ll humanity is
involved, so that from all the peoples of the civilized world there will
be a great cry of rage and horror if the spirit of militarism raises its
head again and demands new sacrifices of blood and life's beauty.

The Germans have revealed the meaning of war, the devilish soul of
it, in a full and complete way, with a most ruthless logic. The chiefs of
their great soldier caste have been more honest than ourselves in the
business, with the honesty of men who, knowing that war is murder,
have adopted the methods of murderers, whole-heartedly, with all the
force of their intellect and genius, not weakened by any fear of public
opinion, by any prick of conscience, or by any sentiment of
compassion. Their logic seems to me flawless, though it is diabolical.
If it is permissible to hurl millions of men against each other with
machinery which makes a wholesale massacre of life, tearing up
trenches, blowing great bodies of men to bits with the single shot of a
great gun, strewing battlefields with death, and destroying defended
towns so that nothing may live in their ruins, then it is foolish to make
distinctions between one way of death and another, or to analyse
degrees of horror. Asphyxiating gas is no worse than a storm of
shells, or if worse then the more effective.

The lives of non-combatants are not to be respected any more than
the lives of men in uniform, for modern war is not a military game
between small bodies of professional soldiers, as in the old days, but
a struggle to the death between one people and another. The
blockading of the enemy's ports, the slow starvation of a besieged
city, which is allowed by military purists of the old and sentimental
school does not spare the non-combatant. The woman with a baby at
her breast is drained of her mother's milk. There is a massacre of
innocents by poisonous microbes. So why be illogical and pander to
false sentiment? Why not sink the Lusitania and set the waves afloat
with the little corpses of children and the beauty of dead women? It is
but one more incident of horror in a war which is all horror. Its logic is
unanswerable in the Euclid of Hell. ... It is war, and when millions of
men set out to kill each other, to strangle the enemy's industries, to
ruin, starve, and annihilate him, so that the women may not breed
more children, and so that the children shall perish of wide-spread
epidemics, then a few laws of chivalry, a little pity here and there