Don’t be in a hurry to enlist, brother. Wait a few more days. Two weeks after next will do. The “very _best_ people” in your town are not hurrying to enlist. Can’t you see the point? Before you enlist, or before you consent to have your son or younger brother enlist, be sure to read some books describing real war with improved murdering machinery. A brilliant war correspondent, Mr. Richard Barry, thus describes a modern war-storm in his book, descriptive of the Japanese-Russian War, _Port Arthur, A Monster Heroism_, passim:[85] “Toward three o’clock a second advance is ordered ... nearly 15,000 men close in ... now they are through [the wire fence] ... half naked, savage, yelling, even Japanese stoicism gone. Up to the very muzzles of the first entrenchments they surge, waver and break like the dash of angry waves against a rock-bound coast.... _Officers are picked off by sharp-shooters, as flies are flecked from a molasses jug_.... So up they go, for the tenth time.... Spottsylvania Court House was no more savage.... Thus hand to hand they grapple, sweat, bleed, shout, expire. The veneer of culture sloughed as a snake his cast-off skin; they spit and chew, claw and grip as their forefathers beyond the memory of man.... The cost! The fleeing ones left _five hundred corpses in four trenches_. The others paid _seven times that price_—killed and wounded—to turn across the page of the world’s warfare that word Nanshan.... A hospital ship left every day for Japan carrying from 200 to 1,000.... I lay in the broiling sun watching the soldiers huddle against the barbed-wire, under the machine guns ... only to melt away like chaff before a wind.... The ‘pioneers’ met with the death-sprinkle of the Maxim [guns] ... a machine rattled and the shale beyond spattered. I was carried back [in memory] to a boiler factory and an automatic riveter. Of all war sounds that of the machine gun is least poetic, is most deadly.... The regiment under fire of the machine guns retreated precipitately, leaving _one-half its number_ on the slope.... Overwhelmed on all sides, tricked, defeated, _two-thirds of its men killed or wounded_ ... for out of that [another] brigade of 6,000 men there are ... uninjured but 640.... Moreover in throwing up their trenches ... _corpses had to be used to improvise the walls_.... _The dead were being used to more quickly fill the embankments_.... Soon dawn came and with it hell. The battle was on again. Within his sight were more than a hundred dead and twice as many wounded. Groans welled up like bubbles from a pot. Arms tossed feverishly. Backs writhed in despair.... Almost crazed by thirst and hunger, he [a wounded soldier unattended for days on the battlefield] at length severed the arteries of one of his comrades newly dead, and lived on [that is, sucked blood from a comrade’s corpse?]. He found worms crawling in the wounds of his legs.