Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/74

 warfare, and as far as possible expend energy, time and money in encouraging our inventors and scientists to study the waging of war on a wholesale scale instead of thinking so much about methods which will kill a few individuals only at a time.”

In the war just finished,—according to neutral and scientifically dispassionate Danish historians—nearly ten million soldiers died in battle or of wounds; probably two or three million soldiers were permanently disabled. Yet we were killing only by retail, where in “the next war” we shall kill by wholesale.

The same late war, according to those same Danish statisticians, cost thirty million more human beings—mere civilians—“who might be living today.” Yet taking Armageddon by and large, the weapons were deliberately turned against civilians with comparative infrequency. Declining birth rates account for a part of those thirty millions. The rest, for the most part died of the “accidents,” of such warfare as we waged. If we except the Armenian massacres, we find that only a small fraction of the total went to their graves through attacks aimed directly at their lives—as in the atrocities of the Hungarians against the Serbs, the Russians against the East Prussians, the Germans against the Belgians; or in attacks aimed indirectly at their lives—as in the submarine sinkings and air raids. Most of them died just because they were in the way of war—died of malnutrition in the blockaded countries, of