War Material
THOUGHTS FROM THE FRONT
Is not to enter war to enter an arena of great possibilities, wherein a great game may be played, or a bad game? but, in any case, it is so closely and seriously fraught with terrible issues that it bares the character of men to the very bone. And there are many characters—not one character, but a thousand characters; some great, some small, some active, some dormant, but out of all such elements it is a wise man’s wish to weld a universal organisation of strength; and an ignorant man’s folly to look at no other ambition but his own.
And therein lie the factors of all troubles of organisation, and the tremendous internal difficulties of army or national construction. One man—or body of men—may plan to build well, but can only succeed if the material is good: if the material is bad, there results failure, with credit neither to the builder nor the material. And human character is material—the most delicate material great builders may know and direct, in war, or commerce—just so many human beings prone to be directed so far, and for the rest to rise or fall, in the world’s estimate, as our characters decide. But out of this mass of human character, out of these manifold qualities of a multitude, is formed the final whole which goes to mark the characteristics of an era of history, and a national greatness or littleness.
Like unto axe-men felling trees in a forest is the destructive hand of warfare. The land is depopulated of its finest timber, and that which will take a lifetime to replace.
Wholesale destruction reaches far beyond the actual crime of killing. It breaks the evolution of growth, retards or destroys the life-history of a species, and leaves, through the age it occurs in, an irreplaceable blank in the population and wealth of a country.
This is not the first war, nor has anyone in the present authority to state that it is the last. If war and the felling of our forests must be, it is well to cling stoutly to the old features of the race and cultivate, in place of the fallen giants, clean-limbed sturdy saplings of full-worthy quality to serve the generations of the future.
It will concern us greatly in the future to cultivate a race strong enough to endure the buffeting of great elements, and true and straight as the best of the race of the past. For the country will want a race that is fine-grained and sure-rooted, and fit to stand up against the stress of the many storms of a restless world’s brewing.
How little we are, we pawns of a universe: how far-reaching is war in the destruction of our plans! At the beginning of life it has picked us up in its whirlwind, from every stage of life, and left our poor ambitious castles in the air, tiny long-forgotten dust-heaps on the plain.
And yet we laugh and hide our sorrow, and go on, on our new-found task, our future now no farther ahead than we can see, and trusting in God that all will come right in the end.
We learn at the front and at home that nothing else matters, that nothing really counts in the greatness of a nation but clean, unshaken, sacrificing purpose, and ceaseless industry: worthless are all our little deceits and vanities, and greed of personal gain.
That nation will find religion and prosperity which holds on to the deeper lessons of war, long after war is over. To forget those lessons will be to sin against God and conscience, and the great silent grave-yard of our dead, who died that their nation might live.
NEED OF INDUSTRY
Industry will greatly concern us after the war. On that will our nation depend for its solid existence hereafter, as it does to-day, on the activities of our war-worn, long-enduring men-at-arms. We should be glad that there will be much to do, for work is a fine thing. It is sincere in its object—it accomplishes, and it satisfies the strongest trait in our character: that wish of all men to establish a stable place of existence where they can support an acknowledged standing of manhood.
Had we not to provide for ourselves, the chief care of our lives would be taken away from us. In idleness we would become brainless and degenerate.
Nature has decreed her purposeful laws of all existence. Everything that lives must industriously seek to find its means of livelihood, and its means of defence against its enemies. For instance, in wild nature, do not birds and animals without cease spend all their lives providing themselves with food, and defending themselves against storms and their enemies? In similar manner so must we; so must all things.
There are centuries of Time.
The World is very, very old, and a mighty universe in which a man is but an infinitesimal activity of creation. After all, in spite of the breathless, concentrated ambitions of a lifetime, we are a little people and we only live on earth for a very little while. Let us then, above all, make our fireside, and that of our neighbours, as pleasant as we can. For love and beauty have a powerful influence to promote the better religion, the stronger manhood of our race, and it is those intimate characteristics, wisely planted, that may take root and grow, and be everlasting long after we have travelled over the line and are gone.
It is sometimes our misfortune to misunderstand the scene or the life around us. Forgetting our humility, it is often our temperament to find fault, rather than reason, with the picture we view; and fault-finding causes uneasiness, pain, and strife.
Perhaps our first care should be to perfect ourselves, and, next, to harmonise with the endeavours of our neighbours. It would be well to go pleasantly forward to find the best that is in anything—to look for the little gleams of beauty which throw light across most pictures, no matter how dark the background.
IMPULSES OF CHARACTER
Some men, like a giant moth in its full beauty of life when it breaks from its chrysalis cell, fail to accomplish anything before they are lured to the bright lights of the lamps of civilisation. Like an unfortunate moth to a lamp, it is their fate to be inevitably drawn towards the attraction, to seek an elusive something, and a possible happiness. Persistently they damage their manhood and their strength in trying to reach a luminous star within the radiant unattainable circle. Again and again they return to flutter madly to their doom; and have no wish to stay away. Until, at last—unless the will and mind overmaster the weakness, and they go soberly away—the body drops to the darkness, wasted and broken, and lies seriously damaged or dead. Ah, the pity of it!—the sadness! There lies a creature of unknown possibilities come to untimely grief.
Some men have no luck. Why are the strong impulses of a character born in a creature without the one great saving grace of control? It is the mystery of life, and it is impossible to criticise justly the man or the ultimate end. It would be wise and kind to be very generous to all acts and to all characters, since it is, above all else, “Destiny that shapes our ends.” The moth could not damage its wings if the lamps were not there, and alight, and yet for generations they have hung in their places by the custom of our race, if not by the will of our God.
Judge no man hastily or harshly. Know a man long enough and, in most cases, you will know him, in some phase of life, do an act of nobleness.
Environment has a great and often a deciding influence on man’s behaviour; and sometimes it is a man’s misfortune never to have had a chance.
Justice is not so straightforward as it seems. To bring blame home to the true offender, or the true origin of offence, is often a task beyond human breadth of mind and human skill. We attempt, as best we can, what is God’s work—He who sees and knows all things.
It is not always what appears on the surface that really counts; it is when the storms of battle are at their bitterest that the true materials are found out, and the pure metal most praised.
How thoroughly in us is instilled the knowledge of right and wrong! How clearly we know our wickedness when we err! That alone should be sufficient to prove that there is a God and a sound foundation to religion.
WAR’S SCHOOLING
Sleepless night—the bare hard ground an awkward resting-place, and our look-out on the outer edges of outer civilisation. Over on the left of camp a tireless, cheerful youngster, with spirit undaunted, is holding the long, dreary watches through the night. Once he was a dandy-dressed youth of a great city. He has come through a lot since then, he has learned his lesson and his position in a grim world of naked realities. He has risen from nothing to become a man—stripped of the fine clothes of his drifting butterfly days, and aware now of how little they were. For him the war has held more than loyalty to his country, for it held for him, in its own time, and in its own way, the finding of himself.
A boy changed to a man, and the man seeing a world that is not as he built it. He has sighed and fretted for lost dreams, but he knows the battle-ground of Life’s conflict must be in the arena before him, and, headstrong and vigorous, he accepts the challenge against strange weapons and foes, and is of the stuff to prove that he has grown to be a worthy defender of his race.