It is interesting that Mormon was reluctant to tell us everything about the horrible experiences during these last battles. They were, to him, unspeakably sad, awful events. In Mormon 4:11 we read, “It is impossible for the tongue to describe, or for man to write a perfect description of the horrible scene of the blood and carnage which was among the people, both of the Nephites and the Lamanites.”
There are a few other places in which Mormon made a similar plea for his readers to understand how bad it was, though he said it was impossible for him to describe. He did not go into detail. Is that something that modern readers could learn? If they were to produce this installment of the Nephite history in a feature-length film, the battle scene would likely go on for fifteen or twenty minutes. Mormon would not have been happy with that. His reluctance was in keeping with his lifestyle. He was surrounded by wickedness and slaughter all his life, and yet he was visited by the Savior and he was an apostle, a very sensitive person, the leader of the church, and a prophet, so his reluctance to describe the evils was in keeping with his role and life.
When one considers the great man that produced this whole book, one can appreciate what he had and had not told us about many other events. When he reported the great battles in the Book of Alma, he did not really dwell on the carnage. He said, in modern terms, “There were a lot of them and they threw them in the river.” That is about as much as he wanted to say about that. He had sensitivity about not wanting to give more time and attention to such terrible things than he absolutely had to.
The most graphic description of the atrocities is not in Mormon’s public writings in Mormon 4. It is in his letter, in Moroni 9:8–9. After Mormon had lived with the experience for some time, and it was a little in the past, he wanted people to know how bad it really had become. He wanted them to know that God was no longer justified in standing by these people; then he was willing to put this into the record so that it was available. However, when Mormon wrote these words, he did not intend them for public consumption. He was writing a letter to Moroni who was one of his Generals and his son. This record, which speaks of such atrocities as eating the flesh of others, can be compared to classified information. But it became declassified, in Moroni 9:8–9.
It happened in Mormon’s time, and it happened when Jerusalem was attacked by the Romans and they would not let anybody in or out of the city of Jerusalem. Josephus recorded that they had nothing at all to eat, so they started eating their children. It has happened in South Sudan more recently. According to CNN, “Forced cannibalism, gang rapes, and death by burning are among the atrocities marking the brutal civil war taking place in South Sudan, according to an African Union (AU) report.” The report describes heart-wrenching events too ugly to detail, and assures the reader that the details of Mormon’s experiences are not fantasy and were thankfully under-reported.
Susannah Cullinane, “Cannibalism, gang rapes -- the brutal toll of the South Sudan conflict,” CNN (October 29, 2015).