Righteous WarsBy Beulah Marie Dix(From the drama, “Across the Border.”)
By Beulah Marie Dix
(From the drama, “Across the Border.”)
The Junior Lieutenant: Children crying—hungry, freezing, tortured. Hundreds of ’em. Poor little devils! Old women—starving, stumbling, driven, mumbling their prayers that nobody minds. Mothers crying over the smashed-up things that were their kids. Ah-h! That’s the horses screeching. Don’t you hear them? When a shell rips them up they look at you beseeching. But you can’t waste shot on them.... That’s the chaps in the hospital now—drying up with typhoid, rotting with dysentery—chaps on the battlefield, torn and smashed and mangled, two days of it, three days of it, and the wheels of the big guns grinding them to pulp. Ah-h! That’s some chaps caught in the granary. It’s burning. The flames are at them. That’s a train load of wounded, smashing through a bridge, stifling, drowning, helpless, rats in a trap. Men and women and children,—hundreds of ’em, thousands of ’em, millionsof ’em—O my God! My God! Why don’t you stop it? Why don’t you stop it?
The Master of the House: Did you do anything to stop it? It’s drifted through here, that wail of the world, for a long time now. Years. Centuries. Ages. God hears it. It repented Him that He made the world. Always the crying comes up to us. Always misery and to spare. But it’s worse when you are making your righteous wars. For they’re all righteous. There’s never a man comes here but says, as you said, that his cause is just and God is on his side. It’s wonderful how many ages through, as you reckon time, you men have fought your righteous wars to advance civilization, and you’re advancing it today just the same way you did when Attilia was king.