The loss of three people in
an automobile accident comes nearer home than the fact that at the
battle of Sezanne thirty thousand men were killed. Few of us are
trained to think of men in such numbers--certainly not of dead men in
such numbers. We have seen thirty thousand men together only
during the world's series or at the championship football matches. To
get an idea of the waste of this war we must imagine all of the
spectators at a football match between Yale and Harvard suddenly
stricken dead. We must think of all the wives, children, friends
affected by the loss of those thirty thousand, and we must multiply
those thirty thousand by hundreds, and imagine these hundreds of
thousands lying dead in Belgium, in Alsace-Lorraine, and within ten
miles of Paris. After the Germans were repulsed at Meaux and at
Sezanne the dead of both armies were so many that they lay
intermingled in layers three and four deep. They were buried in long
pits and piled on top of each other like cigars in a box. Lines of fresh
earth so long that you mistook them for trenches intended to conceal
regiments were in reality graves.
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