It would be too much to expect of satire that it alone will cure mankind of the disease of war. It is a good sign, however, that satires on war have begun to be written. War has affected with horror or disgust a number of great imaginative writers in the last two or three thousand years. The tragic indictment of war in _The Trojan Women_ and the satiric indictment in _The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms_ are evidence that some men at least saw through the romance of war before the twentieth century. In the war that has just ended, however--or that would have ended if the Peace Conference would let it--we have seen an imaginative revolt against war, not on the part of mere men of letters, but on the part of soldiers. Ballads have survived from other wars, depicting the plight of the mutilated soldier left to beg: You haven't an arm and you haven't a leg, You're an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg, You ought to be put in a bowl to beg-- Och, Johnnie, I hardly knew you! But the recent war has produced a literature of indictment, basing itself neither on the woes of women nor on the wrongs of ex-soldiers, but on the right of common men not to be forced into mutual murder by statesmen who themselves never killed anything more formidable than a pheasant. Soldiers--or some of them--see that wars go on only because the people who cause them do not realize what war is like. I do not mean to suggest that the kings, statesmen and journalists who bring wars about would not themselves take part in the fighting rather than that there should be no fighting at all. The people who cause wars, however, are ultimately the people who endure kings, statesmen and journalists of the exploiting and bullying kind. The satire of the soldiers is an appeal not to the statesmen and journalists, but to the general imagination of mankind. It is an attempt to drag our imaginations away from the heroics of the senate-house into the filth of the slaughter-house. It does not deny the heroism that exists in the slaughter-house any more than it denies the heroism that exists in the hospital ward. But it protests that, just as the heroism of a man dying of cancer must not be taken to justify cancer, so the heroism of a million men dying of war must not be taken to justify war. There are some who believe that neither war nor cancer is a curable disease. One thing we can be sure of in this connection: we shall never get rid either of war or of cancer if we do not learn to look at them realistically and see how loathsome they are. So long as war was regarded as inevitable, the poet was justified in romanticizing it, as in that epigram in the _Greek Anthology:_ Demætia sent eight sons to encounter the phalanx of the foe, and she buried them all beneath one stone. No tear did she shed in her mourning, but said this only: "Ho, Sparta, I bore these children for thee."