“When a captain, has lost his boat, he is judged and condemned, if he is found guilty of negligence or even of incapacity. “Why should not the governments be judged after the declaration of a war? If the nations understood this, if they themselves sat in judgment over the death-dealing powers, if they refused to allow themselves to be killed without reason, if they made use of their weapons against those who gave them to them for the purpose of massacring, war would be dead at once! But this day will not come!”
The author sees all the horror of war; he sees that its cause is in this, that the governments, deceiving people, compel them to go out to kill and die without any need; he sees also that the men composing the armies might turn their weapons against the governments and demand accounts from them. But the author thinks that this will never happen, and that, therefore, there is no way out of this situation. He thinks that the business of war is terrible, but that it is inevitable and that the demands of the governments that the soldiers shall go and fight are as inevitable as death, and that, since the governments will always demand it, there will always exist wars.
Thus writes a talented, sincere author, who is endowed with that penetration into the essence of the matter which forms the essence of the poetical genius. He presents to us all the cruelty of the contradiction between men’s conscience and their activity, and, without solving it, seems to recognize that this contradiction must exist and that in it consists the tragedy of life.
Another, not less gifted author ( E. Rod) describes the cruelty and madness of the present situation in still more glaring colors, and similarly, recognizing the tragical element in it, does not offer or foresee any way out of it: