Topics for consideration, especially by the mothers in the working class.^[241]

(1) “Will there be, indeed, more wars?”

Yes, undoubtedly.^[242]

“What shall be done about it?”

There are two things to be done, by the mother, right away: Think about war and talk about war with other mothers and the boys—also with the girls.

Let us see:

In the next war whose sons shall be shot?

The aristocrat’s wife is not worrying about whose children are to be destroyed in the next war. She knows already that her sons will not be destroyed in battle; her sons will not stand before Gatling guns; her sons will not be torn and lie bleeding, groaning, screaming and cursing on the steel-swept battlefield by day or through the long night; her sons will not fester and sicken and die in dismal battlefield hospitals; she knows that her sons will not be pitched into nameless trenches—buried like dogs; her flesh and blood, her slain sons, will not be brought home to mock her aching heart.

That is settled—positively.

She belongs to the ruling class.

The ruling class protect her and the men and boys she loves—loyally.

But the working class mother—the humble mother of wage-slaves—she feels no such security. Herod and Mars invade her home to steal the men and boys she loves. The rude fist of war is ever ready to crush her. This humble woman is wholly unprotected against war by the ruling class. She is also unprotected against war by the voting men of her own class.

This woman must protect herself—for the present.

Let it be remembered that in the gentle heart of a humble mother whose loving sons have been butchered in battle, it is always winter. The cheap rhetoric and hypocritical compliments of the coarse-grained political orator, the honeyed words of any man in any profession—sacred or secular—craftily exempted from the war which slew her loved ones, these can not charm the wintry desolation of her life into rare June weather. Nor can the wound in her mother heart be healed with a stingy quarterly allowance of filthy money called a pension. When her loved ones were slaughtered her joys were slain.

This woman must indeed protect herself; and she can protect herself, somewhat,—if she will.

She can do this: She can teach her child to hate—to hate war.^[243]

(2) Mother, is your five-year-old son strong, healthy and handsome? Yes? Well, that is fine. But think of him at the age of twenty in slaughtering clothes, being transformed into a swaggering armed bully. Mother, if he should be tricked into the army and butchered and his torn corpse should be brought home to you, you would then know what other mothers feel when their boys, whom your son butchers, are brought home to them. Then, perhaps, war would seem quite different—far less “great” and “glorious” to you. You see, mother, in a war some mothers’ boys must be butchered. Perhaps a false patriotism has been taught to you—just as a false patriotism is taught your sons. Both the mother and her sons are confused. To get the working class boy ready for war the capitalist must first confuse and trick the mother.

Kings, emperors, presidents, tsars, and capitalists of all lands are lovingly interested in the problem of “race suicide,” the problem of small families,—interested in the “food-for-powder” crop, the “bullet-stopper” crop,—EAGER THAT EVERY WORKING CLASS MOTHER SHOULD BECOME A BREEDER. After Napoleon Bonaparte had had multitudes of the men and boys of France butchered, making it difficult to find soldiers, he impatiently exclaimed, “What France needs is mothers!” What he meant was that France needed more human breeders flattered into bearing and rearing more butchers for Napoleon. Of course Napoleon was shrewd enough to confuse the humble mothers with plenty of cheap flattery concerning their “patriotism.”^[244] Capitalists today want larger working class families for more soldiers, also for a larger army of unemployed—in order that the capitalists may, in the industrial civil war, more tyrannically dictate the wage terms to the workers and also more easily secure substitutes in case of a war.

And to this end the capitalists are willing to pay the price; that is, willing to pay for the social chloroform, for the false teachings, necessary to beget a slave’s blind enthusiasm for the master that betrays him—called patriotism.

(3) Thomas Carlyle called working class soldiers simpletons. A person of good mind, however, if caught young, can be confused till he will actually volunteer to butcher his fellowman. This can be done in many ways; for example, take Fitchburg, Massachusetts, May 29–30, 1908. The very small children, also ten-year-olds, and those still older, were assembled, according to age, in halls, churches, the Young Men’s Christian auditorium, and elsewhere, May 29; and for long weary hours gory stories of “bravery” in war were recited to them, horrible pictures were displayed before them, blood-curdling suggestions were urged upon them, cheap lusts for cheap glory were inspired in the helpless youngsters,—just as a savage might teach his little sons to rip the scalp from a screaming victim’s skull. And humble mothers of the working class were tricked into co-operating in this anti-social “patriotism.”

