Wilfred Owen, one of the poetic voices stilled by World War I, chose as his subject “war and the pity of war,” finding his poetry in the pity. It can be argued that even then the pity had gone out of war. It is certain that the events of subsequent wars—large and small, local as well as worldwide—have been so pitiless in character and conduct that little or no “poetry” remains.

We are three-quarters through a century of unprecedented violence, with the grim prospect of even greater evils tying ahead. In his Twentieth Century Book of the Dead Gil Eliot offers what he considers a reasonable estimate of 100,000,000 “man-made” deaths since 1900. That figure alone is enough to give us pause. But it is not merely the number of deaths that should concern us here, but who is killed and the manner in which the victims are killed. In World War I, of the ten million or so victims, 90 per cent were soldiers. The carnage of World War II was so great and so indiscriminate that an equally simple estimate is almost impossible to contrive.