The Last Shot

The Last Shot

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Title: The Last Shot
Author: Frederick Palmer
Release Date: October 13, 2004 [eBook #13738]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE LAST SHOT
by
FREDERICK PALMER

Author of Over the Pass, etc.
1914

TO THE READER
This story of war grew out of my experience in many wars. I have been
under fire without fighting; known the comradeship of arms without
bearing arms, and the hardships and the humors of the march with only
an observer's incentive. A singular career, begun by chance, was
pursued to the ends of the earth in the study of the greatest drama
which the earth stages. Whether watching a small force of white
regulars disciplining a primitive people, or the complex tactics of huge
army against huge army; whether watching war in the large or in the
small, I have found the same basic human qualities in the white heat of
conflict working out the same illusions, heroisms, tragedies, and
comedies.
The fellowship of campaigning made the cause of the force that I
accompanied mine for the time being. Thus, one who settles in the
town of A absorbs its local feeling of rivalry against the town of B in
athletic games or character of citizenship. To A, B is never quite
sportsmanlike; B is provincial and bigoted and generally inferior. But
settle in B and your prejudices reverse their favor from A to B.
Yet in the midst of battle, with the detachment of a non-combatant
marvelling at the irony of two lines of men engaged in an effort at
mutual extermination, I have caught myself thinking with the other side.
I knew why my side was busy at killing. Why was the other? For the
same reasons as ours.
I was seeing humanity against humanity. A man killed was a man
killed, courage was courage, sacrifice was sacrifice, romance was
romance, a heart-broken mother was a heart-broken mother, a village
burned was a village burned, regardless of race or nation. Every war
became a story in a certain set form: the rise of the war passion; the

conflict; victory and defeat; and then peace, in joyous relief, which the
nations enjoyed before they took the trouble to fight for it.
But such thoughts have been a familiar theme to the poet, the novelist,
the dramatist, the satirist, the dreamer, and the peace propagandist,
while the world goes on arming. In want of their talent, I offer
experience of the monstrous object of their gibes and imagination. To
me, the old war novels have the atmosphere of smoke powder and
antiquated tactics which still survived when I went on my first
campaign sixteen years ago. These classic masterpieces endure through
their genius; the excuse of any plodder who chooses their theme to-day
is that he deals with the material of to-day.
Methods of light and of motive power have not changed more rapidly
in the forty-odd years since the last great European war than the
soldier's weapons and his work. With all the symbols of economic
improvement the public is familiar, while usually it thinks of war in the
old symbols for want of familiarity with the new. My aim is to express
not only war as fought to-day, soldiers of to-day under the fire of arms
of to-day, but also the effects of war in the nth degree of modern
organization and methods on a group of men and women, free in its
realism from the wild improbabilities of some latter-day novelists who
have given us wars in the air or regaled us with the decimation of
armies by explosives dropped from dirigibles or their asphyxiation by
noxious gases compounded by the hero of the tale.
The Russo-Japanese and the Balkan campaigns, particular in their
nature, gave me useful impressions, but not the scene for my purpose.
The world must think of those wars comparatively as second-rate and
only partially illustrative, when its fearful curiosity and more fearful
apprehension centre on the possibility of the clash of arms between the
enormous forces of two first-class European land-powers, with their
supreme training and precision in arms. What would such a war mean
in reality to the soldiers engaged? What the play of human elements?
What form the new symbols? Therefore have I laid my scene in a small
section of a European