“Some of the wounded crawled up themselves, some walked up tottering and falling. One soldier almost ran up to us. His face was smashed, and only one eye remained, burning wildly and terribly. He was almost naked....
“The ward was filled with a broad, rasping, crying groan, and from all sides pale, yellow, exhausted faces, some eyeless, some so monstrously mutilated that it seemed as if they had returned from hell, turned toward us.
“I was beginning to get exhausted, and went a little way off to ... rest a bit. The blood, dried to my hands, covered them like a pair of black gloves, making it difficult for me to bend my fingers.”[[4]]
Would it not be a strange thing to see a banker, a bishop, a railway president, a coal baron, an anti-labor injunction judge, and a United States Senator all hanging on stakes in a pit with scores of other men piled in on top of them—all clawing, kicking, cursing, wiggling, screaming, groaning, bleeding, dying—“following the flag”—patriotically?
Such would indeed be a strange and interesting sight.
Strange and interesting, extremely so—but absolutely impossible.
And there is good reason.
Let me explain.
CHAPTER TWO.
What Is War?
War is wholesale, scientific suicide for the working class under orders from their political and industrial masters.