THE ART OF WAR

The militaristic mind has seldom been shown in a more characteristic light than in the recent refusal of the War Department to furnish a publisher with war pictures stored in its archives. The publisher purposed a book composed of photographs of war in its worst barbarity. Pointing out to the Department that there could be no stronger propaganda against war than the book which he had in mind, he requested the loan of a few pictures to be added to the large unofficial store already on hand. But the War Department was adamant. Gold Star mothers had been shown tidy graveyards in Flanders; they must never be made to suffer the awful pang of realization that war was not the glorious sacrifice it had been represented to them. "Such a policy would not be ethical; it would not be decent".

When the War Department is forced to hide behind the skirts of the Gold Star mothers to prevent propaganda against war, they not only play into the hands of a publisher seeking notoriety, but put themselves in a false light as well. Far more convincing would it have been to explain simply that once men had seen these pictures they could only with great difficulty be induced to fight, that in consequence the possibility of war would be shoved ever more into the background, and, incidentally, that tax payers money would flow else-where than into the iron coffers of the War Department.