The mind revolts at the inevitable catastrophe awaiting us, but it is necessary to prepare for it.  For twenty years all the powers of knowledge have been exhausted in inventing engines of destruction, and soon a few cannon shots will suffice to destroy a whole army.

It is no longer as it was formerly, when a few thousand mercenary wretches were under arms.  Whole nations are preparing to kill one another…  And in order to fit them for murder, their hatred is excited by assurances that they themselves are hated.  Kind-hearted men will believe this, and peaceful citizens, having received an absurd order to slay one another for God knows what ridiculous boundary incident or commercial colonial interests, will soon fling themselves at one another with the ferocity of wild beasts.

They will go to the slaughter like sheep, but with a knowledge of where they are going, that they are leaving their wives, and that their children will be hungry.  But they will be so deceived and inebriated by false, bombastic words, that they will call on God to bless their bloody deeds.  They will go with enthusiastic songs, cries of joy, and festive music, trampling down the harvest they have sown and burning towns they have built.  They will go without indignation, humbly and submissively, despite the fact that the strength is theirs and that if they could only agree, they could establish common sense and fraternity in place of the savage frauds of diplomacy.  Edouard Rod

An eyewitness relates what he saw when he stepped on to the deck of the Varyág during the present Russo-Japanese war.  The sight was dreadful.  Headless trunks, arms that had been torn off, and fragments of flesh were lying about in profusion, and everywhere there was blood, and a smell of blood which nauseated even those most accustomed to it.  The conning tower had suffered most – a shell had exploded on it and had killed a young officer who was directing the sighting of the guns.  All that was left of that unfortunate young man was a clenched hand holding an instrument.  Two men who were with the captain were blown to pieces, and two others were severely wounded (both had to have their legs amputated, and then had to undergo a second amputation higher up).  The captain escaped with a blow on the head from the splinter of a shell.

And this is not all.  The wounded cannot be taken on board neutral ships because of the infection from gangrene and fever.  Gangrene and suppurating wounds, together with hunger, fire, ruin, typhus, smallpox, and other infectious diseases, are also incidental to military glory.  Such is war.

And yet Joseph de Maistre sang the praises of the beneficence of war: “When the human soul loses its resilience owing to effeminacy, when it becomes unbelieving and contracts those rotten vices which accompany the superfluities of civilization, it can only be re-established in blood.”

M. de Vogue, the academician, says much the same thing, and so does M.  Brunetiere.  But the unfortunates of whom cannon-fodder is made have a right to disagree with this.

Unfortunately, however, they have not the courage of their convictions.  Therein lies the whole evil.  Accustomed from of old to allow themselves to be killed on account of questions they do not understand, they continue to let this be done, imagining all to be well.

That is why corpses are now lying beneath the water and are being devoured by crabs.  When everything around them was being demolished by grapeshot, these unfortunates can hardly have consoled themselves by the thought that all this was being done for their good and to re-establish the souls of their contemporaries, which had lost their resilience from the superfluities of civilization.  They had probably not read Joseph de Maistre.

I advise the wounded to read him between two dressings, and they will learn that war is as necessary as the executioner, because like him it is a manifestation of the justice of God.  This great thought may serve them as consolation while the surgeons are sawing their bones!  Hardouin

In the Russian News I read the opinion that Russia’s advantage lies in her inexhaustible store of human material.  For children whose father is killed, for a wife whose husband is killed, for a mother whose son is killed – this material is quickly exhausted.  From a private letter from a Russian mother, March 1904

You ask whether war is still necessary between civilized nations.

I reply that not only is it no longer necessary, but that it never has been necessary.  It has always violated the historical development of humanity, infringed human rights, and hindered progress.

