The context shows that the prophet is speaking of the last times, when "the day of the Lord is near." Verse 14.
The Prophecy Fulfilling
This is what we have seen in our time, as never before in the history of man,—the product of the plowshare and the pruning hook being turned into instruments of war.
About twenty-five years ago the late Marquis of Salisbury, speaking as a man grown gray in the service of the state, asked a London audience the question, "What is the great change that marks this time as different from the times when most of us were young men?" The aged statesman answered his own question, saying that it was the arming of the nations, the swift race upon which the powers had then recently entered, to increase their naval and military armaments. It is a sign of our times, answering to the prophetic forecast.
Throughout the present generation the thoughtful have watched with grave forebodings the preparations of the nations for war. Queen Alexandra, of Britain, once said of it:
"I was educated in the school of a king who was, before all things, just; and I have tried, like him, always to preach love and charity, I have always mistrusted warlike preparations, of which nations seem never to tire. Some day this accumulated material of soldiers and guns will burst into flames in a frightful war that will throw humanity into mourning on earth and grieve our universal Father in heaven."
As the race of armaments went forward on a scale never before thought of, statesmen and writers began to make use of the word "Armageddon" to describe the conflict that they saw was inevitable. Years ago the London Contemporary Review said:
"Odd things are happening everywhere.... Russia, Germany, England—these are great names; they palpitate with great ideas; they have vast destinies before them, and millions of armed men in their pay, all awaiting Armageddon."
In June, 1909, Lord Rosebery, in a speech before a press convention in London, commented gravely upon the significance of the feverish haste with which the nations were arming themselves, "as if for some great Armageddon, and that in a time of the profoundest peace."
To quote from a popular American magazine, of the same year: