NO BLOOD LUST, EXCEPT —!

Clutha Leader, Volume XLII, Issue 89, 16 May 1916, Page 7

NO BLOOD LUST, EXCEPT —!

»«» In "The Soul of the War" Mr Philip Gibbs pictures the soldiers of France, "who, in the mass, have no blood lust, and hate butchering their fellowbeings." But exception must be made of "their moments of mad excitement, made up of fear as well as of rage, when to the shout of 'En avant!' they leap out of the trenches and charge a body of Germans, stabbing and slashing with their bayonets, clubbing men to death with the butt-ends of their rifle \ and for a few minutes of devilish intoxication, with tho smell of blood in their nostrils, and with bloodshot eyes, rejoicing in slaughter. 'We did not, listen to the cries of surrender or to tho beseeching plaints of the wounded,' said a French soldier, describing one of those scenes. 'We had no use for prisoners, and on both sides there was no quarter given in this Argonne wood. Better than fixed bayonets was an unfixed bayonet grasped as a dagger. Better than any bayonet was a bit of iron or a ' broken gun-stock, or a sharp knife. In ' the hand-to-hand fighting there was no shooting, but only the struggling of in- ' terlaced bodies, with fists, and claws ' grabbing for. each other's throats. I saw men use teeth and bite their enemy to death with their jaws, gnawing at their ! windpipes. This is modern war in the '2oth century—or one scene in it—and ' it is only afterwards, if one escapes with life, that one is stricken with the thought of all that horror which has debased ns as low as the beasts—lower than beasts, because we have an intelligence and a soul to teach us better things"' -_