be to say that for
four years the flower of the country's population were engaged in
killing each other. All other industries were overshadowed by the
occupation of human slaughter. Shop and farm, church and college, school
and home, all were subsidiary to the battlefield.

The battlefield itself is not easily conceived by the civilian, even
with the aid of poets and story-tellers from Homer to Kipling. The
reader, who has perhaps never seen a shot fired in anger, may have
chanced to witness a man struck down in the street by a falling beam or
trampled by a runaway horse. Or, as a better illustration, he may
remember in his own case some hour of sudden and extreme suffering,--a
hand caught by a falling window, a foot drenched by scalding water.
Intensify that experience, extend it through days, for the home couch
and the nursing of mother or wife put the bare ground and the onrush of
hostile men,--and you have the nucleus, the constituent atom, of a
battle. Multiply it by hundreds or thousands; give to each sufferer the
background of waiting parents, wife, children, at home; give to a part
death, swift or agonizing; to another part lifelong infirmity or
irritation,--and you begin to get the reality of war.

It was Wellington who said that the worst sight on earth, next to the
field of defeat, was the field of victory. It was Lee who wrote from
Mexico to his son: "You have no idea what a horrible sight a
battle-field is." And he said that the strongest memory left from his
first battle was the plaintive tone of a little Mexican girl whom he
found leaning over a wounded drummer-boy.

Men not only witness such carnage but inflict it, in the excitement of
battle, because animated by feelings of which only a part can rightly be
called heroic. Honor indeed is due to the subordination of personal fear
to the sense of duty and comradeship,--yes, high honor; and the appeal
of the soldier to the imagination, as a type of self-sacrifice and
nobility, has its element of truth. But the ordinary courage of the
battle-field is largely an excitement half-animal, half-contagious,
running often into savagery and insensate fury. In that situation the
highest and lowest elements in man come into play. For the most part
only the highest is portrayed for us by the historians and
romancers,--they keep the wild beast and the devil out of sight. Only in
these later days, when mankind begins to scrutinize its boasted glories
more closely, do