalism." It is the supporters of militarism who on the eve of a
great war go about crying for suppression of facts, censorship of the
facts not only of military plans, but of human suffering. For if there
is one thing that the military journalist dreads it is the sight and
smell of blood. "Let us enjoy this pleasant compaign. Let us present our
readers with a little military music played upon the brass bands of the
press. But for God's sake do not waft over Europe the smell of iodoform,
or of the slaughter-house. Man is a fighting animal; let us enjoy the
fight. And_--pollice verso!"
_Unfortunately for these gentlemen, whose good taste is so impeccable
that they shrink from the whole truth, man is also a fighting god. 'And
the next thing we are going to fight is militarism. There is hardly a
great commander in the history of modern warfare who has not described
his own profession as "a dirty trade" and war itself as hell. The party
of "bad taste" which is going to destroy militarism is not likely to
reject the testimony of Wellington, Grant and Napier in favor of the
sensational journalist. This book deals chiefly with the physical and
mental horrors of war. It presents just that one side of the case; but
it must not be forgotten that there are vast battalions of logic and
common sense on the same side. From a logical point of view a war
between civilized peoples is as insane as it is foul and evil. The
pacificists are fighting the noblest battle of the present day. They are
not going to win without a struggle; but they will win. And they will
win because they have on their side the common good of mankind, common
sense, common justice, and common truth._
ALFRED NOYES.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
WILHELM LAMSZUS
LETTER FROM THE CONGRES UNIVERSEL DE LA PAIX
CHAPTER I MOBILIZATION
CHAPTER II SOLDIER
CHAPTER III OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN
CHAPTER IV THE LAST NIGHT
CHAPTER V THE DEPARTURE
CHAPTER VI LIKE THE PROMISE OF MAY
CHAPTER VII BLOOD AND IRON
CHAPTER VIII THE SWAMP
CHAPTER IX THE WHIRLING EARTH
EPILOGUE--WE POOR DEAD
WILHELM LAMSZUS
Few books of its size--one hundred and eleven pages in the original
edition--can perhaps of recent years claim the striking and
instantaneous success of Wilhelm Lamszus's "Menschenschlachthaus." In
appraising this success, I am less concerned with the number of copies
sold (which now, three months after publication, approximates, I
believe, one hundred thousand) than with the impression it has left on
the mind of its readers in Germany and elsewhere on the Continent.
Within a few days of its publication the author awoke to find himself
famous--or infamous, according to the point of view adopted--in his own
country. The fact that his book has been, or is being, translated into
no less than eight European languages is evidence that its appeal is not
confined to the conditions of one country, or of a single nationality.
Its appeal is broad-based. It is addressed to the conscience of
civilized humanity, and as was to have been expected, the conscience of
the individual has reacted to its stimulus in various ways.
The first evidence the author received of the success of his work was
drastic. By profession he is a master at one of the great German public
schools. He was at once "relieved" of his duties, but has now, I
understand, been reinstated. The schoolmaster in Germany, it must be
borne in mind, is primarily a state official. His most important
function is to educate, not only the rising generation of citizens, but
the future levies of conscripts. For a schoolmaster to write a book
"with a tendency" to strip the pomp and circumstance of war of its
traditional glamour--an integral factor in the German educational
system--must, in the eyes of the orthodox of the "State-conserving"
parties, have savored of an unholy alliance between blasphemy and high
treason. The sale of the book was interdicted in the town of its first
publication--the "free" city of Hamburg. The interdict had the effect
of stimulating its sale elsewhere. It challenged a hearing. Even the
"State-conserving" journals were unable to ignore it entirely.
A short time ago, in an open letter addressed to the German press, the
author replied to the criticisms and strictures of his professional
reviewers. As may be conceived, these criticisms and strictures lacked
nothing in virulence or acrimony. "A peril to the public safety," "an
hysterical neuropath," "a morbid phantasy," "a socialist-anarchic
revolutionary," "a cowardly weakling," "a landless man," "an imported
alien draining the marrow of patriotic backbone," may serve as an
anthology (for which I am mainly indebted to the _Hamburger
Nachrichten_) of the compliments showered on the author and his work. As
this reply discloses what was in the author's mind when he wrote his
book, definitely explains its purport and its purpose, it may be worth
some consideration. It may serve to differentiate "The Human
Slaughter-House" from the itch of mere literary sensationalism and
enable the foreigner to understand the light in which the Commission for
Instruction, Education, etc., of the nineteenth Universal Peace Congress
at Geneva regarded it when last year it wrote officially to congratulate
its author on having placed "a weapon of the greatest importance" in the
hands of the pacificists.
