Of these some were placid, emotionless, extinguished, consistently noble, selfless, profoundly and simply religious, as correct in every thought and deed as the best bourgeois peace society of any land.
But others! Alexina had been horrified at first at the wanderings off after nightfall of women who had nursed like scientific angels by day, accompanied by men who were never more men than when any moment might turn them into carrion. But with her mental suppleness she had quickly readjusted her point of view. There is nothing as sensual as war. It is the quintessential carnality. Renan once wrote a story of the French Revolution, "The Abbess Juarre," in which his thesis was that if warning were given that the world would end in three days the entire population of the globe would give itself over to an orgy of sex; sex being life itself. It is the obsession of the doomed consumptive, the doomed spinster, the last thought of a man with the rope round his neck.
How much more under the terrific stimulation of war, the constant heedless annihilation of life in its flower and its maturity? Man's inveterate enemy, death, shrieking its derision in the very shells of man's one inviolable right, the right to drift into eternity through the peaceful corridors of old age. War is a monstrous anachronism and a monstrous miscarriage of justice. The ignorant feel it less. It is the enlightened, the intelligent, accustomed to the higher delights of civilization, to the perfecting of such endowments, however modest, as their ancestors have transmitted and peace has encouraged, with ambitions and hopes and dreams, that resent however sub-consciously the constant snarling of death at their heels. All the forces of mind and body and spirit become formidable in a reckless hatred of the gross injustice of a fate that individually not one of them has deserved.
But the moment remains. They compress into it the desires of a lifetime. After years of proud individualism they have learned that they are atoms, cogs, helpless, the sport of iron and steel and powder and the ambitions and stupidities of men whose lives are never risked. Very well, turn the ego loose to find what it can. If all they have learned from civilization is as useless in this shrieking hell, as impotent as the dumb resentment of the clod, they can at least be animals.
To talk of the ennobling influences of war is one of the lies of the conventionalized mind anxious to avoid the truths of life and to extract good from all evil—worthy but unintelligent. How can men in the trenches, foul with dirt and vermin, stench forever in their nostrils, callous to death and suffering, wallowing like pigs in a trough, compulsorily obscene, be ennobled? Courage is the commonest attribute of man, a universal gift of Nature that he may exist in a world bristling with dangers to frail human life; never to be commended, only to be remarked when absent. If men lose it in the city, the sedentary life, they recover it quickly in the camp. The exceptions, the congenital cowards, slink out of war on any pretext, but if drafted are likely to acquit themselves decently unless neurotic. The cases of cowardice in active warfare are extremely rare; a mechanical chattering of teeth, or shaking of limbs, but practically never a refusal to obey the command to advance. But it is this very courage which breeds callousness, and, combined with bestial conditions, inevitably brutalizes.
When good people (far, oh far, from the zones of danger) can no longer in the face of accumulating evidence, cling to their sentimental theory that war ennobles, they take refuge in the vague but plausible substitute that at least it makes the good better and the bad worse. Possibly, but it is to be remembered that there is bad in the best even where there is no good in the worst.
Indubitably it leaves its indelible mark in a collection of hideous memories, on the just and the unjust, alike; as it is more difficult (Nature having made human nature in an ironical mood) to recall the pleasant moments of life than the poignantly unpleasant, so is it far more difficult to recall the moments of exaltation, of that intense spiritual desire which visits the high and low alike, to give their all for the safety of their country and the honor of their flag. Moreover, the sublime indifference in the face of certain death often has its origin in a still deeper necessity to relieve the insufferable strain on scarified nerves, and forever. As for the much vaunted recrudescence of the religious spirit which is one of the recurring phenomena of war, it is merely an instinct of the subtle mind, in its subtlest depths called soul, to indulge in the cowardice of dependence since the body must know no fear.
If men who have been temperate and moral all their lives, or at the worst indulging in moderation, spend their leaves of absence from the front like swine, it is not a reaction from the monotony of trench life, or from the nerve-racking din of war, but merely an extension of the fearful stimulation of a purely carnal existence, even where the directing mind is ever on the alert.
The aggressors of war should be pilloried in life and in history. Men must defend their country if attacked; to do less would be to sink lower than the beasts that defend their lairs; and for that reason all pacifists, and conscientious objectors, are abject, mean, and shabby. In times of national danger no man has a right to indulge his own conscience; it merges, if he be a normal courageous man, into the national conscience. But that very fact lowers the deliberate seekers of war so far below the high plane of civilization as we know it, that they should be blotted out of existence.