Soldiers as a class are men who have disregarded the civil standard of morality altogether. They simply ignore it. It is no doubt why civilians fight shy of them. In the game of life they do not play the same rules, and the consequence is a good deal of misunderstanding, until finally the civilian says he will not play with Tommy any more. In soldiers' eyes lying, theft, drunkenness, bad language, etc., are not evils at all. They steal like jackdaws. As to language, I used to think the language of a merchant ship's forecastle pretty bad, but the language of Tommies, in point of profanity and in point of obscenity, beats it hollow. This department is a speciality of his. Lying he treats with the same large charity. To lie like a trooper is quite a sound metaphor. He invents all sorts of elaborate lies for the mere pleasure of inventing them. Looting, again, is one of his preferred joys, not merely looting for profit, but looting for the sheer fun of the destruction.[99]
(Please, please, dear reader, do not say that I am slandering the British soldier. I am quoting a British officer, and a British officer, moreover, who is keenly in sympathy with the person that he has just been describing.) He adds:
Are thieving, and lying, and looting, and bestial talk very bad things? If they are, Tommy is a bad man. But for some reason or other, since I got to know him, I have thought rather less of the iniquity of these things than I did before.
I do not know which of the two passages that I have quoted is the more striking commentary on the moral influence of military training; that such training should have the effect which Captain March Phillips describes, or (as Mr. J.A. Hobson in his "Psychology of Jingoism" says) that the second judgment should be given by a man of sterling character and culture—the judgment, that thieving, and lying, and looting, and bestial talk do not matter. Which fact constitutes the severer condemnation of the ethical atmosphere of militarism and military training? Which is the more convincing testimony to the corrupting influences of war?[100]
To do the soldiers justice, they very rarely raise this plea of war being a moral training-school. "War itself," said an officer on one occasion, "is an infernally dirty business. But somebody has got to do the dirty work of the world, and I am glad to think that it is the business of the soldier to prevent rather than to make war."
Not that I am concerned to deny that we owe a great deal to the soldier. I do not know even why we should deny that we owe a great deal to the Viking. Neither the one nor the other was in every aspect despicable. Both have bequeathed a heritage of courage, sturdiness, hardihood, and a spirit of ordered adventure; the capacity to take hard knocks and to give them; comradeship and rough discipline—all this and much more. It is not true to say of any emotion that it is wholly and absolutely good, or wholly and absolutely bad. The same psychological force which made the Vikings destructive and cruel pillagers made their descendants sturdy and resolute pioneers and colonists; and the same emotional force which turns so much of Africa into a sordid and bloody shambles would, with a different direction and distribution, turn it into a garden. Is it for nothing that the splendid Scandinavian race, who have converted their rugged and rock-strewn peninsula into a group of prosperous and stable States, which are an example to Europe, and have infused the great Anglo-Saxon stock with something of their sane but noble idealism, have the blood of Vikings in their veins? Is there no place for the free play of all the best qualities of the Viking and the soldier in a world still sadly in need of men with courage enough, for instance, to face the truth, however difficult it may seem, however unkind to our pet prejudices?
There is not the least necessity for the peace advocate to ignore facts in this matter. The race of man loves a soldier just as boys love the pirate, and many of us, perhaps to our great advantage, remain in part boys our lives through. But as, growing out of boyhood, we regretfully discover the sad fact that we cannot be pirates, that we cannot even hunt Indians, nor be scouts, nor even trappers, so surely the time has come to realize that we have grown out of soldiering. The romantic appeal of the ventures of the old Vikings, and even later of piracy,[101] was as great as that of war. Yet we superseded the Viking, and we hanged the pirate, though I doubt not we loved him while we hanged him; and I am not aware that those who urged the suppression of piracy were vilified, except by the pirates, as maudlin sentimentalists, who ignored human nature, or, in Homer Lea's phrase, as "half-educated, sick-brained visionaries, denying the inexorability of the primordial law of struggle." Piracy interfered seriously with the trade and industry of those who desired to earn for themselves as good a living as they could get, and to obtain from this imperfect world all that it had to offer. Piracy was magnificent, doubtless, but it was not business. We are prepared to sing about the Viking, but not to tolerate him on the high seas; and some of us who are quite prepared to give the soldier his due place in poetry and legend and romance, quite prepared to admit, with Mr. Roosevelt and Von Moltke and the rest, the qualities which perhaps we owe to him, and without which we should be poor folk indeed, are nevertheless inquiring whether the time has not come to place him (or a good portion of him) gently on the poetic shelf with the Viking; or at least to find other fields for those activities which, however much we may be attracted by them, have in their present form little place in a world in which, though, as Bacon has said, men like danger better than travail, travail is bound, alas!—despite ourselves—to be our lot.