Carpenter - Never Again!: A Protest and a Warning Addressed to the Peoples of Europe

Never again must this Thing happen. The time has come if the humanrace does not wish to destroy itself in its own madness for mento make up their minds as to what they will do in the future; fornow indeed is it true that we are come to the cross-roads, we standat the Parting of the Ways.

The rapid and enormous growth of scientific invention makes it obviousthat Violence ten times more potent and sinister than that whichwe are witnessing to-day may very shortly be available for our use orabuse in War. On the other hand who can doubt that the rapid growthof interchange and understanding among the peoples of the world isdaily making Warfare itself, and the barbarities inevitably connectedwith it, more abhorrent to our common humanity?

Which of these lines are we to follow? Along which path are we to go?This is a question which the mass peoples of Europe in the future andnot merely the Governments will have seriously to ponder and decide.

That bodies of men as has happened a hundred times in the trenchesin Northern France and even on the Eastern Front should exchangemorning salutations and songs in humorous amity, and then at a wordof command should fall to shooting each other;

That peasants and artisans, and shopkeepers and students andschoolmasters, who have no quarrel whatever, who on the whole ratherrespect and honour each other, should with explosive bombs deliberatelyblow one another to bits so that even their own mothers could notrecognize them;That human beings should use every devilish invention of sciencewith the one purpose of maiming, blinding, destroying those againstwhom they have no personal grudge or grievance;All this is sheer madness.

Only a short time ago a private soldier said to me: "Yes, we hadgot to be such friends with those Bavarians in the trenches overagainst us that if we had returned there again I believe nothingcould have made us fight with each other; but of course that pointwas perceived and we were moved to another part of the Line."What a criticism in a few words on the whole War!A hundred times this or something similar has happened, and a hundredand a thousand times these 'enemies' who have madly mutilated eachother have a few minutes later been only too glad to dress eachother's wounds and share the last contents of their water-bottles.

By all the heart-rending experiences which have now become so commonand familiar to us;

By the fact that to-day there is hardly a family over the greaterpart of Europe that is not grieving bitterly over the loss of somedearest member of its circle;

By the white faces of the women clad in black, whom one sees everywherein the streets of Berlin and Brussels and Paris and Vienna, of Londonand Milan and Belgrade and Petrograd;

By the sufferings of famine-stricken Poland, ravaged already threeor four times in the last two years by opposing and alternate armies;

By the awful sufferings of the six or seven million Jews of theRussian Pale, hounded homeless in winter to and, fro over the frozenearth the old men and women and children perishing of exposure,fatigue, and starvation;By the agony of Serbia, and the despair of Belgium;

This must not be again!

By the five or six million actual combatants already slain; and,the strange spectacle of millions of Women (over half a millionin Britain, more in France, multitudes in Germany and America)manufacturing man-destroying explosive shells in ceaseless streamby day and night;(And it is estimated that on the average some fifty shells are expendedfor every one man slain)By the terrified faces as of drowning men of those suffering incountless hospitals from shell-shock; by their trembling hands and,limbs and horrible dreams at night pursued by an ever-living horror;

By the curses of the tender-hearted friend who collects in No-man's-landbetween the lines the scattered fragments of his comrade'sbody the dabs of flesh, the hand, the head he knows so well, a bootwith a foot still in it and puts them all together in a sack forburial;

By the silent stupefaction of wives and mothers trying vainly topicture to themselves a death which cannot be pictured; by the insanelaughter of those who having witnessed these things can no longerweep;

This must not be again!

By the beach at Gallipoli covered with the prostrate and writhingforms of men exhausted and emaciated with dysentery, who have crawleddown from the hills only to lie out there in the terrible sun tormentedwith flies and thirst, or to shiver through the frosty night, waitingfor the tardy arrival of the Hospital Ship;

By the hundreds of bodies thrown at the last into the sea at sunrise,for their unceremonious end;

And each poor body for all its loathsome state so loved, so lovedby some one far away;

By the dear Lord who in the beautiful legend descended for threedays into Hell that he might redeem mankind; but these have livedin an actual Hell for weeks and months together

This must not be again!

By the growth and expansion of Science (God forgive the word!) whichwill inevitably make each future war more devilish and inhuman thanthe last;

By the cry of the black and coloured peoples of the Earth who havefor long enough already said how hard and cruel the faces of thewhite men seemed to them, and who now think how black their souls are;

By the hardness of heart, the insensitiveness of a certain kind,which during a century or more now has been bred by the institutionsof Commercialism;

By the habitual betrayal, through long periods of 'prosperity' and'peace,' of men by their fellows of the weak by the powerful, ofthe generous by the mean, of the simple and thoughtless by the craftyand selfish;

By the huge dividends declared by Armament Firms; by theinternational agreements of these firms with one another, even tocozen their own respective Governments;

By the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of innocent folk trampledunderfoot in the ditch of competition, the mad, race in which thedevil takes the hindmost;

By the treacherous internal warfare of the ordinary industrial lifeof every country, the secret betrayal and murder of bodies and soulsfor profit at last written out in letters of blood and fire acrossthe continents, for all to behold

This must not be again!

Let the Allies by all means accuse Germany of world-ambition andworld-plunder, and let the German people accuse their Prussian lordsbut let every nation also search its own heart and accuse itself.

For have not the lords of every nation set before themselves thesame goal, the goal of world-ambition and glory and 'empire' andplunder? And have not the mass-peoples of every nation stood meanlyby and acclaimed the fraud, nor spoken out against it, silentlyconsenting to these things in the prospect of some advantage alsoto themselves?