In the old warfare a man was either stabbed, shot, or thrust through
after an hour or so of excitement, and all the wounded on the field were
either comfortably murdered or attended to before the dawn of the next
day. One was killed by human hands, with understandable and tolerable
injuries. But in this war the bulk of the dead--of the western Allies,
at any rate--have been killed by machinery, the wounds have been often
of an inconceivable horribleness, and the fate of the wounded has been
more frightful than was ever the plight of wounded in the hands of
victorious savages. For days multitudes of men have been left mangled,
half buried in mud and filth, or soaked with water, or frozen, crying,
raving between the contending trenches. The number of men that the war,
without actual physical wounds, has shattered mentally and driven insane
because of its noise, its stresses, its strange unnaturalness, is
enormous. Horror in this war has overcome more men than did all the
arrows of Cressy.

Almost all this enhanced terribleness of war is due to the novel
machinery of destruction that science has rendered possible. The
wholesale mangling and destroying of men by implements they have never
seen, without any chance of retaliation, has been its most constant
feature. You cannot open a paper of any date since the war began without
reading of men burned, scalded, and drowned by the bursting of torpedoes
from submarines, of men falling out of the sky from shattered
aeroplanes, of women and children in Antwerp or Paris mutilated
frightfully or torn to ribbons by aerial bombs, of men smashed and
buried alive by shells. An indiscriminate, diabolical violence of
explosives resulting in cruelties for the most part ineffective from the
military point of view is the incessant refrain of this history.