Where and how shall the immensely virile and fertile Germanic race find a new home and a new empire over seas? Or will it, with the greatest army in the world at its command and a tremendous war fleet in the making, sit tight within its narrow boundaries at home until famine and pestilence sap its vitality and reduce its numbers? It may do that, it may allow millions of its sons to renounce their allegiance to the fatherland, or it may—the last terrible alternative is the one of which the world stands in dread.
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See [Armies of the World]; [Militarism]; [Navies of the World].
WAR, THE HORRORS OF
After his splendid victory of Austerlitz was won and the iron crown of empire securely fixt on his brow, Napoleon, standing on the high ground, saw a portion of the defeated Russian army making a slow, painful retreat over a frozen lake. They were at his mercy. He rode up to a battery and said, “Men, you are losing time! fire on those masses; they must be swallowed up! fire on that ice!” Shells were thrown, the bridge of ice was broken, and amid awful shrieks hundreds upon hundreds of miserable wretches were buried in the frozen waters.
The crime of war is its wanton waste of human life. And so are the social wrongs that decimate our world. And so is evil in every form. (Text.)
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WARFARE, ANTIQUATED
The ordinary spear was eighteen feet long, or three times the height of the man, and from one inch to an inch and a half in thickness. The iron jaws of the head were two feet and a half in length.
With such spears the Massachusetts militia was trained for more than forty years, or until the outbreak of Philip’s war. I do not know how long they may have been used in Virginia. Poking Indians armed with muskets out of a swamp with a spear might do for imaginary warfare—but when it came to real fighting it was very ugly business. The desperate character of the conflicts with Philip and the necessity for the exclusive use of gunpowder became apparent, and the edict went forth that the militia, who were trained to the use of the spear, should take up the musket. With this edict the spear disappeared in this country forever. It went out in England about the same time. Thus do we learn the progress of the human mind in arts of destruction.—Edward Eggleston.