Essays in War-Time | Page 9

each civilised country during half a century, and found that the total amounted to nine and a half millions, while, by including the Napoleonic and other wars of the beginning of the nineteenth century, he considered that that total would be doubled. Put in another form, Lapouge says, the wars of a century spill 120,000,000 gallons of blood, enough to fill three million forty-gallon casks, or to create a perpetual fountain sending up a jet of 150 gallons per hour, a fountain which has been flowing unceasingly ever since the dawn of history. It is to be noted, also, that those slain on the battlefield by no means represent the total victims of a war, but only about half of them; more than half of those who, from one cause or another, perished in the Franco-Prussian war, it is said, were not belligerents. Lapouge wrote some ten years ago and considered that the victims of war, though remaining about absolutely the same in number through the ages, were becoming relatively fewer. The Great War of to-day would perhaps have disturbed his calculations, unless we may assume that it will be followed by a tremendous reaction against war. For when the war had lasted only nine months, it was estimated that if it should continue at the present rate (and as a matter of fact its scale has been much enlarged) for another twelve months, the total loss to Europe in lives destroyed or maimed would be ten millions, about equal to five-sixths of the whole young manhood of the German Empire, and nearly the same number of victims as Lapouge reckoned as the normal war toll of a whole half-century of European "civilisation." It is scarcely necessary to add that all these bald estimates of the number of direct victims to war give no clue to the moral and material damage--apart from all question of injury to the race--done by the sudden or slow destruction of so large a proportion of the young manhood of the world, the ever widening circles of anguish and misery and destitution which every fatal bullet imposes on humanity, for it is probable that for every ten million soldiers who fall on the field, fifty million other persons at home are plunged into grief or poverty, or some form of life-diminishing trouble.
The foregoing considerations have not, however, brought us strictly within the field of eugenics. They indicate the great extent to which war affects the human breed, but they do not show that war affects the quality of the breed, and until that is shown the eugenist remains undisturbed.
There are various circumstances which, at the outset, and even in the absence of experimental verification, make it difficult, or impossible, that even the bare mortality of war (for the eugenical bearings of war are not confined to its mortality) should leave the eugenist indifferent. For war never hits men at random. It only hits a carefully selected percentage of "fit" men. It tends, in other words, to strike out, temporarily, or in a fatal event, permanently, from the class of fathers, precisely that percentage of the population which the eugenist wishes to see in that class. This is equally the case in countries with some form of compulsory service, and in countries which rely on a voluntary military system. For, however an army is recruited, it is only those men reaching a fairly high standard of fitness who are accepted, and these, even in times of peace are hampered in the task of carrying on the race, which the less fit and the unfit are free to do at their own good pleasure. Nearly all the ways in which war and armies disturb the normal course of affairs seem likely to interfere with eugenical breeding, and none to favour it. Thus at one time, in the Napoleonic wars, the French age of conscription fell to eighteen, while marriage was a cause of exemption, with the result of a vast increase of hasty and ill-advised marriages among boys, certainly injurious to the race. Armies, again, are highly favourable to the spread of racial poisons, especially of syphilis, the most dangerous of all, and this cannot fail to be, in a marked manner, dysgenic rather than eugenic.
The Napoleonic wars furnished the first opportunity of testing the truth of Franklin's assertion concerning the disastrous effect of armies on the race, by the collection of actual and precise data. But the significance of the data proved unexpectedly difficult to unravel, and most writers on the subject have been largely occupied in correcting the mistakes of their predecessors. Villermé in 1829 remarked that the long series of French wars up to 1815 must probably reduce the height of the French people, though he was unable to prove that this was so.