XIV

Military glory—that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood, that serpent’s eye that charms to destroy.

Abraham Lincoln.

The friends of humanity will deprecate war, whenever it may appear.George Washington.

There is no need of bloodshed and war.Abraham Lincoln.

Wars are largely the result of unbridled passions.

Clara Barton.

War is only splendid murder.James Thomson.

War is the mad game that the world so loves to play.Swift.

Every battleship is a menace to the peace of the world. With each new battleship every nation carries a chip on its shoulder.

Clara Barton.

The Red Cross took its rise in, and derived its existence from, war. Without war it had no existence.Clara Barton.

Deplore it as we may, war is thegreat actof all history.

Clara Barton.

War has been the rule, if not largely the occupation, of the peoples of the earth from their earliest history.Clara Barton.

Scarcely a quarter of the earth is yet civilized, and that quarter not beyond the probabilities of war.Clara Barton.

General Sherman was right when, addressing an assemblage of cadets, he told them “war was hell!” Take it as you will, it is this;—whoever has looked active war full in the face has caught some glimpse of regions as infernal as he may ever fear to see.

Clara Barton.

Only time, prolonged effort, national economics, universal progress and the pressure of public opinion could ever hope to grapple with the existence of war, the monster evil of the ages.

Clara Barton.

I have studied the massing of forces and scanned from point to point the old battle-grounds of Marengo and Jena and Waterloo and the Magenta and Solferino and it has seemed to me that these armies had a fairer field and a better chance than ours, in the Civil War.Clara Barton.

War may be agreat harmonizer, but it is not ahumanizer.

Clara Barton.

That which is won by the sword must be held by the sword, whether it is worth the cost or not.Clara Barton.

If there be any power on earth which can right the wrongs for which a nation goes to war, I pray it may be made manifest.

Clara Barton.

If there be any good wars, I will attend them.

Sir Philip Sidney.

That noble and numerous class of patriots who are brave with other men’s lives and lavish of other men’s money.Gladstone.

There never was a good war, nor a bad peace.

Benjamin Franklin.

Don’t talk about war; we have done with war. The Peace of the world is the question now.Clara Barton.

Clara Barton was a patriot, but “not a war woman.” She had no sympathy with the religion such as was Odin’s, of the ninth century, which religion assured for him who had killed in battle the greatest number the highest seat reserved in the Paradise of the Valhalla;nor with the sentiment of the King of Denmark of that day, “What is more beautiful than to see the heroes pushing on through battle, though fainting with their wounds;” nor with the sentiment of that same king’s boast, “War was my delight from my youth, and from my childhood I was pleased with a bloody spear.”

Princes were privileged to kill,The numbers sanctified the crime.

Princes were privileged to kill,

The numbers sanctified the crime.

Wolves in “packs” seek prey; so do men—in sheep’s clothing. Wolves truthful, in howls, send forth their propaganda—hunger; men untruthful, in words, send forth their propaganda—hate. If the “survival of the fittest” be nature’s law only brutes conform to nature—by using no weapons. Men kill their own “kith and kin”; brutes combine to protect their own species. The more one sees of men on war’s slaughter-fields killing their friends or strangers, for prospective profit, the more he must admire the ethics of the brute. In brute history there have been no wars. Facing human record, the record of 3,400 years, there have been 3,166 years of war, and only 234 years of peace; facing the picture of which history makes no mention and which in the wake of armies she had seen, Clara Barton says: “Faces bathed in tears and hands in blood, lees in the wind and dregs in the cup of military glory, war has cost a million times more than the world is worth, poured out the best blood and crushed the fairest forms the good God has ever created.”

Through war and its consequences, one third of “civilized man” since the world began has come to an untimely end, by violence, as did Abel at the hands of Cain.

Earth’s remotest regionsLie half unpeopled by the feuds of Rome.

Earth’s remotest regions

Lie half unpeopled by the feuds of Rome.

“Mankind is the greatest mystery of all mysteries,” says Clara Barton, and insists that she can never understand the history of human conduct in this world, and wonders whether or not she will in the next. In the light of war’s history and, trying to solve the “mystery of all mysteries,” she asks: “Heavenly Father! what is the matter with this beautiful earth that thou hast made? And what is man that thou art mindful of him?”

Further philosophizing on the “Wickedness of War,” in a masterful public address, she says: “There is not a geographical boundary line on the face of the earth that was not put there by the sword, and is not practically held there by this same dread power. War actually settles no disputes, it brings no real peace; it but closes an open strife;—the peace is simply buried embers. The war side of the war could never have called me to the field—through and through, thought and act, body and soul,I hate it. We can only wait and trust for the day to come when the wickedness of war shall be a thing unknown in this beautiful world.”

Again philosophizing she says: “As I reflect upon the mighty and endless changes which must grow out of war’s issues, the subject rises up before me like some far-away mountain summit, towering peak upon peak, rock upon rock, that human foot has not trod and enveloped in a hazy mist the eye has never penetrated.”

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