Prime Ministers and Some Others: A Book of Reminiscences

by George William Erskine Russell

III

INDURATION

Though my heading is as old as Chaucer, it has, I must admit, a Johnsonian sound. Its sense is conveyed in the title of an excellent book on suffering called Lest We Grow Hard, and this is a very real peril against which it behoves everyone

"Who makes his moral being his prime care"

to be sedulously on his guard. During the last four years we have been, in a very special way and degree, exposed to it; and we ought to be thankful that, as a nation, we seem to have escaped. The constant contemplation, even with the mental eye, of bloodshed and torture, has a strong tendency to harden the heart; and a peculiar grace was needed to keep alive in us that sympathy with suffering, that passion of mercy, which is the characteristic virtue of regenerate humanity. I speak not only of human suffering. Animals, it has been said, may have no rights, but they have many wrongs, and among those wrongs are the tortures which war inflicts. The suffering of all sentient nature appeals alike to humanitarian sympathy.

It has always seemed to me a signal instance of Wordsworth's penetrating thought "on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life," that he assigned to this virtue a dominant place in the Character of the Happy Warrior—

"Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!
Turns his necessity to glorious gain";

and who, "as more exposed" than others "to suffering and distress," is

"Hence, also, more alive to tenderness."

This tribute to the moral nature of the Warrior, whether his warfare be on land or on sea or in the air, is as true to-day as when Wordsworth paid it. The brutal and senseless cry for "reprisals" which of late has risen from some tainted spots of the Body Politic will wake no response unless it be an exclamation of disgust from soldiers and sailors and airmen. Of course, everyone knows that there is a sense in which reprisals are a necessary part of warfare. Generation after generation our forefathers fought bow to bow and sword to sword and gun to gun against equally armed and well-matched foes; this was reprisal, or, if you prefer, retaliation. And when, in more recent times, the devilish ingenuity of science invented poisonous gas, there was nothing unmanly or unchivalrous in retorting on our German enemies with the hideous weapon which they had first employed.

But this is not the kind of reprisal which indurated orators demand. They contend that because the Germans kill innocent civilians, and women, and little children in English streets, Englishmen are to commit the same foul deeds in Germany. "It is hard," says the Church Times, "to say whether futility or immorality is the more striking characteristic of the present clamour for reprisals in the matter of air-raids.... Mr. Joynson Hicks would 'lay a German town in ashes after every raid on London,' and he is not much worse than others who scream in the same key." Nay, he is better than many of them. The people who use this language are not the men of action. They belong to a sedentary and neurotic class, who, lacking alike courage and mercy, gloat over the notion of torture inflicted on the innocent and the helpless.

A German baby is as innocent as an English baby, a German mother is as helpless as an English mother; and our stay-at-home heroes, safely ensconced in pulpits or editorial chairs, shrilly proclaim that they must be bombed by English airmen. What a function to impose on a band of fighters, peculiarly chivalrous and humane!

I refer to the pulpit because one gross and disgusting instance of clerical ferocity has lately been reported. A raving clergyman has been insolently parodying the Gospel which he has sworn to preach. Some of the newspapers commended his courage; and we do not know whether his congregation quitted the church or his Bishop rebuked him. Both results are possible, and I sincerely hope that the latter is true. The established and endowed teachers of religion have not always used their influence on the side of mercy; but on the question of reprisals I have observed with thankfulness that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London have spoken on the right side, and have spoken with energy and decision. They, at any rate, have escaped the peril of induration, and in that respect they are at one with the great mass of decent citizens.

I am no advocate of a mawkish lenity. When our soldiers and sailors and airmen meet our armed foes on equal terms, my prayers go with them; and the harder they strike, the better I am pleased. When a man or woman has committed a cold-blooded murder and has escaped the just penalty of the crime, I loathe the political intrigue which sets him or her free. Heavy punishment for savage deeds, remorseless fighting till victory is ours—these surely should be guiding principles in peace and war; and to hold them is no proof that one has suffered the process of induration.

Here I am not ashamed to make common cause with the stout old Puritan in Peveril of the Peak: "To forgive our human wrongs is Christian-like and commendable; but we have no commission to forgive those which have been done to the cause of religion and of liberty; we have no right to grant immunity or to shake hands with those who have poured forth the blood of our brethren."

But let us keep our vengeance for those who by their own actions have justly incurred it. The very intensity of our desire to punish the wrong-doer should be the measure of our unwillingness to inflict torture on the helpless and the innocent. "Lest we grow hard"—it should be our daily dread. "A black character, a womanish character, a stubborn character: bestial, childish, stupid, scurrilous, tyrannical." A pagan, who had observed such a character in its working, prayed to be preserved from it. Christians of the twentieth century must not sink below the moral level of Marcus Aurelius.