The Cost to Humanity

I

NOT all the cost of this war will fall upon the belligerent nations. The neutrals cannot escape paying part of the price. ‘If we are engaged in war,‘ said Sir Edward Grey on August 3, concerning Great Britain’s position, ‘we shall suffer but little more than we shall suffer even if we stand aside.’ The warmest admirers of the Foreign Secretary will scarcely quote this sentence as evidence of his statesmanlike insight, but it deserves record nevertheless as an official recognition of a truth too often ignored, namely, that an outbreak of war inflicts severe losses even upon countries that remain at peace. It is an inevitable corollary that any great power engaging in war has a moral responsibility to other powers that is not limited by an exact observance of international conventions respecting contraband cargoes and the like; that, in fact, from enlightened nations in the twentieth century there may justly be required not only a decent respect to the opinions of mankind but a decent regard for the well-being of civilization as a whole. The conventional apology for a so-called ‘righteous war’ likens it to the act of a householder who defends himself by force against an armed burglar. The parallel breaks down, not only because it begs the question as to who is the householder and who is the burglar, — in war each side regards its opponent as either a burglar or in league with burglars, — but because it leaves out of account the sufferings inflicted by war upon non-combatants and neutrals. The real analogy is to a feud between two quarrelsome persons who keep up a running fire at each other from the opposite sidewalks of a crowded street.

In some instances the disturbance caused outside the war-zone has been obvious and sensational. The most conspicuous victim has been poor little Holland, suddenly overrun with multitudes of starving and homeless Belgian refugees at the very moment when her own resources are strained to the utmost by the mobilization which is regarded as a necessary measure of precaution. Of the difference the war immediately made to America there is no need to speak here at length. Perhaps the most curious illustration of the Norman Angell doctrine of the mutual dependence of nations is afforded by the hard case of distant Guatemala. Here, if anywhere, one might have thought that the developments of a European war could be watched with as much detachment as the unwinding of a cinema film. But within a few weeks the everyday routine of trade and employment in that remote country was so dislocated that the poor, maddened by hunger, were confiscating the foodstuffs of the wealthy.

For some time after the war is over, our economists will be busy calculating what it has cost the commercial and industrial life of the world. Half a column in a year-book will afford room enough for the sums in plain addition that will show the grand total of direct expenditure, in men and money, by the combatant powers. This simple reckoning will need to be supplemented by calculations based on other data than official casualty lists and budget statements. But even when expert statisticians have completed their estimates of war’s products and by-products, their figures will come far short of an adequate account of the toll levied by the war upon the civilization of our own and following generations.

A single instance will suggest the nature of some of the considerations that can find no place in any statistical table. In August, 1913, the 17th International Medical Congress was held in London. By common consent its most distinguished member was Professor Paul Ehrlich, of Frankfort-on-Main, and its most notable feature was his address on chemio-therapy, with special reference to his famous remedy, salvarsan, ‘the discovery of which,’ said the London Times, ‘is the most conspicuous achievement of the day.’ Professor Ehrlich himself gives much of the credit for that discovery to a colleague at the Frankfort Physiological Institute, Dr. Bertheim, the greatest, recent authority on organic arsenic compounds, without whose researches Professor Ehrlich’s success in finding such valuable remedies for the protozoan diseases would have been impossible. Dr. Bertheim was one of the first German soldiers slain in the present war.

In his address to the Congress Professor Ehrlich looked forward to further important developments of chemiotherapy in numerous diseases to which it has not yet been applied, including smallpox, scarlatina, yellow fever, and, above all, the infectious diseases caused by invisible germs. These endeavors will henceforth lack the coöperation of one of the investigators from whom most might have been expected. It is not extravagant to say that the bullet or shrapnel or bayonet that killed Bertheim killed also an unknown number of future sufferers of all nationalities, whose lives might have been saved by the discoveries he would have made if his career had not thus been prematurely cut short. In the official tables his death is counted technically as a ‘ loss ’ to Germany only. Actually it inflicted a loss no less severe upon France, upon England, upon America, and indeed upon every country that profits by the advances of scientific medicine. Was the ‘ military significance ’ of getting rid of that one soldier worth to the Allies the price that his death may ultimately cost them? In this case the fact that Bertheim had already made a reputation enables us to realize something of the loss sustained in his tragic end. But there are numerous instances in which, owing to the youth of the victim, who has not yet had time to make his mark, we are scarcely aware that any endowment of value to the world has perished with him. If the war had broken out five years earlier and Bertheim had met the same fate, the loss to medicine would have been still greater, — for there would have been no salvarsan, — while at the same time it would have been unsuspected. And even if Bertheim had been spared, the conditions that surround scientific experiments in the nations at war no longer make possible the patient, costly, and undisturbed investigation which alone can bring Ehrlich’s inspiring hopes to fruitage.