Such abominable performances stunt the children. Their social development is arrested. They become jingoists, ignorant little bigots—utterly incapable of sincere international love. Their political philosophy is a shallow and silly “Hurrah!” Their “patriotism” becomes a belittling conceit and a readiness for cruel deeds.

Everybody, of course, loves a frank, finely social child. International and national murder is a coarse and unsocial thought; and when parents, teachers, preachers, or lecturers, speak enthusiastically of wholesale murder or of famous national and international murderers in the presence of a child, the child’s social development is checked, stunted; when a few suggestions of international jealousy and malice have been ignorantly (or cunningly) thrust into a child’s mind it becomes simply impossible for the child to develop into an “international man,” a finely social person sincerely loving his fellowmen. This would be a charming world if all men and women were social—socialized, unblasted, unstung by shriveling national jealousy and malice; but everywhere the vile business of blasting the social nature of the rising generation is being extended. The school, even, is invaded. The Rev. Dr. Walter Walsh warns parents thus:^[245]

“The school has become not only the training ground, but actually a recruiting ground for the army. The British War Office issues a circular pressing secondary schools to teach boys over twelve the use of the rifle; issues Morris tube carbines to schools having suitable ranges; and supplies ammunition at cost price. The inevitable next step is the formation of cadet corps in the schools, with inspection by military chiefs.... The capture of the schools by the militarists is one of the most ominous signs of the times. The militarist has long looked with wistful eye at this happy hunting grounds.... Parliaments have already been strongly urged to make military drill compulsory in all public schools.... The scholar is rapidly transformed into the conscript.”

The shameless audacity of using a socializing institution, the school, to cultivate national malice in the helpless children!

(4) If only the children could get one good look at the hell behind the curtain it would be more difficult to beguile and betray them.

Let the wonderful Zola tell what the boys in the public schools are not taught and are not permitted to realize till later when they are grown up and are seduced to the battlefield with the crafty cry, “Follow the flag!”

Here following are some paragraphs on the battlefield hospital. A military hospital, it may be said, is an institution in which sick and shell-torn men are hastily repaired in order that they may go again to the battle line—perchance to faint or be ripped to pieces again. Thus Zola:^[246]