At all times and at all places, Lamszus points out, patriotism has been
of two kinds. The one sort takes its stand on the public market-place,
with its hand on its manly chest, to advertise the public spirit that
inflates it. In season and out of season, it never fails to invite the
public gaze to dwell on the integrity of its patriotic sentiments. Its
main strength lies in the spectacular and oratorical. As such it not
infrequently deteriorates into the idle sound and fury of Junkerdom,
Chauvinism and Jingoism.
There is that other type of patriotism that, no less loyal to its own
country, believes in the dignity and worth of humanity, that believes in
the patriotism of quiet, unadvertised, productive work and in the virtue
of a sense of moral responsibility. It is sanguine enough to believe
that it may yet be the destiny of a great nation to serve the cause of
humanity by eliminating the hideous necessity for war. It finds its
highest representative in the patriot of the type of the late Emperor
Frederick the Noble, who, himself a soldier proven on the stricken
field, found the courage to say, "I hate the business of blood. You have
never seen war. If you had ever seen it you would not speak the word
unmoved. I have seen it, and I tell you it is a man's highest duty to
avoid war if by any means it can be avoided."
The issue Lamszus raises at the bar of public opinion of the civilized
world is whether the patriot of this type must necessarily be either a
"neuropath" or a "landless alien," as compared with him of the other
sort; whether he be necessarily lacking in civic spirit, virility, and
even soldierly virtues.
If the matter be of any concern, I gather that the author himself, so
far from being physically a weakling, is a trained gymnast (of the type
that our representatives will have to take into account at the next
Olympic games) given to athletic exercises. He has also had sufficient
medical training to have passed through a school of comparative anatomy.
There are, therefore, no grounds for assuming offhand that he is of the
nerveless type that faints at the first sight of blood; yet he writes of
war with a shudder that the reader can feel in every line.
Yet--a contradiction his critics have not been slow to underline--this
same man, who abhors the very thought of war, has written to the praise
and glorification of war "like a professional panegyrist." While he was
writing "The Human Slaughter-House," he was also engaged in etching
some literary silhouettes, embodying the Dutch folk-songs, of the revolt
of the Netherlands. The contrast is so striking that one or two of these
"prose poems" may be worth quoting.
I
A reign of terror has dawned on the Netherlands. The Netherlands, ever
proud of their freedom, are henceforward to be Spanish provinces. But
the Netherlander has no mind for the honor. He cleaves obstinately to
his chartered rights and to his nationality.
Then the Duke of Alva has come into the country in the Emperor's stead.
He has brought in his train an army of Spanish soldiers, the gallows,
and the executioner's axe. He has turned the country into a cemetery. A
graveyard stillness reigns over it. For where three men foregather in
the streets they smell out conspiracy in their midst. An ill-considered
word, and the gallows, lowering in the background, silences the foolish
mouth.
Setting their teeth, the Netherlander have to suffer it. The Spanish
sword reaches the remotest village. Only in secret do they dare clench
their fists. For the hangman's rack has a way of smoothing out clenched
fists.
Terror lies on its chain like a wild beast. Only when it believes itself
to be unobserved does it rise and sees the people lying on their knees,
and hears a tortured country crying up to Heaven.
II
A star has risen against the sky of despair. The saviour of the
Fatherland has been found. Egmont and Hoorn, the darlings of the people,
have walked into the trap and have been beheaded in the market-place.
But Orange has escaped. He has taken flight to Germany.
Orange, a clever brain! More clever than Spanish guile.
Orange, a brave heart! Braver than Spanish death and swords.
How calm was his countenance! How confident his speech! He is not the
man to rush anything, to spoil anything. He will return in his own time.
They are already whispering it stealthily in one another's ear. The
whisper is already passing from ear to ear, increasing to joyous
certainty:
He is already in our midst. As yet he is in hiding. But on the morrow
his call will ring out, and his confidence glow through every man's
heart.
