John Haynes Holmes, of the Community Church, New York City, delivered this sixth lecture on "Heroes in Peace," at Race Street Meeting House, on Fifth month 9th, 1920.
Philadelphia, 1920.
Heroes in Peace
In an essay published some years ago on Thomas Carlyle's famous book, Heroes and Hero Worship, Prof. MacMechan, a well-known student of literature in England, makes the following observation: "In 1840, 'hero' meant, most probably, to nine Englishmen out of every ten, a general officer who had served in the Peninsula, or taken part in the last great fight with Napoleon, and who dined year after year with the Duke at Apsley House on the anniversary of Waterloo. To most people 'hero' means simply 'soldier,' and implies a human soul greatly daring and greatly enduring."
What Prof. MacMechan here tells us about the Englishman of 1840 is equally true of the Englishman of today—is true, indeed, of all peoples in all ages of history. Heroism has nearly always been taken to imply physical courage; physical courage has always found its most terrible and dramatic expression in warfare; and, therefore, by a natural association of ideas, the hero has come to be identified with the soldier. When we think of heroes, we almost instinctively find ourselves thinking of armored champions of Greece and Rome, who were helped to immortality by Plutarch, whom Emerson calls "the doctor and historian of heroism"; of King Arthur, and his knights of the Round Table; of Harold and his men of iron on the field of Hastings; of the Crusaders, who marched to the East with the sword in the one hand and the crucifix in the other, to wrest the holy city from the profaning clutch of the hated Moslem. Or, coming down to the more modern times, if we speak of heroism to the Frenchman, he thinks of the first Emperor and the old guard which "dies but never surrenders"; to the Italian, he hails the names of Garibaldi and the Thousand; to the Englishman, he acclaims the "thin red line of heroes" who held the field of Waterloo, conquered India and Egypt, and recently defended the Empire from the onslaughts of the Germans. And the same thing holds true of the American! To you and to me, the word "hero" means George Washington and the ragged Continentals who starved and froze amid the snowdrifts of Valley Forge; Commodore Perry and the sailors who shattered the British fleet upon the waters of Lake Erie; General Grant and the boys in blue who fought and conquered General Lee and the equally heroic boys in gray. The national heroes of all countries are soldiers. Walk the streets of any city in any land, and everywhere you will see statues of military chieftains, as though these were the only heroes the world had ever produced who were worthy of commemorative monuments. "To most people," as Prof. MacMechan has well said, "'hero' means simply soldier"; or, if we be enlightened enough now and then to extend this title to men who have achieved fame in other walks of life, it is because we see in them some analogy to the warrior. "It is to the military attitude of the soul," says Emerson, "that we give the name of heroism."
Now that the universal instinct of humanity to identify the hero and the soldier is sound and wholesome, to a large extent, we must all agree. I would be among the last, I trust, to deny to the soldier the possession of those heroic qualities which are so manifestly his. I must confess that I have both admiration and love for the men who march away to trench and battlefield, there to fling away their lives as little things for the sake of some great cause which they hold to be supremely dear. "Every heroic act," says Emerson again, in his essay on Heroism, "measures itself by its contempt of some external good"; and what man, I ask you, has more contempt for certain external goods, and therefore more heroism, than the loyal soldier? Material comfort, physical security, the familiar sights and sounds of home, the love of friends and kindred, the laughter of little children, the dreams of quiet old age, the precious boon of life—these are some of the more elementary things which a man shows to us that he holds in contempt, as compared with the happiness and safety of his native land, when he voluntarily enlists for active service. There are some soldiers, of course, who are mere adventurers. There are some others to whom war is nothing more nor less than a trade. There are still others who see in war only an opportunity for the release of the brutish passions which are inconsistent with the ordered ways of peace. But even these men bear a certain aspect of heroism. "I naturally love a soldier," says Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medica, "and honor those tattered and contemptible regiments that will die at the command of a sergeant." And when we come to the ordinary man who goes to the front in time of war, such as the farmer described by John Masefield in his elegy, August, 1914, who looks with fond eyes upon his furrowed fields, his barns, his hay-ricks, his "friendly horses"—
"The rooks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen * * *
The fields of home, the byres, the market towns"
and then, with weary heart, leaves all these things behind to perish in "the misery of the soaking trench," we find the sublimity of sacrifice. The true soldier is indeed a hero. In this age, of all ages of human history, are we unable to give denial to this fact. Millions of men, on a dozen different battle-fronts, have recently taught us the heroisms which make war almost as glorious as it is hideous. Not a day passed during more than four terrible years, but what we read with tingling hearts how brave men suffered without complaint, and died without fear, for the countries that they loved. I remember, for example, reading on a certain day in 1916, in a single copy of an evening newspaper, of three young soldiers who were heroes. One was a German lad, unnamed, who was found stricken unto death by the side of a dead Englishman, whose wounds he had tried to staunch, and whose thirst he had quenched from the water of his own canteen—a second Sir Philip Sidney, nobler than the first, since he gave succor not to a friend but to an enemy. The second man was an Englishman, Capt. Alexander Seaton, who fell fighting bravely at the Dardanelles. A classical scholar of repute, a fellow in Pembroke College, Cambridge, devoted to his work as a tutor and lecturer in history, it was written of him, by one who knew and loved him, "Not a soldier by inclination, he left his peaceful life at Pembroke solely because he conceived that his duty lay that way, and that the hour had come for every man to strike a blow for his country." The third man was a Frenchman, a poet, Ernest Psichari by name, who fell at Verton, in Belgium. "His battery had been ordered to keep the enemy in check while the army was falling back," ran the story. "They were expected to hold their ground for a few hours, and they did so for a whole day; and when the last shell had been spent, officers and gunners were killed to a man on the guns they had taken care to render unusable."
Such are the stories which came to us through the period of the Great War. All of them are eloquent of the fact, are they not, that the instinct of humanity is right in its ascription of heroism to the soldier? If this instinct has gone astray, it is only in the tendency which it has shown to ascribe heroism exclusively to the soldier. In attempting to do full justice to the man who has fought and died amid the terrors of the battlefield, it has been tempted again and again to do something less than justice to the man who has fought and died as gallantly in fields less dramatic but no less terrible than those of war. For whether we judge heroism as involving contempt of comfort, hazard of death, or the simple eager quest for fullness of life, we find it, I believe, even more truly, though less frequently, characteristic of the circumstances of peace than those of war. It was upon this plain fact that William James sought to vindicate the possibility of what he called, in his famous essay of that title, "a moral equivalent of war." He affirmed that "the war party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues are absolute and permanent human goods." But, he continues, "patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form"; nor, we may add, its only present form. "It would be simply preposterous," says James again, "if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or Japanese. Great indeed is fear, but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it. The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper." And it is here that James urges, as his "moral equivalent of war," the conscription of our young men "to coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, to the frames of sky-scrapers," there to pay "their blood-tax—in the immemorial human warfare against nature." All of which means, among other things, that those men and women today who are already mining coal, and washing dishes, and making tunnels, and stoking furnaces, and building sky-scrapers, are already heroes, trained like the soldier to "the military ideals of hardihood and discipline!"