ew days later I saw the wounded of Neuve Chapelle, which was a
victory bought at a fearful price. They were streaming down to
Boulogne, and the hospital ships were crowded with them. Among
them were thousands of Indians who had taken a big share in that
battle.

With an Oriental endurance of pain, beyond the courage of most
Western men, these men made no moan. The Sikhs, with their finely
chiselled features and dreamy inscrutable eyes--many of them
bearded men who have served for twenty years in the Indian army--
stared about them in an endless reverie as though puzzling out the
meaning of this war among peoples who do not speak their tongue,
for some cause they do not understand, and in a climate which
makes the whole world different to them. What a strange, bewildering
mystery it must have seemed to these men, who had come here in
loyalty to the great Raj in whom they had faith and for whom they
were glad to die. They seemed to be searching out the soul of the
war, to find its secret.

The weeks have passed since then, and the war goes on, and the
wounded still stream back, and white men as well as dark men ask
God to tell them what all this means; and can find no answer to the
problem of the horror which has engulfed humanity and made a
jungle of Europe in which we fight like beasts.

Conclusion

In this book I have set down simply the scenes and character of this
war as they have come before my own eyes and as I have studied
them for nearly a year of history. If there is any purpose in what I
have written beyond mere record it is to reveal the soul of war so
nakedly that it cannot be glossed over by the glamour of false
sentiment and false heroics. More passionate than any other emotion
that has stirred me through life, is my conviction that any man who
has seen these things must, if he has any gift of expression, and any
human pity, dedicate his brain and heart to the sacred duty of
preventing another war like this. A man with a pen in his hand,
however feeble it may be, must use it to tell the truth about the
monstrous horror, to etch its images of cruelty into the brains of his
readers, and to tear down the veils by which the leaders of the
peoples try to conceal its obscenities. The conscience of Europe
must not be lulled to sleep again by the narcotics of old phrases
about "the ennobling influence of war" and its "purging fires." It must
be shocked by the stark reality of this crime in which a