call a Nietzschean Superman? War is not an affair of sentiment. Some of
our newspapers complain that the Germans kill the wounded and fire on
field hospitals and Red Cross Ambulances. These same newspapers fill
their columns with exultant accounts of how our wounded think nothing of
modern bullet wounds and hope to be back at the front in a week, which I
take to be the most direct incitement to the Germans to kill the wounded
that could be devized. It is no use being virtuously indignant: "stone
dead hath no fellow" is an English proverb, not a German one. Even the
killing of prisoners is an Agincourt tradition. Now it is not more
cowardly to kill a woman than to kill a wounded man. And there is only
one reason why it is a greater crime to kill a woman than a man, and why
women have to be spared and protected when men are exposed and
sacrificed. That reason is that the destruction of the women is the
destruction of the community. Men are comparatively of no account: kill
90 per cent, of the German men, and the remaining 10 per cent. can
repeople her. But kill the women, and _Delenda est Carthago_. Now this
is exactly what our Militarists want to happen to Germany. Therefore the
objection to killing women becomes in this case the reason for doing it.
Why not? No reply is possible from the Militarist, disable-your-enemy
point of view. If disablement is your will, there is your way, and the
only effectual way. We really must not call the Kaiser and Von Bernhardi
disciples of the mythical Neech when they have either overlooked or
shrunk from such a glaring "biological necessity." A pair of puling
pious sentimentalists if you like. But Supermen! Nonsense. O, my brother
journalists, if you revile the Prussians, call them sheep led by snobs,
call them beggars on horseback, call them sausage eaters, depict them in
the good old English fashion in spectacles and comforter, seedy overcoat
buttoned over paunchy figure, playing the contrabass tuba in a street
band; but do not flatter them with the heroic title of Superman, and
hold up as magnificent villainies worthy of Milton's Lucifer these