Bisbee Daily Review

SLAUGHTERING MEN'S MINDS

Every army actively engaged in the war has its
"psychopathic ward", where soldiers driven insane by
the fighting can have expert treatment. It is a striking
fulfillment of a prophecy made in fiction by Wilhelm
Lamszus in "The Human Slaughter House"; he represented
German soldiers as turned to a howling delirium
by the frightful carnage of a modern battle. For
that portrayal he lost his government job; and then
came along this war and proved him right.

How could it be otherwise? Human brains and nerves
were never meant to endure the horrors that make a
soldier's daily portion today. To meet one's enemy
face to face, and fight him to the death with fists, clubs,
sword, bayonet or rifle, that is endurable. Men have always
done that; they have died, but died sane. But
when they were fighting against men; now they fight
machinery, which has neither nerves nor heart.

They do not see the foe, nor the foe them. They burrow
in the ground and hide there day after day, cramped,
chilled, benumbed, with explosive shells from everywhere
and nowhere searching them out and blasting away their
defenses, and the enemy mining the ground beneath
to blow them to eternity. The exposure, the confinement,
the detonations, the uncertainty, the waiting hour
after hour and day after day for they know not what-
if this is more intolerable than toil, wounds or death
silence the crop of madmen to make this mad war still
more horrible, and to be a death-in-life reminder to humanity
for half a century to come.