quiet.

Over against them the Netherlanders are a people assembled at haste. They are ignorant of drill, are ignorant how they ought to fight in ranks, and on horseback. But on the issue they are staking hearts filled with indomitable hate, filled full with undying love of country.

Beggars, the Spaniards once called them. And the Beggars are mindful of their nakedness. Their fists clench. Their teeth are set. And their lips are mumbling curses and hot prayers.

VI

It came to fighting. It came to murder. Death leaped up, and raced neighing across the battlefield, until it dripped blood—until at even, blinded with blood, it fled away into the darkness.

The battle is over now. The daylight is dying behind Bergen's towers. The shadows of night are blending with the shadow of Death.

It was a glorious fight. The wrath of a people is mightier than all the guile and strategy on earth.

But the victors are exhausted. Watch fires are ablaze. They all crowd round them to comfort themselves in their warmth.

Dark figures are whispering in groups. "Ha! How they ran! Whoever was overtaken was cut down—without mercy. They will remember the day. Will they come on again? How will the sinister Emperor take it? How far does his power reach? They will come on again. A bigger army! A bigger fleet!"

Look how the stars are gleaming. The air is clear. Even now you can see the heavens opening. And the Milky Way is glimmering down to meet you.

The sound of singing rises in the distance. An old hymn. A prayer of thanks of the days of our fathers. Those nearest by take it up. The chant leaps from fire to fire. The darkling field is singing. The night is singing. A choir raising their hands to Heaven, their voices to the stars.

Lord! Grant us freedom!

Where then lies the truth? In these "prose poems" aglow with martial enthusiasm, and ringing with the soldier's spirit, or in the relentless anatomical realism of "The Human Slaughter-House"? Or are both lies—"both deliberate conscious untruths, written under the inspiration of a social democratic lawyer?"

The explanation, as Lamszus see it, lies in the condition of the times. No one, he claims, could write of the revolt of the Dutch Republics otherwise than in the brave setting of flashing eyes, glittering steel, and the stirring clash of men-at-arms. But it is equally untrue to tell of modern warfare waged with picric acid and electric wires in the same spirit. The romance and glamour of warfare in the past are grinning lies when transferred to latter-day warfare, where long-drawn fronts of flesh and blood are opposed to machines of precision and the triumphs of the chemical laboratory. The anachronism becomes nothing less than the deliberate falsification of history. Dynamite and machine-guns, not the writer, have turned the "Field of Honor" into a "Human Slaughter-House," where regiments are wiped out by pressing an electric button.

In the hideousness of these scenes of future warfare the charge of exaggeration, of painting carnage red, is easy to raise, and difficult to rebut. Lamszus does not shirk it.

"What I have written was worked out empirically. It is a sum that is, mathematically, so incontestable that no one has hitherto ventured to dispute it. For the second factor in this sum is the albuminous substance of human brain and marrow. And when we hear that in the Russo-Japanese war thousands went mad, who would care to maintain that the nervous system of the civilized mid-European is hardier and tougher than that of Asiatics and semi-civilized Russians? 'The material has become softer,' says the authority of the staff-general. What now, when the sum total of acoustic and visual stimuli, of physical and psychic shocks, to which this 'softer material' is exposed, has, with every new invention, become more destructive in quality and quantity? To find the answer to such a simple problem did not assuredly call for a mathematical genius."

With the answer before us, the question rises whether it is more patriotic to blink it, to go on pretending that war is what it used to be—a soldier's death on the field of honor, or senseless automatic slaughter by machinery. It is against this latter mechanical aspect of war that the instinct of humanity, to which Lamszus has given voice in vivid words, revolts. Does it become a man better to look, with the full sense of his moral and ethical responsibility, the hideous fact in its face, or to continue to disguise it under a veil of romance woven round the pomp and circumstance of glorious war? In this sense "The Human Slaughter-House" of Lamszus' invention stands, as the Universal Peace Congress read it, for the revolt of the spirit of humanity, the spirit of progress and evolution, against the cumulative horror of the mechanics of modern warfare.

"For just as there is no room for the uncouth monsters of primeval times, for Mastodon and Brontosaurus, on the green earth today, so little will a nation of Krupp's steel plates be able to continue to live in the community of civilized nations."

None the less, a nation of men of virile breed will, he believes, be no less prompt to take up arms in defence of its heritage of culture than Prussia was in 1813, and to fight in its defence to the last gasp. For in the War of Liberation it was not drill, but the spirit of the people that saved the country.

"Thus the people in which we have belief will be irresistible in the council of nations, and be destined before every other to lead the nations to the work for which Nature has fashioned them.... Worthless indeed is the nation that would not stake its all for its honor. The only question that remains is what the spirit of this honor be; whether the appetite of savages and barbarians, hungry for spoils, impels me, or whether moral honor, the blood-stained desecrated face of God, inspires me."

With these bold words Lamszus concludes his apologia for the brutality of "The Human Slaughter-House."

OAKLEY WILLIAMS.

[Translation.]

To HERR LAMSZUS.

XIXme Congres Universel de la Paix a Geneve.

Geneve,1912.

DEAR SIR,

I have great pleasure in acquitting myself of the duty of expressing to you, in the name of "The Commission for Education, Instruction, etc.," composed of delegates of the most varied nations assembled at the World's Peace Congress, and, further, in the name of all Pacificists, our thanks for the distinguished word-picture of rare artistic originality and of gripping effectiveness of the wholesale murders of the future in "The Human Slaughter-House," for having furnished the cause of peace with a weapon of considerable importance, and for having more especially made a very valuable gift to the cause of every Pacificist.

May the blessing of its work be great!

On behalf of the Congress Commission for Education, Instruction, etc.

DR. A. WESTPHAL, Secretary.

THE HUMAN SLAUGHTER-HOUSE

CHAPTER I

MOBILIZATION

War! War is declared! So the news speeds hollow-eyed through the streets. We are at war. It's the real thing this time.

Mobilization!

The ominous word dominates the placards on the hoardings. The newspapers reproduce the proclamations in their heaviest type, and rumors and dispatches flutter like a ruffled dovecote round this day of Blood and Iron.

It is deadly earnest now. And this sense of the seriousness of it has numbed the State like a stroke of paralysis. But then a jar, as of a lever thrown over, goes through the vast iron fabric. And every one has got to yield to this jar. The time for anxiety and hesitation is over, for doubts and oscillation. The moment has now come when we cease to be citizens, from henceforward we are only soldiers—soldiers who have no time to think, who only have time to die.

So