“No. The truth about war cannot be told. It is too horrible. The public will not listen. A white bandage about the forehead with a strawberry mark on the center is the picture they want of the wounded. They won’t let you tell the truth and show bowels ripped out, brains spilled, eyes gouged away, faces blanched with horror. The only painter fellow who ever told the truth about war was Verestchagin, poor chap, drowned over there in the harbor. He in paint and Zola in words told the truth and they were howled down and ostracized all their lives, simply because the theorists, like this surgeon, fed up with themselves, nursed in the belief that science is all powerful, will always assure the public that modern war is humane.
“Scientific warfare! Let me tell you the facts about science. Archibald Forbes predicted twenty years ago that the time would come when armies would no longer be able to take their wounded from the field of battle. That day has come. We are living in it. Wounded have existed—how, God alone knows—on that field out there, without help, for twelve days, while shell and bullets rained above them, and if a comrade had dared to come to their assistance his would have been a useless suicide. The searchlight, the enginery of scientific trenches, machine guns, rifles point blank at 200 yards with a range of 2,000—these things have helped to make warfare more terrible now than ever before in history.
“Red Cross societies and scientific text-books—they sound well and look pretty, but as for ‘humane warfare’—was there ever put into words a mightier sarcasm!”
This was translated. The officers—Lieutenant-General Oshima and three of his staff—listened, gravely. No one said anything. Finally, we walked home silently as the sun went down.
[Chapter Fourteen]
SCIENTIFIC FANATICS
Noon found me well up toward the firing line, assured by the staff that it would be the day of days. To get there I passed a mile and more of batteries—the Osacca guns vomiting balls of fire, puff-balls of smoke and fat, heavy balls of steel; the howitzers—coyotes of artillery—spitting from peaks, snapping, louder than the monsters growl below; the naval six-inch turret firers, rakishly sunk in valleys, their greyhound noses dappled with mud, baying out reverberations at which even the sulking sun might have shuddered; the field four-point-sevens, bag-redoubted, conventional as pictures, flinging forth the business barks of house dogs; then, finally, the hand one-pounders, hauled well up the parallels, their bodies angled half-wise and as forlorn amid such colossal music as a penny whistle before a symphony orchestra. To be in it, to pass through it, to feel this whiz and boom people the air above with demon gossip, to sniff from ravines the gusts seeped with cordite and with phosphorus, while in the far-stretched vistas bluecoat files wind through the fierce, vain taunts hurled in among them—ah, this is the atmosphere—the grand, the fearful, the unspeakably sublime atmosphere of war.