Lest We Forget: World War Stories

by John G. Thompson; Inez Bigwood

Yet he believed firmly that England was right in declaring war against Germany on August 4, 1914, and that she would have failed in her duty if she had remained neutral. France, Russia, Belgium, and Serbia had no choice. They were obliged to fight, for the war was forced upon them. Germany did not wish to fight England; but after carefully looking over the whole matter, England, of her own free will, declared war. She took upon her shoulders a great responsibility. But she was right.

With a few changes in the wording and some omissions, the argument of Gilbert Murray is as follows:

"How can such a thing be? It is easy enough to see that our cause is right, and that the German cause is wrong. It is hardly possible to study the official papers issued by the British, the German, and the Russian governments, without seeing that Germany—or some party in Germany—had plotted this war beforehand; that she chose a moment when she thought her neighbors were at a disadvantage; that she prevented Austria from making a settlement even at the last moment; that in order to get more quickly at France she violated her treaty with Belgium. Evidence shows that she has carried out the violation with a cruelty that has no equal in the wars of modern and civilized nations. Yet there may be some people who still feel doubtful. Germany's wrong-doing they think is no reason for us to do likewise. We did our best to keep the general peace; there we were right. We failed; the German government made war in spite of us. There we were unfortunate. It was a war already on an enormous scale and we decided to make it larger still. There we were wrong. Could we not have stood aside, as the United States did, ready to help refugees and sufferers, anxious to heal wounds and not make them, watchful for the first chance of putting an end to this time of horror?

"'Try for a moment,' they say, 'to realize the suffering in one small corner of a battlefield. You have seen a man here and there badly hurt in an accident; you have seen perhaps a horse with its back broken, and you can remember how dreadful it seemed to you. In that one corner how many men, how many horses, will be lying, hurt far worse, and just waiting to die? Terrible wounds, extreme torment; and all, further than any eye can see, multiplied and multiplied! And, for all your just anger against Germany, what have these wounded done? The horses are not to blame for anybody's foreign policy. They have only come where their masters took them. And the masters themselves ... though certain German rulers and leaders are wicked, these soldiers, peasants, working-men, shop-keepers, and schoolmasters, have really done nothing in particular; at least, perhaps they have now, but they had not up to the time when you, seeing they were in war and misery already, decided to make war on them also and increase their sufferings. You say that justice must be done on such wrong-doers. But as far as the rights and wrongs of the war go, you are simply condemning to death and torture innocent men, by thousands and thousands; is that the best way to satisfy your sense of justice? These innocent people, you say, are fighting to protect the guilty parties whom you are determined to reach. Well, perhaps, at the end of the war, after millions of innocent people have suffered, you may at last, if all goes well with your arms, get at the "guilty parties." You will hold an inquiry, you will decide that certain Prussians with long titles are the guilty parties, and even then you will not know what to do with them. You will probably try, and almost certainly fail, to make them somehow feel ashamed. It is likely enough that they will instead become great national heroes.

"'And after all, this is supposed to be a war in which one party is wrong and the other right, and the right wins. Suppose both are wrong; or suppose the wrong party wins? It is as likely as not; for, if the right party is helped by his good conscience, the wrong has probably taken pains to have the odds on his side before he began quarreling. In that case, all the wild waste of blood and treasure, all the suffering of innocent people and dumb animals, all the tears of women and children have not set up the right, but established the wrong. To do a little evil that great or certain good may come is all very well; but to do great evil for only a chance of getting something which half the people may think good and the other half think bad ... that is neither good morals nor good sense. Anybody not in a passion must see that it is insanity,' So they say who think war always wrong.

"Their argument is wrong. It is judging war as a profit-and-loss account. It leaves out of sight the fact that in some causes it is better to fight and be broken than to yield peacefully; that sometimes the mere act of resisting to the death is in itself a victory.

"Let us try to understand this. The Greeks who fought and died at Thermopylæ had no doubt that they were doing right to fight and die, and we all agree with them. They probably knew they would be defeated. They probably expected that, after their defeat, the Persians would easily conquer the rest of Greece, and would treat it much more harshly because it had resisted. But such thoughts did not affect them. They would not consent to their country's dishonor.

"Take again a very clear modern case: the fine story of the French tourist who was captured, together with a priest and some other white people, by Moorish robbers. The Moors gave their prisoners the choice either to trample on the Cross or to be killed. The Frenchman was not a Christian. He disliked Christianity. But he was not going to trample on the Cross at the orders of a robber. He stuck to his companions and died with them.

"Honor and dishonor are real things. I will not try to define them; but will only notice that, like religion, they admit no bargaining. Indeed, we can almost think of honor as being simply that which a free man values more than life, and dishonor as that which he avoids more than suffering or death. And the important point for us is that there are such things as honor and dishonor.

"There are some people, followers of Tolstoy, who accept this as far as dying is concerned, but will have nothing to do with killing. Passive resistance, they say, is right; martyrdom is right; but to resist violence by violence is sin.