I spending what is left of my
substance and you what is left of yours to keep on this war against
each other? What have we to gain from hurting one another still
further? Why should we be puppets any longer in the hands of crowned
fools and witless diplomatists? Even if we were dumb and acquiescent
before, does not the blood of our sons now cry out to us that this
foolery should cease? We have let these people send our sons to
death._

_It is you and I who must stop these wars, these massacres of boys._

_Massacres of boys! That indeed is the essence of modern war. The
killing off of the young. It is the destruction of the human
inheritance, it is the spending of all the life and material of the
future upon present-day hate and greed. Fools and knaves,
politicians, tricksters, and those who trade on the suspicions and
thoughtless, generous angers of men, make wars; the indolence and
modesty of the mass of men permit them. Are you and I to suffer such
things until the whole fabric of our civilisation, that has been so
slowly and so laboriously built up, is altogether destroyed?_

_When I sat down to write to you I had meant only to write to you of
your son and mine. But I feel that what can be said in particular of
our loss, need not be said; it can be understood without saying.
What needs to be said and written about is this, that war must be
put an end to and that nobody else but you and me and all of us can
do it. We have to do that for the love of our sons and our race and
all that is human. War is no longer human; the chemist and the
metallurgist have changed all that. My boy was shot through the eye;
his brain was blown to pieces by some man who never knew what he had
done. Think what that means!... It is plain to me, surely it is
plain to you and all the world, that war is now a mere putting of
the torch to explosives that flare out to universal ruin. There is
nothing for one sane man to write to another about in these days but
the salvation of mankind from war._

_Now I want you to be patient with me and hear me out. There was a
time in the earlier part of this war when it was hard to be patient
because there hung over us the dread of losses and disaster. Now we
need dread no longer. The dreaded thing has happened. Sitting
together as we do in spirit beside the mangled