The Ocala banner. (Ocala, Marion County, Fla.) 1883-194?, 1911-04-21
THE OTHER, OR HIDDEN, SIDE OF
WAR

Bayonets cleaning in the sun, flags
unfurled and proudly borne, the quick
and measured tramp, tramp, tramp
through the city's streets, while fife
and drum and military band stir the
neart with patriotic fervor, the pranc-
ing horse. the rider respondent with
gilded trappings, the cheering crowds
that throng the line of march, fair wo-
men radiant with admiration for the
brave boys who have enlisted for the
war-this is the side, the only side,
that most men see. How brilliant the
pageant! How thrilling the hour!
But this is not war. Let no man or
boy deceive himself. This is not what
it is to be a soldier. War is yonder on
the field, blood-soaked and death
strewn. There, where bullets hiss and
cannon roar, where gatling guns hurl
out their three thousand deadly bull
let's every minute, where screaming
shells charged with peroxiIene fly into
more than a thousand pieces, destroy
ing al life within range of two hun
dred yards; there, where men are be-
ing rent limb from limb by bursting
shrapnel, where mangled, mutilated
beyond recognition, they writhe and
grOan, and, dying, clutch the very
earth with their stiffening fingers
there, where pain-maddened horses ex-
pire in lingering torture-there is war,
barbarous, brutal, savage, pitiless war,
that nations bearing the Christian
name have waged against each other.
The story of the awful wreckage of
human life on modern battlefelds
where the latest scientific implements
of war are set in motion to pour their
deadly missiles into rank after rank of
living men, is enough to wiring cry
of anguish from the heart of Borgia.
There are descriptions by eyewitness
es of scenes of slaughter during the
recent Russian-Japanese war that are
too appalling to be read by any but
the few who are willing to look into
the very face of hell to see the horror
that is there.
Think of a gun" one writes, fifty
feet long, weighing 100000 pounds,
consuming 612 pounds of smokeless
powder at every charge, firing pro-
jectile weighing almost ton and four
hundred pounds, that will pierce two
feet of Krupp steel armor, and having
a range of nearly nine miles-a mon
strous butchering machine"
And then the waste of the nations
money! Each time modern Dread
naught" flames out broadside near
ly $4,000 is taken from the peoples !
pockets.
Whether your shell hits the target or
not,
Your cost is six undred dollars a shot
You thing of noise and flame and pow
er,
We feed you hundred barrels of
flour
Each time you roar. Your flame is fed
With twenty thousand loaves of bread. |
Silence! A million hungry men
Seek bread to fill their mouths again"
From official reports it has been
gathered by recent author that the
cost of militarism in the United States
for the fifteen months ending June 80, |
1909. was greater than the total value
of all the books, libraries, lands, |
grounds, buildings, furniture, scientific |
apparatus, machinery and all of the
endowments, all the investments and |
all productive funds of all kinds be-
longing to all our universities and
higher institutions of learning. About
seventy per cent. of the nations ag-
gregate income is being spent for past
wars, and the preparations for war.
And then the awful cost in human
life! Mars, the god of war, Mars,
the mock of mothers" we are told,
hour after hour, day and night,
through a whole hundred recent
years, has devoured on the average
Ou6 uulildH DS1uS, udS QIuuh more
than two gallons of human blood every
twenty minutes"
If fathers and mothers whose sons
may some day be summoned into a
war. brought on by men who will new
er go themselves to be shot to pieces
where the leaden rain descends, of
fathers and mothers would but read
the story of a twentieth century field
of battle and see for but single mo-
ment in Imagination their boys the
victims of that merciless onslaught of
bullets, dynamite, lyddite-see their
scorched, dismembered bodies. hear
their dying groans. there would be no
more war from henceforth, forever.
This is the other side of war of
which the picture drawn a few mo-
ments ago is but as the shining mask
on the face of grim, relentless, de-
vouring death. It's time this side be
presented to the youth of the world