Jan Egeland was appalled. Returning from Yemen this week, the European diplomat said he was “shocked to the bones.” The nation is on the brink of famine, but that famine is the work of men, not nature. War is the cause.

War “is all hell,” Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman said during the American Civil War – an opinion echoed through history. But there are signs of a growing rebellion against simply accepting that mind-set. Aid agencies are responding quicker and more innovatively than ever to looming war-caused famines in Yemen and elsewhere, as the Monitor’s Peter Ford has reported. They are not accepting the collateral tragedy of war as inevitable. Western militaries, too, are taking unprecedented steps to avoid civilian casualties – warplanes have returned from bombing runs without having dropped a bomb.

The atrocities of war are not to be understated. But nor are they to be surrendered to without a fight from our own conscience and effort.