Does not the recruiting officer try to get the soundest men for slaughter?
Let the orthodox worshippers answer: Is pagan Japan more fit for survival than Christian Russia?
What show for survival would Belgium have in a contest with Turkey, Spain or Russia?[[217]]
(25) A kindred and stupid assumption in all wars is this: Might makes right.
But if might makes right between two warring nations, then why does not might make right when a strong man by force compels a weaker man to hand over his pocket-book?
(26) A Scotch philosopher on the “brave boys”:[[218]]
“Omitting much, let us impart what follows: Horrible enough! A whole march-field strewed with shell-splinters, cannon-shots, ruined tumbrils and dead men and horses; stragglers remaining not so much as buried. And those red mound-heaps: aye, there lie the Shells of Men, out of which the life and virtue have been blown; and now they are swept together and crammed down out of sight, like blown Eggshells!... How has thy breast, fair plain, been defaced and defiled! The green sward is torn up, hedge-rows and pleasant dwellings blown away with gunpowder, and the kind seed-field lies a desolate Place of Skulls. Nevertheless, Nature is at work ... all that gore and carnage will be shrouded in, absorbed into manure....
“What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net purport and upshot of the war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain ‘natural enemies’ of the French, there are successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men: Dumrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them up to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red and shipped away, at the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain, and fed there till wanted. And now to that same spot in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans—in like manner wending their ways; till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition, and thirty stand facing thirty, each with his gun in hand. Straightway the word ‘Fire!’ is given, and they blow the souls out of one another; and in the place of sixty brisk, useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for.
“Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a universe, there was even, unconsciously, by commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them.
“How then?