War is Inhuman | 5

5. War Is Inhuman,
As It Involves Men in Fatigue, Famine, and All the Pains of Mutilated Bodies

To describe the fatigues and hardships of a soldier’s life would require the experience of a soldier, so that only some of their common sufferings can be touched upon by a person who is a stranger to the miseries of a camp.

A great majority of those who enter the ranks of an army are persons unaccustomed to great privations and severe fatigues; hence the great proportion of mortality among fresh recruits.

Their habits and strength are unable to endure the hard fare, and the rapid and constant marches generally imposed upon them in active service.

The young soldier commonly exchanges a wholesome table, a comfortable dwelling, and an easy bed for bad food, the field for his house, the cold earth for his bed, and the heavens over him for his covering.

He must stand at his post day and night, summer and winter;

face the scorching sun, the chilling tempest, and be exposed to all the storms of the season, without any comfortable repose;

perhaps during most of the time with a scanty allowance of the coarsest food, and often destitute of any, except the miserable supply he may have chance to plunder – not enough to satisfy, but only to keep alive the craving demands of nature;

often compelled to march and counter-march several days and nights in succession, without a moment to prepare his provisions to nourish him and glad to get a little raw to sustain his life.

Frequently, this hardship is endured in the cold and inclement season, while his tattered clothing is only the remains of his summer dress.

Barefooted and half naked, fatigued and chilled, he becomes a prey to disease, and is often left to perish without a human being to administer to him the least comfort.

If he is carried to a hospital, he is there surrounded by the pestilential breath of hundreds of his poor fellow-sufferers, where the best comforts that can be afforded are but scanty and dismal.

But all this is comparatively trifling to the sufferings of the wounded on the field of battle:

There, thousands of mangled bodies lie on the cold ground hours, and sometimes days, without a friendly hand to bind up a wound; not a voice is heard except the dying groans of their fellow-sufferers around them.

No one can describe the horrors of the scene:

here lies one with a fractured skull, there another with a severed limb, and a third with a lacerated body; some fainting with the loss of blood, others distracted, and others again crying for help.

If such are some of the faint outlines of the fatigues and sufferings of soldiers, then their occupation must be an inhuman employment,

for they are instrumental in bringing the same calamities on others which they suffer themselves; and of course it is unfriendly to the spirit of the gospel, and wrong for Christians to engage in it.