When they announce the death of a veteran discoverer or inventor, the papers are accustomed to speak of it as a ‘great loss’ to scientific progress. Actually these terms are quite inappropriate to a bereavement of this kind. When Lord Kelvin died in his eightyfourth year, science suffered not at all. Had he lived to be a centenarian, the record of his achievements would not have been lengthened by a single line. The real ‘loss’ would have been if he had passed away sixty years earlier. In that case his biography in the press, instead of filling several columns, would not have exceeded a paragraph, and the world would never have known what it had missed by the cutting short of his career. In all the reports of the war there is nothing more pathetic than some of the brief obituary notices, published from time to time in the British Medical Journal, of young doctors, serving as Red Cross surgeons at the front, whom the wastefulness of war has thrown upon the scrap-heap just when long years of patient study were beginning to bear fruit. We read of one, ‘Had his life been spared, there is no height in his profession to which he might not have attained ’; of another, that an essay with which he won the prize at the London Hospital ‘was regarded as an earnest of a steady outflow of original work in the future’; and of another, awarded the V.C. for bravery in attending the wounded under fire, that he had been investigating the problem of sleeping sickness in Africa and was hoping shortly to bring his work on it to a practical conclusion.

II

The slaughter of a possible Lister or Pasteur strikes the imagination as a particularly hideous incident of the war, but in a minor degree many other casualties reported on one side only are really losses to both, and indeed to civilization at large. The world of scholarship and art and letters is not split up into competitive and mutually exclusive territorial areas. For instance, the death, in the field, of Dr. Max Lebrecht Strack, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Kiel, is not a local or national bereavement only, but makes the republic of learning the poorer. It is not German students alone who would have profited by his further researches in Greek numismatics and the other subjects in which he had made a reputation. There will be an appalling list to be compiled presently of Germans of academic or literary distinction who have fallen in this war. Casual newspaper paragraphs that have come in one’s way supply such names as those of Professor Hermann Kriegsmann, of Tübingen, a leading authority on criminal law; the jurist, Dr. Karl Kornmann, who had recently been appointed to a full chair at Leipzig; Dr. Heinrich Hermelink, Professor of Church History at Kiel; Dr. Ernst Heidrich, Professor of the History of Art at Basel; Dr. Ernst Stadler (a B.Litt. of Oxford, by the way), Professor of German Philology at Strassburg; Dr. Maximilian Reinganum, Extraordinary Professor of Physics at Freiburg; Dr. Richard von Gizycki, of the Berlin Seminar for Oriental Languages; Dr. Franz Wellmann, director of the Agricultural College at Odenkirchen; Dr. Lattermann, of the Charlottenburg School of Technology; Dr. A. Moller, head of one of the most important schools in Hamburg; Professor Fricke, head of the Hanover Forestry Academy; and Hermann Löns, a distinguished novelist and writer of folk songs.

A dispatch from Paris to a London paper of October 22 reports as a remarkable feature of the French casualty lists the scores of university professors, from all parts of France, who had laid down their lives for their country. Among men known to have fallen while fighting for France are Emile Raymond, not only Senator for the Loire, but a surgeon of distinction; Joseph Déchelette, whose three-volume Manuel d ’Archéologie préhistorique, celtique et galloromaine is described as ‘the only approach to a complete repertory of researches and results’ on this subject; Paul Philippe Cret, Professor of Architectural Design at the University of Pennsylvania; Charles Péguy, the leader of a new school in French poetry and criticism; Ernest Psichari, one of Péguy’s most brilliant disciples among the younger men; and Alfred Druin, another writer of distinction. Another victim is Albéric Magnard, a musical composer of high rank, whose quintet for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and pianoforte is pronounced by competent authorities to be one of the finest ‘ wind works’ since Mozart’s time. M. Magnard, who was living near Paris, barricaded himself in his house when the Germans were approaching, and shot two Uhlans before the entrance was forced. He accordingly paid the penalty imposed by the laws of war on non-combatants who take up arms against invasion.