“... Outside in the shed the preparations were of another nature: the chests were opened and the contents arranged in order.... On another table were the surgical cases with their blood-curdling array of glittering instruments, probes, forceps, bistouries, scalpels, scissors, saws, an arsenal of implements of every imaginable shape adapted to pierce, cut, dice, rend, crush.... The wagons kept driving up to the entrance in an unbroken stream.... The regular ambulance wagons of the medical department, two-wheeled and four-wheeled, were too few in number to meet the demand ... provision vans, everything on wheels that could be picked up on the battlefield, came rolling up with their ghastly loads; and later in the day carrioles and market-gardeners’ carts were pressed into the service and harnessed to horses that were found straying along the roads.... It was a sight to move the most callous to behold the unloading of those poor wretches, some with the greenish pallor on their faces, others suffused with the purple hue that denotes congestion; many were in a state of coma, others uttered piercing cries of anguish ... the keen knife flashed in the air, there was the faint rasping of the saw barely audible, the blood spurted in short sharp jets.... As soon as the subject had been operated on another was brought in, and they followed one another in such quick succession that there was barely time to pass the sponge over the protecting oil-cloth. At the extremity of the grass plot, screened from sight by a clump of lilac bushes, they had set up a kind of morgue whither they carried the bodies of the dead, which were removed from the beds without a moment’s delay in order to make room for the living, and this receptacle also served to receive the amputated legs and arms, whatever débris of flesh and bone remained upon the table.... Rents in tattered, shell-torn uniforms disclosed gaping wounds, some of which had received a hasty dressing on the battlefield, while others were still raw and bleeding. There were feet, still encased in their coarse shoes, crushed into a mass like jelly; from knees and elbows, that were as if they had been smashed by a hammer, depended inert limbs. There were broken hands, and fingers almost severed, ready to drop, retained only by a strip of skin. Most numerous among the casualties were the fractures; the poor arms and legs, red and swollen, throbbed intolerably and were as heavy as lead. But the most dangerous hurts were those in the abdomen, chest, and head. There were yawning fissures that laid open the entire flank, the knotted viscera were drawn into great hard lumps beneath the tight-drawn skin, while as the effect of certain wounds the patient frothed at the mouth and writhed like an epileptic.... And finally the head, more than any other portion of the frame, gave evidence of hard treatment; a broken jaw, the mouth a pulp of teeth and bleeding tongue, an eye torn from its socket and exposed upon the cheek, a cloven skull that showed the palpitating brain beneath.... Although the sponge was kept constantly at work the tables were always red.... The buckets ... were emptied over a bed of daisies a few steps away.... Some seemed to have left the world with a sneer on their faces, their eyes retroverted till naught was visible but the whites, the grinning lips parted over the glistening teeth, while in others with faces unspeakably sorrowful, big tears still stood on the cheeks. One, a mere boy, short and slight, half whose face had been shot away by a cannon ball, had his two hands clasped convulsively above his heart, and in them a woman’s photograph, one of those pale, blurred pictures that are made in the quarters of the poor, bedabbled with his blood. And at the feet of the dead had been thrown in a promiscuous pile the amputated arms and legs, the refuse of the knife and the saw of the operating table, just as the butcher sweeps into a corner of his shop the offal, the worthless odds and ends of flesh and bone.... Bourouche, brandishing the long, keen knife, cried: ‘Raise him!’ seized the deltoid with his left hand and with a swift movement of the right cut through the flesh of the arm and severed the muscle; then, with a deft rear-ward cut, he disarticulated the joint at a single stroke, and, presto! the arm fell on the table, taken off in three motions.... ‘Let him down!’ ... he had done it in thirty seconds.... Their strength all gone, reduced to skeletons, with ashen, clayey faces, the miserable wretches suffered the torments of the damned.... The patients writhed and shrieked in unceasing delirium, or sat erect in bed with the look of spectres.... There were others again who maintained a continuous howling.... Often gangrene kept mounting higher and higher, and the amputation had to be repeated until the entire limb was gone.”

And that is hell—for which your children are prepared.

This phase of war is shrewdly kept from the children. No child’s mind could be poisoned, no child’s imagination could be set on fire for war, no child’s heart could be made to lust for the “glory” of the battlefield of carnage—if he were shown this side of war.

But the child is an easy victim. Even some cheap jingo jingle called patriotic poetry renders the working class the easy, fooled tool of despots. The victimizing of the helpless child is rendered especially easy when the mother, blindfold with flattery, gullibly lends assistance in strangling the child’s sociability. (See Chapter Seven, Section 30.)

(5) Here is a specimen of the poison craftily used in the public schools under the control of the capitalist class:

Will the mothers protect their children’s nature against the unsocial small souls who are always ignorantly or maliciously ready to thrust fangs and venom into the generous natures of frank and social children by having them recite stupid praise of distinguished human butchers and “famous victories”?

An American literary man of great eminence, Dr. Edward Everett Hale, thus rebuked the poisoners of school children:

“But even now, think how much more care you give to the study of the histories of war than to the histories of peace. There are ten times as many people who know who commanded at the Battle of New Orleans as there are who could tell me the name of the great apostle who made freedom the law for Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Michigan. This man died leaving no memorial.”^[249]

(6) The working class should speedily get control of public libraries and throw out and keep out books written especially to exalt war and puff the brilliant butchers who have guided millions of working men to death on blood-soaked battlefields,—throw out and burn all books designed to praise the Christian or pagan cannibalism, or the civilized savagery called war. Labor unions and all other working class bodies should make formal and vigorous protest against having anything said in the public schools in praise of war and in praise of distinguished butchers. Let them reflect too that military drills, given as such, with martial songs and war tales, cultivate blood lust in the children, blind them to the true meaning of war, make them an easy prey, later, to the crafty cowards who will seek to use them in future savage contests, and are thus an outrage on the children. For a dozen reasons the working class should get control of local school boards.^[250]

(7) The following lines from a poem written by an elegant coward, are often used in the primary grades of the public schools:

A school teacher can make a fool and a murderer of a boy of eight or ten years with such lines. Remember that poets and teachers who furnish the war-song chloroform for school children usually “side-step” when the storm breaks—no rifle business for them—they let others “meet the storm” which their poetry and teaching helped stir up. The war-song poet and the war-song school teacher, if you please, are too “cultivated and respectable” to be patriotically butchered.

