The Power That Preserves | My Web Site Page 108 Chapter 03 Page 02

Ovations

Sitemaps

In the old warfare a man was either stabbed, shot, or thrust through after an hour or so of excitement, and all the wounded on the field were either comfortably murdered or attended to before the dawn of the next day. One was killed by human hands, with understandable and tolerable injuries. But in this war the bulk of the dead--of the western Allies, at any rate--have been killed by machinery, the wounds have been often of an inconceivable horribleness, and the fate of the wounded has been more frightful than was ever the plight of wounded in the hands of victorious savages. For days multitudes of men have been left mangled, half buried in mud and filth, or soaked with water, or frozen, crying, raving between the contending trenches. The number of men that the war, without actual physical wounds, has shattered mentally and driven insane because of its noise, its stresses, its strange unnaturalness, is enormous. Horror in this war has overcome more men than did all the arrows of Cressy.

We went along the banks of the beautiful island of Antas, after which we halted at the house of Jose Maracati, a Mundurucu chieftain, with thirty Indians under him. A delegate of the Para Province in charge of the Indians--a man of strong Malay characteristics and evidently of Indian parentage--received us, and gave me much information about the local rubber industry. He told me that the best rubber found in that region was the kind locally called _seringa preta_, a black rubber which was coagulated with the smoke of the _coco de palmeira_. He calculated that 150 rubber trees gave about 14 kilos of rubber a day. The _seringa preta_ exuded latex all the year round, even during the rainy season.

Thus, from a combination of causes, the whole force and energy of the age was directed towards the sea. The wide excitement and the greatness of the interests at stake, raised even common men above themselves; and people who in ordinary times would have been no more than mere seamen, or mere money-making merchants, appear before us with a largeness and greatness of heart and mind in which their duties to God and their country are alike clearly and broadly seen and felt to be paramount to every other.

This page is Copyright © Formidable Deuce. All Rights Reserved. The Power That Preserves | My Web Site Page 108 is a production of Formidable Deuce and may not be reproduced electronically or graphically for commercial uses. Personal reproductions and browser or search engine caching are acceptable.

Ovations provided by The Power That Preserves | My Web Site Page 108 are included only for information. The entertainment value of The Power That Preserves | My Web Site Page 108's ovations may vary on the basis of your personal needs. Formidable Deuce and The Power That Preserves | My Web Site Page 108 take no responsibility for the content provided by other Web sites. Links are provided "as is" without liability or warranty.