Free War Letters from the Living Dead Man by Elsa Barker Page A

Spring campaign, and I led my two friends to a point where they could watch the combat.
    “What are those beings down there sending back and forth?” asked the rose-veiled stranger. “Those objects are known as shells,” I replied. “Shells?” the stranger returned in bewilderment. The Beautiful Being answered for me. “Shells are elaborately convoluted houses in which our brothers of the great deep live and disport themselves.” The look of bewilderment increased on the face of the stranger. “My friend forgets,” I said, “that you know not the language of earth, where a word, an arbitrary symbol for an idea, may stand for two ideas very dissimilar.” “What are those objects that the beings down there are sending back and forth?” the stranger repeated. I have to translate its form of speech into ordinary English to make it intelligible. Literally, its communication would stand like this: “Objects beings sending reciprocally?”
    From my long association with angels, both with these astral bodies and those without, such a form of speech is intelligible to me; and I answered, translating my cumbrous native idiom into the simpler language of ideas: “The objects that are hurled back and forth between those beings on the plain below us are explosive shells, with a marvelous power to shatter the forms of other objects and to scatter them in all directions.” “Is it a form of play?” asked the rose-veiled stranger. “It is not,” I answered. “It is war.” “War?” All the horror that in my mind is associated with the word war was conveyed by my thought to the mind of the angelic visitor, and its rosy veil grew pale with pain. “What is this strange emotion that I feel?” it asked. “Truly, were it not for your presence here, my friends, I should desire to go away.” “The emotion that you feel,” I said, “is a sympathetic reflection of the emotions of war.” “And what is war?” “A horrible passion felt mutually and indulged by two opposing aggregates of souls, by which they are enabled to overcome their natural pity and to destroy each other’s bodies in vast numbers.”
    The veil of the stranger grew almost white. “And does God permit this horror?” it asked. “He permits it on the planet Earth.” Now the word God is not an adequate translation of the idea expressed in the angel’s question, but let it stand. The real idea is untranslatable by any one word in any language of earth. It was a composite of Love and Time and Purpose, raised to the highest power, an idea for which I can find no other word than God. “Earth is a strange star!” the angel said. “The inhabitants of this world have a common saying to that effect,” I answered. “It is a fragment of race wisdom, handed down from their remote ancestors, who, when they first tried to adjust their celestial consciousness to the baffling conditions of this star on which they had been placed for their education, observed to one another, ‘This is a strange world.’” “And are they obliged to perpetrate this horror before us by the conditions of this planet?”
    “No.” “Then why do they do it?” “From force of habit.” “Then was it ever necessary?” “In far away times,” I said, “men were more isolated than at present, there were fewer of them in incarnation, and a brilliant archangel who had their training in charge taught them to develop courage and resource, and to accentuate their egos, by struggling with each other, two by two.” “But there are millions of beings down there!” the angel exclaimed. “And I see bodies fall by thousands!” “That is what they call a great victory,” I said, “and one of their commanders gives to those who have slaughtered a vast number a little iron cross.” “An iron cross? Why iron?” “Iron is the metal of Mars,” I said, “Mars, their war god.” “And why a cross?” “It is the symbol of their Christ.” “The one who died down here to make