#war is hell

“You’ve made enough pasta to feed a small army” Mum says, shaking her head before leaving the kitchen. She assumes it’s a figure of speech, but if only she’d look out the window to see the army queuing. They are so hungry. War is terrible.

‘War taught us what War is. Most people did not know; we thought it was splendid courage, which it was, the defense of national honor, and a struggle for Freedom. That the war was also the most hideous, dirty, and agonizing experience of mankind, humanity did not know. If, in 1914, the German people had known, a German public opinion would not have permitted its Government to set the world on fire.

So, the first step to prevent War is for everybody to acquire an opinion about War. Instruction can come through reading — hard reading. Here in America we’d better begin right off to read certain grimly informing books… There are dozens of them. We might start in with Will Irwin’s “The Next War”, Barbusse’s "Under Fire”, Philip Gibbs’s “Now It Can Be Told” and his novel “The Middle of the Road”, Boyd’s ”Through the Wheat“, Cobb’s ”The Paths of Glory“ and, of course, everything Herbert Adams Gibbons has to say.

War books make us cringe. They are horrid. War is horrid. It is sublime spiritual endurance, but it is also dirt, and stink, and madness, and agony — and graves. We are "tired of war books”? Well, our soldiers were “tired” of being killed — but they kept on being killed. Surely we can do as much for their precious memory as to read how they lived and died? Such reading will light in our hearts a flaming determination that there shall be no more unnecessary killing! Out of every ten persons who read these books, probably six will say: “Stop the Stupidity: Stop futile dying! Stop War!”.

Public Opinion, is the only thing that can ever really stop War. Public opinion can move mountains.’

After WW1,  Margaret Deland, American novelist.