“My sergeant yesterday,” another relates, “turned to me and said:  ’It isn’t cricket.  There’s no game in shooting into a target as big as that.  It’s just murder.’  I had to order him to continue firing.”

They tell of it without pose or emotion.  It is all in the day’s work.  Most of them are young men of wealth, of ancient family, cleanly bred gentlemen of England, and as they nod and leave the restaurant we know that in three hours, wrapped in a greatcoat, each will be sleeping in the earth trenches, and that the next morning the shells will wake him.

Chapter X The Waste of War

In this war, more than in other campaigns, the wastefulness is apparent.  In other wars, what to the man at home was most distressing was the destruction of life.  He measured the importance of the conflict by the daily lists of killed and wounded.  But in those wars, except human life, there was little else to destroy.  The war in South Africa was fought among hills of stone, across vacant stretches of prairie.  Not even trees were destroyed, because there were no trees.  In the district over which the armies passed there were not enough trees to supply the men with fire-wood.  In Manchuria, with the Japanese, we marched for miles without seeing even a mud village, and the approaches to Port Arthur were as desolate as our Black Hills.  The Italian-Turkish War was fought in the sands of a desert, and in the Balkan War few had heard of the cities bombarded until they read they were in flames.  But this war is being waged in that part of the world best known to the rest of the world.

Every summer hundreds of thousands of Americans, on business or on pleasure bent, travelled to the places that now daily are being taken or retaken or are in ruins.  At school they had read of these places in their history books and later had visited them.  In consequence, in this war they have a personal and an intelligent interest.  It is as though of what is being destroyed they were part owners.

Toward Europe they are as absentee landlords.  It was their pleasure-ground and their market.  And now that it is being laid low the utter wastefulness of war is brought closer to this generation than ever before.  Loss of life in war has not been considered entirely wasted, because the self-sacrifice involved ennobled it.  And the men who went out to war knew what they might lose.  Neither when, in the pursuits of peace, human life is sacrificed is it counted as wasted.  The pioneers who were killed by the Indians or who starved to death in what then were deserts helped to carry civilization from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Only ten years ago men were killed in learning to control the “horseless wagons,” and now sixty-horsepower cars are driven by women and young girls.  Later the air-ship took its toll of human life.  Nor, in view of the possibilities of the air-ships in the future, can it be said those lives were wasted.  But, except life, there was no other waste.  To perfect the automobile and the air-ship no women were driven from home and the homes destroyed.  No churches were bombarded.  Men in this country who after many years had built up a trade in Europe were not forced to close their mills and turn into the streets hundreds of working men and women.