I.
Probably there have never been before in the whole past of mankind so many people convinced of the dreadfulness of war, nor so large a proportion anxious to end war, to rearrange the world's affairs so that this huge hideousness of hardship, suffering, destruction, and killing that still continues in Europe may never again be repeated.
The present writer is one of this great majority. He wants as far as possible to end war altogether, and contrive things so that when any unavoidable outbreak does occur it may be as little cruel and mischievous as it can be.
But it is one thing to desire a thing and another thing to get it. It does not follow because this aspiration for world-peace is almost universal that it will be realized. There may be faults in ourselves, unsuspected influences within us and without, that may be working to defeat our superficial sentiments. There must be not only a desire for peace, but a will for peace, if peace is to be established forever. If out of a hundred men ninety-nine desire peace and trouble no further, the one man over will arm himself and set up oppression and war again. Peace must be organized and maintained. This present monstrous catastrophe is the outcome of forty-three years of skillful, industrious, systematic world armament. Only by a disarmament as systematic, as skillful, and as devoted may we hope to achieve centuries of peace.
No apology is needed, therefore, for a discussion of the way in which peace may be organized and established out of the settlement of this war. I am going to set out and estimate as carefully as I can the forces that make for a peace organization and the forces that make for war. I am going to do my best to diagnose the war disorder. I want to find out first for my own guidance, and then with a view to my co-operation with other people, what has to be done to prevent the continuation and recrudescence of warfare.
Such an inquiry is manifestly the necessary first stage in any world pacification. So manifestly that, of course, countless others are also setting to work upon it. It is a research. It is a research exactly like a scientific exploration. Each of us will probably get out a lot of truth and a considerable amount of error; the truth will be the same and the errors will confute and disperse each other. But it is clear that there is no simple panacea in this matter, and that only by intentness and persistence shall we disentangle a general conception of the road the peace-desiring multitude must follow.
Now, first be it noted that there is in every one a certain discord with regard to war. Every man is divided against himself. On the whole, most of us want peace. But hardly any one is without a lurking belligerence, a lurking admiration for the vivid impacts, the imaginative appeals of war. I am sitting down to write for the peace of the world, but immediately before I sat down to write I was reading the morning's paper, and particularly of the fight between the Sydney and the Emden at Cocos Island.
I confess to the utmost satisfaction in the account of the smashing blows delivered by the guns of the Australian. There is a sensation of greatness, a beautiful tremendousness, in many of the crude facts of war; they excite in one a kind of vigorous exaltation; we have that destructive streak in us, and it is no good pretending that we have not; the first thing we must do for the peace of the world is to control that. And to control it one can do nothing more effective than to keep in mind the other side of the realities of war.
As my own corrective I have at hand certain letters from a very able woman doctor who returned last week from Calais. Lockjaw, gangrene, men tied with filthy rags and lying bitterly cold in coaly sheds; men unwounded, but so broken by the chill horrors of the Yser trenches as to be near demented—such things make the substance of her picture. One young officer talked to her rather dryly of the operations, of the ruined towns and villages, of the stench of dead men and horses, of the losses and wounds and mutilations among his men, of the list of pals he had lost. "Suddenly he began to cry. He broke down just like an overtaxed child. And he could not stop crying. He cried and cried, and I could do nothing to help him." He was a strong man and a brave man, and to that three months of war had brought him.
And then this again:
There were a fair number of Belgian doctors, but no nurses except the usual untrained French girls, almost no equipment, and no place for clean surgery. We heard of a house containing sixty-one men with no doctor or nurses—several died without having received any medical aid at all. Mrs. —— and I even on the following Wednesday found four men lying on straw in a shop with leg and foot wounds who had not been dressed since Friday and had never been seen by a doctor. In addition there were hundreds and hundreds of wounded who could walk trying to find shelter in some corner, besides the many unwounded French and Belgian soldiers quartered in the town.
