40 THEOLOGY AND THE WAR 



the first to experience this. Their plan of hurling columns 

 of men in close formation against strongly-defended positions 

 led to scenes of horror almost without precedent ; for the rear 

 ranks had to trample over ground thickly carpeted with the 

 bodies of their dead and mutilated comrades, mown down by 

 hailstorms of lead. There can be little doubt that the conduct 

 of the German troops in Belgium was largely attributable to 

 the shattering of their nerves by these indescribable loath- 

 somenesses. The tactics of the Allies have perhaps not 

 involved such concentrations of carnage ; but the measuring 

 of degrees of horror is probably illusory, for each hideous 

 experience seems the worst possible at the moment of its 

 enactment. At all events, millions of men all over Europe 

 have died in agony, after living for months in the midst of 

 every sort of torment, physical and spiritual, that human 

 nature can endure without succumbing. Millions of non- 

 combatants have undergone untold miseries from famine and 

 exposure, in addition to indescribable mental sufferings. 

 Never before in history have death, disease, mutilation, 

 starvation, pain and anguish in every possible form, run 

 riot over such wide areas of what we still, from incorrigible 

 habit, call the civilized world. It is true there have been 

 mitigations. Charity has been organized and dispensed on 

 a scale hitherto undreamt of. Medical science is no longer 

 so helpless as it once was. The horrors of surgery are 

 tempered by anaesthetics. But it may be doubted whether, 

 on the balance, the ghastliness of war has not been increased 

 rather than diminished by science. There has probably never- 

 been anything in the world like the scene on board a great 

 modern warship battered to death by high explosives. And 

 as to the numbers of our species that have, within a given 

 time, been afflicted by all these evils, there can be no doubt 

 that they are quite without parallel. 



Meanwhile there has been a continual wafting of incense- 

 and chanting of praise from ten thousand cathedrals, churches, 

 chapels, conventicles of all sorts, to the Power which is 

 supposed to have ordained, and to regulate from moment to 

 moment, this edifying spectacle the Power which guides every 

 bullet and countersigns every death-warrant. Thousands of 

 professional apologists for this Power are explaining what 

 great designs may be supposed to lurk behind its admittedly 

 disconcerting proceedings ; millions of individual men and 

 women, suffering intolerable torments of anxiety, are putting 

 up, in silence or in broken words, petitions that from one 



