“... Outside in the shed the preparations were of another nature: the chests were opened and the contents arranged in order.... On another table were the surgical cases with their blood-curdling array of glittering instruments, probes, forceps, bistouries, scalpels, scissors, saws, an arsenal of implements of every imaginable shape adapted to pierce, cut, dice, rend, crush.... The wagons kept driving up to the entrance in an unbroken stream.... The regular ambulance wagons of the medical department, two-wheeled and four-wheeled, were too few in number to meet the demand ... provision vans, everything on wheels that could be picked up on the battlefield, came rolling up with their ghastly loads; and later in the day carrioles and market-gardeners’ carts were pressed into the service and harnessed to horses that were found straying along the roads.... It was a sight to move the most callous to behold the unloading of those poor wretches, some with the greenish pallor on their faces, others suffused with the purple hue that denotes congestion; many were in a state of coma, others uttered piercing cries of anguish ... the keen knife flashed in the air, there was the faint rasping of the saw barely audible, the blood spurted in short sharp jets.... As soon as the subject had been operated on another was brought in, and they followed one another in such quick succession that there was barely time to pass the sponge over the protecting oil-cloth. At the extremity of the grass plot, screened from sight by a clump of lilac bushes, they had set up a kind of morgue whither they carried the bodies of the dead, which were removed from the beds without a moment’s delay in order to make room for the living, and this receptacle also served to receive the amputated legs and arms, whatever débris of flesh and bone remained upon the table.... Rents in tattered, shell-torn uniforms disclosed gaping wounds, some of which had received a hasty dressing on the battlefield, while others were still raw and bleeding. There were feet, still encased in their coarse shoes, crushed into a mass like jelly; from knees and elbows, that were as if they had been smashed by a hammer, depended inert limbs. There were broken hands, and fingers almost severed, ready to drop, retained only by a strip of skin. Most numerous among the casualties were the fractures; the poor arms and legs, red and swollen, throbbed intolerably and were as heavy as lead. But the most dangerous hurts were those in the abdomen, chest, and head. There were yawning fissures that laid open the entire flank, the knotted viscera were drawn into great hard lumps beneath the tight-drawn skin, while as the effect of certain wounds the patient frothed at the mouth and writhed like an epileptic.... And finally the head, more than any other portion of the frame, gave evidence of hard treatment; a broken jaw, the mouth a pulp of teeth and bleeding tongue, an eye torn from its socket and exposed upon the cheek, a cloven skull that showed the palpitating brain beneath.... Although the sponge was kept constantly at work the tables were always red.... The buckets ... were emptied over a bed of daisies a few steps away.... Some seemed to have left the world with a sneer on their faces, their eyes retroverted till naught was visible but the whites, the grinning lips parted over the glistening teeth, while in others with faces unspeakably sorrowful, big tears still stood on the cheeks. One, a mere boy, short and slight, half whose face had been shot away by a cannon ball, had his two hands clasped convulsively above his heart, and in them a woman’s photograph, one of those pale, blurred pictures that are made in the quarters of the poor, bedabbled with his blood. And at the feet of the dead had been thrown in a promiscuous pile the amputated arms and legs, the refuse of the knife and the saw of the operating table, just as the butcher sweeps into a corner of his shop the offal, the worthless odds and ends of flesh and bone.... Bourouche, brandishing the long, keen knife, cried: ‘Raise him!’ seized the deltoid with his left hand and with a swift movement of the right cut through the flesh of the arm and severed the muscle; then, with a deft rear-ward cut, he disarticulated the joint at a single stroke, and, presto! the arm fell on the table, taken off in three motions.... ‘Let him down!’ ... he had done it in thirty seconds.... Their strength all gone, reduced to skeletons, with ashen, clayey faces, the miserable wretches suffered the torments of the damned.... The patients writhed and shrieked in unceasing delirium, or sat erect in bed with the look of spectres.... There were others again who maintained a continuous howling.... Often gangrene kept mounting higher and higher, and the amputation had to be repeated until the entire limb was gone.”
And that is hell—for which your children are prepared.
This phase of war is shrewdly kept from the children. No child’s mind could be poisoned, no child’s imagination could be set on fire for war, no child’s heart could be made to lust for the “glory” of the battlefield of carnage—if he were shown this side of war.
But the child is an easy victim. Even some cheap jingo jingle called patriotic poetry renders the working class the easy, fooled tool of despots. The victimizing of the helpless child is rendered especially easy when the mother, blindfold with flattery, gullibly lends assistance in strangling the child’s sociability. (See Chapter Seven, Section 30.)
(5) Here is a specimen of the poison craftily used in the public schools under the control of the capitalist class:
“A soldier is the grandest man
That ever yet was made.
He’s valiant on the battlefield
And handsome on parade.
By strict attention to my drill