“I take it for granted,” he says, “that, in a general way, the bravest are the best, physically and spiritually. Now, in this war of machinery, this meat-mill, it is the bravest who lead the charges and attempt the daring feats, and, correspondingly, the loss is greatest among those bravest.
“So much when the army gets into line. But in the conscript countries, like France and Germany, there is a process of selection in picking the army by which the best—speaking in general terms—go out to die, while the weakest remain. The undersized, the undermuscled, the underbrained, the men twisted by hereditary deformity or devitalized by hereditary disease—they remain at home to propagate the breed. The rest—all the rest—go out to take chances.
“Furthermore, as modern conscript armies are organized, it is the youngest men who sustain the heaviest losses—the men who are not yet fathers. And from the point of view of the race, that is, perhaps, the most melancholy fact of all.
“All the able-bodied men between the ages of nineteen and forty-five are in the ranks. But the older men do not take many chances with death.... These European conscript armies are arranged in classes according to age, and the younger classes are the men who do most of the actual fighting. The men in their late thirties or their forties, the ‘territorials,’ guard the lines, garrison the towns, generally attend to the business of running up the supplies. When we come to gather the statistics of this war we shall find that an overwhelming majority of the dead were less than thirty years old, and probably that the majority were under twenty-five. Now, the territorial of forty or forty-five has usually given to the state as many children as he is going to give, while the man of twenty-five or under has usually given the state no children at all.”[103]
Mr. Irwin was gauging the racial cost by the criterion of youth. A leading English scholar, Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, obtained equally alarming results by applying the test of genius. He analyzed the casualty lists “filled with names which, but for the fatal accidents of war, would certainly have been made illustrious for splendid service to the great cause of life.... A government actuated by a cold calculus of economic efficiency would have made some provision for sheltering from the hazards of war young men on whose exceptional intellectual powers our future progress might be thought to depend. But this has not been done, and it is impossible to estimate the extent to which the world will be impoverished in quality by the disappearance of so much youthful genius and talent.... The spiritual loss to the universe cannot be computed, and probably will exceed the injury inflicted on the world by the wide and protracted prevalence of the celibate orders in the Middle Ages.”[104]
The American biologist S. K. Humphrey did not underestimate the extent of the slaughter of genius-bearing strains when he wrote: “It is safe to say that among the millions killed will be a million who are carrying superlatively effective inheritances—the dependence of the race’s future. Nothing is more absurd than the notion that these inheritances can be replaced in a few generations by encouraging the fecundity of the survivors. They are gone forever. The survivors are going to reproduce their own less-valuable kind. Words fail to convey the appalling nature of the loss.”[105]
It is the same melancholy tale when we apply the test of race. Of course the war bore heavily on all the white race-stocks, but it was the Nordics—the best of all human breeds—who suffered far and away the greatest losses. War, as we have seen, was always the Nordic’s deadliest scourge, and never was this truer than in the late struggle. From the racial standpoint, indeed, Armageddon was a Nordic civil war, most of the officers and a large proportion of the men on both sides belonging to the Nordic race. Everywhere it was the same story: the Nordic went forth eagerly to battle, while the more stolid Alpine and, above all, the little brunet Mediterranean either stayed at home or even when at the front showed less fighting spirit, took fewer chances, and oftener saved their skins.
The Great War has thus unquestionably left Europe much poorer in Nordic blood, while conversely it has relatively favored the Mediterraneans. Madison Grant well says: “As in all wars since Roman times, from the breeding point of view the little dark man is the final winner.”[106]
Furthermore, it must be remembered that those disgenic effects which I have been discussing refer solely to losses inflicted upon the actual combatants. But we have already seen that for every soldier killed the war took five civilian lives. In fact, the war’s profoundly devitalizing effects upon the general population can hardly be overestimated. Those effects include not merely such obvious matters as privation and disease, but also obscurer yet highly destructive factors like nervous shock and prolonged overstrain. To take merely one instance, consider Havelock Ellis’s remarks concerning “the ever-widening circles of anguish and misery and destitution which every fatal bullet imposes on humanity.” He concludes: “It is probable that for every 10,000,000 soldiers who fall on the field, 50,000,000 other persons at home are plunged into grief, or poverty, or some form of life-diminishing trouble.”[107]
Most serious has been the war’s effect upon the children. At home, as at the front, it is the young who have been sacrificed. The heaviest civilian losses have come through increased infant mortality and decreased birth-rates. The “slaughter of the innocents” has thus been twofold: it has slain millions of those already alive, and it has prevented millions more from being born or conceived. The decreased fecundity of women during the war even under good material conditions apparently shows that war’s psychological reflexes tend to induce sterility.