them, which had come as ghosts during a night when such a mass of wounded had been brought in that the hospitals, numerous as they were, could no longer hold them. It was from these tents that the wail of the wounded rolled out to crush the soul. The white figures of the doctors and the nurses moved silently and swiftly in the soft morning light, at once mysterious and terrible in their white uniforms spotted with blood. At intervals they entered the tents and brought out the dead, placing them on a long, flat wagon and continuing with their gory stretchers down another tented street.
Though many years have passed since that depressing morning, I remember it as though it were but yesterday. It was a field of human torture and despair, sown by the lavish hand of the scarlet spectre of War.
I know that war is an inevitable phenomenon in the physical life of peoples; but it is a phenomenon terrible and crying for revenge unto Heaven. Though I am a man of action and have seen war eye to eye, fighting for causes which I could comprehend and for which I could take the risk of the sacrifice, I cannot help being moved when I see masses of men flung into the jaws of death without this comprehension of, and sympathy with, the purposes of the war, which is often waged for material aims, for Mammon alone, asking from men victims without number and a sea of blood and giving them in return only wounds and crippled bodies for life, too often without the arms with which Nature has provided them to meet their struggle for existence.