So far, for obvious reasons, the British casualty lists afford no parallel to these tragic rolls; but the names are beginning to appear of young university men of promise who have met their death in the field.

These are only the first fruits of war’s harvest from men whose intellect and training had fitted them for some conspicuous service to humanity. Many who escape alive will return either physically disabled or so shaken mentally by their terrible experiences as to be incapable of any further intellectual work of high quality. A fund of cheering recollections was promised by Mr. Lloyd George to those who responded to his appeal for recruits. Another Verestchagin, no doubt, might hope to bring back abundant treasures of memory as inspiration and material for his gruesome pictures, but life in the trenches offers no such reward to those whose allotted service to humanity is not the representation or interpretation of the morbid and disgusting. In any case, while the war lasts, the employment of scholars and artists on military tasks suspends altogether their activities in regions where they most excel. The olive and fig and vine in Jotham’s parable refused to abandon their fruitful ministries even for the honor of a kingdom. To what a pass civilization has come when it must call away from their work and offer as food for powder such men as Maxim Gorky, who has taken part in several battles in Galicia; Charles Nordman, the editor of the scientific section of the Revue des Deux Mondes, now serving in Alsace; the French poet, Paul Claudel, also in the held, whose literary merits have so transcended national boundaries that there exist in Germany ‘Claudelian’ societies for the study of his writings; or Professor Caspar René Gregory, a naturalized German of American birth, now shouldering a rifle on behalf of his adopted country.

An infantry officer at the front has described in a letter home the effect of the shells from the big German guns, which more than once buried whole sections of men in the earth of the parapets. ‘Some of them,’ he writes, ‘took no harm, and we dug them out and used them again. Others died, being torn to fragments.’ ‘We dug them out and used them again’—that is a phrase to stick in one’s mind in reflecting on the employment given by war to some of the finest spirits of our time.

We have not yet begun to realize to what an extent the academic life of Europe is suffering through the war. ‘ Cambridge in the past term,’ says the Cambridge correspondent of the Athenœum, ‘has been, as a university, practically non-existent.’ ‘Were I to state,’ says the Cambridge correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, ‘that, for all the value of the academic work done during this term, term might as well not have been held, I should probably evoke a storm of criticism, but I must say that, in my opinion, I should not be far from the truth.’ Similar reports come from the other British universities. Any one who takes up the new issue of the Oxford Calendar and notes how many names of undergraduates have the note A (Absent on Military Service) appended to their names will see that the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s desire to secure ‘the cream of the nation’ for the war is being amply fulfilled. Amazing figures have been published showing the large proportion of students at Berlin and Paris now under arms. At Heidelberg several professors, unable themselves to go to the front, are taking the place of bank officials who have been called to military service—a respectable and useful function, doubtless, but not one that gives quite adequate scope to the attainments of a gelehrte. How scientific research everywhere has been stopped short by the war can be appreciated in some measure from an article in Nature of December 10, which mentioned as specific instances the suspension of the international fishery investigations, the interference with the investigation of tropical diseases in Africa, the nonpublication of the usual meteorological reports, the cessation of the publication of the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature, and various hindrances to seismological observations and investigations of the upper air. On the continent of Europe and in the British Isles not only colleges and schools, but museums, libraries, and learned institutions and societies of all kinds have to carry on their work as best they can, short-handed. The head of an important specialist library in the north of England mentions incidentally in a private letter that the preparation of his revised catalogue has had to be suddenly suspended owing to the summons of four of his five assistants to the colors. It is only the armament-makers and the purveyors of supplies for the troops who can count upon unimpaired activity in war-time. In the cultivation of the things of the mind, ‘business as usual’ is by no means a practicable maxim.

