Conclusion

In this book I have set down simply the scenes and character of this war as they have come before my own eyes and as I have studied them for nearly a year of history.  If there is any purpose in what I have written beyond mere record it is to reveal the soul of war so nakedly that it cannot be glossed over by the glamour of false sentiment and false heroics.  More passionate than any other emotion that has stirred me through life, is my conviction that any man who has seen these things must, if he has any gift of expression, and any human pity, dedicate his brain and heart to the sacred duty of preventing another war like this.  A man with a pen in his hand, however feeble it may be, must use it to tell the truth about the monstrous horror, to etch its images of cruelty into the brains of his readers, and to tear down the veils by which the leaders of the peoples try to conceal its obscenities.  The conscience of Europe must not be lulled to sleep again by the narcotics of old phrases about “the ennobling influence of war” and its “purging fires.”  It must be shocked by the stark reality of this crime in which all humanity is involved, so that from all the peoples of the civilized world there will be a great cry of rage and horror if the spirit of militarism raises its head again and demands new sacrifices of blood and life’s beauty.

The Germans have revealed the meaning of war, the devilish soul of it, in a full and complete way, with a most ruthless logic.  The chiefs of their great soldier caste have been more honest than ourselves in the business, with the honesty of men who, knowing that war is murder, have adopted the methods of murderers, whole-heartedly, with all the force of their intellect and genius, not weakened by any fear of public opinion, by any prick of conscience, or by any sentiment of compassion.  Their logic seems to me flawless, though it is diabolical.  If it is permissible to hurl millions of men against each other with machinery which makes a wholesale massacre of life, tearing up trenches, blowing great bodies of men to bits with the single shot of a great gun, strewing battlefields with death, and destroying defended towns so that nothing may live in their ruins, then it is foolish to make distinctions between one way of death and another, or to analyse degrees of horror.  Asphyxiating gas is no worse than a storm of shells, or if worse then the more effective.

The lives of non-combatants are not to be respected any more than the lives of men in uniform, for modern war is not a military game between small bodies of professional soldiers, as in the old days, but a struggle to the death between one people and another.  The blockading of the enemy’s ports, the slow starvation of a besieged city, which is allowed by military purists of the old and sentimental school does not spare the non-combatant.  The woman with a baby at her breast