It is in the by-products of the war that the waste, cruelty, and stupidity of war are most apparent.  It is the most innocent who suffer and those who have the least offended who are the most severely punished.  The German Emperor wanted a place in the sun, and, having decided that the right moment to seize it had arrived, declared war.  As a direct result, Mary Kelly, a telephone girl at the Wistaria Hotel, in New York, is looking for work.  It sounds like an O. Henry story, but, except for the name of the girl and the hotel, it is not fiction.  She told me about it one day on my return to New York, on Broadway.

“I’m looking for work,” she said, “and I thought if you remembered me you might give me a reference.  I used to work at Sherry’s and at the Wistaria Hotel.  But I lost my job through the war.”  How the war in Europe could strike at a telephone girl in New York was puzzling; but Mary Kelly made it clear.  “The Wistaria is very popular with Southerners,” she explained, “They make their money in cotton and blow it in New York.  But now they can’t sell their cotton, and so they have no money, and so they can’t come to New York.  And the hotel is run at a loss, and the proprietor discharged me and the other girl, and the bellboys are tending the switchboard.  I’ve been a month trying to get work.  But everybody gives me the same answer.  They’re cutting down the staff on account of the war.  I’ve walked thirty miles a day looking for a job, and I’m nearly all in.  How long do you think this war will last?” This telephone girl looking for work is a tiny by-product of war.  She is only one instance of efficiency gone to waste.

The reader can think of a hundred other instances.  In his own life he can show where in his pleasures, his business, in his plans for the future the war has struck at him and has caused him inconvenience, loss, or suffering.  He can then appreciate how much greater are the loss and suffering to those who live within the zone of fire.  In Belgium and France the vacant spaces are very few, and the shells fall among cities and villages lying so close together that they seem to touch hands.  For hundreds of years the land has been cultivated, the fields, gardens, orchards tilled and lovingly cared for.  The roads date back to the days of Caesar.  The stone farmhouses, as well as the stone churches, were built to endure.  And for centuries, until this war came, they had endured.  After the battle of Waterloo some of these stone farmhouses found themselves famous.  In them Napoleon or Wellington had spread his maps or set up his cot, and until this war the farmhouses of Mont-Saint-Jean, of Caillou, of Haie-Sainte, of the Belle-Alliance remained as they were on the day of the great battle a hundred years ago.  They have received no special care, the elements have not spared them nor caretakers guarded them.  They still were used as dwellings, and it was only when you recognized them by having seen them on the post-cards that you distinguished them from thousands of other houses, just as old and just as well preserved, that stretched from Brussels to Liege.