Nor, of course, was it only the wounded, companions in misfortune, who thus forgot their enmity; for the practice of “fraternizing” sprang up to such an extent at the first Christmas of the war, that it was afterwards prohibited. “They gave us cigars and cigarettes and toffee,” wrote an English soldier who took part in this parley with the accursed race, “and they told us that they didn’t want to fight, but they had to. We were with them about an hour, and the officers couldn’t make head or tail of it.” To this a military correspondent adds: “There is more bitterness against the Germans among the French soldiers than among the British, who as a rule show no bitterness at all, but the general spirit of the French army is much less bitter than that of many civilians.” It is an interesting psychological fact that it was the civilians, the do-nothings, who made Hatred into a cult.
And what a beggarly, despicable sort of virulence it was! For a genuine hatred there is at least something to be said; but this spurious manufactured malevolence, invented by yellow journalists, and fostered by Government placards, was a mere poison-gas of words, a thing without substance, yet with power to corrupt and vitiate the minds of all who succumbed to it. Men wrangled, as in Æsop’s fable, not over the ass, but over the shadow of the ass. Theirs was, in Coleridge’s words:
A wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile,
Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile.
Yet it was difficult not to smile at it. The Niagara of nonsense that the war let loose—the war that was supposed to be “making people think”—was almost as laughable as the war itself was tragic; and satirists[42] there were who, like Juvenal, found it impossible to keep a grave countenance under such provocation. Hereafter, no doubt, smiles and tears will be freely mingled, when posterity realizes, for example, what tragi-comic part was played by “the scrap of paper,” that emblem of national adherence to obligations of honour; by the concern felt among the greater nations for the interests of the smaller; or by the justification of the latest war as “the war to end war.”[43] What a vast amount of material, too, will be available for an illustrated book of humour, when some wag of the future shall collect and reprint the series of official war-posters, including, of course, those printed as advertisements of the war-loans (the melancholy lady, reminded that “Old Age must Come,” and the rest of them), and when it shall be recollected that these amazing absurdities could really influence the public! As if militarism in itself were not comical enough, its eulogists succeeded in making it still more ridiculous by their cartoons. As for the blind credulity which the war-fever inspired, the legend of the Angels of Mons will stand for age-long remembrance.
Parturiunt mures, nascetur ridiculus Mons.
This credulity begins, like charity, at home. Whenever a war breaks out, there is much talk of the disingenuousness of “enemy” writers; but the sophisms which are really perilous to each country are those of native growth—those which lurk deep in the minds of its own people, ready, when the season summons them, to spring up to what Sydney Smith called “the full bloom of their imbecility.” That egregious maxim, si vis pacem para bellum, “If you wish for peace, prepare for war,” is now somewhat discredited; but it did its “bit” in causing the war, and after a temporary retirement will doubtless be brought forward again when circumstances are more favourable. It is perhaps as silly a saying as any invented by the folly of man. Imagine a ward of lunatics, who, having got their keepers under lock and key by a reversal of position such as that described in one of Poe’s fantastic stories, should proceed to safeguard peace by arming themselves with pokers and legs of tables. For a time this adoption of the para bellum principle might postpone hostilities; but even lunatics would be wasting time and temper in thus standing idly arrayed, and it is certain that sooner or later that madhouse would realize its Armageddon. For opportunity in the long run begets action; and whether you put a poker into a lunatic’s hand, or a sword into a soldier’s, the result will eventually be the same.
Or perhaps we are told that war is “a great natural outburst,” mysterious in its origin, beyond human control: the creed expressed in Wordsworth’s famous assertion that carnage is “God’s daughter.” Could any superstition be grosser? There is nothing mysterious or cataclysmic in the outbreak of modern wars. Antipathies and rivalries of nations there are, as of individuals, and of course if these are cherished they will burst into flame; but it is equally true that if they are wisely discountenanced and repressed they will finally subside. We do not excuse an individual who pleads his jealousy, his passion, his thirst for revenge as a reason for committing an assault, though personal crime is just as much an “outbreak” as war is. There seems to be an idea that when such passions exist it is better for them to “come out.” On the contrary, the only hope for mankind is that such savage survivals should not come out, but that “the ape and tiger” should be steadily repressed until they die.
But “this war was justifiable.” In every nation the belief prevails that, though war in general is to be deprecated, any particular contest in which they may be engaged is righteous, inevitable, one of pure self-defence, in their own words, “forced on us.” Even if this were true, in some instances, in bygone years when international relations were less complex, and when it was possible for two countries to quarrel and “fight it out,” like schoolboys, without inflicting any widespread injury upon others, it is wholly different now; for the calamity caused by a modern war is so great that it hardly matters, to the world at large, who, in schoolboy phrase, “began it.” It takes two to make a quarrel; and the two are jointly responsible for the disaster that their quarrel entails upon mankind.
The more one looks into these fallacies about fighting—and their number is legion—one is compelled to believe that the spirit which chiefly underlies the tendencies to war, apart from the direct incentive of commercial greed, is one of Fear. Hatred is more obvious, but it is fear which is at the bottom of the hatred. This alone can account for the extraordinary shortsightedness with which all freedom, both of speech and of action, is trampled on, when a war is once commenced. In such circumstances, society at once reverts, in its panic alarm for its own safety, to what may be called the Ethics of the Pack. Of all the absurd charges levelled against those objectors to military service who refused to sacrifice their own principles to other persons’ ideas of patriotism, the quaintest was that of “cowardice”; for, with all respect to the very real physical bravery of those who fought, it must be said that the highest courage shown during the war was that of the persons who were denounced and ridiculed as cravens. It was a moment when it required much more boldness to object than to consent; one of those crises to which the famous lines of Marvell are applicable:
When the sword glitters o’er the judge’s head,
And fear has coward churchmen silencéd,
Then is the poet’s time; ’tis then he draws,
And single fights forsaken virtue’s cause.