Under no circumstances should a working class father and mother keep silent while a public school teacher or a Sunday-school teacher thrills the children’s blood and blasts the glorious sentiments of human brotherhood with recitals of war-tales and fulsome praise of men whose “glory” is red with the blood of tens of thousands of working class men. Such stories and such praise scar and brutalize the social natures of the children as distinctly as a hot branding iron would disfigure their tender faces.

(8) The little lovers, the children, who are conceived in love, born in love, and live on love, who hunger for love, long to love, glorify the home with love and make the sad world hope for—almost mad for—love, one generation of these sweet little lovers, these prattling sweethearts of mankind, would, when grown up, fill the world with an international love, if they were not bitten by the viper of petty, local patriotism.

The mother who will think about this matter somewhat will promptly realize that there is something disastrously wrong with the education which stings her little lovers with a murderer’s aspiration. There is something wrong when the gracious neighborliness and charming sociability of children give way to swaggering insolence and savage blood-lust.

Let the mother think of it: Even their playthings, their toys, are craftily used to sting, to debauch the imagination of the children, to write the hopes of brutes in the hearts of gentle children. Lately there has been enormous increase in the business of manufacturing toy soldiers, toy cavalry horses, toy cannon and toy Gatling guns, also khaki soldier clothing for children. “120,000 bales of scrap tin from the Puget Sound canneries were sent recently to Hamburg, Germany, to be made into toy soldiers.”^[251] There can be no doubt about the results of using such garb and playthings. That the child is thus scarred is revealed when the tiny boy assumes the attitudes and the strut and swagger of the professional man-slaughterer. His very conversation with his military toys shows he is marked—ready.^[252]

William Lloyd Garrison wrote:

“My country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind.”

But the stung child can not learn the meaning of Garrison’s noble words.

(9) Boy, kill one human being, and you will be called a murderer—despised and hanged. But kill a thousand human beings in war—and you become “great”! Deluded women smile upon you, little children gape at you, preachers praise you, politicians pet you, orators glorify you, capitalists grin at you, universities honor you, and the Government medals and pensions you;—but lonely, war-orphaned children and war-robbed widows, these despise you exactly in proportion as they understand you.

Remember, boy, the soldier’s sword reaches through the slaughtered father to others—reaches the hearts of helpless women and helpless children.

Which would you rather be, boy, a dead and useless slaughterer of men, or a live and useful man of peace?—a dead butcher or a live brother?

(10) Here, of course, the thought of patriotism occurs.

A great American, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote:

“We hesitate to employ a word so much abused as patriotism, whose true sense is almost the reverse of the popular sense. We have no sympathy with that boyish egotism, hoarse with cheering for one side, for one state, for one town; the right patriotism consists in the delight which springs from contributing our peculiar legitimate advantages to the benefit of humanity.”

And thus James Russell Lowell:^[253]

“There is a patriotism of the soul whose claim absolves us from our other and terrene fealty.... When, therefore, one would have us throw up our caps and shout with the multitude, ‘Our country, however bounded!’ he demands of us that we sacrifice the larger to the less, the higher to the lower, and that we yield to the imaginary claims of a few acres of soil our duty and privilege as liegemen of Truth. Our true country is bounded on the north and the south, on the east and the west, by justice.... Veiling our faces, we must take silently the hand of Duty to follow her.”

