THIS WAR BUSINESS
Herbert Photos, Inc.
RR
Infantry and tanks re-enacting the war in France. Real-
istic and thorough are the preparations for the next war
How it originated and how it keeps going. A very revealing
treatment of the seven sources of war
EATED beside me on a park bench one
beautiful day a few summers ago was a
grizzled old man. Something about his
bearing prompted me to scrutinize him
closely. My eye caught a medal hanging
upon his breast. It bore the imprint of
Queen Victoria, and suspended beneath was a bar
bearing the one word “Sebastopol.” I held back
for no formal introduction, but bluntly inquired
whether he were a veteran of the Crimean War,
for the word Sebastopol and the Crimea are synony-
mous in the history of that mighty struggle in the
middle of the past century.
He told me of his service in that bloody conflict,
and of how he watched from an eminence the charge
of the famous Six Hundred as they rode forth into
‘““the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell.” And
on that quiet parkway he painted for me a picture
of the struggle that now seems only a chapter of the
time past.
“But what particular connection does this incident
have with the subject of this present article?” you
may inquire. It has this very real and pertinent
PAGE SIX
By Francis D. Nichol
connection, that it provides the basis for the very
first point that I want to stress; namely, that war,
instead of being an uncommon, unusual happening,
is one of the most routine events occurring in
every generation. This old Crimean War veteran,
when mustered out at the close of that conflict,
might have thought that men would now be sick
of war, and that peace would henceforth reign over
the world. But he lived to see a whole series of
sanguinary struggles. In the sixties came the Civil
War in the United States. This struggle had no
more than ended when the Franco-German War
broke out. Then the scene of conflict moved back
again to the Western Hemisphere for the Spanish-
American War. A few years later the Far East
witnessed the gory struggle between the Russians
and the Japanese. Then, in less than a decade,
came the two Balkan wars, separated by little
more than a brief truce, and followed swiftly by
the world-embracing war of 1914. In other words,
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