“To be, materially, a great man, to be pompously violent, to reign by virtue of the sword-knot and cockade ... to possess a genius for brutality—this is to be great, if you will, but it is a coarse way of being great.”
The cannon’s roar, the bayonet’s thrust, the crush of flesh, the splash of blood,—such things in battle make men gentle, tender, gallant, even heroic, fit subjects for the adoration of women.[[201]] For example: When the Christian heroes captured Magdeburg:
“Now began a scene of massacre and outrage which history has no language, and poetry no pencil, to portray. Neither the innocence of childhood nor the helplessness of old age, neither youth nor sex, neither rank nor beauty, could disarm the fury of the conquerors. Wives were dishonored in the very arms of their husbands, daughters at the feet of their parents, and the defenseless sex exposed to the double loss of virtue and life.... Fifty-three women were found in one church with their heads cut off. The Croats amused themselves by throwing children into the flames, and Pappenheim’s Walloons with stabbing infants at their mothers’ breasts.”[[202]]
But it may be said that those things were done far back in the seventeenth century. Consider, then, the fact that in the French civil war of 1871 the government’s noble heroes, having conquered the revolutionists, took thousands of unarmed prisoners—men, women, and children—to an open space at the city limits of Paris and shot them, children and all; in many cases the brave, armed ruffians stood up rows of helpless prisoners one behind the other and amused themselves by testing their rifles on living human flesh, noting how many men, women and children could be butchered with one bullet. Many of the “better class,” “refined ladies and gentlemen,” “leading citizens,” conspicuous by their elegance of manners and dress, were present watching the fun, smiling encouragement and making helpful suggestions to the “civilized” butchers.
And still more recently:
A British hero thus describes a “funny” incident in the South African war: “Really, sir, I never saw anything quite so funny in all my life. Just fancy, I saw a Kaffir woman pick up the headless body of her baby and strap it on her back. Funny, oh, Lord! It makes me laugh when I think of it now.” The same authority (the Westminster Review, quoted by Walter Walsh) also gives the following case of Christian military heroism: “A contingent of German scouts [in South Africa] took five native women prisoners ... an officer ordered ten men to fix bayonets. Five stood in front and five behind the women, and stabbed the women to death.” Ten armed, Christian heroes with bayonets ripping the breasts of five unarmed women. Great! Isn’t it? At least it is war. One scarcely knows which to despise the more—the soldiers or the lazy parasites for whom they committed a thousand crimes of basest cruelty and cowardice. Dr. Walter Walsh[[203]] lets the soldiers tell in their own heroic language of their manly deeds—thus:
“‘Our progress was like the old-time forays in Scotland two centuries ago.... We moved on from valley to valley ... burning, looting and turning out the women and children to sit and cry beside the ruins of their once beautiful farmsteads ... my men fetched bundles of straw. The women cried, and the children stood holding to them and looking with large frightened eyes at the burning house.... The people had thought we had come for refreshments, and one of them went to get milk.... We then set the whole place on fire. They dropped on their knees and prayed and sang, weeping bitterly the while. One of the poor women went raving mad. When the flames burst from the doomed place the poor woman threw herself on her knees, tore open her bodice, and bared her breasts, screaming, “Shoot me, shoot me, I’ve nothing to live for, now that my husband is gone, and our farm is burnt, and our cattle taken!”’”
These foul deeds are samples of thousands.
“War, is it?” says Dr. Walsh. “Be it war: then an army is a manufactory for cowards and a school for cowards.”
“A war hero,” says the distinguished Roman Catholic Bishop John Spaulding,[[204]] “supposes a barbarous condition of the race; and when all shall be civilized, they who know and love the most shall be held to be the greatest and the best.”