The fallacy of false patriotism is exploded in the following quotation by James Mackaye:^[254]

“There is a school of patriotism more or less popular which teaches that a man owes to his country a duty which he owes to no other aggregate of the human race, and that he should render service to the constituted authorities thereof, whatever policies they may choose to pursue. The motto of this school is ‘My country, right or wrong.’ Had this been the motto of Washington and his compatriots the United States would still be a part of the British Empire. The particular aggregate of men which constitutes a nation is a matter of the merest accident.... Indeed the patriotism whose dictum is ‘My country, right or wrong’ is but one degree of egotism, for if my country right or wrong, why not my state right or wrong; if my state right or wrong, why not my town ... my neighborhood ... my family ... my great uncle ... or why not myself right or wrong?”

George Washington was disloyal to his own government, the greatest national government in the world in his day, simply because that government did not do things to suit him. Washington took up arms against his own government because it did not suit him. Washington was unpatriotic toward his great national government because it did not please him. Washington even trampled upon the flag of his own national government because that government’s policy did not suit him.

But Washington was loyal to his own interests. He was patriotic toward the new revolutionary government that did suit him. He transferred his allegiance to a new flag and a new constitution and a new government and thus protected his economic interests.

And all these things are true, strictly true, of almost every great American in the times of Washington. Nearly every “leading citizen” in England at that time thought the behavior of the great Americans was “simply awful,” “outlandishly anarchistic.”

The “patriotic” great men in England were protecting their economic interests and used their government to protect those interests.

The “unpatriotic” Americans were protecting their economic interests, and they despised the government that would not protect their interests, and they straightway constructed a government which they could use in protecting their interests. Then they became patriotic toward the new government which they were using to protect their interests.

Always those in possession of the powers of government use the Government to protect themselves—that is, to protect their interests; and they never fail to shrewdly shout, “Patriotism!” and teach “patriotism”; nor do they ever fail to shout, “Unpatriotic!” at any group or class who seek to reorganize government in self-defense.

“Patriotism!” “Love of our country!” Yes, indeed! But, doesn’t the average American working class man look ridiculous shouting, “Hurrah for our country—our land of the free”? He has no voice in the control of the factory where he works; has no voice as to the use of the militia and the soldiers; has no right to demand a job and thus defend his life; he could not have the service of one petty village marshal, to open up a “shut-down” factory, even though the opening of the factory would save him and five thousand other men and their twenty-five thousand women and children from starvation; in the mill and mine and factory he has no voice as to who shall be his foreman or superintendent any more than black chattel slaves in Georgia cotton fields in 1850.

Our country! Land of the free! Where the president of the American Federation of Labor could be clapped into jail if he should use the “freedom of the press” to publish even a short list of boycotted industrial tyrants; where the officers of the Western Federation of Miners were kidnapped and the kidnapping was declared to be constitutional by the highest court in the land, and the untried prisoners (constitutionally entitled to all the presumptions of innocence) were declared guilty by the cheap President of the political mockery called a “free republic.”

(11) Mothers and fathers are not permitted to learn of many of the foul things happening at barracks or far away whither their sons have been “flimflammed” for bullet-stoppers.

For President William H. Taft’s official testimony on the sexual degradation of the soldier sons of loving mothers, see Chapter Four, Section One, of the present volume.

“On the 17th of July, 1899, the staff correspondents of American newspapers stationed in Manila stated unitedly in public protest:

“‘The [Press] censorship has compelled us to participate in this misrepresentation by excising or altering uncontroverted statements of fact, on the plea, as General Otis said, that “they would alarm the people at home,” or “have the people of the United States by the ears.”’”^[255]

Some things, you know, must be concealed. President D. S. Jordan (Leland Stanford University) writes:^[256]

“Does the Outlook [editor] know what Manila is becoming under military rule? We hear of four hundred saloons on the Escolta, where two were before; that twenty-one per cent. of our soldiers are attacked with venereal disease, that according to the belief of the soldiers, ‘even the pigs and dogs have the syphilis.’”

Following the Spanish war, venereal diseases as cause of ineffectiveness and cause for discharge from the army increased two and a half fold; that is, two hundred and fifty per cent.^[257] The statement by the Secretary of War, Mr. Dickinson (Report for 1909, p. 17) is sufficient to disgust and anger every woman in the land with the entire filthy business of militarism. For the startling statement see Chapter Four, Section One, of present volume.

