If it is permissible to hurl millions of men against each other with
machinery which makes a wholesale massacre of life, tearing up
trenches, blowing great bodies of men to bits with the single shot of a
great gun, strewing battlefields with death, and destroying defended
towns so that nothing may live in their ruins, then it is foolish to make
distinctions between one way of death and another, or to analyse
degrees of horror. Asphyxiating gas is no worse than a storm of
shells, or if worse then the more effective.
The lives of non-combatants are not to be respected any more than
the lives of men in uniform, for modern war is not a military game
between small bodies of professional soldiers, as in the old days, but
a struggle to the death between one people and another. The
blockading of the enemy's ports, the slow starvation of a besieged
city, which is allowed by military purists of the old and sentimental
school does not spare the non-combatant. The woman with a baby at
her breast is drained of her mother's milk. There is a massacre of
innocents by poisonous microbes. So why be illogical and pander to
false sentiment? Why not sink the Lusitania and set the waves afloat
with the little corpses of children and the beauty of dead women? It is
but one more incident of horror in a war which is all horror.
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