[Cheers.] Here
again they were wrong in thinking that the reign of ideas, Old World
ideas like those of duty and good faith, had been superseded by the
ascendency of force. My Lord Mayor, war is at all times a hideous thing;
at the best an evil to be chosen in preference to worse evils, and at
the worst little better than the letting loose of hell upon earth. The
prophet of old spoke of the "confused noise of battle and the garments
rolled in blood," but in these modern days, with the gigantic scale of
the opposing armies and the scientific developments of the instruments
of destruction, war has become an infinitely more devastating thing than
it ever was before. The hope that the general recognition of a humaner
code would soften or abate some of its worst brutalities has been rudely
dispelled by the events of the last few weeks. ["Shame!"]
Shameful and Cynical Desecration.
The German invasion of Belgium and France contributes, indeed, some of
the blackest pages to its sombre annals. Rarely has a non-combatant
population suffered more severely, and rarely, if ever, have the
monuments of piety and of learning and those sentiments of religion and
national association, of which they are the permanent embodiment, even
in the worst times of the most ruthless warriors, been so shamefully and
cynically desecrated; and behind the actual theatre of conflict with its
smoke and its carnage there are the sufferings of those who are left
behind, the waste of wealth, the economic dislocation, the heritage, the
long heritage of enmities and misunderstanding which war brings in its
train.
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