This thought came to me vividly one summer night in Serbia. It was during the typhus epidemic, and I stumbled unawares upon an open grave. It was three-quarters full of naked corpses. They were typhus victims. They had been prisoners of war, and the grave would not be closed until there were enough dead to fill it. Heavy rain had fallen, and the bodies were half-submerged in water; but I saw one man above the others. His body, long and strong-limbed, was all uncovered, but his face, fine featured, proudly ignorant of the ignominy, his face was covered with--flies; filthy, bloodsucking flies. Round his finely-cut nostrils, his mouth, his half-opened eyes, squatting, buzzing, sucking, shunting one another for best place--flies, flies, flies, and no one to beat them off. Flies in thousands, squabbling for his blood, and no one to beat them off. Only flies knew where he was. His mother was, perhaps, at this moment, picturing him as a hero, and he was--food for flies. The night, in old parlance, would have been called glorious. But is there glory on this bloodstained earth? The stars of heaven were shining; but could stars be of heaven, and blink, and blink, and blink complacently, and nothing else, when they might have set the heavens ablaze, in a million fiery points of indignation, at the bloody sights which they were seeing on the earth? And the moon--cold, cruel, heartless moon, hidden at first, behind a thunder cloud--emerged suddenly, with revengeful triumph, to illumine the grave, lest I might miss the horror; turned on full candle-power to show me, a woman, to show me _that_, and other things unspeakable. I walked away quickly, tears burning in my eyes; angry, cursing in my heart, the ways of men who bring these things to pass. But I remembered that he was unmourned--alone--and for her sake, his mother's sake, I came back, and knelt beside that charnel pit, to spread round him, as she would have done, thoughts of love, and, oh, God! how difficult, of Faith and Hope. "You're not alone!" I cried aloud, that the stars and moon, and God, if He were near, should hear, and understand. "You are not alone, for the hearts of all the mothers on the earth are with you--in your open grave--and will one day rescue you and all their sons from--flies." The glamour, the adventure, the chivalry, which of old gilded the horrors of war, have vanished. War is now a bloody business; a business for butchers, not for high-souled gentlemen. Modern militarism involves tortures and extermination, not only of the fighting, but of the non-fighting portion of the population, in a manner which would have shocked even the heroes of the Old Testament. War is not merely an encounter between rival armies of men. War is, in these days, an encounter between equipped armies, and unequipped women and children, with results that are bestial and humiliating; between equipped armies and unequipped civilisation, with results that are destructive of civilisation.