In this connection read the words of an officer in the Department of War, Col. John Van Rensselaer:^[258]

“I have but one word to say. I am an officer of the Medical Corps of the Army, and will speak on this important subject from that standpoint.

“Every soldier excused from duty on account of sickness of any kind has a record made of his case. By reason of this fact, I believe I may safely say that military vital statistics, including venereal diseases, are the most complete extant.

“The authorities observing that there has been in recent years a progressive increase of these diseases in the Army, until the non-efficiency from them with us now exceeds that of any other army, and despairing of help from the civil control of prostitution, have instituted a plan within the service by which they hope to reduce the excessive non-efficiency from venereal. Medical officers are required to instruct the men in the nature and dangers of these diseases, the non-necessity of exposure to them....

“Such instruction is valuable to a certain extent, but only to a certain extent.... We cannot, therefore, expect all of our men, so many of whom are at the age of highest virility, to avoid exposure by reason of any moral suasion we may bring to bear. Some certainly will not, so we say to them, ‘Be continent, but if you cannot, then protect yourself!’ And we tell them how to do it.”

How splendid, how grandly noble, it must have been to see a regular army physician, wearing the official professional uniform marked “U. S.,” going, officially, at stated intervals, to the officially “segregated” houses of prostitution in Manila to officially examine the condition of professional prostitutes, and, having examined them, officially report them “unfit” (for whom?)—or “fit” (for whom?). How sublime! How patriotic! How lovingly Christian! Great flag-waving, constitutional government, performing a noble function nobly and, of course, constitutionally! All in the name of Christ, of course—for “This is a Christian nation”—officially.

Life on board a war vessel is unnatural. So far as social and sex relations are concerned the men are virtually kept in solitary confinement for weeks, even months, at a time. Under such profoundly unnatural conditions human beings behave unnaturally. Many strong characters and all the weak ones collapse, utterly collapse; and the wild, ugly, worse than brute monster, Perverted Sex Appetite, has a vile festival weeks at a time, enticing, embracing, befouling, devouring many of the finest youths in the land.

It is said to be common knowledge with many who know and with many it is a source of horrible jest—that under such unnatural conditions on board a battleship men sexually associate with men in ways worse (if possible) than the most degrading ways mentioned (and cursed) in the Old Testament. And when, after weeks or months at sea, the warship touches at a port for a few days or weeks, there is a wild rush of unfortunate boys for unfortunate women whose diseased condition is an unspeakable abomination. And this should be known too: Certain Christian and un-Christian governments’ officials provide the boys with certain preventive chemicals (as they leave the ship for a “lark” on shore), knowing that the boys, many of them, are sure to be the victims of victims reeking with disease.

And then if the reader could witness the “round-up” the night before the ship sets out to sea again,—could see scores of fine young marines, pride of loving mothers,—if the reader could see them taken on board dead drunk and horribly befouled, taken on board in wheel barrows and dumped like big lumps of diseased, drunken, snoring and slobbering flesh, to be sobered up and “treated” when the ship gets out to sea,—if the reader could see all this and very much more, for example in New York harbor, he would then better understand why very few of “our very best people” of the “upper class” are not easily wheedled into giving up their own sons to defend our great and glorious country on board a big steel fighting machine called a battleship—to cruise and carouse around the world. Just in proportion as the working class mother thinks about this matter her sons will be safer from the wheedling seductions of the recruiting officer.

Mothers, what is the blind sentiment that makes you clap your hands in admiration of the “great statesmen” or the “great government” that has prostitutes examined for the sons you bore and carefully reared and tenderly love?

“Lead us not into temptation,” said Jesus Christ. Yet a “civilized” Christian government recently not only examined, but provided prostitutes for the soldier boys. The great British Government within recent years provided prostitutes for her soldiers in India. Circular memoranda were sent to all the cantonments of India by Quarter-Master General Chapman, in the name of the commander-in-chief of the army of India (Lord Roberts). Here are three excerpts from those documents and from official reports:^[259]

“In regimental bazaars it is necessary to have a sufficient number of women; to take care that they are SUFFICIENTLY ATTRACTIVE; to provide them with proper houses, and above all to insist upon means of ablution being always available [to prevent venereal diseases].... If young soldiers are carefully advised in regard to the advantages of ablution, and recognize that convenient arrangements exist in the regimental bazaar (that is, in the chacla, or brothel), they may be expected to avoid the risks involved in association with women who are not recognized [that is, not examined and licensed] by the regimental authorities.”

