THE HORROR OF IT -- CAMERA RECORDS OF WAR'S GRUESOME GLORIES

FOREWORD
By Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D.

This book of authenticated photographs is a hard-headed answer to the common charge made against the peacemakers that they are soft-headed idealists.  No piece of strategy on the part of the militarists is more emotionally effective than their endeavor, often successful, to picture themselves as clear-sighted and realistic while the devotees of the peace movement are sentimental and visionary.

This book say s in effect that if the militarists want realism we will give it to them.  Here is war not seen through the lenses of anybody's prejudice but caught in the act by the camera.  This is war's plain, stark, ugly meaning.  Back of the camouflage of uniform and music, oratory and popular cheering, this is the gist and essence of war at the point where it specifically operates.

To be sure, war is like infantile paralysis in that, though it starts with a flash of hectic fever, its more dreadful aspect is its long drawn out aftermath.  This book has not photographed the endless miseries which follow war for many years.  No camera could catch the agonies of innumerable homes now where, as the direct issue of the world's disorganization in the Great War, the days are hard and the nights are terrible.  This book merely presents photographs of a few characteristic scenes from the first hectic fever which is war's beginning.  These scenes, however, are startling enough.  Some of us saw their like at first hand.  They ought to stop the mouths of those who think war a moral tonic, or a glorious tradition, or an inspiration to useful patriotism, or a way of advancing human progress.

There is no difference between militarists and peace lovers on one matter:  we all believe in national defense.  We differ deeply, however, as to the means of achieving it.  The idea that in this closely interrelated world of mutual economic interests national defense can be achieved by such activities as are depicted in this book seems to some of us sheer insanity.  When we fight each other we destroy ourselves.  We are spending this year among the great nations five billion dollars on armaments to do to each other the sort of thing this book portrays, and we call that national defense.  It is of course both national and international ruination.

Let this book, then, do its quiet work.  Let it say in scenes which did actually occur and will occur again, in forms more horrible if war returns, that war is a mad and barbarous business.  When Verestchagin painted his picture "The Conquerors," depicting the world's military heroes riding down a desolate landscape amid piled rows of naked dead, the Czar's government would not allow it to be exhibited in Russia.  It was one of the first endeavors realistically to paint the truth about war.  Here is another endeavor, with the camera's lens for the p0ainter.  When we talk war, if we are realistic and honest, this is what we must mean.

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