When one meets the ambulance wagons loaded with suffering, mutilated men who a few weeks before were sustaining heads of happy households; when one sees the dark red stream flowing from ghastly wounds and splashes of blood on all sides; when one observes the pallor of death on the strong man’s face, while a comrade with tender pity bends over to obtain a last message for home; when one hears the despairing wail of orphan and widow; when one has watched the endless procession of terror-stricken refugees whose homes have become the prey of the cannon, when one hears repeatedly the sad experience of these exiles on their journeys from place to place, lying on hay or straw, in barns, in schools, on the bare ground, or in the basin of the empty canal, when one meditates on those perverse circumstances which have changed civilized men into savage brutes—then we also agree that “The world has gone back a thousand years,” while a presentiment as of impending disaster passes over the earth and depresses each individual heart.
“Cast yourselves upon the knees and pray for victory,” cry out Christian monarchs to their soldiers, and, nevertheless, the God to whom they pray is witness to the wanton desecration of His churches and the wholesale destruction of life, liberty and property.
From the dark abodes of despair, the cohorts of satan seem to have taken possession of the world and filled it with vice and wretchedness, until it resembles the “abomination of desolation” referred to in Holy Writ.
To know what war is, it would be necessary to possess eyes to behold all the sin and vice; all the ruin and destruction; ears to hear every despairing cry and agonizing wail; a mind to comprehend all the misery and desolation, and a heart to feel the anguish in the heart of each suffering fellow-creature, from the moment the first shot was fired down through ages yet to come, until the twilight of times, brighter in prospect, than the daylight of the present generation shall obscure the last shadows of the unholy conflict.
To realize what war really means, we should give consideration to the moral and physical degeneration of these sufferers and of their descendants; to the hatred, lust, passion, wilful murder and other high crimes against God and nature, engendered and committed, not in the moment of strong individual anger and passion, but as the result of a well-calculated plan, with profound forethought, called by some “strategy.”
“War is justifiable only, if it is the necessary means for securing peace.” (His Eminence, Cardinal Mercier.) May we humbly add, then only as the last resort.
CHAPTER XIII.
Our Departure.
Monday, September 28, witnessed the scenes of sorrow and desolation in and around Mechelen and vicinity described in the foregoing chapters. Many of the residents of Willebroeck had already taken flight, and the others were preparing to leave.
The Sisters, wholly absorbed in their work for the wounded, and relying on the word of the Belgian officers, that timely warning would be given as to the necessity of departure, had as yet no idea of joining the throngs of refugees who continuously filed through the main street.