The war seems to have made a special levy upon musicians, both composers and performers. Madame Schumann-Heink has told how, during a performance in which she was taking part at Bayreuth on August 1, a military officer came and took away six of the singers and twenty-two of the orchestra, to mobilize. That interruption appears to be a type of what has happened everywhere in the European musical world. In the lists of musicians serving in the field may be found such well-known names as those of Rachmaninoff, Dohnanyi, Lehar, Fall, Muratore, and Chaliapin. ‘ Musicians,’ says Mr. Ernest Newman in the Musical Times, ‘ may well doubt the sanity of a world in which Kreisler is in arms against Thibaud, and in which it is the business of those of us here who owe some of the finest moments of our life to the great living German composers to do all we can to prevent their pouring out any more of their genius upon us.’ Any one who has ever listened to the magic of Fritz Kreisler’s playing will indeed wonder at the madness that could find no better use for him than to send him into the field to sleep night after night in the wet grass, and then into the trenches to be ridden over and wounded by a Cossack lancer.

III

At no previous moment in the history of the world has civilization suffered such sore bereavement through the diversion of the highest gifts to destructive tasks. In a minor degree it is suffering further from the pressure of this horror upon the minds of men who stay at home, deadening their powers of thought and imagination, and inhibiting the exercise of their ripest talents. One hears of artists who lament that they have almost forgotten that they once painted pictures, and of composers who since the war broke out have been unable to write a single bar. Of the deplorable effect of the war upon men of letters who try to use it as a spur to their creative genius one needs no other evidence than Sir James Barrie’s pitiful play. Only a passing reference is necessary to the trail of ruin left by the war in the destruction or damage of the literary and artistic treasures that happen to lie in its path. Every war is waged by vandals, and this one not the least. Here, too, anything like a complete estimate of losses is impossible. The most serious are not always those that are most prominent in newspaper dispatches. The burning of a great library attracts general attention, but it may be that the mischief wrought thereby is mainly sentimental. In these days not even an infinitesimal fraction of the great literature of the world perishes when any single collection of books is destroyed. Nothing disappears that would have made any real difference to the welfare of civilization or the advancement of science. Photographic reproductions have made it unnecessary to preserve even some of the rarest ancient manuscripts except for their purely antiquarian interest. It is otherwise when an invader puts to the flames a commonplace private house that happens to contain the accumulated memoranda or the unpublished writings of a thinker or scholar. Yet it is a matter of chance whether depredations of this kind ever become publicly known. Early in December there died in England one of the group of Louvain professors who had accepted the hospitality of the University of Cambridge — Dr. Albert van Gehuchten, a neurologist of European reputation. It was only from an incidental sentence in a newspaper obituary that one learned that the burning of his home by German soldiers had consumed the manuscript records of the last ten years of his work.

‘But however deplorable the immediate setback due to the war,’ say some, ‘ compensation will soon be found in the inspiration this world-conflict will give to creative work in art and letters when peace is restored.’ Out of the eater comes forth meat. Comforting generalizations are drawn from the masterpieces of Greek genius that followed Marathon and Salamis, and from the indisputable chronological fact that Shakespeare came after and not before the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The theory of the dependence of literary upon military activity is built upon two or three isolated coincidences, and would not survive the test of continuous history. A little reflection will start some awkward questions. If the golden age of Athens was a product of the successful resistance to Persia, why was there no golden age in Macedon also after Alexander’s conquests? If, too, the genius of Shakespeare had its birth in national feats of arms, why was he so long in coming? In the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries there was surely enough fighting, both abroad and at home, to supply the inspiration required for great works of literature. In comparison with the prolonged struggles of those periods, the Elizabethan conflict with Spain was a mere ‘scrap.’ The big wars of modern times certainly give this militarist theory no countenance. In America, for instance, the efflorescence of literary and artistic genius that should have sprung from the soil of the Civil War is by this time long overdue. The very people who are most optimistic about the results of the present war are the first to point out that the world’s intellectual debt to Germany has been rapidly diminishing since 1870. For one thing, if a war does arouse literary or artistic genius into activity, it is only, after all, the survivors who can thus be inspired by it. (This truism seems really in need of being affirmed nowadays.) What happened to the earlier Shakespeare that might have been? Quite possibly he was killed at Crécy or Towton. Even the Shakespeare that was would have had less chance of writing Hamlet if the struggle between sovereign and Parliament had come fifty years earlier and the more adventurous of the players at the Globe had joined a Bankside train-band. If we could read the full meaning of the casualty lists appearing daily in the papers, we might perhaps become aware that the death of Sir Philip Sidney was not the final loss sustained by English literature through fighting in Flanders.

