WHAT the world has paid in blood and money for its own devastation and the multiplication of its own sorrows will never be known by mortal man. I speak of the world as a whole; for, the peoples have struggled against peoples, nations against nations, humanity is still a unit, and its sensitiveness to pleasure and suffering alike acute in all portions of the earth. So wherever war has raged, it is the old story of humanity heaping sorrow, misery, and death upon itself. The nations that have sowed the seeds of war have garnered to themselves the bosom of destruction; and nations that have been trampled under foot have turned upon their tormentors, or hurled themselves upon other peoples, to supplant, uproot, harass, and destroy. Thus has the earth wasted itself and slain its own household from the days of Cain and Nimrod and Nero down to the days in which we live.
From the earliest times, families, tribes, and nations have wandered from place to place, dispossessing neighboring families, and tribes, and nations, and leaving in the wake of their wicked pilgrimage fire, famine, pestilence, ruined homes, crippled inmates, desolation, and death. We see it in the buffetings of the Hittites from Egypt on the south, from Assyria and Babylon on the east, and from the tribes of Asia Minor on the north, until the nation was ground to powder and scattered to the winds, saved from oblivion only by the records of Holy Writ and the writings in the rocks. Only for these, we could not know that such a nation was ever on the earth.
In the history of the Cymry, or Welsh, we have another example of an aggressive nation that has been ground between the upper and nether millstones of war. The Welsh are the lineal descendants of a race which drove a bloody plow through the people of the ancient world from the land of Shinar to the British Isles. But from the successive shocks of the Normans, the Romans, and the Saxons they have recoiled into the mountains and valleys of Wales. For four hundred years they fought the Romans; for six hundred years they fought the Saxons—one thousand years of desperate fighting for independence, till the death of Llewellyn, the last of their princes. Now they are crowded back into the confines of Wales, mourning the loss of their independence, the destruction of their literature, and the massacre of their poets. Of the sorrows they spread in the wake of their progress from the Tigris to the Thames, only heaven has the record; of the desolation wrought and the lives that went out along the path of that human hurricane, only heaven can tell; and to quell the spirit of conquest in them cost the treasure and blood of Rome, and the lives of many a Saxon horde.
But these are not the only migrations in armor from which the world has suffered. Wherever men have lived, the doctrine of Cain has found its votaries, and the shrine of the war-god has drunk the blood of its sacrifices. When men began to lord it over men, and the demands of the State became more sacred than the individual rights of man, then it was that the human thought himself exempt from the laws of God, and free to murder and plunder and ravish in the name of the king or State that sent him out; and under this reasoning the ambition of a petty lord was sufficient license for the commission of almost every crime. Self was enthroned in the place of God, and licensed men to do that which the King of kings has forbidden for all time. “Thou shalt not steal,” and “Thou shalt not kill,” stand reversed to-day by the War Department of every nation under heaven—stand reversed to-day in the heart of every human being who takes up the implements of death to bruise, and mangle, and kill, or who applauds the awful havoc of the battle-field. Satan is still fighting the laws and authority of God; and Thor and Mars are the field marshals of his campaign. The hold which they have secured upon the sentiments of the people, indicates the extent to which the world will devastate itself for the sake of the glitter and glamour and “glory” of murderous combat. It is this that has opened the way for what war has cost the world.
We will pass by the predatory pilgrimage of ancient peoples, and the ruin they have wrought, and draw aside the curtain of time and distance to look hastily upon what later peoples have paid for their worship of licensed passion and lustful power.
Babylon, lording it over the world, subjugating9peoples and transplanting nations, worshiping war and sacrificing nations upon its altar, spreading death and suffering from India to the Great Sea, dozes at last in luxury, and passes into history conquered at the hands of a vassal power. War cost Babylon the full price of her existence.
Out of the mists of tradition emerges the Medo-Persian empire, welded in blood, and carrying conquest from Babylon, Nineveh, and the Indus, to the Danube, the Dnieper, and the Nile. History has given us little record of the period when Medo-Persia was at peace. When not engaged in actual war, she was preparing to avenge herself upon her enemies. Conquest was her business, and she stuck to it with a zeal. Conquest was her god, and her life, too, went out in its worship. These nations that worshiped war at such a cost in human lives have paid the penalty with their own. The cost was dear; but they paid it, and stepped down.
The burial of Persia is synchronous with the rise of Grecia, and due to it. Her disintegration was made possible by the indulgence of her people in the luxury that followed her conquests of other nations. Greece followed in the footsteps of Persia, and Rome followed in the footsteps of Grecia, and each paid the same penalty for the worship of Mars. Truly, woeful spectacles are the fearful slaughters and the streams of blood that have been poured out by men for the mastery over men and the exaltation of self. There is not a country in all the world but that has had the hearts of its people wrung by the horrors of war; not a country where the fires of the war-god have not been lighted, and the incense of his votaries gone up from the mouths of cannon or the smoke of burning homes; not a country to-day that would make an outcast of the man who murders in war. This is what war has done for the world, what it has cost the world; but what of the cruelties suffered by humanity while the dreadful work went on?
In the battles of ancient peoples, massacre followed victory as sure as victory was won. This is what swells the casualty list of Platæa to 257,000 men; of Issus to 100,000; of Magnesia to 53,000; of Canae to 46,000; of Metaurus to 43,000; of Arbela to 90,000. But when the battle had been won and the massacre was ended, cruelty was not yet satisfied. Scipio Æmilius cut off the hands of such of his captives as he suffered to live, and we are told that this was a common Roman practise. Crassus hanged on crosses erected on the road from Rome to Capua 6,000 gladiators. Cæsar cut off the hands of thousands of his Gallic prisoners to intimidate their countrymen. He slew by treachery, in one day, one whole tribe of 430,000 men, women, and children; and the sum of Cæsar’s massacres in Gaul runs into the millions. “When Scipio believed that ‘there had entered enough soldiers into Carthagena, ‘he sent the most part against the inhabitants, as ‘the Romans are accustomed to do when they capture a town by assault, with order to kill all they met, to give no quarter, and thus to inspire terror of the Roman name.’—Polybius. (How much this reads like the order of a ruler recently when sending his troops to China.) Ancient victors are pictured in the act of flaying alive the vanquished who fell into their hands, boring their tongues, or burning out their eyes with hot irons. O war, what cruelties have been practised in thy service!
In the European wars covering a period of ninety years, ending in 1880, 4,470,000 lives were lost, and the actual amount of money expended in war during that time was $14,828,890,000. France and England between 1793 and 1815 spent $6,087,500,000 in their war, and lost 1,900,000 men. Russia and Turkey, in 1828, from their combined forces lost in war, 120,000; Spain and Portugal, from 1830-1840, 160,000; France and Algeria, 1830-1847, 110,000; England, France, and Russia, 1854-1860, 485,000; United States (Civil War) 1861-1865, 656,000; Brazil and Paraguay, 1864-1870, 330,000. In less than 300 years Great Britain alone has spent $6,618,330,000 in war. In 218 years France alone has spent $4,835,910,000 for the same purpose.
Thus we may gather by these few glimpses at what humanity has suffered, some little idea of what war has cost the world; but the story is not told. Preparation for war is costing the world more now, in money, than actual war did not many years ago; and the world that has worshiped war will come to its end in war, as have so many of the nations of the world. Then, and then only, will be written the record of the cost. That war will be the climax to which all wars have tended, the grand finale of the worship of Mars.
