Atlanta Daily World

Harvests Of Hate
By REV. JOHN C. WRIGHT

PHILOSOPHERS, DIPLOMATS, statesmen, historians and economists have spent hours of time and reams of paper, analyzing and explaining the holocaust of destruction now sweeping across Europe.

The need of territory and raw materials for hard-pressed and expanding nations, imperialistic ambitions, fear. All of these and many more are offered as perhaps accurate interpretations of the motives and causes back of the present conflict.

But anyone who was close enough to the last great war to observe its devastating effects upon the civilian populations does not have to seek for the causes of this present war. The men who are fighting today were the little children of France and the other invaded countries in 1914.

They were a part of those pictures of abject terror and heart rending grief that were presented every railroad station where husbands, fathers, brothers and sweethearts tore themselves away from all that love and hope had builded to find their abode beneath the crosses in hundreds of silent cities of the dead.

SAW CHILDREN

I saw those children, as many others did, trudging home clutching the skirts of weeping mothers, the young little eyes red and smarting with the tear of their first heartbreak. They spent long anxious days and sleepless nights wondering why mother cramped the floor and ran so frequently to tuck them in just to satisfy herself that they were there.

They knew what it was to be deprived of food and to be limited in time and facilities for play. They saw women doing the work of men and boys growing old before their time. On the way to school they passed lines of women watching bulletin boards at strategic places about the town and cities waiting for the dread news, all were certain ultimately would come, of the death of the men they had given for sacrifice upon the altar of war.

Often their lessons were interrupted, as were their hours of sleep, by the terrifying scream of sirens, warning of the approach of enemy planes. Long lines of trembling youngsters were hustled away by their teachers to the "arbri" and other air-raid shelters while many returned home to find it in ruins and, frequently, their mother fled or dead.

These are the memories that drive forward the armed legions in Europe's latest baptism of blood. It is the blood of the children who saw the horrors, and whose souls were seared by the brutalities of the struggle of a generation ago, that is making crimson the streams and fields of a dozen warring nations today.

HARVEST OF HATE

They are fighting more to avenge the losses, the humiliation and the sufferings of that war, than they are for the little-understood causes back of this one.

The babies of 1914, conceived in fear and hatred, and born to blood and tears, are today keeping faith with their fathers and elder brothers who fell on Flanders and a hundred other fields where human blood ran redder than poppies growing row on row.

The war of 1940 is the harvest of hate sown in the heart of childhood in 1914. The scenes of horror, destruction and murder which are daily being enacted before the eyes of the children of today will be the seed from which a similar harvest will be gathered a generation from now.