spill their hellish cauldron on you from out of the blue distance still
"war"? War was the collision of the superfluous forces, the ruffians of
all nations. Youth, for whom the town had grown too small and the
doublet too tight, ventured out, intoxicated by the play of its own
muscles. And now shall the same word hold good when men already anchored
to house and home are torn away and whipped into the ranks and laid out
before the enemy, and made to wait, defenseless, in dull resignation,
like supers in this duel of the munition industries?

Is it right to misuse the word "war" as a standard when it is not
courage and strength that count, but explosive bombs and the length of
range of the guns and the speed with which women and children turn out
shells? We used to speak with horror of the tyrants of dark ages, who
threw helpless men and women to the lions and tigers; but now is there
one of us who would not mention them with respect in comparison with the
rulers who are at present directing the struggle between men and
machines, as though it were a puppet show at the end of telegraph wires,
and who are animated by the delightful hope that our supply of human
flesh may outlast the enemy's supply of steel and iron?

No! All words coined before this carnage began are too beautiful and too
honest, like the word "front," which I have learned to abhor. Are you
"facing" the enemy when their artillery is hidden behind mountains and
sends death over a distance of a day's journey, and when their sappers
come creeping up thirty feet below the surface? And your "front" is a
terminal station, a little house all shot up, behind which the tracks
have been torn up because the trains turn back here after unloading
their cargo of fresh, sunburned men, to call for them again when they
have emerged from the machines with torn limbs and faces covered with
verdigris.