William of Orange!
III
The call has come. They are flocking in on every road. Groups of
peasants and artisans. Masters, and apprentices among them. And the
greybeards have taken their old weapons from the wall.
Halberds flash in the sunlight. Old-fashioned furniture of war. But
still more ardently do their eyes flash. All are of one mind. All driven
on irresistibly by one single impulse.
So they pass singing along the highroads. They had almost forgotten how
to sing. But now it breaks out the more joyously in the sunlight--the
solemn chant.
Dumfounded, the Spanish outpost, under cover of a hedge, gapes after
them. Let them run, the spies. The spell is broken. Let them hear of it
till their ears ring again.
The morning sun is shining. But we are marching to death and singing:
"Happy is he who knows how to die for God and his dear Fatherland."
IV
A pleasant farm hidden away in a garden. It is springtide. The garden is
a blaze of white. Apple-trees in blossom. Beneath their boughs a man and
a girl are standing close intertwined.
Beyond, on the other side of the hedge, they are passing along the
village street. Their friends of the village. Their hour has come.
The girl's head is resting heavily on his breast, and her arm trembling
round his neck. "Stay with me, only stay one day more. The wedding was
to have been tomorrow. You will never come back! And we are so young--so
very young. Look, how the blossom is falling. You, too, will lie on the
ground like that, so dead and white. And I shall waste away and fade."
Then he looks into her eyes--sad unto death and fearful. "So you wish
me to stay behind, and the others to go and die for us?"
She shakes her head without a word, and looks up at him with a smile
amid her tears. Then he kisses her, and clasps her hand in farewell.
V
The groups have assembled. They have grown from day to day, and drawn
nearer and nearer to the enemy.
And now the two armies are arrayed against each other--eye to eye. On
the plain yonder you can see them--the Spanish troops flashing in
steel--so close that you can distinguish their yellow faces in the
sunlight.
What is their quest here on foreign soil? They are selling their blood
for a hireling's wage, and turning themselves into hangmen to lay a free
people in chains.
A distant glow is still glowering to the heavens. The last villages
through which the Spanish dogs passed. They have left smoke and ruin
behind them. Mangled corpses, the wailing of children. What do the
strangers care? They have come into the country for loot.
There they stand, the destroyers! Splendidly harnessed, practised in
war, and used to victory. Callously, as if at their handicraft, without
much shouting, or much running about and movement, the array over there
falls into line. A dangerous foe in its uncanny quiet.
Over against them the Netherlanders are a people assembled at haste.
They are ignorant of drill, are ignorant how they ought to fight in
ranks, and on horseback. But on the issue they are staking hearts filled
with indomitable hate, filled full with undying love of country.
Beggars, the Spaniards once called them. And the Beggars are mindful of
their nakedness. Their fists clench. Their teeth are set. And their lips
are mumbling curses and hot prayers.
VI
It came to fighting. It came to murder. Death leaped up, and raced
neighing across the battlefield, until it dripped blood--until at even,
blinded with blood, it fled away into the darkness.
The battle is over now. The daylight is dying behind Bergen's towers.
The shadows of night are blending with the shadow of Death.
It was a glorious fight. The wrath of a people is mightier than all the
guile and strategy on earth.
But the victors are exhausted. Watch fires are ablaze. They all crowd
round them to comfort themselves in their warmth.
Dark figures are whispering in groups. "Ha! How they ran! Whoever was
overtaken was cut down--without mercy. They will remember the day. Will
they come on again? How will the sinister Emperor take it? How far does
his power reach? They will come on again. A bigger army! A bigger
fleet!"
Look how the stars are gleaming. The air is clear. Even now you can see
the heavens opening. And the Milky Way is glimmering down to meet you.
The sound of singing rises in the distance. An old hymn. A prayer of
thanks of the days of our fathers. Those nearest by take it up. The
chant leaps from fire to fire. The darkling field is singing. The night
is singing. A choir raising their hands to Heaven, their voices to the
stars.
Lord! Grant us freedom!
* * * * *
Where then lies the truth? In these "prose poems" aglow with martial
enthusiasm, and ringing with the soldier's spirit, or in the relentless
anatomical realism of "The Human Slaughter-House"? Or are both
lies--"both deliberate conscious untruths, written under the inspiration
of a social democratic lawyer?"