As if this inferno of misery were not enough, there were added the refugees! These were not Belgians, as I had imagined, but French. It appears that both English and French armies have to clear the civil population out of the whole fighting area—partly to prevent spying and treachery, (which has been a curse to both armies,) and partly because they would starve. They are sent to Calais, and then by boat to Havre.
That first Sunday evening an endless procession flowed from the station to the quays in the drenching rain. Each family had a perambulator, (a surprisingly handsome one, too,) piled with sticks of bread, a few bundles of goods, and, when we peered inside, a couple of crying babies. There were few young people; mostly it was whimpering, frightened-looking children and wretched, bent old men and women. It seemed too bad to be true; even when they brushed past us in the rain we could not believe that their sodden figures were real. They were dematerialized by misery in some odd way.
Some of them slept in skating rinks, trucks, some in the Amiral Ganteaume. (One's senses could not realize that to the horrors of exile these people had added those of shipwreck next day.) Some certainly stood in the Booking Hall outside our hotel all night through. This sort of thing went on all the week, and was going on when we left.
Nevertheless, I was stirred agreeably by the imagination of the shells smashing the Emden and the men inside the Emden, and when I read the other day that the naval guns had destroyed over 4,000 men in the German trenches about Middlekirche I remarked that we were "doing well." It is only on the whole that we who want to end war hate and condemn war; we are constantly lapsing into fierceness, and if we forget this lurking bellicosity and admiration for hard blows in our own nature then we shall set about the task of making an end to it under hopelessly disabling misconceptions. We shall underrate and misunderstand altogether the very powerful forces that are against pacifist effort.
Let us consider first, then, the forces that are directly opposed to the pacification of the world, the forces that will work openly and definitely for the preservation of war as a human condition. And it has to be remembered that the forces that are for a thing are almost always more unified, more concentrated and effective than the forces that are against it. We who are against war and want to stop it are against it for a great multitude of reasons. There are other things in life that we prefer, and war stops these other things. Some of us want to pursue art, some want to live industrious lives in town or country, some would pursue scientific developments, some want pleasures of this sort or that, some would live lives of religion and kindliness, or religion and austerity.
But we all agree in fixing our minds upon something else than war. And since we fix our minds on other things, war becomes possible and probable through our general inattention. We do not observe it, and meanwhile the people who really care for war and soldiering fix their minds upon it. They scheme how it shall be done, they scheme to bring it about. Then we discover suddenly—as the art and social development, the industry and pleasant living, the cultivation of the civil enterprise of England, France, Germany, and Russia have discovered—that everything must be pushed aside when the war thinkers have decided upon their game. And until we of the pacific majority contrive some satisfactory organization to watch the war-makers we shall never end war, any more than a country can end crime and robbery without a police. Specialist must watch specialist in either case. Mere expressions of a virtuous abhorrence of war will never end war until the crack of doom.
The people who actually want war are perhaps never at any time very numerous. Most people sometimes want war, and a few people always want war. It is these last who are, so to speak, the living nucleus of the war creature that we want to destroy. That liking for an effective smash which gleamed out in me for a moment when I heard of the naval guns is with them a dominating motive. It is not outweighed and overcome in them as it is in me by the sense of waste, and by pity and horror and by love for men who can do brave deeds and yet weep bitterly for misery and the deaths of good friends. These war-lovers are creatures of a simpler constitution. And they seem capable of an ampler hate.
You will discover, if you talk to them skillfully, that they hold that war "ennobles," and that when they say ennobles they mean that it is destructive to the ten thousand things in life that they do not enjoy or understand or tolerate, things that fill them, therefore, with envy and perplexity—such things as pleasure, beauty, delicacy, leisure. In the cant of modern talk you will find them call everything that is not crude and forcible in life "degenerate." But back to the very earliest writings, in the most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew prophets, for example, you will find that at the base of the warrior spirit is hate for more complicated, for more refined, for more beautiful and happier living.
