“Tut, tut; good enough to toss; food for powder; food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better.”
Here is a glimpse of the battle of Sedan:[[82]]
“Let your readers fancy masses of colored rags glued together with blood and brains, pinned into strange shapes by fragments of bones. Let them conceive men’s bodies without legs, and legs without bodies, heaps of human entrails attached to red and blue cloth, and disembowelled corpses in uniform, bodies lying about in all attitudes with skulls shattered, faces blown off, hips smashed, bones, flesh and gay clothing all pounded together as if brayed in a mortar, extending for miles, not very thick in any one place, but recurring perpetually for weary hours, and then they can not with the most vivid imagination come up to the sickening reality of that butchery [the battle of Sedan, 1870].”
It is reliably estimated that modern artillery is capable of doing one hundred and sixteen times more damage than the artillery used by the German army in 1870. Even the simple instrument known as the range-finder adds much to effectiveness,—it enables soldiers to find the range in three minutes and pour death-dealing missiles into the human targets promptly. This instrument weighs about sixty pounds and is being rapidly improved.[[83]] A single battery of modern artillery can hurl 1,450 rounds upon ten regiments of men while they march one mile and a half. These 1,450 shells arranged with time fuses to burst at the target would sweep these ten thousand men with 275,000 bullets and ragged iron scraps. Bloch says:[[84]]
“In 1870 an ordinary shell when it burst broke into from 19 to 30 pieces. Today it bursts into 240 pieces. Shrapnel in 1870 scattered only 37 death-dealing missiles. Now it scatters 340. A bomb weighing about 70 pounds, thirty years ago, would have burst into 42 fragments. Today, when it is charged with peroxilene, it breaks into 1,200 pieces, each of which is hurled with much greater velocity than the larger lumps which were scattered by a gunpowder explosion. It is estimated that such a bomb would destroy all life within a range of 200 metres [about 200 yards] of the point of the explosion.... With the increase in the number of bullets and fragments, and in the forces which disperse them, increases also the area which they affect. Splinters and bullets bring death and destruction, not only as in 1870, to those in the vicinity of the explosion, but at a distance of 220 yards away, and this tho’ fired from a distance of 3,300 yards [about two miles].... In a time when rifle and artillery fire were beyond comparison weaker than they are now, those who were left unhelped on the battlefield might hope for safety. But now, when the whole field of battle is covered with an uninterrupted hail of bullets and fragments of shells [at night too, with a searchlight equipment], there is little place for such hope.”
Surely you can easily see that a business man’s soft, fat flesh won’t do for a bullet-stopper. Here is where the cheap, meek, weak wage-slaves come in handy—the very stuff for bullet-stoppers.
In connection with this subject, remember that a bullet fired from a modern rifle or a Gatling gun rotates over 3,800 times per second. This rotary motion produces the effect of an explosion when the bullet strikes the stomach, bladder, or heart—where there are liquids. The effect is horrible; with terrible violence “the liquids are cast on all sides with the destructive effect of an explosion.”—(Bloch.)
Of course, the business man knows that his flesh should never be torn with such a horrible thing. He has nothing to fear, however. He will not go to war. He will send a cheap man, a wage-slave substitute. He knows it doesn’t make any difference in the case of a cheap wage-earner who is only a working-class slave.
Ah, my working-class reader, it will make a difference when the working class become proud enough and shrewd enough to defiantly declare that it shall be different. The business man is too proud and shrewd to stand up before these modern flesh-tearing machines.
Don’t be in a hurry to enlist, brother. Wait a few more days. Two weeks after next will do. The “very best people” in your town are not hurrying to enlist. Can’t you see the point? Before you enlist, or before you consent to have your son or younger brother enlist, be sure to read some books describing real war with improved murdering machinery. A brilliant war correspondent, Mr. Richard Barry, thus describes a modern war-storm in his book, descriptive of the Japanese-Russian War, Port Arthur, A Monster Heroism, passim:[[85]]