George Santayana: Slaughter by the indistinguishable million

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

American writers on peace and against war

George Santayana: Selections on war

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George Santayana
Persons and Places

My two Guardsmen were apparently thinking of resigning their commissions; something that surprised me a little in the case of A, who I knew had made a special study of gunnery. As for B, soldiering was what any obligation is for the vaguely young….I was sorry for the poor chap. Most enviable of men, I should have thought him, in his person and surroundings; yet for that very reason he seemed to have no future. The garden that had bred him, having seen him bloom, had no further use for him. It is indeed in the nature of existence to undermine its best products, and also its worst. This may be an acceptable reflection to the philosopher, who dwells in the eternal, but not for the fatted calf being led to the slaughter.

To the slaughter he was being led without suspecting it, like any placid wreathed bullock marching to the sacrifice. His generation had just endured the carnage of the Boer War, but that of 1914 was approaching. After all this was the traditional calling of his class, but in a simpler, smaller, clearer phase of society, when there could be chivalry in the master, and devotion in the servant. Now all that was outmoded, and the ethics of it sounded hollow. The gentleman no longer felt at home in the saddle or in the field; he was no longer the ruler of his land and his country; he was a tax-payer submerged and forced to sell his estates by the very war he had helped to wage. Nor could he escape by becoming a plain citizen. Slaughter would continue, slaughter now by the indistinguishable million. It would be a question of victims without a vocation to die, conscripts and mechanics buried by chance in an avalanche of missiles.