The explanation, as Lamszus see it, lies in the condition of the times.
No one, he claims, could write of the revolt of the Dutch Republics
otherwise than in the brave setting of flashing eyes, glittering steel,
and the stirring clash of men-at-arms. But it is equally untrue to tell
of modern warfare waged with picric acid and electric wires in the same
spirit. The romance and glamour of warfare in the past are grinning lies
when transferred to latter-day warfare, where long-drawn fronts of flesh
and blood are opposed to machines of precision and the triumphs of the
chemical laboratory. The anachronism becomes nothing less than the
deliberate falsification of history. Dynamite and machine-guns, not the
writer, have turned the "Field of Honor" into a "Human Slaughter-House,"
where regiments are wiped out by pressing an electric button.
In the hideousness of these scenes of future warfare the charge of
exaggeration, of painting carnage red, is easy to raise, and difficult
to rebut. Lamszus does not shirk it.
"What I have written was worked out empirically. It is a sum that is,
mathematically, so incontestable that no one has hitherto ventured to
dispute it. For the second factor in this sum is the albuminous
substance of human brain and marrow. And when we hear that in the
Russo-Japanese war thousands went mad, who would care to maintain that
the nervous system of the civilized mid-European is hardier and tougher
than that of Asiatics and semi-civilized Russians? 'The material has
become softer,' says the authority of the staff-general. What now, when
the sum total of acoustic and visual stimuli, of physical and psychic
shocks, to which this 'softer material' is exposed, has, with every new
invention, become more destructive in quality and quantity? To find the
answer to such a simple problem did not assuredly call for a
mathematical genius."
With the answer before us, the question rises whether it is more
patriotic to blink it, to go on pretending that war is what it used to
be--a soldier's death on the field of honor, or senseless automatic
slaughter by machinery. It is against this latter mechanical aspect of
war that the instinct of humanity, to which Lamszus has given voice in
vivid words, revolts. Does it become a man better to look, with the full
sense of his moral and ethical responsibility, the hideous fact in its
face, or to continue to disguise it under a veil of romance woven round
the pomp and circumstance of glorious war? In this sense "The Human
Slaughter-House" of Lamszus' invention stands, as the Universal Peace
Congress read it, for the revolt of the spirit of humanity, the spirit
of progress and evolution, against the cumulative horror of the
mechanics of modern warfare.
"For just as there is no room for the uncouth monsters of primeval
times, for Mastodon and Brontosaurus, on the green earth today, so
little will a nation of Krupp's steel plates be able to continue to live
in the community of civilized nations."
None the less, a nation of men of virile breed will, he believes, be no
less prompt to take up arms in defence of its heritage of culture than
Prussia was in 1813, and to fight in its defence to the last gasp. For
in the War of Liberation it was not drill, but the spirit of the people
that saved the country.
"Thus the people in which we have belief will be irresistible in the
council of nations, and be destined before every other to lead the
nations to the work for which Nature has fashioned them.... Worthless
indeed is the nation that would not stake its all for its honor. The
only question that remains is what the spirit of this honor be; whether
the appetite of savages and barbarians, hungry for spoils, impels me, or
whether moral honor, the blood-stained desecrated face of God, inspires
me."
With these bold words Lamszus concludes his apologia for the brutality
of "The Human Slaughter-House."
OAKLEY WILLIAMS.
[_Translation_.]
To HERR LAMSZUS.
_XIXme Congres Universel de la Paix a Geneve_.
_Geneve_,1912.
DEAR SIR,
I have great pleasure in acquitting myself of the duty of expressing to
you, in the name of "The Commission for Education, Instruction, etc.,"
composed of delegates of the most varied nations assembled at the
World's Peace Congress, and, further, in the name of all Pacificists,
our thanks for the distinguished word-picture of rare artistic
originality and of gripping effectiveness of the wholesale murders of
the future in "The Human Slaughter-House," _for having furnished the
cause of peace with a weapon of considerable importance_, and for having
more especially made a very valuable gift to the cause of every
Pacificist.
May the blessing of its work be great!
On behalf of the Congress Commission for Education, Instruction, etc.
