And, as I rode through the black night, amongst this suffering host, in rain, in wind, in cold, in storm, deafened by the roaring of the guns, which reverberated from rock to rock, all through the defile, thoughts, though not consecutive, had a fierce intensity. The thought dominant in my mind was the irreligion of the world. Crimes—the most gigantic crimes were triumphant everywhere in Europe, and the exponents of religion were silent. For prayer is smoke unless it is determination, and religion is only sentiment if it is divorced from action. "Thy will be done," is the ideal prayer.
During the first part of the night, I was joined by our friend, the artillery major. He had placed his guns, and as we passed his camp, he had been about to sit down to supper, but he saw us passing, and he joined me, and rode with me for an hour, for a talk—a talk which I shall never forget. For this Serbian officer was a philosopher, well-read, and with an intellectual breadth of vision, and depth of thought, which would certainly have been unusual in an army major of Western Europe.
There was, that night, neither moon nor stars. Black clouds hung over the mountains, which were dimly discernible, precipitous, close upon either side of us. The darkness was complete, and all night long the guns thundered ceaselessly against the mountain sides. (At home, canaries were singing in their cages.) Death was near for many; it might also be near for us. At any moment annihilation of our columns was possible; the scene of what might happen, in this narrow gorge, if the enemies overtook us—from both ends—was easily imagined. We both knew the peril of the situation, but we did not talk about that. And perhaps it was because, in the physical world, there was no light visible, that we sought light in the realm of thought, and discussed the problems of death, and of life beyond. He was one of those few who can discuss without argument; we both knew that we knew nothing; but we listened with eager interest to each other's guesses concerning the great truths which are still so dramatically withheld from our conscious intelligence. Why are they withheld? Is the God who withholds them—is the God who is now permitting our European holocaust—is He, in fact, all-powerful? Can anyone be all-powerful unless he exists without conditions? But why crave an all-powerful God? May not all-powerfulness have to go the way of jealousy, anger, and all the other human attributes with which primitive man endowed his deity? May not the germs of human evolution be within the human soul, for us to develop or to neglect at will? Eve was free to take, or to reject, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge—material knowledge; are not we, perhaps, also free to take, or to reject, the fruit of the Tree of Life—spiritual life? It is largely because we are taught that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves, that we tumble into crimes of militarism. To leave ourselves in God's hands, is often an excuse for idleness, and the result is that we find ourselves in the hands of a war-lord. Autocratic government is giving place to democratic government, on earth; may not our view of an autocratic God also be doomed to disappear? If the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, the King of Heaven must be there too, reigning not in solitary glory, in empty space, but within each one of us. The souls of men are the prism which should refract the radiant Spirit of God, and we must not be disappointed when, in times of trouble, the human spectrum shows the dark lines only. If we knew more about the laws of Nature, we should know that the dark lines are due to local conditions, which give invaluable proof of the Universal Law of Light.
My constant ejaculations—"Chovai! Stoi! Terrai! Napred!" ("Get out of the way! Stop! Go on! Forward!") were like tugs at the tether, which tied us to the material world, reminding us that we still had small material parts to play.
I was specially interested during our talk to find that it was not only in the older, and, as it might be thought, more effete civilisations of Western Europe, that a consciousness of the incongruity of war with twentieth century ideas, is becoming current. This officer, representative of the best traditions of Eastern European soldierhood, described how he had formerly been an enthusiastic lover of war, a believer in its glories, and had once even sacrificed a good position on the Staff, in order to be in the thick of the fighting line. And now, though he suffered, as his personal record testified, from no lack of courage or virility, war, in his eyes, was murder, and its glories tinsel. I compared this Serbian major with our German devil-major at Tongres. Which of the two was the more truly civilised? I realised that Kipling's "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet" does not apply to the east and west of Europe. The west of Europe must, and will, unite with the Slav portion of the east, as a safeguard against the Central Powers of darkness. This war is bringing clearly before human consciousness in the east, as well as in the west of Europe, the fact that it is logically impossible for civilised mankind to preserve simultaneously two opposed standards of conduct: for individuals, a high form of morality, in which life, honour, and justice are revered; and for nations, a cynical non-morality, in which murder, dishonour, and injustice are inculcated as the highest virtues. We must raise the international standard or we shall inevitably debase the individual standard of human right and wrong.
The fate of humankind, whilst this war lasts, is in the balance. The fight between the Allies and the Central Powers is not merely a struggle between one form of civilisation and another; between a society which believes in full-blown militarism, and a society which believes in a milder form of militarism. There is more than that at stake. The struggle is between militarism and human evolution. Europe is in travail—the travail preceding the birth of a new race. We prayed God that the birth might not be still-born. For fear of this, and for this reason alone, deliverance must not be prematurely forced. The Central Powers, the arch exponents of militarism, must be vanquished.
My friend and I were agreed, that in the future, militarism must be exterminated, root and branch, if mankind is not to regress towards a monstrous sub-humanity. There was no one and nothing to contradict us, and we felt that if we lived a thousand years, our thoughts would never be more appropriately leaded to plumb the depths of the sea of Truth.
After an hour, the Major left me, and went back to his murderous guns, and as I rode on alone, I welcomed the ideas which we had exchanged, to a place in my memory, but I warned them that they were not there for ornament; ideas are lumber until they are expressed in action. The thinker should also be the doer; the world's trouble is that too often thinkers only think and doers only do. Society understands how to translate into action its hatreds—the hatreds of a minority; it has not yet learned to translate into action the love and sympathy of the majority of mankind. Hatred is expressed easily enough in war; love has no such dramatic mouthpiece. Hatred is positive; love still only negative in expression. Love is still blind, and the poets shouldn't joke about it. Love has not yet seen that there is a greater love than for a man to lay down his life for his friend; to take up your life for someone who is not your friend, requires a more difficult sacrifice.
The warmongers have an advantage over the peacemongers; they don't talk, they act; the peacemongers don't act, they talk; and until their talk is translated into action, they will be ineffective in conquering war. It's no use sweeping, unless you get rid of the dust.