“How far, in the future, it may be possible for men to gain the strength necessary for kingship without either fronting death, or inflicting it, seems to me not at present determinable. The historical facts are that, broadly speaking, none but soldiers, or persons with a soldierly faculty, have ever yet shown themselves fit to be kings; and that no other men are so gentle, so just, or so clear-sighted. Wordsworth’s character of the Happy Warrior cannot be reached in the height of it but by a warrior; nay, so much is it beyond common strength that I had supposed the entire meaning of it to be metaphorical, until one of the best soldiers of England[104] himself read me the poem, and taught me, what I might have known, had I enough watched his own life, that it was entirely literal.”
By extending his soldierly qualification to “persons with a soldierly faculty,” he gives the case away. For that can only mean the faculty of courage, organization and command. These qualities a peaceful ruler like William Penn possessed in striking measure. The whole passage is the record of a swaying contest between sentiment and conviction; between the glamour of the glowing haze of distant tradition and actual facts, only too closely pressing upon mankind to-day.
Truly the question of the effect of war on character is vital. I had written here, in pre-war days, some observations upon it; but they seem to me now faint and platitudinous. We have had since then such widespread experience of the play of character faced with the dread calamity of the world-war, that it is too complicated to treat briefly. We are all saddened and wearied. So I leave it to the experience of the millions who know more about it from their own experience than I do.
We need not wait for war to harden our fibre and stiffen our backs. Surely this can be done without wholesale demoralization and destruction. Are there not national evils to be fought? privations to be endured here in fighting vice, ugliness and disease, or in voluntarily participating in poverty? There is courage needed to stand against public opinion and to lead it, to sacrifice wealth and social repute if required. These things are what we must turn to for the exercise of the courage and unselfishness of the soldier. We want more strenuous asceticism of a form not so essentially unreasonable and destructive as war.
It would entirely overload this chapter to give any idea of the vigour and number of the passages in Fors which storm against war:—“storming” is generally the method, varied, as usual with this master of fancy and emotion, with stinging sarcasm and mocking raillery. The burden of his plea throughout is that “the game of our nobles and the gain of our usurers” is war.[105]
“When you have got the Devil well under foot in Sheffield, you may begin to stop him from persuading my Lords of the Admiralty that they want a new grant, etc., etc., to make his machines with.... The fiend sees that he can blind you, through your lust for drink, into quietly allowing yourselves to pay fifty millions a year, that the rich may make their machines of blood, and play at shedding blood.”[106]
“In this contest (of poor and rich) assuredly, the victory cannot be by violence; every conquest under the Prince of War retards the standards of the Prince of Peace.”[107]
He quotes[108] from the Daily Telegraph the following from its description of the capture of Paris: “Each demolished house has its own legend of sorrow, of pain, and horror; each vacant doorway speaks to the eye, and almost to the ear, of hasty flight, as armies of fire came—of weeping women and trembling children running away in awful fear, abandoning the home that saw their birth, the old house they loved—of startled men seizing quickly under each arm their most valued goods, and rushing, heavily laden, after their wives and babes, leaving to hostile hands the task of burning all the rest. When evening falls, the wretched outcasts, worn with fatigue and tears, reach Versailles, St. Germain, or some other place outside the range of fire, and there they beg for bread and shelter, homeless, foodless, broken with despair. And this, remember, has been the fate of something like a hundred thousand people during the last four months. Versailles alone has about fifteen thousand such fugitives to keep alive, all ruined, all hopeless, all vaguely asking the grim future what still worse fate it may have in store for them.”
The following passage is interesting, however feeble it may appear in view of our recent developments of war:—
“We fight inelegantly as well as expensively, with machines instead of bow and spear; we kill about a thousand now to the score then, in settling any quarrel—(Agincourt was won with the loss of less than a hundred men; only 25,000 English altogether were engaged at Creçy; and 12,000, some say only 8,000, at Poictiers); we kill with far ghastlier wounds, crashing bones and flesh together; we leave our wounded necessarily for days and nights in heaps on the fields of battle; we pillage districts twenty times as large, and with completer destruction of more valuable property; and with a destruction as irreparable as it is complete; for if the French or English burnt a church one day, they could build a prettier one the next; but the modern Prussians couldn’t even build so much as an imitation of one; we rob on credit, by requisition, with ingenious mercantile prolongations of claim; and we improve contention of arms with contention of tongues, and are able to multiply the rancour of cowardice, and mischief of lying, in universal and permanent print; and so we lose our tempers as well as our money, and become indecent in behaviour as in raggedness.”[109]