Our boys, he wrote, have died, fighting one against the other.  They have been fighting upon an issue so obscure that your German press is still busy discussing what it was.  For us it was that Belgium was invaded and France in danger of destruction.  Nothing else could have brought the English into the field against you.  But why you invaded Belgium and France and whether that might have been averted we do not know to this day.  And still this war goes on and still more boys die, and these men who do not fight, these men in the newspaper offices and in the ministries plan campaigns and strokes and counter-strokes that belong to no conceivable plan at all.  Except that now for them there is something more terrible than war.  And that is the day of reckoning with their own people.

What have we been fighting for?  What are we fighting for?  Do you know?  Does any one know?  Why am I spending what is left of my substance and you what is left of yours to keep on this war against each other?  What have we to gain from hurting one another still further?  Why should we be puppets any longer in the hands of crowned fools and witless diplomatists?  Even if we were dumb and acquiescent before, does not the blood of our sons now cry out to us that this foolery should cease?  We have let these people send our sons to death.

    It is you and I who must stop these wars, these massacres of boys.

Massacres of boys!  That indeed is the essence of modern war.  The killing off of the young.  It is the destruction of the human inheritance, it is the spending of all the life and material of the future upon present-day hate and greed.  Fools and knaves, politicians, tricksters, and those who trade on the suspicions and thoughtless, generous angers of men, make wars; the indolence and modesty of the mass of men permit them.  Are you and I to suffer such things until the whole fabric of our civilisation, that has been so slowly and so laboriously built up, is altogether destroyed?

When I sat down to write to you I had meant only to write to you of your son and mine.  But I feel that what can be said in particular of our loss, need not be said; it can be understood without saying.  What needs to be said and written about is this, that war must be put an end to and that nobody else but you and me and all of us can do it.  We have to do that for the love of our sons and our race and all that is human.  War is no longer human; the chemist and the metallurgist have changed all that.  My boy was shot through the eye; his brain was blown to pieces by some man who never knew what he had done.  Think what that means!...  It is plain to me, surely it is plain to you and all the world, that war is now a mere putting of the torch to explosives that flare out to universal ruin.  There is nothing for one sane man to write to another about in these