“The Masonic Temple in Chicago, until recently the largest office building in the world, weighs 30,000 tons. In firing a 14–inch gun, sufficient energy is developed to lift the Masonic Temple two feet in one second. The force behind a single eight-gun broadside from 14–inch guns would raise that building sixteen feet in a single second.”[[93]]
The United States Government has a 16–inch cannon; it can throw a shot weighing 2,000 pounds to an extreme range of twenty-one miles, and has an effective range of twelve miles. It has been fired four times.
And now think of a murdering machine 50 feet long, weighing 260,000 pounds, consuming 612 pounds of smokeless powder per charge, firing a projectile weighing 2,400 pounds through 23½ inches of Krupp steel armor, and having a range of almost nine miles—a monster butchering machine. The United States Government exhibited such a gun at the World’s Fair, at St. Louis, in 1904,—exhibited this hell’s masterpiece with pride, true, Christian, savage pride.
This huge gun was exhibited—shrewdly.
What for?
Many youths from Christian homes looked upon this mechanical monster and themselves became monsters—in their hearts—eager to butcher, “not only willing, but anxious to fight.”
Human slaughter has become a science. The machines are perfect and ready, all ready, for the working class to use—on the working class.
Section two: The silent destroyer—disease.
The barking rifle, the snarling Gatling gun, and the booming cannon—these have also on the battlefield a foul and powerful confederate, Disease. Disease joins in to poison the blood the guns do not spill. On this important matter the reader will appreciate the expert testimony here offered.
“In every great campaign,” says L. L. Seaman,[[94]] “an army faces two enemies: First, the armed force of the opposing foe with his various machines for human destruction, met at intervals in open battles; and, second, the hidden foe, always lurking in every camp, the spectre that gathers its victims while the soldier slumbers in the barracks or bivouacs, the greater silent foe—disease. Of these enemies, the history of warfare for centuries shows that in extended campaigns, the first or open enemy kills twenty per cent. of the total mortality; while the second, or silent, enemy kills eighty per cent. In other words, out of every hundred men who fall in war, twenty die from casualties of battle, while eighty perish from disease.... It is in these conditions that we find the true hell of war.... Health alone, however, is no guarantee against the insidious attacks of the silent foe that lingers in every camp and bivouac. It is this foe, as the records of war for the past two hundred years have proved, that is responsible for four times as many deaths as the guns of the enemy, to say nothing of the vast number temporarily invalided or discharged as unfit for duty.... In the Russo-Turkish war, the deaths from the battle casualties were 20,000, while those from disease were 80,000. In our great Civil conflict ... 400,000 were sacrificed to disease to 100,000 from battle casualties. In a recent campaign of the French in Madagascar 14,000 were sent to the front, of whom 29 were killed in action, and over 7,000 perished from preventable diseases. In the Boer War in South Africa the English losses were ten times greater from disease than from the bullets of the enemy. In our recent war with Spain fourteen lives were needlessly sacrificed to ignorance and incompetency for every man who died on the firing line or from results of wounds.