“We walked along ... and with each step we made, that wild, unearthly groan ... grew ominously, as if it was the red air, the earth and sky that were groaning.... We could almost feel the distorted mouths from which those terrible sounds were issuing ... a loud, calling, crying groan.... All those dark mounds stirred and crawled about with out-spread legs like half-dead lobsters let out of a basket.... “The train was full, and our clothes were saturated with blood, as if we had stood for a long time under a rain of blood, while the wounded were still being brought in.... “Some of the wounded crawled up themselves, some walked up tottering and falling. One soldier almost ran up to us. His face was smashed, and only one eye remained, burning wildly and terribly. He was almost naked.... “The ward was filled with a broad, rasping, crying groan, and from all sides pale, yellow, exhausted faces, some eyeless, some so monstrously mutilated that it seemed as if they had returned from hell, turned toward us. “I was beginning to get exhausted, and went a little way off to ... rest a bit. The blood, dried to my hands, covered them like a pair of black gloves, making it difficult for me to bend my fingers.”[4] Would it not be a strange thing to see a banker, a bishop, a railway president, a coal baron, an anti-labor injunction judge, and a United States Senator all hanging on stakes in a pit with scores of other men piled in on top of them—all clawing, kicking, cursing, wiggling, screaming, groaning, bleeding, dying—“_following the flag_”—patriotically? Such would indeed be a strange and interesting sight. Strange and interesting, extremely so—but _absolutely impossible_. And there is good reason. Let me explain. ----- Footnote 2: The present wholly unpretentious book has a distinct purpose (announced in the Preface and also on this page), and has, too, it is hoped, an effective plan and method for the realization of that purpose. Readers in search of conventionally elaborated theses on war are referred, for suggestions, to Chapter Twelve, Sections 8 and 9. Footnote 3: “An’ you’ll die like a fool of a soldier. Fool, fool, fool of a soldier.”—Rudyard Kipling: “The Young British Soldier,” in _Ballads_. Footnote 4: Andreief: _The Red Laugh_, passim. (Russian-Japanese War literature. Published by J. Fisher Unwin, London.) CHAPTER TWO. What Is War? War is wholesale, scientific suicide for the working class under orders from their political and industrial masters. War is: For working class homes—emptiness, For working class wives—heartache, For working class mothers—loneliness, For working class children—orphanage, For working class sweethearts—agony, For the nation’s choicest working class men—broken health or death, For society—savagery, For peace—defeat, For bull-dogs—suggestions, For the Devil—delight,