THE WAR
This address, which aroused much criticism in the press, is compiled from a newspaper report and some notes found among Professor Bateman's papers. It is probably incomplete, but is included because of the interest attaching to it.
The address was delivered before the University Y.M.C.A. on Sunday, 25 October 1914, on the eve of the departure of Professor Bateman's battalion. This was in the early days of the war, before the magnitude of the struggle had been generally realized, and there were those who had tried to persuade Professor Bateman that his higher duty lay at home. His address was prompted in part by this circumstance, and was a vindication of his enlisting. It was also prompted by a colleague's address from the same platform contrasting Samuel, who "hewed Agag in pieces," with Christ, Who commanded Peter to "put up the sword"—a plea for the peaceful settlement of personal and national disputes. Professor Bateman had for several years declined to address the University Y.M.C.A., because he had never before felt that he had a message for them.
So, although there is here much of the young man glorying in his strength and rejoicing to run the race, the address was not penned without thought and consideration.
We hear much, perhaps too much, at the present time of the horrors of war; I wish to-day to speak to you of its blessings. Far be it from me to minimize the dark side of war. Only those who have actually experienced warfare can form an adequate idea of the horrors of campaigns and battlefields. But I wish to impress on you to-day the fact that war has compensations, and that it is by no means an unmitigated evil.
The Power Who manifests Himself to us in the phenomena of this Universe has apparently decreed that war should be the supreme test of both the nation and the individual. Biologically, struggle and self-sacrifice by one generation on behalf of the next are the conditions of the perpetuation of a species. A similar law of competition seems to hold for those aggregates of men which we call nations. History teaches that once a nation ceases to struggle or to be prepared to struggle for its existence, once it loses its military spirit and the willingness to fight to the death, if need be, for its national honour, its greatness invariably declines, and its growth ceases.
Of course, competition among nations may be carried on by other means than by war. Commercial rivalry, diplomatic rivalry, artistic rivalry, are all important means of progress, but war is the one supreme, the only entirely adequate test of a nation's spiritual quality.
Readiness for war is a token of national righteousness. In the sense in which I use the words, readiness for war does not mean a national spirit of militarism and aggressiveness, the spirit which has so often proved the downfall of great military powers. It is a readiness which is the result of a clean and vigorous national life during times of peace; a readiness which springs not so much from direct military training as from a high national idea of physical and mental fitness. The ideal soldier is not he who has been drilled into a military machine in times of peace, but he who is physically and mentally fit to become an efficient soldier, if need be, on short notice in time of war.
Self-sacrifice, self-denial, temperance, hardihood, discipline, obedience, order, method, organizing power, intelligence, purity of public life, chastity, industry, resolution are some only of the national and individual attributes which go towards producing the efficiency of modern armaments.
The broad rule which one deduces from a general survey of the history of human progress—a rule to which, no doubt, some exceptions can be found—is that the failure of nations to meet the test of war has always been the result of the decay of national morality, and that success in war has been an indication of national virtue. Right has not, indeed, always been might, but right has always tended to create might.
Rome conquered Greece because her sons were hardier, stronger, and more imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice; Rome herself, centuries later, fell a victim to the inroads of the Goths because of the corruption of her national virtue and the decay of her military spirit through self-indulgence and immorality. The refined sensuality of the Roman could not withstand the rude virtue of the barbarian. "And generally," to quote Harold Wyatt, "history has repeatedly proved that efficiency in war, or for war, is God's test of a nation's soul. By that test it stands, or by that test it falls. This is the ethical content of competition. This is the determining factor of human history. This is the justification of war."
The terrible punishment provided by war for national depravity has been, perhaps, the chief stimulus in the progress of mankind. Behind the horror and havoc of the field of battle, therefore, is working a Power which makes for righteousness, and which has ordained that the nation which, from the righteousness of its cause and its fitness to defend that cause, best deserves the victory, shall win it.
Such is apparently the law of human progress, and we must accept it as we accept other seemingly unpleasant facts of our present existence; as we accept, for example, the fact of death. It is only by death that life is possible; it is only by struggle and self-sacrifice that national progress is possible.
Do not, therefore, be lulled into a sense of false security by the talk of universal peace, or by assertions that the present war must be the last in human history; but determine that, should you have the opportunity, you will do your part to make the nation to which you belong fit for its supreme test, the test of war. If you do not, you are a traitor to the past generations who won by struggle and self-sacrifice the heritage which you now enjoy, and to the future generations, who demand that you shall pass on that heritage, not diminished, but increased.
But take care that you do not mistake a national spirit of greed and aggressiveness for virtue. Remember Kipling's warning that military force should be used only for the defence or enforcement of just rights or for those which you truly and firmly believe to be just.
The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart;
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust
And, guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
National greed and aggressiveness must, sooner or later, bring their own punishment.
