War organizes a body of men who lose the feelings of the citizen in the soldier; whose habits detach them from the community; whose ruling passion is devotion to a chief; who are inured in camp to despotic sway; who are accustomed to accomplish their ends by force and to sport with the rights and happiness of their fellow beings; who delight in tumult, adventure, and peril, and turn with disgust and scorn from the quiet labors of peace…  It (war) tends to multiply and perpetuate itself endlessly.  The successful nation, flushed by victory, pants for new laurels, while the humbled nation, irritated by defeat, is impatient to redeem its honor and repair its losses…

Instead of awakening pity, the slaughter of thousands of fellow beings flushes them with delirious joy, illuminates the city, and dissolves the whole country in revelry and riot.  Thus the heart of man is hardened and his worst passions are nourished.  He renounces the bonds and sympathies of humanity.  Channing

The age for military service has arrived, and every young man has to submit to the arbitrary orders of some rascal or ignoramus.  He must believe that nobility and greatness consist in renouncing his own will and becoming the tool of another’s will, in slashing and in getting himself slashed, in suffering from hunger, thirst, rain, and cold; in being mutilated without knowing why and without any other reward than a glass of brandy on the day of battle and the promise of something impalpable and fictitious: immortality after death, and glory given or refused by the pen of some journalist in his warm room.

A gun is fired.  He falls wounded.  His comrades finish him off by trampling over him.  He is buried half alive and then he may enjoy immortality.  The one for whom he had given his happiness, his sufferings, and his very life, never knew him.  And years later someone comes to collect his whitened bones, out of which they make paint and English blacking for cleaning his General’s boots.  Alphonse Karr

They take a man in the bloom of his youth, they put a gun into his hands, a knapsack on his back, and a cockaded hat on his head, and then they say to him: “My brother-ruler of so-and-so has treated me badly.  You must attack his subjects.  I have informed them that on such and such a date you will present yourselves at the frontier to slaughter them…  Perhaps at first you will think that our enemies are men, but they are not men – they are Prussians or Frenchmen.  You will distinguish them from the human race by the color of their uniforms.  Try to do your duty well, for I am looking on.  If you gain the victory, they will bring you to the windows of my palace when you return.  I will come down in full uniform and say, ‘Soldiers, I am satisfied!’  Should you remain on the battlefield (which may easily happen), I will communicate the news of your death to your family that they may mourn for you and inherit your share of things.  If you lose an arm or a leg I will pay you what they are worth.  But I will dismiss you if you remain alive and are no longer fit to carry your knapsack, and you can go and die where you like.  That will no longer concern me.”  Claude Tillier

I learned discipline, namely, that the corporal is always right when he addresses a private, the sergeant when he addresses a corporal, the sub-lieutenant when he addresses a sergeant-major, and so on up to the Field-Marshal – even should they say that twice two is five!

It is at first difficult to grasp this, but there is something that will help you to understand it.  It is a notice stuck up in the barracks, and which is read to you from time to time in order to clear your ideas.  This notice sets out all that a soldier may wish to do – to return to his village, to refuse to serve, to disobey his commander, and so on – and for all this the penalty is mentioned: capital punishment, or five years’ penal servitude.  Erckmann-Chatrian

I have bought a Negro, and he is mine.  He works like a horse.  I feed him badly, I clothe him similarly, and he is beaten when he disobeys.  Is there anything surprising in that?  Do we treat our soldiers any better?  Are they not deprived of liberty like this Negro?  The only difference is that the soldier costs much less.  A good Negro is now worth at least five hundred écus, but a good soldier is hardly worth fifty.  Neither the one nor the other may quit the place where he is confined.  Both are beaten for the slightest fault.  Their salaries are about the same.  But the Negro has this advantage over the soldier: he does not risk his life but passes it with his wife and children.  Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, par des amateurs, Art. Esclavage.

It is as if neither Voltaire, nor Montaigne, nor Pascal, nor Swift, nor Kant, nor Spinoza had ever existed, nor the hundreds of other writers who have very forcibly exposed the madness and futility of war, and described its cruelty, immorality, and savagery.  Above all, it is as if Jesus and his teaching of human brotherhood and love of God and man had never existed.

Recalling all this and looking around on what is happening now, one experiences horror less at the abominations of war than at that most horrible of all horrors, the consciousness of the impotence of human reason.  Reason, which alone distinguishes man from the brutes and constitutes his true dignity, is now regarded as an unnecessary, useless, and even pernicious attribute that simply impedes action, like a bridle dangling from a horse’s head, merely entangling his legs and irritating him.

It is understandable that a pagan, a Greek, a Roman, or even a medieval Christian ignorant of the Gospel and blindly believing all the prescriptions of the Church, might fight, and while fighting pride himself on his military calling.  But how can a believing Christian, or even a skeptic involuntarily permeated by the Christian ideals of human brotherhood and love that have inspired the works of the philosophers, moralists, and artists of our time – how can such a man take a gun or stand by a cannon and aim at a crowd of his fellow men, desiring to kill as many of them as possible?

The Assyrians, Romans, or Greeks might be convinced that they not only acted according to their conscience but even performed a good action when fighting.  But we are Christians whether we wish it or not, and the general spirit of Christianity (however it may have been distorted) has lifted us to a higher plane of reason, whence we cannot but feel with our whole being not only the senselessness and cruelty of war but also its complete contrast to all that we regard as good and right.  And so we cannot quietly do as they did with assurance and firmness.  We cannot do it without a consciousness of our criminality, without the desperate feeling of a murderer who, having begun to kill his victim and aware in the depths of his soul of his guilt, tries to stupefy or infuriate himself in order to be able to complete his dreadful deed.  All the unnatural, feverish, hotheaded, insane excitement that has now seized the idle upper ranks of Russian society is merely a symptom of their consciousness of the criminality of what is being done.  All these swaggering mendacious speeches about devotion to, and worship of, the monarch; all this readiness to sacrifice their lives (they should say other people’s lives); all these promises to defend with their breasts land that does not belong to them; all these senseless blessings of one another with various banners and monstrous icons; all these Te Deums; all this preparation of blankets and bandages; all these detachments of nurses; all these contributions to the fleet and to the Red Cross presented to the government – whose direct duty it is, having declared war (and being able to collect as much money as it requires from the people), to organize the necessary fleet and necessary means for attending the wounded – all these pompous, senseless, and blasphemous Slavonic prayers, the utterance of which the papers report as important news in various towns; all these processions, calls for the national anthem, and shouts of hurrah; all this desperate newspaper mendacity, which has no fear of exposure because it is so general; all this stupefaction and brutalization in which Russian society is now plunged, and which is transmitted by degrees to the masses – all this is merely a symptom of the consciousness of guilt in the dreadful thing that is being done.

Spontaneous feeling tells men that what they are doing is wrong, but as a murderer who has begun to assassinate his victim cannot stop, so the fact of the deadly work having been begun seems to Russian people an unanswerable reason in its favor.  War has begun, and so it must go on.  So it seems to simple, benighted, unlearned men under the influence of the petty passions and stupefaction to which they have been subjected.  And in the same way the most learned men of our time demonstrate that man has no free will, and that therefore, even if he understands that the thing he has begun is evil, he cannot stop doing it.

And so, dazed and brutalized, men continue the dreadful work.