“Yeah, I know about that,” Carl said. “That image has been around a long time.”

“That’s right,” Charley said. “In fact, I believe strongly that the terrible ride of the Four Horsemen was fulfilled during the twentieth century. It’s not going to happen in the future because it has already happened.”

“Is that right?” Dave Busby asked.

“That’s the way I see it, Dave,” Charley said. “But if that sounds odd to you, just stop and think what all has happened during the past hundred years. Wars, one right after the other, along with revolutions, disasters, and terrors of every kind. More than fifteen million people died in World War One. Before that, the Muslim Turks slaughtered practically the entire population of Armenian Christians in Eastern Europe.”

“Gosh, that’s right,” said Dave. “I read somewhere that the Bolsheviks wiped out at least forty million people during the Russian Revolution, between 1917 and about 1940.”

“In China after the end of World War Two,” Charley said, “Mao Tse-tung butchered sixty million more in his revolution.”

“That’s over a hundred million people!” Lori exclaimed. “You’re right, Charley. That’s hard to believe, isn’t it?”

“Hard to believe, Lori, but that wasn’t the end of it. World War Two saw the killing rise to new heights. The combined death toll in Europe and Asia was at least fifty million people from just that one war, and that includes both soldiers and civilians. On top of that, Adolf Hitler was a demon-possessed madman who ordered the execution of at least six million innocent Jews, along with another million non-Jews, Christians, Poles, and others. And even before Hitler, upwards of a million people lost their lives in the Spanish Civil War.”

Carl stirred restlessly in his seat. “Charley, is that true? The last century was the worst in history? I mean, worse even than Rome or Greece or the Dark Ages?”

“It’s a simple matter of technology, Carl. It would have been impossible to kill so many people at any other time in history. The Romans had swords. They didn’t have guns or bombs. It took two thousand years of science to give mankind the expertise to wipe out millions of people in such a short period of time.”

“Doesn’t say a lot for technology, does it?” Dave added.

“Just think what happened during the second half of the twentieth century,” Charley said. “We lost hundreds of thousands of lives in Korea, then another million in Vietnam. How about revolution and famine in Nigeria and Ethiopia, Somalia, Angola, Mozambique, Sudan, and Rwanda, as well as Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Bosnia? By all reports those revolutions and famines cost from fifteen to twenty million lives. If you add all those numbers together—and I don’t even want to try—it becomes readily apparent that the death and misery of the last century was—well, incalculable.”

As Charley paused to sip his coffee, Dave said, “Charley, you paint a pretty gruesome picture, but you haven’t mentioned the Middle East. There were something like three separate Arab-Israeli wars, weren’t there? And I know that hundreds of thousands of people had to have died there. Not to mention hundreds of thousands more in Lebanon, Syria, and the Persian Gulf War. In some college class back there, I learned that a million or more died in the Iran-Iraq war. So I hear what you’re saying. That was one bloody century.”