Only a short time ago a private soldier said to me: "Yes, we had got to be such friends with those Bavarians in the trenches over against us that if we had returned there again I believe nothing could have made us fight with each other; but of course that point was perceived and we were moved to another part of the Line." What a criticism in a few words on the whole War! A hundred times this or something similar has happened, and a hundred and a thousand times these 'enemies' who have madly mutilated each other have — a few minutes later — been only too glad to dress each other's wounds and share the last contents of their water-bottles.
By all the heart-rending experiences which have now become so common and familiar to us;
By the fact that to-day there is hardly a family over the greater part of Europe that is not grieving bitterly over the loss of some dearest member of its circle;
By the white faces of the women clad in black, whom one sees everywhere in the streets of Berlin and Brussels and Paris and Vienna, of London and Milan and Belgrade and Petrograd;
By the sufferings of famine-stricken Poland, ravaged already three or four times in the last two years by opposing and alternate armies;
By the awful sufferings of the six or seven million Jews of the
Russian Pale, hounded homeless in winter to and, fro over the frozen
earth the old men and women and children perishing of exposure,
fatigue, and starvation;
By the agony of Serbia, and the despair of Belgium;
This must not be again!
By the five or six million actual combatants already slain; and, the strange spectacle of millions of Women (over half a million in Britain, more in France, multitudes in Germany and America) manufacturing man-destroying explosive shells in ceaseless stream by day and night; (And it is estimated that on the average some fifty shells are expended for every one man slain) By the terrified faces — as of drowning men — of those suffering in countless hospitals from shell-shock; by their trembling hands and, limbs and horrible dreams at night — pursued by an ever-living horror;
By the curses of the tender-hearted friend who collects in No-man's-land between the lines the scattered fragments of his comrade's body — the dabs of flesh, the hand, the head he knows so well, a boot with a foot still in it — and puts them all together in a sack for burial;
By the silent stupefaction of wives and mothers trying vainly to picture to themselves a death which cannot be pictured; by the insane laughter of those who having witnessed these things can no longer weep;