The military peoples of the world have almost always been harsh and rather stupid peoples, full of a virtuous indignation of all they did not understand. The modern Prussian goes to war today with as supreme a sense of moral superiority as the Arabs when they swept down upon Egypt and North Africa. The burning of the library of Alexandria remains forever the symbol of the triumph of a militarist "culture" over civilization. This easy belief of the dull and violent that war "braces" comes out of a real instinct of self-preservation against the subtler tests of peace. This type of person will keep on with war if it can. It is to politics what the criminal type is to social order; it will be resentful and hostile to every attempt to fix up a pacific order in the world.
This heavy envy which is the dominant characteristic of the pro-military type is by no means confined to it. More or less it is in all of us. In England one finds it far less frequently in professional soldiers than among sedentary learned men. In Germany, too, the more uncompromising and ferocious pro-militarism is to be found in the frock coats of the professors. Just at present England is full of virtuous reprehension of German military professors, but there is really no monopoly of such in Germany, and before Germany England produced some of the most perfect specimens of aggressive militarist conceivable. To read Froude upon Ireland or Carlyle upon the Franco-German War is to savor this hate-dripping temperament in its perfection.
Much of this literary bellicosity is pathological. Men overmuch in studies and universities get ill in their livers and sluggish in their circulations; they suffer from shyness, from a persuasion of excessive and neglected merit, old maid's melancholy, and a detestation of all the levities of life. And their suffering finds its vent in ferocious thoughts. A vigorous daily bath, a complete stoppage of wine, beer, spirits, and tobacco, and two hours of hockey in the afternoon would probably make decently tolerant men of all these fermenting professional militarists. Such a regimen would certainly have been the salvation of both Froude and Carlyle. It would probably have saved the world from the vituperation of the Hebrew prophets—those models for infinite mischief.
The extremist cases pass to the average case through insensible degrees. We are all probably, as a species, a little too prone to intolerance, and if we do in all sincerity mean to end war in the world we must prepare ourselves for considerable exercises in restraint when strange people look, behave, believe, and live in a manner different from our own. The minority of permanently bitter souls who want to see objectionable cities burning and men fleeing and dying form the real strength in our occasional complicities.
The world has had its latest object lesson in the German abuse of English and French as "degenerates," of the Russians as "Mongol hordes," of the Japanese as "yellow savages," but it is not only Germans who let themselves slip into national vanity and these ugly hostilities to unfamiliar life. The first line of attack against war must be an attack upon self-righteousness and intolerance. These things are the germ of uncompromising and incurable militarism everywhere.
Now, the attack upon self-righteousness and intolerance and the stern, self-satisfied militarism that arises naturally out of these things is to be made in a number of ways. The first is a sedulous propaganda of the truth about war, a steadfast resolve to keep the pain of warfare alive in the nerves of the careless, to keep the stench of war under the else indifferent nose. It is only in the study of the gloomily megalomaniac historian that aggressive war becomes a large and glorious thing. In reality it is a filthy outrage upon life, an idiot's smashing of the furniture of homes, a mangling, a malignant mischief, a scalding of stokers, a disemboweling of gunners, a raping of caught women by drunken soldiers. By book and pamphlet, by picture and cinematograph film, the pacifist must organize wisdom in these matters.
And not only indignation and distress must come to this task. The stern, uncompromising militarist will not be moved from his determinations by our horror and hostility. These things will but "brace" him. He has a more vulnerable side. The ultimate lethal weapon for every form of stupidity is ridicule, and against the high silliness of the militarist it is particularly effective. It is the laughter of wholesome men that will finally end war. The stern, strong, silent man will cease to trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality at the head of the present war. Not the slaughter of ten million men can make the quality of the German Kaiser other than theatrical and silly.
The greater part of the world is in an agony, a fever, but that does not make the cause of that fever noble or great. A man may die of yellow fever through the bite of a mosquito; that does not make a mosquito anything more than a dirty little insect or an aggressive imperialist better than a pothouse fool.
Henceforth we must recognize no heroic war but defensive war, and as the only honorable warriors such men as those peasants of Visé who went out with shotguns against the multitudinous overwhelming nuisance of invasion that trampled down their fields.
Or war to aid such defensive war.