Now let us look at war from the standpoint of the individual. The sacrifice of individual lives is for many men the most prominent fact of war. They look upon a field of battle, and are filled with dismay at the sight of heaped-up carnage and garments rolled in blood, but fail to find there the radiance of high endeavour and the glow of great achievement. Like Carlyle, in his famous reductio ad absurdum of war in the Sartor, they see only the physical side of war, and neglect its ethical and spiritual content. Of course, this is a piece of perversity on Carlyle's part.
What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net-purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain "Natural Enemies" of the French, there are successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men: Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them: she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red; and shipped away, at the public charges, some two-thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain; and fed there till wanted. And now to that same spot, in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending: till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition: and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word "Fire!" is given: and they blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk useful craftsmen the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even, unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their Governors had fallen-out; and instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot. Alas, so it is in Deutschland, and hitherto in all other lands; still as of old, "what devilry soever Kings do, the Greeks must pay the piper!" In that fiction of the English Smollett, it is true, the final Cessation of War is perhaps prophetically shadowed forth; where the two Natural Enemies, in person, take each a Tobacco-pipe, filled with Brimstone; light the same, and smoke in one another's faces, till the weaker gives in: but from such predicted Peace-Era, what blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!
But what if these men of Dumdrudge are not blockheads at all, but high-souled, clear-sighted men? What if they do not go to the war because their rulers tell them to, but because they believe in the justice of their cause, and consider it not only a duty but a privilege to lay down their lives, if necessary, to maintain it?
Tennyson gets a nearer view of the truth in Maud, when he represents war as the purifier which purges the corruption of a too-long-continued peace, and which saves nation and individual alike from sloth and selfishness. Peace under a just and beneficent government is surely a blessing of the first magnitude. But those who enjoy it, and surely this applies to us, must never forget at what price that blessing was bought and at what price it must be maintained. They must not grow petty and self-indulgent, and forget that they possess a heritage won for them by the sacrifice of others. Is it not far better that they should feel a thrill of patriotism at the rude touch of war, and die striking a blow for freedom, than that they should live to a dishonoured old age, seeking beggarly gain? Let us have less talk of the horrors of war and more talk of its blessings.
Most of those who speak of "the horrors of war" fail to recognize that it is those horrors which give war its great, its inestimable value. It would, no doubt, be very pleasant if war could be conducted in a polite and gentlemanly way, if it could be arranged that nobody would get killed, and that wounds and bloodshed would be reduced to a minimum. If that were so, we could all play at the game. But where would be our heroes, our hearts of triple steel? Where would be their victories over death and the fear of death, and their leading of captivity captive? We could then, like Falstaff, fill up our armies with "toasts-and-butter, with hearts in their bellies no bigger than pins' heads," and nobody would be a jot the worse. But war robbed of its terror would be war without glory, and one of the greatest and grandest of experiences which Destiny allows to man would no longer be possible. To endure gladly the most severe labour and hardship, to grapple with a mortal foe in deadly strife, a strife without mercy and without remorse, to pass through Hell unterrified, to wrest one's life by main force from the very jaws of death, and to do all this, not for pay, but for one's country, this is, perhaps, the very climax of human endeavour.
And what of the many who do not win through, but must leave their bodies upon the field of battle? We may not agree with Horace that such a death is "sweet and becoming," but surely it is sweeter and more becoming than the majority of deaths which men are called on to endure. Who would not rather die in the fullness of strength, with the shout of battle upon his lips, than succumb to the attacks of some disease which degrades the body and unhinges the mind, and pass away at last from a fleshly house that is no longer fit for the soul to inhabit, wringing the hearts of the bystanders with incoherent babblings?
The death roll of war, still far from complete, reaches back into the unfathomable past which lies far beyond the ken of man. The immensity of that death roll is dreadful to contemplate. But a past unstained by the blood of human strife would be more dreadful still. No doubt there would be to-day more people living in the world, but those high virtues which are realized to the full in war and war alone—courage and self-sacrifice—would be dead beyond all hope of resurrection. It was war which gave birth to the ideals of chivalry and honour; it is war which keeps those ideals alive in an age of sordid commercialism. It is the possibility of war, however remotely realized, which makes our young men keep their bodies clean and strong, and their souls free from that lowest form of selfishness, the selfishness of Parolles, which puts life before honour, which says:
"Let me live, sir, in a dungeon, in the stocks, or anywhere, so I may live."
When the more dangerous of lower animals have been tamed or exterminated, when locomotion by land, air, and sea has become safe and easy, when—greatest blessing of all—war has ceased to exist, then surely we shall see the return of the Golden Age. Perhaps so, but it will be a Golden Age enjoyed by a spineless and emasculated race of beings, who have forgotten the meaning of the words courage, honour, and self-sacrifice.