When a child is outraged or done to death in time of Peace the whole nation is stirred. In wartime, millions of children are outraged and done to death in manner not the same but as horrible. On them are forced slow starvation, illness, deformities, orphanage, death from disease, gas and bombs. From them is rived all fatherly control so that in many cases they become little criminals. Undernourished and stunted physically and morally they are taken from school prematurely and set to war work. The effects of war are felt by them for years after war is over—often for the rest of their lives. Fortunate are those hundreds of thousands who, but for war, would have been born and are not. The sufferings of children through wars in the past are likely to be far exceeded in wars to come, when the very pulses of the nations will be stopped by havoc wrought from the air on crowded centres of population and the wholesale destruction of docks and factories. War, however you look at it, is an insensate folly. It achieves no real end; no sane or lasting satisfaction for national honour, no true economic benefit, not even a strengthening of fibre through suffering and effort, for though it may be a purge at first, it becomes a wasting disease, long before its close. But when you look at it from the point of view of children—children who are the helpless future in the power of the arrogant and wasteful present—war becomes a monster, devour-ing and red-jawed, killing and maiming without mercy and without reason, the very godless dragon of the child’s fancy. By war we mortgage the future, not only in those ways now so alarmingly patent to us in the trough of economic despond, but in a way far more subtle and deadly, by the partial destruction, and the widespread blighting of the crop we have sown for the morrow, and which in great part we can never reap. Let those men who will meet soon now, for the avowed purpose of considering how far they can minimize the chances and the scope of war, put each one to himself this question: If I were incited to outrage and murder a child, what should I say and do to him who incited me? And let them remember that the health, the moral welfare, and the lives of millions of children, generation by generation, depend on how far they shall succeed in their coming efforts to save the future from the headstrong follies of the present, and the bitter cruelties and degradations of the past. John Galsworthy: ‘Children and War’ from Glimpses and Reflections (collected 1938)
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 05:48:58 +0000
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