Killing for Sport: Essays by Various Writers

by Unknown

APPENDIX

I
SPORT AS A TRAINING FOR WAR

It is often said, in attempted justification of “sport,” that it is the best training for war. This is true only in the sense that as far as concerns the creation and the perpetuation of a certain aggressive spirit, war and sport are certainly kindred pastimes with a good deal in common. They both date from a prehistoric period when man

“Butted his rough brother-brute

For lust or lusty blood or provender,”

and both, having been prolonged into an age which ought to have left them far behind with other antiquated barbarisms, are now defended by the same moral and economic fallacies, as being, in the first place, part of the great “struggle for existence,” “survival of the fittest,” and so forth, and, secondly, as “good for trade.” Good for trade they both are, in the sense that they help the few to snatch a temporary profit at the expense of the many; and as for the survival of the fittest, if you are determined to wrest that theory from its true meaning, it may be made to cover both war and sport at a stretch. As Robert Buchanan said:

“Under the fostering wing of Imperialism, brute force is developing more and more into a political science. There is no excess of rapacity, no extreme of selfishness, no indifference to the rights of the weak and helpless, which Christian materialism is not ready to justify. The Englishman, both as soldier and colonist, is a typical sportsmen; he seizes his prey wherever he finds it with the hunter’s privilege. He is lost in amazement when men speak of the rights of inferior races, just as the sportsman at home is lost in amazement when we talk of the rights of the lower orders. Here, as yonder, he is kindly, blatant, good-humoured, aggressive, selfish, and fundamentally savage.”

We may take it for granted that, in the long run, as we treat our fellow-beings, “the animals,” so shall we treat our fellow-men. In spite of all the barriers and divisions that prejudice and superstition have so industriously heaped up between the human and the non-human, the fact remains that the lower animals hold their lives by the same tenure as men do, and that there is no essential difference between the killing of one race and of the other. The tiger that lurks in all of us will not easily be tamed, so long as the deliberate murder of harmless creatures for “sport” is a recognised amusement in every “civilised” country. Once open your eyes to the kinship that links all sentient life, and you will see very clearly the relation that subsists between the sportsman and the soldier.

We recall an incident related some years ago at a Humanitarian League meeting, where the craze for “big-game” shooting was being discussed. Everyone knows how the possessors of such “trophies” as the heads and horns of “big game” love to decorate their houses with these treasured mementoes of the chase. It had been the fortune—good or bad—of the narrator of the story to visit a house which was not only beautified in this way, but also contained a human head that had been sent home by a member of a certain African expedition and “preserved” by the skill of the taxidermist. When the owner of the head—the second owner—invited the humanitarian visitor to see the trophy, it was with some trepidation that he acquiesced. But when, after passing up a staircase between walls literally plastered with portions of the carcases of elephant, rhinoceros, antelope, etc., he came to a landing where, under a glass case, stood the head of a pleasant-looking young negro, he felt no special repugnance at the sight. It was simply a part—and, as it seemed, not especially dreadful or loathsome part—of the surrounding dead-house; and he understood how mankind itself is nothing more or less than “big game” to our soldier-sportsmen, when they find themselves in some conveniently remote region where the restrictions of morality are unknown. The absolute difference between human and non-human is a fiction which will not bear the test either of fearless thought in the study or of rough experience in the wilds.

The temper which makes war still possible in the twentieth century is that which is kept alive and fostered in so-called times of peace by the practice, among other practices (for we do not, of course, assert that sport is the only accessory to war), of doing to death thousands upon thousands of helpless animals for purposes of mere recreation. Peace advocates who declaim against the infamies of war, without taking note of the kindred infamies of sport, have, to say the least of it, not looked very deeply into the subject of their propaganda;[31] and precisely the same holds good of those “lovers of animals” who are horrified at the idea of running a fox to death, but are ready to accept the flimsiest of flimsy sophisms as an excuse for going to war. Sport is, in truth, a form of war, and war is a form of sport; and those who defend such institutions as the Eton Beagles, on the ground that the schoolboys who indulge in them are thereby trained to be the future stalwarts of Imperialism, are fully justified in their contention—provided only that they look the facts of war and of Imperialism in the face. The Etonians who, in the eighteenth century, used to beat rams to death with clubs, and who now break up hares as a half-holiday pastime, have always furnished a large contingent of officers to the British Army. Need we wonder that wars flourish without regard to morality or justice?

But when we turn to the assertion that the practice of sport is, actually, the best training for war, we find it to be contradicted by facts. On this point we cannot do better than quote from a letter addressed to the Humanitarian by Mr. R. B. Cunninghame-Graham:

“The rise of Japan and the fighting qualities of the Japanese have shaken sportsmen from their ‘sport-the-image-of-war’ position. It is well known that not only are the majority of Japanese vegetarians, but that such a thing as a sportsman is unknown amongst them. Yet, without wishing to disparage the prowess of European soldiers, how many ‘sportsmen’ would wager much money on the chances of a thousand picked Europeans if opposed to a thousand Japanese soldiers in an open plain with no weapons but swords?

“The Boer War, and the miserable figure cut by our officers in comparison with the Boer officers in both shooting and riding, disposed conclusively of the ‘sport-the-preparation-for-war’ argument, so dear to sportsmen. In fact, ‘sport’ as understood in England cannot prepare men for war, even if they ride to hounds three days a week, shoot the other three, and read the Pink Un on Sunday. English sport and war are different in their essence, and one has no analogy to the other.

“In the one case men rise from a comfortable bed, bathe, and breakfast, and even if they are exposed to weather during the day, return at night to a well-cooked dinner and comfortable bed. The horses they ride are valuable, highly-trained animals, who are expected to put out their full strength for at most two or three hours, and are perhaps not required again for two or three days, or even expected to be required. The shooting is done under the same conditions, and though requiring skill (as does the riding in fox-hunting), is not of a nature to be useful in war.

“In neither case does the ‘diversion’ conduce to the self-denying or abstemious habits so essential in war. Of course, I do not mean that sportsmen are of necessity of intemperate habits, but in war the conditions are different from those of sport. In the latter case the soldier rises, perhaps from a night of rain round a camp-fire, gets, without breakfast, on his half-starving horse, and jogs along all day at a footspace, to sleep, supposing there is no fighting and he has not been killed, once more by a camp-fire, perhaps again in rain, or in a driving wind.

“Every condition under which the sportsman plays is different from those under which the soldier works. As in the Roman times regiments of gladiators proved the most useless at the front, so I believe a regiment all composed of sportsmen would make a miserable show before a thousand quite unsporting Japanese.”

To the same effect is the opinion of Sir H. H. Johnston, as expressed in an article in the Nineteenth Century of September, 1913.

“One is told that fox-hunting is a splendid school for riders, the making of our cavalry, etc. Rubbish! Very few of our great cavalry officers have been fox-hunters, or willing fox-hunters, and practically none of the troopers. A large proportion of our mounted soldiers are recruited from townsmen who never learned to ride until they entered the riding-school. The Boers were admittedly the cunningest, most enduring riders recent warfare has known, but they, like their cousins of the Wild West, would probably show themselves duffers in the hunting-field; at any rate, they never practised in this school of steeplechasing. The last thing I desire to do is to undervalue riding as an exercise, an accomplishment, a necessary art in warfare, a school for teaching suppleness, coolness, and courage. But the fox is not a necessary ingredient in the curriculum.”

We conclude, then, that Sport, considered as a school for War, is doubly to be condemned, inasmuch as, while it breeds the aggressive and cruel spirit of militarism, it does not furnish that practical military training which is essential to successful warfare. Sport may make a man a savage; it does not make him a soldier.