1. The immediate effects are destruction and massacre, ruin and death, the negation of all the elementary and essential blessings of life. In addition to the lives directly destroyed on the field of battle, there are the multitudes who perish from wounds, disease, or other inevitable hardships and privations of war, or are irreparably unfitted thereby for the useful toils of life, and there are the further multitudes linked with these by social or family ties who are indirectly but cruelly smitten by this terrible scourge. Even for the conquerors war is a tremendous misfortune. There must be included also in the reckoning the immense economic loss which it occasions. It means the destruction of crops and homesteads, the devastation of town and country, the loss of historic treasures and monuments that cannot be replaced, the disturbance of industry, the drying up of the very springs of wealth. And the preparation for war, the burden of armaments, the withdrawal of priceless human faculties from fruitful use, the direction of large masses of labour into essentially barren toils—all this is an alarming waste of energy and an immense obstacle to progress.
The economic aspect of the evil is not only that we suffer incalculable loss through the cessation and crippling of industry, but that wealth, represented by hundreds of millions of pounds, which would otherwise be devoted to productive uses, is as completely wasted as if the wealth had been destroyed by fire or flung into the sea. It has been powerfully argued by Mr. Norman Angell that even the victor in a great European war, though he may inflict untold damage upon others, cannot hope to make a profit out of the adventure which will even compensate himself for his own losses in wealth and credit.
It is impossible to estimate the material damage caused by war. In Belgium over 43,000 houses were destroyed. In France 46,000 buildings, and 331 churches were brought to ruins. The cost of the damage done to buildings, agriculture and industry in France and Belgium alone would run into hundreds of millions of pounds. The world’s losses in shipping were also enormous. It has been estimated that over twelve million tons were sent to the bottom of the sea, exclusive of German ships. The loss in production by the diversion of men from the workshops, factories, and the land to the battlefields, and the economic value of the lives that have been lost or rendered incapable of any useful work must also be taken into consideration when reckoning up the losses of the war. Here, again, it is utterly impossible to add it all up in pounds, shillings and pence. [Note: Daily Express, June 30, 1919.]
2. But the cost of war is not only in money, it is also in men. We live in an age when the utmost reverence is shown for man as man, and every effort is made by public authorities and by medical skill to preserve and prolong life. All the resources of science and of applied science are applied, by the best brains and hands, to compass the mutilation and death of hundreds of thousands of victims. And what heightens the tragedy is that those who are carried off by war are picked men in their prime. A pestilence sweeps away the weak and the unfit, and sometimes leaves the winnowed mass healthier and sounder than before, but war takes the strong and leaves the weaker to make good the blanks.
Some years after the Franco-German war I had a talk with an old man in Bavaria: “The worst of it,” he said, as a tear coursed down his cheek, “is that it is the flower of the youth that perish.” A distinguished American has been lecturing on this aspect of the subject, and has said that it is almost impossible to exaggerate the loss to the higher life of the United States that resulted from their civil war, in which so many who were the hope of their generation were stricken down before their time. [Note: W. P. Paterson, In the Day of the Muster, 37.]
I had an interview in the sad days of the Boer War with a widow who had given two sons to the service of the country. They were young men of the finest promise—strong, kindly, fair-minded, honourable. One had died, after horrible suffering, of wounds received in action; one had died of enteric in a field-hospital. The mother was full of noble and unmurmuring resignation; but it made me shudder to think that these two young men, who might have lived long and valued lives, the kindly fathers of strong children, should thus, and for such ends as these, have been lost to the earth. [Note: A. C. Benson, Along the Road, 360.]
“Under the sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with clenched teeth, and hell-fire eyes, hacking one another’s flesh; converting precious living bodies, and priceless living souls, into nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnip manure.” [Note: Carlyle, Past and Present, 163.]
3. To men’s lives as the cost of war add the sufferings of women and children.
Listen to the tramping! Oh, God of pity, listen!
