The midland journal. (Rising Sun, Md.) 1885-1947, 1940-05-17
a'r9te wNU Service.

known to faint, contemplating the
scene, even so many years after the
Magyar religion has been swept
away.
But in what way does the slaugh-
ter Of innocent boys across the seas
improve upon these barbaric days?
In one way, today's wars are even
worse. For the Magyar had at least
the feeling that this was destiny;
he was helpless and he had been
chosen for death. But our English,
German, French, Russian boys
have no such consolation. They
have no feeling against each other.
They have committed no crime.
They hate no one. And too often
they writhe into slow, agonizing, bit
terly lonely deaths with every Grim
inal instinct of their natures reused
and brought to life; hate, a desire
for revenge, complete loss of
faith in everything their mothers
taught them of goodness and for
giveness and generosity.
Their mothersl Here we are
back to their mothers again, as
Mothers day passes by. It is no
use to watch their babyhood sick
nesses, to train them in boyhood to
goodness, only to fail them when
the first bugle blows, and send them
forth to freeze in muddy trenches,
to meet hot death in the air, to
drive their bayonets into the bodies
of boys they never saw before, just
as shrapnel or bullets pierce their
own splendid bodies, to rot unnoted
in crowded, fetid hospitals, and final
ly to lie still and aforementioned
by all except Mothers!-in foreign
soil.
Let Men Over Forty Fight.
If I could l would get bill
through congress prohibiting the en-
Istment in army or navy of any
man under forty years. This would
stop war so fast that soon its MEM
DRY would blend with WITHDRAWING,
smallpox epidemics, slavery, and
a hundred other insanities and
abuses that shame the pages of his
tory. If thoughtful, established
middle-aged men, men who are alb
sorbed in offices or professions, who
love wife and home and children, and
golf and fishing and bridge games,
had to get themselves into olive
drab and sail across seas to solve
Europe's never-ending quarrels,
how quickly we should be reading
some other plan for the solution of
international problems!
Even if their health and strength
didn't match those Of younger men,
what of it? If life is to be destroyed,
why not begin with the unfit? Send
them into battle sneezing and rheu-
matte and taking soda minis, for
war destroys health anyway, and
all camps are full Of invalids.
There was one battalion Of strong
young men with fiat feet, who
stayed safe in camp all through
bloody 1918, and went home happily
to draw their bonus a few years
later.
Older Men Make Wars.
It is the old men who shrewdly
consider profits and expanding mar
kets and uses for surplus products;
it is the old men who make the
wars. Is there in the long, long
history of these decisions to destroy
young life some shadow of the old
jealousy Of the males? Male bulls
kill young ones, deer and elephant
and even household cats do the
same. Unexpressed and perhaps
completely unsupported, is jealousy
at the base Of the policy that sends
the finest men of each generation
to their death?
Sometimes it almost seems so.
At all events, men obviously can't
solve this war question. They never
have and they never will.