DR. A. WESTPHAL, _Secretary_.
THE HUMAN SLAUGHTER-HOUSE
CHAPTER I
MOBILIZATION
War! War is declared! So the news speeds hollow-eyed through the
streets. We are at war. It's the real thing this time.
Mobilization!
The ominous word dominates the placards on the hoardings. The newspapers
reproduce the proclamations in their heaviest type, and rumors and
dispatches flutter like a ruffled dovecote round this day of Blood and
Iron.
It is deadly earnest now. And this sense of the seriousness of it has
numbed the State like a stroke of paralysis. But then a jar, as of a
lever thrown over, goes through the vast iron fabric. And every one has
got to yield to this jar. The time for anxiety and hesitation is over,
for doubts and oscillation. The moment has now come when we cease to be
citizens, from henceforward we are only soldiers--soldiers who have no
time to think, who only have time to die.
So they come flocking in from the work-shops, from the factories, from
behind the counters, from business offices, and the open country--they
come flocking into the town, and every man falls in to stand by his
native land.
"Four days from date" was the order on my summons. Well, the fourth
morning has come, and I have said good-by to my wife and my two
children. Thank God, the fourth morning has come, for the parting was
not easy, and my heart aches when I think of them "at home."
"Where are you going, Daddy?" asked Baby, as I kissed her for the last
time with my portmanteau in my hand.
"Daddy's going on a journey," said her mother, and looked at me with a
smile amid her tears. "Yes, he's going on a journey, girlie, and you,
little chap, you've got to be good, and do as Mummy tells you."
And then we got the parting over quickly, for Dora kept up her pluck
until the last moment....
* * * * *
Now we are drawn up in the barrack-yard with bag and baggage--we of the
rank and file--we reservists and militiamen, every man at his place by
the table.
How serious their faces are. They reveal no trace of youthful high
spirits or martial exuberance. Their expressions rather betoken deep
thought.
"The war that in the end was bound to come"--so we heard and so we read
in the papers. "That is bound to be so, that is a law of Nature. The
nations are snatching the bread from one another's mouths; they are
depriving each other of the air to breathe. That is a thing which in
the end can only be settled by Force. And if it has to be, better it
should be today than tomorrow."
We are mercenaries no longer--those hirelings for murder, who once sold
their blood for money down to all and sundry. We are gladiators no
longer--slaves who enact the drama of dying as an exciting spectacle for
the entertainment of the rich, and for the lust of their eyes. It is to
our native land we took our oath. And if it must be, we are resolved to
die as citizens, to die in the full consciousness and full
responsibility for our acts.
What will the next few days have in store for us?
Not one of us has probably ever, with his own eyes, seen a field of
battle. But we have heard about it from others, and we have read in
books of other men what a battlefield looked like in 1870-71, and, as
though with our own eyes, we have watched the shells shattering human
bodies. And another thing we know is that forty years ago in spite of
inferior guns and rifles, over a hundred and twenty thousand dead stayed
behind on the field of honor. What percentage of the living will modern
warfare claim? Armies are being marshalled vaster than the world has
ever seen. Germany alone can put six million soldiers in the field;
France as many. Then the war of '70-'71 was nothing more than a
long-drawn affair of outposts! My brain reels when I try to visualize
these masses--starting to march against one another; I seem to choke for
breath.
Then are we a breed of men other than our fathers?
Is the reason because we only have one life to lose? And do we cling so
passionately to this life? Isn't our native land worth more than this
scrap of life?
There probably won't be many among us who believe in the Resurrection,
who believe that our mangled bodies will rise again in new splendor.
Nor do we believe that our Father in Heaven will have pleasure in our
murderous doings, that in that better world He will regard us other than
as our brothers' murderers. But we bend our heads before iron Necessity.
The Fatherland has called us, and we, as loyal sons, obey the command
there is no evading, submissively.... From today onward we belong to our
native land, so the Major shouted a minute ago as he read out the
articles of war.
And it's going to be the real thing this time.
The Sergeant-Major has already read the roll and checked it. We are
already told off in fours. Now, in a long column, we are marching across
the barrack-yard, for this very day we are ordered to doff our civilian
dress, and don our new kit. This very day we have got to become
soldiers.
Things are moving apace with us now.