Never Again! | Page 4

grudge or
grievance; All this is sheer madness.
Only a short time ago a private soldier said to me: "Yes, we had got to
be such friends with those Bavarians in the trenches over against us that
if we had returned there again I believe nothing could have made us
fight with each other; but of course that point was perceived and we

were moved to another part of the Line." What a criticism in a few
words on the whole War! A hundred times this or something similar
has happened, and a hundred and a thousand times these 'enemies' who
have madly mutilated each other have -- a few minutes later -- been
only too glad to dress each other's wounds and share the last contents of
their water-bottles.
By all the heart-rending experiences which have now become so
common and familiar to us;
By the fact that to-day there is hardly a family over the greater part of
Europe that is not grieving bitterly over the loss of some dearest
member of its circle;
By the white faces of the women clad in black, whom one sees
everywhere in the streets of Berlin and Brussels and Paris and Vienna,
of London and Milan and Belgrade and Petrograd;
By the sufferings of famine-stricken Poland, ravaged already three or
four times in the last two years by opposing and alternate armies;
By the awful sufferings of the six or seven million Jews of the Russian
Pale, hounded homeless in winter to and, fro over the frozen earth the
old men and women and children perishing of exposure, fatigue, and
starvation; By the agony of Serbia, and the despair of Belgium;
This must not be again!
By the five or six million actual combatants already slain; and, the
strange spectacle of millions of Women (over half a million in Britain,
more in France, multitudes in Germany and America) manufacturing
man-destroying explosive shells in ceaseless stream by day and night;
(And it is estimated that on the average some fifty shells are expended
for every one man slain) By the terrified faces -- as of drowning men --
of those suffering in countless hospitals from shell-shock; by their
trembling hands and, limbs and horrible dreams at night -- pursued by
an ever-living horror;
By the curses of the tender-hearted friend who collects in
No-man's-land between the lines the scattered fragments of his
comrade's body -- the dabs of flesh, the hand, the head he knows so
well, a boot with a foot still in it -- and puts them all together in a sack
for burial;
By the silent stupefaction of wives and mothers trying vainly to picture
to themselves a death which cannot be pictured; by the insane laughter

of those who having witnessed these things can no longer weep;
This must not be again!
By the beach at Gallipoli covered with the prostrate and writhing forms
of men exhausted and emaciated with dysentery, who have crawled
down from the hills only to lie out there in the terrible sun tormented
with flies and thirst, or to shiver through the frosty night, waiting for
the tardy arrival of the Hospital Ship;
By the hundreds of bodies thrown at the last into the sea at sunrise, for
their unceremonious end;
And each poor body for all its loathsome state so loved, so loved by
some one far away;
By the dear Lord who in the beautiful legend descended for three days
into Hell that he might redeem mankind; but these have lived in an
actual Hell for weeks and months together --
This must not be again!
By the growth and expansion of Science (God forgive the word!) which
will inevitably make each future war more devilish and inhuman than
the last;
By the cry of the black and coloured peoples of the Earth who have for
long enough already said how hard and cruel the faces of the white men
seemed to them, and who now think how black their souls are;
By the hardness of heart, the insensitiveness of a certain kind, which
during a century or more now has been bred by the institutions of
Commercialism;
By the habitual betrayal, through long periods of 'prosperity' and
`peace,' of men by their fellows -- of the weak by the powerful, of the
generous by the mean, of the simple and thoughtless by the crafty and
selfish;
By the huge dividends declared by Armament Firms; by the
international agreements of these firms with one another, even to cozen
their own respective Governments;
By the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of innocent folk trampled
underfoot in the ditch of competition, the mad, race in which the devil
takes the hindmost;
By the treacherous internal warfare of the ordinary industrial life of
every country, the