Page:Women and war, an appeal to the women of all nations.djvu/6

 4 starvation, disease, violation, loss of home, poverty, sometimes death, slavery and imprisonment. For instance, in the civil war between the States of America, General Sherman swept the southern States bare of food, so that the women and children died of starvation. In the South African war 4,000 women and 15,000 children died of starvation and disease. These are official figures. In the late Balkan war, non-combatants, generally women, were not only starved, but massacred, while rapes and mutilations were reported. Outrages upon women are common in all wars; bestial horrors which are crimes indeed await the women of a conquered country. The brutality lying dormant in some men is kindled by bloodshed; the ape and tiger, the "tooth and claw" come to the surface. War seems to be a concentration of crimes. Under its standard gather violence, malignity, fraud, rage, perfidy and lust. It has been said that "the field of battle is a theatre got up at immense cost for the exhibition of crime on a grand scale." No wonder is it then, that in the Balkan war we read of outrages of Turks upon Bulgarian women, and those of Bulgarians upon Turkish women. It is all the same whether the Cross or the Crescent was uppermost. Cruelty is the child of war, be it raged by Christian or Mohammedan. And in the present deplorable European conflict these horrors are being repeated yet again.

And who can describe adequately the slow torture of fear and suspense, the long agonies of anticipation; the sleepless nights and fevered imagination, the pitiless hours of barren loneliness; the visions of butchered bleeding bodies! And who but those who experience it, can tell of the blow of bereavement, the broken heart of wife or mother or daughter! What must the mental suffering be, in receiving back the sons and husbands, alive indeed, but mutilated or diseased, life-long cripples, or weakened and unable to work!