Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/93



So much for civilians. Now let us turn our imaginations again upon those ten million soldiers dead in the last war, and the unestimated millions in the next. Let us forget the obvious; let me forget it who have seen war—the gray-green streak down Douaumont Ravine where lay tens of thousands of German dead, the rib-bones sticking everywhere out of Vimy Ridge, the wave of moaning from the three thousand wounded and dying in the Casino Hospital at Boulogne. Let us remember that all men must die, and consider the thing cold-bloodedly from the standpoint of the particular race which draws the sword, and of the whole human species. We shall find, then, that the chief loss of the late war was not the hundreds of billions of dollars of property value destroyed, nor yet the thirty million civilians “who might be living today,” but the ten million soldiers.

From the pacifist literature which preceded our entrance into the European War, three books stand out in memory. Jean Bloch, a Pole, maintained that war could not be; the horrors of modern warfare