Another commanding officer writes in his report:

“Please send young and attractive women as laid down in the Quarter-Master General’s circular, No. 21A.... There are not women enough; they are not attractive enough. More and younger women are required.... I have ordered the number of prostitutes to be increased ... and have given special instructions as to additional women being young and of attractive appearance.”

And this: “The total number of admissions to hospital of cases of venereal diseases amongst troops in India rose in 1895 to 522 per 1,000.”

And this from another authority:^[260]

“In 1902, in India, the enormous number of 12,686 men were admitted into hospitals suffering from sexual diseases alone; more than 1,000 military victims were always in the hospital—and the report from which these figures are taken deals with the healthiest year for 20 years past. In the Home Army ... in a single period of twelve months, of 154,000 troops, there were 24,176 sexual complaint cases—or one in every six. In the author’s judgment, 80 per cent. of the entire British Army in India, and a proportion slightly smaller for the Home Army, have been at some time affected.”

“The worst of war and war service is that the soldier is a ruined man.”^[261]

General Sherman has spoken on the refining influences of war:

“Long after the Civil War, General Sherman, defending the conduct of his troops in South Carolina, said to Carl Schurz: ‘Before we got out of that state the men had so accustomed themselves to destroying everything along the line of march that sometimes, when I had my headquarters in a house, that house began to burn before I was fairly out of it. The truth is—human nature is human nature. You take the best lot of young men—all church members if you please—and put them into an army and let them invade an enemy’s country and let them live upon it for any length, and they will gradually lose all principle^[262] and self-restraint to a degree beyond the control of discipline. It has always been so and always will be so.’”^[263]

(12) An anonymous author writes thus:^[264]

“Real war is a very different thing from the painted image that you see at a parade or review. But it is the painted image that makes it popular. The waving plumes, the gay uniforms, the flashing swords, the disciplined march of innumerable feet, the clear-voiced trumpet, the intoxicating strains of martial music, the pomp, the sound, and the spectacle—these are the incitements to war and to the profession of the soldier. They are not what they are. But they still form a popular prelude to a woeful pandemonium. And when war bursts out it is at first, as a rule, but a small minority even of the peoples engaged that really sees and feels its horrors. The populace is fed by excitements; the defeats are covered up; in most countries the lists of killed and wounded are suppressed or postponed; victories are magnified; successful generals are acclaimed, and the military hero becomes the idol of the people. The over-fed, seedy malingerers of a small society join with the starving loiterers about the gin palace in applauding the execution of ruin. If their heroes are successful, what are their trophies?—prisons crowded with captives, hospitals filled with sick and wounded, towns sacked, farms burnt, fields laid waste, taxes raised, plenty converted to scarcity or famine, and vast debts accumulated for posterity. Then when these [military] heroes have done their work, the heroes of peace ... appear, and by long and patient labor amid scenes of universal lamentation seek to mitigate the suffering of their repentant fellow-countrymen.”

The poet Byron was in a war and described war thus:

(13) In connection with the foregoing section 12 examine Chapter Seven, Section 18.

“War! War! War!... God send the women sleep in the long, long night, when the breasts on whose strength they leaned heave no more.”^[266]

Wives and mothers of the working class, as soon as the government has had your choicest sons slaughtered, the government is through with you—except to send you a miserable, blood-stained, silver sop, a sort of cash bribe, once a quarter. Then as you receive the vile cash, you can, in imagination, hear the shrieks of your dead loved ones. The government seeks to win your approval and to silence your hearts’ protests against human butchery with the cheap jingle of some filthy dollars—as if you had sold your sons and husbands for a price. Such a pension is a form of hush money.

“If the stroke of war fell certain on the guilty heads, none else ... but alas!