Can we kneel at prayer, sleep all unmolested,
While the echo thunders?—God of pity, listen!
Can we think of prayer—or sleep—so arrested?
Million upon million fleeing feet in passing
Trample down our prayers—trample down our sleeping;
How the patient roads groan beneath the massing
Of the feet in going, bleeding, running, creeping!
Clank of iron shoe, unshod hooves of cattle,
Pad of roaming hound, creak of wheel in turning,
Clank of dragging chain, harness ring and rattle,
Groan of breaking beam, crash of roof-tree burning.
Listen to the tramping!—God of love and pity!
Million upon million fleeing feet in passing
Driven by, the war out of field and city,
How the sullen road echoes to the massing!
Little feet of children, running, leaping, lagging,
Toiling feet of women, wounded, weary guiding,
Slow feet of the aged, stumbling, halting, flagging,
Strong feet of the men loud in passion striding.
Hear the lost feet straying, from the roadway slipping,
They will walk no longer in this march appalling;
Hear the sound of rain dripping, dripping, dripping,
Is it rain or tears? What, O God, is falling?
Hear the flying feet! Lord of love and pity!
Crushing down our prayers, tramping down our sleeping,
Driven by the war out of field and city,
Million upon million, running, bleeding, creeping. [Note: Dora Sigerson, The Sad Years, 12.]
There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne children, or be merely potentially a child-bearer, who could look down upon a battlefield covered with slain, but the thought would rise in her, “So many mothers’ sons! So many bodies brought into the world to lie there! So many months of weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shaped within; so many hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be; so many baby mouths drawing life at women’s breasts ;—all this, that men might lie with glazed eyeballs, and swollen bodies, and fixed, blue, unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed—this, that an acre of ground might be manured with human flesh, that next year’s grass or poppies or karoo bushes may spring up greener and redder, where they have lain, or that the sand of a plain may have a glint of white bones!” And we cry, “Without an inexorable cause, this should not be! “No woman who is a woman says of a human body, “It is nothing!” [Note: Schreiner, Women and Labour, 170.]
Only a few days ago I saw an old white-haired woman gathering sticks in a wood. We chatted with her, and after a little while she said: “Fourteen years ago I had a stroke. It was at the time of the Boer War, when I heard that my son had been killed in battle.” She asked us to come into her cottage, and then from a little box she drew out a blue piece of paper, headed with the crest of the War Office, and it told us that her son “had been killed in action on March 18, 1900, at the battle of Paardeberg Drift.” She said: “When I heard that news I thought I should go mad. A little after I had a stroke. I have kept that paper ever since, and it will lie with me in my coffin.” “Good God,” I said to myself, “this War is that sorrow multiplied by—well, Thou alone knowest the number, O God.” That day the Cotswolds seemed to have lost their beauty. My dreamswere shattered. I thought of the War raging on the Continent, and of that fiercer battle which rages unceasingly in the hearts of so many anxious ones in the homes of the nations. [Note: B. Brash, Peace in the Time of War, 20.]
Here in this leafy place
Quiet he lies
Cold, with his sightless face
Turned to the skies.
‘Tis but another dead;
All you can say is said.
Carry his body hence,—
Kings must have slaves;
Kings climb to eminence
Over men’s graves;
So this man’s eye is dim;
Throw the earth over him.
What was the white you touched
There by his side?
Paper his hand had clutched
Tight, ere he died;—
Message, or wish may be;
Smooth the folds out and see.
Hardly the worst of us
Here could have smiled!—
Only the tremulous
Words of a child;—
Prattle that has for stops
Just a few ruddy drops.
Look. She is sad to miss,
Morning and night,
His—her dead father’s—kiss;
Tries to be bright,
Good to mamma, and sweet
That is all. “Marguerite.”
Ah, if beside the dead
Slumbered the pain!
Ah, if the hearts that bled
Slept with the slain!
If the grief died;—But no;—
Death will not have it so. [Note: Austin Dobson, in The Fiery Cross, 78.]
