We are savages once more. For science is dead. All the laboratories are shut, save those where poison is brewed and destruction is put up in packages. Education has ceased, save that fierce Nietzschean education which declares: “The weak and helpless must go to the wall; and we shall help them go.” All that made life humanly fair is hidden in the fetid clouds of war where savages (in terror and hysteria) grope for each other’s throats.
The glory of war—rot! The heroism of war—rot! The scarlet and beneficent energies of war—rot! When you look at it close what you see are hulking masses of brutes with fear behind them prodding them on, or wild and splendid savages, hysterical with hate, battling to save their hearth fires and women from the oncoming horde. Reversal to barbarism.
Think it over. Upon whom falls the stress of war? Not upon the soldier. He is killed and fattens the soil where he falls; or he is maimed and hobbles off toward a pension or beggary—both tolerable things; anyway he has drunk deep of cruelty and terror and may go his way. By rare good grace he may have been a hero. In other words, he may have been a Belgian—which is a word like a decoration, a name to make one strut like a Greek of Thermopylae—and become thus a permanent part of the world’s finest history.
******
I would like to write here the name of a friend, Charles Flamache of Brussels. He was twenty-one years old. He was an artist who had already tasted fame. He had known the love of woman. That his destiny might be fulfilled he died, the blithe, brave boy, in front of Liège. It was the right death at the right time—ere yet the massed Prussians had rolled in fire and blood over his fair small land. Wherefore, hail and farewell, young hero!
******
But upon whom falls the stress of war?
In a time of barbarism those who suffer are always the weak. War is in its essence (as said Nietzsche, the German philosopher of “world power”) an attack upon weakness. The weakest suffer most.
I saw children born on cinder heaps, and I saw them die; and the mothers die gasping like she dogs in a smother of flies.