If some of the consequences of war have been advantageous to civilization in general, its harmful consequences have been much greater.  We are misled because only a part of these harmful consequences is immediately apparent.  The greater part and the most important we do not notice.  So we must not accept the word “still.”  Its acceptance gives the advocates of war the opportunity to assert that the difference between them and us is only one of temporary expediency or personal appraisal, and our disagreement is then reduced to the fact that we consider war to be useless, while they consider it still useful.  They readily concede that it may become unnecessary and even harmful – but only tomorrow and not today.  Today they consider it necessary to perform on people these terrible blood-lettings which are called wars, and which are made only to satisfy the personal ambitions of a very small minority – to ensure power, honors, and riches to a small number of men to the detriment of the masses, whose natural credulity and superstitions these men exploit, together with the prejudices created and upheld by them.  Capitaine Gaston Mock

Men of our Christian world in our time are like a man who has missed the right turning and becomes more and more convinced, the farther he goes, that he is going the wrong way.  Yet the greater his doubts the quicker and more desperately does he hurry on, consoling himself with the thought that he must arrive somewhere.  But the time comes when it is quite clear that the way along which he is going leads only to a precipice, which he begins to discern before him.

That is where Christian humanity stands in our time.  We are presently guided in our private lives and in the lives of our separate states solely by desire for personal welfare for ourselves or our states, and we think to ensure this welfare by violence.  It is quite evident that if we continue to live as we are doing, then the means for violence of man against man and state against state will inevitably increase.  We shall first ruin ourselves more and more by expending a major portion of our productivity on armaments, and then we shall become more and more degenerate and depraved by killing the physically best men in wars.

If we do not change our way of life, this is as certain as it is mathematically certain that two non-parallel straight lines must meet.  And not only is it certain theoretically, but in our time our feeling as well as our intelligence becomes convinced of it.  The precipice we are approaching is already visible, and even the most simple, naive, and uneducated people cannot fail to see that, by arming ourselves increasingly against one another and slaughtering one another in war, we must inevitably come to mutual destruction, like spiders in ajar.

A sincere, serious, and rational man can now no longer console himself with the thought that matters can be mended, as was formerly supposed, by a universal empire such as that of Rome, Charlemagne, or Napoleon; or by the medieval, spiritual power of the Pope; or by alliances; or by the political balance of a European treaty and peaceful international tribunals; or, as some have thought, by an increase of military forces and the invention of new and more powerful weapons of destruction.

The organization of a universal empire or republic of European states is impossible, for the different peoples will never wish to unite into one state.  Shall we then organize international tribunals for the solution of international disputes? But who would impose obedience to the tribunal’s decision on a contending party that had an army of millions of men?  Disarmament?  No one desires to begin it, or is able to do so.  Shall we perhaps invent even more dreadful means of destruction – balloons with bombs filled with suffocating gases, which men will shower on each other from above?  Whatever may be invented, every state would furnish itself with similar weapons of destruction.  And as the human cannon-fodder faced the bullets that succeeded sword and spear, and the shells, bombs, long-range guns, shrapnel, and torpedoes that succeeded bullets, so it will submit to bombs charged with suffocating gases scattered down upon it from the air.

The speeches of M. Muravëv and Professor Martens as to the Japanese war not conflicting with the Hague Peace Conference show more obviously than anything else to what an extent speech – the organ for the transmission of thought – is distorted amongst men of our time, and show that the capacity for clear, rational thinking is completely lost.  Thought and speech are used not to guide human activity but to justify any activity, however criminal it may be.  The late Boer war and the present Japanese war (which may at any moment expand into universal slaughter) have proved this beyond all doubt.  All anti-war discussions are as useless as an attempt to stop a dog-fight by an eloquent and convincing speech pointing out to the dogs that it would be better to share the piece of meat they are struggling over, rather than to bite one another and lose the piece of meat which is bound to be carried off by some passing non-combatant dog.

We are rushing on towards the precipice and cannot stop, but are tumbling over it.  No rational man who reflects on the present position of humanity, and on what its future must inevitably be, can help seeing that there is no practical way out; that it is impossible to devise any alliance or organization that can save us from the destruction into which we are uncontrollably rushing.

Quite apart from the economic problems that become more and more complex, the mutual relations of states arming against one another and the wars that are ready at any moment to break out clearly indicate the unavoidable destruction awaiting so-called civilized humanity.

Then what is to be done?