Since the war started, how often have we heard that phrase—­the last war! It became the battle-cry of all recruiting-men, who would have fought under no other circumstances, joined up now so that this might be the final carnage.  Nations left their desks and went into battle voluntarily, long before self-interest forced them, simply because organised murder so disgusted them that they were determined by weight of numbers to make this exhibition of brutality the last.

Before Europe burst into flames in 1914, we believed that the last war had been already fought.  The most vivid endorsement of this belief came out of Germany in a book which, to my mind, up to that time was the strongest peace-argument in modern literature.  It was so strong that the Kaiser’s Government had the author arrested and every copy that could be found destroyed.  Nevertheless, over a million were secretly printed and circulated in Germany, and it was translated into every major European language.  The book I refer to was known under its American title as, The Human Slaughter-House.  It told very simply how men who had played the army game of sticking dummies, found themselves called upon to stick their brother-men; how they obeyed at first, then sickened at sight of their own handiwork, until finally the rank and file on both sides flung down their arms, banded themselves together and refused to carry out the orders of their generals.  There was no declaration of peace; in that moment national boundaries were abolished.

In 1912 this sounded probable.  I remember the American press-comments.  They all agreed that national prejudices had been broken down to such an extent by socialism and friendly intercourse, that never again would statesmen be able to launch attacks of nations against nations.  Governments might declare war; the peoples whom they governed would merely overthrow them.  The world had become too common-sense to commit murder on so vast a scale.

Had it?  The world in general might have:  but Germany had not.  The argument of The Human Slaughter-House proposed by a German in protest against what he foresaw was surely coming, turned out to be a bad guess.  It made no allowance for what happens when a mad dog starts running through the world.  One may be tender-hearted.  One may not like killing dogs.  One may even be an anti-vivisectionist; but when a dog is mad, the only humanitarian thing to do is to kill it.  If you don’t, the women and children pay the penalty.

We have had our illustration in Russia of what occurs when one side flings away its arms, practising the idealistic reasonings which this book propounds:  the more brutal side conquers.  While the Blonde Beast runs abroad spreading rabies, the only idealist who counts is the idealist who carries a rifle on his shoulder—­the only gospel to which the world listens is the gospel which saviours are dying for.