However, the activities quickened by a war are of necessity material rather than spiritual. During the period immediately following, the most urgent problem of the nations involved is to regain their means of livelihood, and art and literature are more of a luxury than ever. As Dr. Muck puts it, what Europe will want for many years to come is not music, but houses and food. Those countries especially that have been actually ravaged by the war are suddenly thrown back to a more primitive stage in their development. It is true that in these days the process of recuperation is accelerated by the improved appliances available for rebuilding what has been destroyed, as is illustrated by the recovery of San Francisco from the disaster of 1906; but, at best, to repair the material and physical losses of a struggle on such a scale as the present must mortgage the main energies of a generation. What sustenance can a ruined and desolated country offer to its Maeterlincks and Verhaerens? Even in lands that have been exempt from invasion the general commercial and industrial dislocation will take years to adjust, and the best brains, as well as the strongest hands, will find engrossing employment in duties that are largely those of a pioneer settlement. The mutual bitterness left behind between nation and nation will be a further handicap to all kinds of intellectual progress. For a long time, to be willing to learn from a recent enemy will be a mark of deficient patriotism. ‘French music,’ to quote again from Mr. Ernest Newman, ‘is still suffering in all sorts of ways from 1870. It is so small because it is so bent on being exclusively French. By its refusal to fertilize itself with the great German tradition it deliberately cuts itself off from permanent spiritual elements in that tradition that would give it a wider rage and a deeper humanity. The German tradition in its turn would be all the better for some cross-fertilization from modern France; but again chauvinism intervenes, and new harmonic possibilities are not developed as they might be because they are associated primarily with French music. It is just possible that each of the great nations, swollen with vanity or blindly nursing a grievance, may build round itself a wall more impassable than exists at present; and, if that happens, music will have to wait another twenty years for the new flight that we have all lately felt to be imminent.’

The same danger threatens every form of intellectual activity. The boasted cosmopolitanism of science, of art, and of letters has sustained a blow from which it will take many years to recover.

V

And what of the losses inflicted by the war upon religion? The churches in every belligerent country are congratulating themselves upon the sudden increase of their congregations and upon the greater responsiveness to emotional appeals. The pressure of anxiety and bereavement has impelled many hitherto thoughtless persons to seek the comfort and support of services of worship and intercession, just as a tornado in Texas will drive a holiday crowd to the shelter of a cyclone cellar. An account of a similar phenomenon may be read in the first chapter of Isaiah. It gave little encouragement to the prophet, and to-day it is a shallow optimism that builds upon such superficial evidence the hope of a permanent religious uplifting. ‘History,’ writes Principal George Adam Smith in his comment on this passage, ‘has many remarkable instances of peoples betaking themselves in the hour of calamity to the energetic discharge of the public rites of religion. But such a resort is seldom, if ever, a real moral conversion. It is merely physical nervousness, apprehension for life, clutching at the one thing within reach that feels solid, which it abandons as soon as panic has passed.’ Dean Henson, of Durham, has reason for his forecast that it is the interests not of religion but of superstition that will gain by the present war, and that the tremendous conflict in which his own country is now engaged will strengthen every retrograde and sterilizing influence within the British churches. Fifteen years ago the ‘black week’ of the Boer War gave a similar stimulus to worship in all parts of Great Britain. But the future historian of religion in England will not note that week as a landmark in any upward spiritual advance. He is more likely to observe that, even by the time the next war broke out, the English churches had not yet recovered the moral influence they forfeited by their condonation and approval of the war against the South African republics. Whatever flaws may be found in the general argument of Bernard Shaw’s pamphlet, his damning indictment of the Christian churches is unanswerable, and there is ground for the fear that the scathing page in which he comments on the ethical collapse of organized religion will be only an anticipation of the final verdict of history. ‘Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?’

Less than five years ago, delegates from practically all the Protestant missionary societies in the world assembled at Edinburgh to take counsel how they might combine to use the unparalleled opportunities presented to them in the mission field. This war has shattered the hopes of united action inspired by that unique assembly. Some of the most distinguished members of that conference are signatories to the manifesto of evangelical leaders justifying the action of Germany; the names of others no less prominent are appended to the British reply. To-day there are hundreds of members of the Student Christian Movement to be found in the trenches, some in German uniform, some in British or French. Methodist local preachers are in arms against Bible Society colporteurs. Of the three secretaries of the Y.M.C.A. at Geneva, one is fighting under German colors, one under French, and the third has been called up by the Swiss mobilization order. It is little wonder that Dan Crawford is postponing his return to ‘the long grass’ until he can hit upon some means of explaining to the African natives why the white men are killing one another when they do not intend to eat one another. In India and China, British and German missionaries have been working for several decades in perfect harmony, coöperating in deeds of mercy and lending one another a hand in times of difficulty and stress. Suddenly the peoples of Asia see these men transformed from friends to enemies on account of a quarrel that has arisen thousands of miles away.

