The sound of singing rises in the distance. An old hymn. A prayer of thanks of the days of our fathers. Those nearest by take it up. The chant leaps from fire to fire. The darkling field is singing. The night is singing. A choir raising their hands to Heaven, their voices to the stars.
Lord! Grant us freedom!
Where then lies the truth? In these "prose poems" aglow with martial enthusiasm, and ringing with the soldier's spirit, or in the relentless anatomical realism of "The Human Slaughter-House"? Or are both lies—"both deliberate conscious untruths, written under the inspiration of a social democratic lawyer?"
The explanation, as Lamszus see it, lies in the condition of the times. No one, he claims, could write of the revolt of the Dutch Republics otherwise than in the brave setting of flashing eyes, glittering steel, and the stirring clash of men-at-arms. But it is equally untrue to tell of modern warfare waged with picric acid and electric wires in the same spirit. The romance and glamour of warfare in the past are grinning lies when transferred to latter-day warfare, where long-drawn fronts of flesh and blood are opposed to machines of precision and the triumphs of the chemical laboratory. The anachronism becomes nothing less than the deliberate falsification of history. Dynamite and machine-guns, not the writer, have turned the "Field of Honor" into a "Human Slaughter-House," where regiments are wiped out by pressing an electric button.
In the hideousness of these scenes of future warfare the charge of exaggeration, of painting carnage red, is easy to raise, and difficult to rebut. Lamszus does not shirk it.
"What I have written was worked out empirically. It is a sum that is, mathematically, so incontestable that no one has hitherto ventured to dispute it. For the second factor in this sum is the albuminous substance of human brain and marrow. And when we hear that in the Russo-Japanese war thousands went mad, who would care to maintain that the nervous system of the civilized mid-European is hardier and tougher than that of Asiatics and semi-civilized Russians? 'The material has become softer,' says the authority of the staff-general. What now, when the sum total of acoustic and visual stimuli, of physical and psychic shocks, to which this 'softer material' is exposed, has, with every new invention, become more destructive in quality and quantity? To find the answer to such a simple problem did not assuredly call for a mathematical genius."
With the answer before us, the question rises whether it is more patriotic to blink it, to go on pretending that war is what it used to be—a soldier's death on the field of honor, or senseless automatic slaughter by machinery. It is against this latter mechanical aspect of war that the instinct of humanity, to which Lamszus has given voice in vivid words, revolts. Does it become a man better to look, with the full sense of his moral and ethical responsibility, the hideous fact in its face, or to continue to disguise it under a veil of romance woven round the pomp and circumstance of glorious war? In this sense "The Human Slaughter-House" of Lamszus' invention stands, as the Universal Peace Congress read it, for the revolt of the spirit of humanity, the spirit of progress and evolution, against the cumulative horror of the mechanics of modern warfare.
"For just as there is no room for the uncouth monsters of primeval times, for Mastodon and Brontosaurus, on the green earth today, so little will a nation of Krupp's steel plates be able to continue to live in the community of civilized nations."
None the less, a nation of men of virile breed will, he believes, be no less prompt to take up arms in defence of its heritage of culture than Prussia was in 1813, and to fight in its defence to the last gasp. For in the War of Liberation it was not drill, but the spirit of the people that saved the country.