War Is a Racket by Smedley Darlington Butler

Author:Smedley Darlington Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2012-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Thank God, this is a democracy, and by your voice and by your vote you can save your boy. YOU are the bosses of this country—you mothers, you fathers.

And that brings up another point: If you let this country go into a European war you will lose this democracy, don’t forget that.

And now for that other picture I said I’d give you, that other picture that could be the picture of your boy, if you let him go abroad to fight. It may help you to build up resistance against all this propaganda which will almost drown you.

Somewhere in a muddy trench, thousands of miles from you and his time your boy, the same one that was sleeping so sweetly and safely in his bed when you watched him in a dead of night—is waiting to “go over the top.” Four o’clock in the morning, drizzling rain, dark and dismal, face caked with mad and tears, so so homesick and longing for you and home—thinks of you on your knees praying for him—frightened to death, but still more scared the boy next to him will discover his terror, that’s your boy. Stomach as big as an egg, I know, I’ve had that sensation many times I was sixteen the first time anyone shot at me in Cuba, two thousand miles from my home, waiting the same way . . . God, the suspense!

Do you want him to be next Unknown Soldier? The Unknown Soldier had a mother, you know, and a father. He didn’t just appear out of the air.

Do you want your boy, tangled in the barbed wire, or struggling for a last gasp of breath in a stinking trench somewhere abroad, do you want him to cry out: “Oh Mother, oh, Father, why did you let them do it?”

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