But take care that you do not mistake a national spirit of greed and aggressiveness for virtue. Remember Kipling's warning that military force should be used only for the defence or enforcement of just rights or for those which you truly and firmly believe to be just.
The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart;
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust
And, guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
National greed and aggressiveness must, sooner or later, bring their own punishment.
Now let us look at war from the standpoint of the individual. The sacrifice of individual lives is for many men the most prominent fact of war. They look upon a field of battle, and are filled with dismay at the sight of heaped-up carnage and garments rolled in blood, but fail to find there the radiance of high endeavour and the glow of great achievement. Like Carlyle, in his famous reductio ad absurdum of war in the Sartor, they see only the physical side of war, and neglect its ethical and spiritual content. Of course, this is a piece of perversity on Carlyle's part.
What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net-purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain "Natural Enemies" of the French, there are successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men: Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them: she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red; and shipped away, at the public charges, some two-thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain; and fed there till wanted. And now to that same spot, in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending: till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition: and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word "Fire!" is given: and they blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk useful craftsmen the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even, unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their Governors had fallen-out; and instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot. Alas, so it is in Deutschland, and hitherto in all other lands; still as of old, "what devilry soever Kings do, the Greeks must pay the piper!" In that fiction of the English Smollett, it is true, the final Cessation of War is perhaps prophetically shadowed forth; where the two Natural Enemies, in person, take each a Tobacco-pipe, filled with Brimstone; light the same, and smoke in one another's faces, till the weaker gives in: but from such predicted Peace-Era, what blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!
But what if these men of Dumdrudge are not blockheads at all, but high-souled, clear-sighted men? What if they do not go to the war because their rulers tell them to, but because they believe in the justice of their cause, and consider it not only a duty but a privilege to lay down their lives, if necessary, to maintain it?
Tennyson gets a nearer view of the truth in Maud, when he represents war as the purifier which purges the corruption of a too-long-continued peace, and which saves nation and individual alike from sloth and selfishness. Peace under a just and beneficent government is surely a blessing of the first magnitude. But those who enjoy it, and surely this applies to us, must never forget at what price that blessing was bought and at what price it must be maintained. They must not grow petty and self-indulgent, and forget that they possess a heritage won for them by the sacrifice of others. Is it not far better that they should feel a thrill of patriotism at the rude touch of war, and die striking a blow for freedom, than that they should live to a dishonoured old age, seeking beggarly gain? Let us have less talk of the horrors of war and more talk of its blessings.
Most of those who speak of "the horrors of war" fail to recognize that it is those horrors which give war its great, its inestimable value. It would, no doubt, be very pleasant if war could be conducted in a polite and gentlemanly way, if it could be arranged that nobody would get killed, and that wounds and bloodshed would be reduced to a minimum. If that were so, we could all play at the game. But where would be our heroes, our hearts of triple steel? Where would be their victories over death and the fear of death, and their leading of captivity captive? We could then, like Falstaff, fill up our armies with "toasts-and-butter, with hearts in their bellies no bigger than pins' heads," and nobody would be a jot the worse. But war robbed of its terror would be war without glory, and one of the greatest and grandest of experiences which Destiny allows to man would no longer be possible. To endure gladly the most severe labour and hardship, to grapple with a mortal foe in deadly strife, a strife without mercy and without remorse, to pass through Hell unterrified, to wrest one's life by main force from the very jaws of death, and to do all this, not for pay, but for one's country, this is, perhaps, the very climax of human endeavour.