"We were like a pack of maddened wolves with the strength, daring, and
fearlessness of lunatics. With diabolical fury, we darted and bounded
wildly and fearlessly into No Man's Land in the face of the greatest
danger.
"Timid ones became heroes without knowing it. The weakest ones killed
with their bare hands. It was indescribable! All of us became filthy,
cruel, inhuman beasts, with fierce irrational emotions and the sole
urge to kill, kill, and kill our enemy. We fought to the death with no
quarter asked or given. Most of us were mumbling our prayers or the
names of our beloved. It is really a miracle that those of us who came
out alive from this vertex of blood and slaughter are again normal and
human.
"Closing his eyes, kneeling, passionately weeping, and vehemently
imploring, he exclaims--In my mind's eye I see passing in front of me,
the lost souls, images of dead soldiers, some of the countless billions
of them who died on the battlefields of our earth.
"Their spirits are joining and inspiring me in this solemn entreaty for
you to help us, so that their sacrifices shall not have been in vain.
Standing up, he continued:
"What of the great many of us who survived, but who are maimed,
crippled, invalidated, disfigured and shell shocked for life? The
terrible pictures of our battle sufferings recur to us very often
in our dreams. Through our torments, tortures, and ordeals, we have
learned in the hardest way the contributive whys and causes of wars and
inhumanity.
"Labor and capital struggles, strikes, unemployment, racial hatred,
and misery are becoming burdensome and unbearable to the majority of
us in this world. In our military life, in the army, in our company,
and on the battlefields, we lived unselfishly as brothers and buddies.
We loved each other, judged each other on our merits, and forgave each
other our frailties and weaknesses.
"Now that we have re-entered civilian life, it is irksome to us to
adjust ourselves and face an existence of selfishness, where the main
object in life is personal interest, regardless of those others. Nature
has endowed us with intelligence; on account of it we are humane,
helpful, unselfish, and self-sacrificing for the welfare of our kind.
Our ancestors have planted on us a money system, a most heartless,
dangerous, tempting, criminally corrupting, degrading, and depraving
medium without which we cannot obtain our necessities.
"In the last war we who endured agonies were used as tools for gaining
victory in war for a _part_ of humanity. _Now_, we are anxious to be
used as implements for gaining universal salvation for _all_ humanity.
By our test and peaceful experiment which we ask you to allow, we hope
to exemplify the new order which will achieve universal and lasting
peace by destroying the real causes and incentives for crime and for
all cruel wars with its wanton disregard of human life, and thereby
save humanity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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