One of the most poignant contributions to the literature of the war is a letter that appeared recently in the London Challenge, a new Church of England paper, over the signature, ‘An Indian Christian.’ He writes as one who desires India to remain within the British Empire and who wishes success to Britain in the present war. But he is deeply concerned as to the effect of it all upon Christian missions in Asia. The difficulty of finance, in his opinion, ‘ is a very small problem compared with the enormous burden of proof that, in the eyes of the enlightened spiritual Hindu, this war will throw upon European missionaries who come to us hereafter to preach the Gospel of Love.’ He is painfully impressed by his observation of the English churches since the war broke out. His criticisms, which are given in some detail, are summed up in his expression of regret that when the State is engaged in an enterprise which at the best is of but doubtful Christian sanction, the Church should find its vocation as the State’s advocate rather than as its conscience. He concludes his letter by telling of the ‘crushing disappointment’ of a sermon to which he listened in St. Paul’s near the beginning of the war — a sermon which ended by quoting from a poem which spoke of the ‘joyful’ sound of the ‘rolling drum’ and other war delights of old pagan time. ‘As I walked home that night, amid the glaring lights and the many khaki uniforms, threading my way through that great throng that seemed continually to pour out of the cathedral, my thoughts went back for a moment across the seas, to my village home in India, far from the military camps and the Legislative Council, — pagan, heathen, animistic, call it what you will, — but where they love their neighbors, and, if they hate, they hate with a bad conscience; and I felt that there, at least, in the wide world to-day, Christ could still walk as He walked in Galilee.’

It has been said that we need not trouble ourselves about the effect of the war upon missions: God will look after them. No doubt He will. He fulfills Himself in many ways. And it may be that this war will open a new era in the story of missionary progress. At the Edinburgh conference there was a ‘feeling in the air’ that we were approaching a time when two important new developments might be expected—when the native Christian churches of Asia would assert their complete independence of the churches of the West, combining in each country into a national church free from denominational distinctions; when, also, Oriental thought, working upon the material provided for it by the Christian revelation, would make a contribution of its own to the rectifying of the traditional Christian theology and Christian ethics. These tendencies will naturally be stimulated if the war should be long drawn out, and, by exhausting the resources of the belligerent nations, should alter the balance of power between the continents, giving Asia the position that has hitherto been held by Europe. But even if this cataclysm, like some other works of the Devil, should turn out in the long run for the furtherance of the gospel, the losses of the intervening period will not be any the less grievous, nor will the ultimate result diminish the shame that the impulse to the new developments should have come not from the faithfulness of the churches of the West but from their apostasy.

There has been much discussion as to whether war is murder. This much is being proved beyond dispute, that, at any rate, it is an approximation to suicide. Well may Romain Rolland call this ‘a sacrilegious conflict which shows a maddened Europe ascending its funeral pyre, and, like Hercules, destroying itself with its own hands.’ Each nation justifies its own share in the present struggle on the ground that it is virtually waging a war of self-preservation. If all this is the outcome of a war of self-preservation, one would like to know what form a war of selfdestruction would take. ‘Your king and country need you’ is the patriotic appeal, and those who respond are immediately thrust by king and country as fuel into a burning furnace. As Dr. David Starr Jordan has been showing so cogently, nothing is a greater delusion than the notion that war generates virility. On the contrary, it destroys the best, the bravest, and the most healthy human stock. As long as it lasts, it makes every other interest yield to its imperious demands. Learning, art, literature, science, commerce, civilization, humanity, count as nothing if they conflict with ‘military necessities.’ And then, when peace returns, it is always a crippled nation, — in this case, one might indeed say, a crippled civilization, — bereaved of men as well as of treasure, that has to apply itself to the appalling tasks of reconstruction. When the lean kine have devoured the well-favored and fat kine, the end of their feast leaves them even leaner and poorer than they were at the beginning.