Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 261, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 November 1914 — MODERN WAR ARMS [ARTICLE]

MODERN WAR ARMS

Death Dealt by Machines—Battles Turn to Slaughter. % Wounded Officer Tells Striking Story of Horrors Attendant Upon Present Manner of Killing in the Great European Conflict. Paris. —In an interview a wounded officer told a striking story of the .terrible results of war with modern arms. “This is not a war of men,” he said; “it is a war of machines. There is an appalling soullessness about it that is inhuman. Men turn handles and death flies out in large bundles. That is what this battle has been. It is all really one battle on the Marne and the Aisne. “No one can even conceive what the battle has been who has not seen th er battlefield. Men could never kill one another by heaps’ and hecatombs. They would sicken at such wholesale slaughter. They would cry: ‘We are soldiers, not butchers.’ A battlefield should not be an abattoir. “Only machines ingeniously constructed to destroy men as locusts have to be destroyed when they sweep over fertile land, only automatic death dealers withopt heart, pity, or remorse could carpet the earth with the dead in this frightful way.” Another witness to the terrific slaughter, which is not yet generally realized, said that the French shells burst with terrific effect and tear legs and arms to pieces. If the wound is

in the head or stomach it is all over. This soldier added: • “It is quite true, too, that many men have been found dead without any wound. We find them as we go over the fields of battle kneeling or sitting in the trenches in a natural attitude just as if they were still alive, just as they knelt or sat when a shell burst and in an instant suffocated them with melinite fumes.” A Red Cross nurse, a clever, businesslike French woman, who had experience in the Balkan war, said: “Germany must be one vast hospital and France is beginning to be the same. I have just traveled from the Atlantic coast through the center of France and saw wounded everywhere. “Already beds are becoming scarce, though fortunately there are so many slightly wounded, that is, cleanly injured, that they recover quickly and make room for newcomers. But it brings home the immensity of the struggle to see etery available school, institution and public hall turned into a hospital as well as every big railway station and numberless private houses.”