as "degenerates," of the Russians as "Mongol hordes,"
of the Japanese as "yellow savages," but it is not only Germans who let
themselves slip into national vanity and these ugly hostilities to
unfamiliar life. The first line of attack against war must be an attack
upon self-righteousness and intolerance. These things are the germ of
uncompromising and incurable militarism everywhere.

Now, the attack upon self-righteousness and intolerance and the stern,
self-satisfied militarism that arises naturally out of these things is
to be made in a number of ways. The first is a sedulous propaganda of
the truth about war, a steadfast resolve to keep the pain of warfare
alive in the nerves of the careless, to keep the stench of war under the
else indifferent nose. It is only in the study of the gloomily
megalomaniac historian that aggressive war becomes a large and glorious
thing. In reality it is a filthy outrage upon life, an idiot's smashing
of the furniture of homes, a mangling, a malignant mischief, a scalding
of stokers, a disemboweling of gunners, a raping of caught women by
drunken soldiers. By book and pamphlet, by picture and cinematograph
film, the pacifist must organize wisdom in these matters.

And not only indignation and distress must come to this task. The stern,
uncompromising militarist will not be moved from his determinations by
our horror and hostility. These things will but "brace" him. He has a
more vulnerable side. The ultimate lethal weapon for every form of
stupidity is ridicule, and against the high silliness of the militarist
it is particularly effective. It is the laughter of wholesome men that
will finally end war. The stern, strong, silent man will cease to
trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension
and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of
his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it
is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the
essential triviality at the head of the present war. Not the slaughter
of ten million men can make the quality of the German Kaiser other than
theatrical and silly.

The greater part of the world is in an agony, a fever, but that does not
make the cause of that fever noble or great. A man may die of yellow
fever through the bite of a mosquito; that does not make a mosquito
anything more than a dirty little insect or an aggressive imperialist
better than a pothouse fool.