This thought came to me vividly one summer night in Serbia. It was during the typhus epidemic, and
I stumbled unawares upon an open grave. It was three-quarters full of naked corpses. They were
typhus victims. They had been prisoners of war, and the grave would not be closed until there were
enough dead to fill it. Heavy rain had fallen, and the bodies were half-submerged in water; but I saw
one man above the others. His body, long and strong-limbed, was all uncovered, but his face, fine
featured, proudly ignorant of the ignominy, his face was covered with—flies; filthy, bloodsucking
flies. Round his finely-cut nostrils, his mouth, his half-opened eyes, squatting, buzzing, sucking,
shunting one another for best place—flies, flies, flies, and no one to beat them off. Flies in
thousands, squabbling for his blood, and no one to beat them off. Only flies knew where he was. His
mother was, perhaps, at this moment, picturing him as a hero, and he was—food for flies.
The night, in old parlance, would have been called glorious. But is there glory on this bloodstained
earth? The stars of heaven were shining; but could stars be of heaven, and blink, and blink, and
blink complacently, and nothing else, when they might have set the heavens ablaze, in a million fiery
points of indignation, at the bloody sights which they were seeing on the earth?
And the moon—cold, cruel, heartless moon, hidden at first, behind a thunder cloud—emerged
suddenly, with revengeful triumph, to illumine the grave, lest I might miss the horror; turned on full
candle-power to show me, a woman, to show me that, and other things unspeakable. I walked away
quickly, tears burning in my eyes; angry, cursing in my heart, the ways of men who bring these
things to pass. But I remembered that he was unmourned—alone—and for her sake, his mother's
sake, I came back, and knelt beside that charnel pit, to spread round him, as she would have done,
thoughts of love, and, oh, God! how difficult, of Faith and Hope. "You're not alone!" I cried aloud,
that the stars and moon, and God, if He were near, should hear, and understand. "You are not alone,
for the hearts of all the mothers on the earth are with you—in your open grave—and will one day
rescue you and all their sons from—flies."
The glamour, the adventure, the chivalry, which of old gilded the horrors of war, have vanished. War
is now a bloody business; a business for butchers, not for high-souled gentlemen. Modern militarism
involves tortures and extermination, not only of the fighting, but of the non-fighting portion of the
population, in a manner which would have shocked even the heroes of the Old Testament.
War is not merely an encounter between rival armies of men. War is, in these days, an encounter
between equipped armies, and unequipped women and children, with results that are bestial and
humiliating; between equipped armies and unequipped civilisation, with results that are destructive
of civilisation.
War, with brutal butchery, destroys millions of human lives for paltry purposes: to avenge the death
of an Archduke or to gain commercial profits. But if life is a thing of meaning, a divine gift, to be
divinely handled, for divine purposes; if life is, as mankind generally professes, the chain upon which
the evolution towards super-conscious man is strung, the chain upon which the pearl of immortality
is hung; if life, as an abstract possession of the human race, is all this, and more besides, then war,
which aims at the destruction of this priceless gift, is a cosmic blunder, which only devils bent upon
the annihilation of the human race, could have conceived.
Militarism has, in one country at least, reached a climax, and I believe it is because we women feel
in our souls, that life has a meaning, and a value, which are in danger of being lost in militarism,
that we are, at this moment, instinctively asking society to give us a share in safeguarding the
destinies of those human lives, for which Nature has made us specially responsible.
The idea of votes for women, or justice for women, is not here my concern; the idea, which, as a
result of my small experiences, engulfs all others, is the necessity of votes for life, justice for
humankind. This can only be achieved by the suppression of war, and wars will never be suppressed
by men alone. Man, says Bacon, loves danger better than travail; man, says Nietzsche, loves danger
better than play. Men still regard battles as magnified football scrums; war is still for many men a
glorified sport, as letters from the soldiers at the front daily testify. "The spirit of our boys was