By Eugene V. Debs - Originally Featured in Appeal to Reason.
The common soldiers of all Nations are drawn from the "Lower Class", and but for war, they would be engaged in the peaceful pursuit of producing wealth for the "Upper Class". They have no more voice in declaring war, or planning campaigns, or manipulating battles that if they were so many cattle. They simply obey orders. When the order comes to go to war, they go. They are perfectly trained in the noble art of killing, poor servile lackeys they do not think. And all they know, or are expected to know is to blindly do what they are told. But for these common soldiers drawn from the working class, armies would cease to exist and war would be no more.
If only the common soldiers knew what they were for, and why they fight and bleed and die. But they don't, or they would not be soldiers. Their poor brains are doped just enough to make them servile to their masters, and to regard their servility as patriotism. In the frightful war that devastated Europe[1], the common soldiers murdered one another with a ferocity unknown to savages or wild beasts. Millions were shot or sabered, maimed and mangled, torn and disemboweled and that is what common soldiers are for. And why not? If the soldiers of one nation are not to kill the soldiers of another nation, then why soldiers at all?
The soldiers that slayed one another with such fiendish ferocity on a hundred battle fields in Europe never saw one another and yet they fell upon one another in a fury of passion that makes men monsters and sinks them lower than the brutes. Alas. If these common soldiers only knew that they are but the tools of their aristocratic and soulless masters, and that fight, and bleed, and die to perpetuate their own slavery and degradation.
Notes:
[1] World War I