saddle by the blast of a tornado, while others, shot through some vital part, retained their seats and rode onward in the ranks with vacant, sightless eyes.... Some there were who had fallen headlong from their saddle and buried their face in the soft earth. Others had alighted on their back and were staring up into the sun with terror-stricken eyes that seemed bursting from their sockets. There was a handsome black horse, an officer’s charger, that had been disemboweled, and was making frantic efforts to rise, his fore feet entangled in his entrails.... Of the brave men who rode into action that day two-thirds remained upon the battlefield.... A lieutenant from whose mouth exuded a bloody froth, had been tearing up the grass by handfuls in his agony, and his stiffened fingers were still buried in the ground. A little farther on a captain, prone on his stomach, had raised his head to vent his anguish in yells and screams, and death had caught and fixed him in that strange attitude.... After that the road led along the brink of a little ravine, and there they beheld a spectacle that aroused their horror to the highest pitch as they looked down into the chasm, into which an entire company seemed to have been blown by the fiery blast; it was choked with corpses, a landslide, an avalanche of maimed and mutilated men, bent and twisted in an inextricable tangle, who with convulsed fingers had caught at the yellow clay of the bank to save themselves in their descent, fruitlessly. And a dusky flock of ravens flew away, croaking noisily, and swarms of flies, thousands upon thousands of them, attracted by the odor of fresh blood, were buzzing over the bodies and returning incessantly.” But let this fact burn its way into your brain to save you from hell and rouse you for the revolution—this fact: NOWHERE ON ALL THAT BATTLEFIELD AMONG THE SHATTERED RIFLES AND WRECKED CANNON, AMONG THE BROKEN AMBULANCES AND SPLINTERED AMMUNITION WAGONS, NOWHERE IN THE MIRE AND MUSH OF BLOOD AND SAND, NOWHERE AMONG THE BULGING AND BEFOULING CARCASSES OF DEAD HORSES AND THE SWELLING CORPSES OF DEAD MEN AND BOYS—NOWHERE COULD BE FOUND THE TORN, BLOATED AND FLY-BLOWN CARCASSES OF BANKERS, BISHOPS, POLITICIANS, “BRAINY CAPITALISTS” AND OTHER ELEGANT AND EMINENT “VERY BEST PEOPLE.” Well, hardly. Naturally—such people were not there, _on the firing line_—up where bayonets gleam, sabres flash, flesh is ripped, bones snap, brains are dashed and blood splashes. WHY NOT? ----- Footnote 5: See Chapter Seven (“For Father and the Boys”), Sections 14, 15, 16—“Were not some of the rich men of today soldiers at one time?” Footnote 6: _The Foundations of Sociology_, pp. 220–221. Footnote 7: See New York _World_, Nov. 21, 1909. Also Chapter Eight, Section 16. Footnote 8: Excellent English translation published by The Macmillan Company, New York. Excerpt printed with kind permission of publishers. Footnote 9: