Destructiveness

“ Here we find the organs, which, when abused, lead to selfishness, cruelty, cunning, and determination, all large; but we have still to account for the faculties which enabled him to act a better part in life. Accordingly, Combativeness is considerably inferior to Destructiveness in size, and Cautiousness is large. These, acting in combination with great Firmness and Secretiveness, would give him command of temper ”

“ Like a flood that slowly undermines a bank, and which the proprietor regards not when he sees so tiny a current dribbling and oozing through, and scarcely bowing the grass between which it trickles, so came the Destroyer—slowly and almost imperceptibly undermining the current of life, and eating out the foundations, until there needed but one mighty rush, and all was over beyond recovery, and the work of destruction was completed. ”

“ Like cormorants that seek a submerged prey.
An angel of destruction guards the door
And keeps the peace of our ancestral home;
Freedom to dream, to work, and to adore,
These vagrant days, nights of untroubled breath,
Are bought with death. ”

“ The most terrific form of destruction, that of explosion, is not the most fatal, numerically regarded. Taking an average of fifteen years, twenty per cent, of the fatal casualties were attributable to explosions, thirty-three per cent, to falls of coal and of roof, fifteen per cent, to shaft accidents, and the rest to miscellaneous causes. ”

“ Destruction is so much easier than construction, and so much more rapid and abundant in its visible results, that the devastator feels a jubilant joy in his work, of which the tardy builder knows nothing. ”

“ Over miles of shattered forest and torn earth the dead lie, sometimes in heaps and winrows—I mean literally! friend and foe, black and white, with distorted features, among mangled and dead horses, trampled in mud, and thrown in all conceivable sorts of places. You can distinctly hear, over the whole field, the hum and hissing of decomposition. Of course you can imagine shattered muskets, bayonets, cartridge-boxes, caps, torn clothing, cannon-balls, fragments of shell, broken artillery, etc. ”

“ The city quivers in the throes of fierce, successive quakes, And massive structures thrill like giant oaks before the blast; Into the streets with deafening crash the frailer ones are cast. Half garbed, the multitude rush out in frantic haste, with prayer and shout, To join the panic stricken rout. Ho! DEATH is marching past. A rumbling noise! The streets upheave, and sink again, like waves; And shattered piles and shapeless wrecks are strewn with human graves. Danger at every corner lurks. Destruction fills the air. Death-laden showers of mortar, bricks, are falling everywhere. ”

“ High-explosives, shrapnel, grenades, bombs, bullets were rending, piercing, and shattering the living flesh and muscle and bone. Towns and villages were being turned into heaps of brick and wreckage. Hordes of old men, women, and children were thronging the roads, and fleeing from approaching disaster. ”

“ It is now in the middle stage of destruction: almost every building is shattered or injured, but enough is standing to make the empty city seem still sensitive, in its very stones, under the enemy’s random shellfire. ”

“ Destruction is the purport of war; its civilizing virtue acts like the hot iron on a cancer, destroying the corrupt tendons in order to arrive at perfect health. No pardon! (Very good, very good.) Destroy! Kill! ”

“ Stray shot and shells came whistling down through the atmosphere, often exploding high up, but sometimes dropping on to buildings, crowded streets, or the solitary mountains and valleys of the country. Often, too, entire wrecks and huge fragments of metal came rushing down without the least warning, destroying great buildings and killing hundreds of people. ”

“ The explosion of mines, the crash of falling buildings, the roar of cannon and musketry, the shouts of the combatants continually filled the air, while a cloud of smoke and dust hung constantly over the city as the terrible scene of warfare continued day after day. ”

“ He who in a tremendous conflagration would blow up a block of houses with powder, must, even amid the riot and roar, so manage the explosion that lives be not wantonly lost. We must clear the chips away as our work advances. ”

“ The survivors of the people scattered over the country—leaderless, lawless, foodless, like sheep without a shepherd—the thousands who had fled by sea, would begin to return; the pulse of life, growing stronger and stronger, would beat again in the empty streets and pour across the vacant squares. Whatever destruction was done, the hand of the destroyer was stayed. ”

“ Suddenly there was a terrific explosion and houses, fences, trees, pavement stones, and all things on earth were hurled high into the air to come back a mass of ruins such as man never before had seen. ”

“ Sometimes where new ground is broken the spade turns up the long-buried dead, ghastly relics of former fights, and on all sides the surface of the earth is ploughed and furrowed by fragments of shell and bombs and distorted by mines. ”

“ One spark, lighting on a grain of gunpowder, scattered on the floor, might communicate with the rest, make it all explode, and spread destruction everywhere. Think in what fearful peril these reckless men had placed, not only themselves, but the whole town, and the army. ”

“ Flashes of fire, the metallic crack of high explosives, the awful explosions that dug holes fifteen and twenty feet in diameter, the utter and complete pandemonium and the stench of hell, your friends blown to bits, the pieces dropping near—even striking you. ”

“ Every drop of the molten liquid bored a hole through the flesh to the bone. At the same moment enormous blocks of stone and masses of sand rolled, rapid and irresistible, down the slope of the breach, overthrowing, breaking, crushing, smashing whatever stood in their way. Joined to this murderous defense was the frightfully effective fire of our arquebusiers, who shot unerringly, at close range, themselves safe, upon a foe in disorder. And yet, however decimated and broken, the royalists stuck to the assault until they finally reached the circumvallation. ”

“ Everywhere the traces of frenzied devastation grinned, blackened remains of a wilderness of wires, beams, sacks, broken tools, a disorder that took one's breath away and made one dizzy—all steeped in the suffocating stench of combustion, powder smoke, and the pungent, stinging breath of the ecrasite shells. ”

“ On all sides houses were on fire, and the falling beams and walls, the bursting flames, the showers of descending sparks, and the bursting shrapnels killing friend and foe alike, created an indescribable jumble. ”

“ Now commenced a scene to which nothing I ever before conceived of war could in any degree compare: the whole ground, covered with combustibles of every deadly and destructive contrivance, was rent open with a crash; the huge masses of masonry bounded into the air like things of no weight; the ringing clangor of the iron howitzers, the crackling of the fuses, the blazing splinters, the shouts of defiance, the more than savage yell of those in whose ranks alone the dead and the dying were numbered, made up a mass of sights and sounds almost maddening with their excitement. ”

“ As the impatient and sluggish breathing of the Destroyer drew near, with a sound as of Earthquake and Pestilence laboring afar off, there appeared upon the outermost verge of the scaffold, near the fortress, a man of a simple and majestic presence, wearing no symbol of power, no badge of authority, before whom the multitude gave way with headlong precipitation, as though but to touch the hem of his garment were death itself, or something yet worse than death. ”

“ It was otherwise with my antagonists: the last that had fallen now ceased to groan: their huge limbs, inured to combat and war-worn, were useless to their own defence, and to the injury of others.
The destruction that I witnessed was vast—Three beings, full of energy and heroism, endowed with minds strenuous and lofty, poured out their lives before me: I was the instrument of their destruction—this scene of carnage and blood was laid by me ”

“ Let us then bring ruin on the rest of men who adore our Destroyer. Well do I recollect the time when ye caused them, their armies and their cities, to be consumed in horrible combustion, yea and caused nigh all the dwellers on the earth to fall through the whelming waters into this fire. ”

“ Destroying, as I look at it, was the weapon God give us so that we could eat and drink and create the world in peace, but we got some mixed up during getting born and we got to believing that destruction was a part of the process. ”

“ The action of this fire, and the force of its explosion, is so violent, that it produces by its re-action, succussions which shake the earth, agitate the sea, overthrow mountains, and destroy the most solid towers and edifices, even to very considerable distances. ”

“ Destruction clamors at your palace gates, and the enemy that cometh upon you unaware is an enemy that none shall vanquish or subdue, not even they who are the mightiest among the mighty. Blood stains the earth and the sky. ”

“ In all these sections the destructive effects of war became manifest in robbery, burnings, the slaughtering and driving away of live stock of all kinds, the plundering of homes with the abuse and humiliation of the inmates by an unrestrained soldiery which bespoke the awful verdict that war is relentless and cruel wherever its effects are felt, and that the path of strife and bloodshed ever leads to destruction and death. ”

“ And the destroyers themselves sinking in the chaos of the ruins, see their wicked work and cry out, 'Horrible!' They rush hither and thither and whine, 'Where is God?' while they themselves have killed Him. ”

“ But in negation, as in fire, there is a destructive power, and how to keep it in bounds, how to tell it where to stop, when that which it must destroy, and that which it must spare are often inseparably welded together? ”

“ We are destructive, or rather, accurately speaking, we should like to be destructive--only we aren't. That was a bad miss of mine. But if we like to destroy, you women love to annex. Witness that pile of seaweed and shells beside you. ”

“ A horrible melange of timbers, rocks, guns and mutilated bodies of men, women and children were hurled into the air through this storm cloud of war, and fell in hideous ruin alike upon the besiegers and the besieged. ”

“ Some, however, losing all hope of escape, piled together a heap of mats, bedding, and other combustibles, and, kindling them with their torches, threw themselves into the flames, intending in this way to set fire to the building, and to perish in one general conflagration with their murderers. ”

“ There being two concurrent causes of the damage,-the explosion of the detonators, and the inflow of the water,-without any appreciable interval of time, or any possibility of distinguishing the amount of damage done by each, the explosion, as the cause which set the water in motion, and gave it its efficiency for harm at the time of the disaster, must be regarded as the predominant cause. ”

“ In the first rush toward the pile an explosion snuffed out the lives of thirty or forty of the men, knocking the rest of us off our feet like so many nine-pins, besides killing several of the horses on the road, and to add to the already indescribable chaos, several of the horses stampeded, racing blindly into barbed-wire entanglements and adding to the general destruction. ”

“ What pity that such destructive brutality should exist in a country so particularly favoured by Nature, and so capable of improvement in the highest degree; whilst, in every other part of the world, it is unknown, almost unheard of! ”

“ These, these with all their wealth, the various stores Of luxury and commerce, to the flames Abandon'd, sink an undefended prey, Swelling the general wreck; unheeded sink By their possessors, flying for their lives: Cries, groans, laments, on every side resound.
[Pg 84] Sudden a magazine of nitrous grain Bursts in a blazing column to the clouds; The dread explosion shakes the solid ground, And through the skies in lengthening thunder rolls: Driven by the furious overwhelming blast To distance round, the burning fragments fall On every side ”

“ Machinery, forges, mortars, and cannon balls, strewn around, remind us of forging thunderbolts, as well as of combat with, and victory over, the giant forces of nature, and making them subservient to human will and purposes. ”

“ Among houses of this sort, when a fire takes place, great and rapid destruction is inevitable, and the only way of saving any portion of them from its fury is by throwing down all those in the direction of its advance. ”

“ The destruction of the enemy, in modern war, and, indeed, modern war itself, are means to obtain that object of the belligerent which lies beyond the war.
Unnecessary or revengeful destruction of life, is not lawful. ”

“ There is great increase in the number, variety, and potential energy of explosives, and they are causing a startling number of disasters; and these involve not only the proprietors who have the control, and the hands who do the work of the magazine, mine, quarry, factory, steam-ship, locomotive, in which the explosion occurs, but also the general public—by-standers, persons walking, riding, or lodging near, passengers by train or steamboat, carriers or purchasers of dangerous goods improperly packed, and many others. ”

“ They must squeeze through it. They were crushed and pinioned in that prison of steel, and mightily they tried to burst it. No! there was only that orifice; they must pass through it. Then with that great force behind them, tortured, maddened, desperate, the waters crashed through the shard of steel, to serve the will of Man.
The man stood by his water-gun and from its nozzle, the gleaming terror leapt. ”