The higher one rises in consciousness, the more nearly free and self-determined life becomes, the greater are the rewards of complete sacrifice. There are many who have "fallen on the field of honor" whose lives, if lived out under normal peace conditions, might have meant much to themselves, possibly to humanity. They have given themselves freely, without question, for what seems to them of more importance than life. Wounded, mutilated past all usefulness, dying, they have not rebelled. Doctors and nurses in the hospitals tell the story of their endurance without complaint of their bitter fate. Much as we must feel the awful price which they have felt obliged to pay, it is not sentimental to say that the finer spirits among them have lived more fully in the few crowded weeks of their struggle than if they had been permitted to live out their lives in all the gratifications of our comfortable civilization. Letters from them give an extraordinary revelation of priceless qualities gained by these soldiers through complete renunciation and sacrifice. War, it must not be denied, is a great developer as well as a destroyer of life. Nothing else, it would seem, in our present state of evolution presses the cup of human experience so full of realization and understanding as battle and death. The men who are paying for their beliefs with their lives are living more in moments and hours than we who escape the ordeal can ever live. For life cannot be measured by time or comfort or enjoyment. It is too subtle for that! A supreme effort, even a supreme agony, may have more real living worth than years of "normal" existence. The youths whose graves now dot so plentifully the pleasant fields of France have drunk deeper than we can fathom of the mystery of life.
As for the nation, that greater mother for whose existence they have given their individual lives, there is even less question of the benefit of this war. We Americans are fond of measuring loss and gain in figures: we reckon up the huge war debts, the toll of killed and wounded, and against this heavy account we set down—nothing. It is all dead loss. Yet even to-day, in the crisis of their struggle, there is not a Frenchman who will not admit the immense good that has already come to his people, that will come increasingly out of the bloody sacrifice. The war has united all individuals, swept aside the trivial and the base, revealed the nation to itself. The French have discovered within their souls and shown before the world qualities, unsuspected or forgotten, of chivalry, steadfastness, seriousness, and they have renewed their familiar virtues of bravery and good humor and intelligence. The French soldier, the French citizen, and the French woman are to-day marvelously moulded in the heroic type of their best tradition: in the full sense of the word they are gallant—chivalrous, self-forgetful, devoted. Is there any price too great to pay for such a resurrection of human nobility?
The pacifist is fain to babble of the "disciplines of peace." No one denies them. But how can humanity be compelled to embrace these disciplines of peace? The German lesson of thoroughness and social organization and responsibility was as necessary before the war as it is to-day, but neither England nor France, neither Russia nor our own America gave heed to it until the terrible menace of extermination in this war ground the lesson into their unwilling souls. It may be lamentable that humanity should still be held so firmly in the grip of biologic law that it must kill and be killed in order to save itself, but there are things worse than death. Until humanity learns the secret of self-discipline it will create diseases that can be eradicated only with the knife; it is merely blind to assume that the insanity of war can be prevented by any system of parliamenting, or litigation, or paper schemes of international arbitration. Some issues are of a primary importance, unarguable, fundamental. No man—and no nation—is worthy of life who is not ready to lay it down in their settlement. I know that some Americans are still unable to perceive that any such fundamental principle is at stake in Europe to-day. Extraordinary as it seems to me I hear intelligent men refer to the great war as if it were a local quarrel of no real consequence to us. Even the humblest poilu in the trenches, the simplest working-woman in France, know that they are giving themselves not merely in the righteous cause of self-defense, but in the world's cause in defense of its best tradition, its highest ideals. Their cause is big enough to consecrate them.
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Therefore a new, a larger, a more vital life has already begun for invaded and unconquered France! In order to reap the blessings of war, a nation must have an irreproachable cause, and aside from Belgium, France has the clearest record of all the belligerents in this world war. She will gain most from it, not in land or wealth, but in honor and moral strength, in dignity and pride. She is ready to pay the great price for her soul. This is the one supreme inspiration that the French are giving an admiring world—their readiness to give all rather than yield to the evil that threatens them. With the light of such nobility in one's eyes, it is difficult, indeed, to be patient with the cynical clamor of comfortable neutrals for peace at any price. If there is anything of dignity and meaning in human life, it lies in selfless devotion to beliefs, to principles; it is readiness to sacrifice happiness, life, all, in their defense.
And that is patriotism in its larger aspect. Our intellectuals discuss coldly the primitive quality of patriotism and its unexpected recrudescence in this world war. They talk of it in the jargon of social science as "group consciousness." Before I felt its fervor in the crisis of Italy's decision, in the sublime endurance of the French, I did not realize what patriotism might mean. It is not merely the instinctive love for the land of birth, loyalty to the known and familiar. Much more than that! The natal soil is but the symbol. Patriotism is human loyalty to the deeper, better part of one's own being, to the loves and the ideals and the beliefs of one's race. It is the love of family, of land, of tongue, of religion, of the woman who bore you and of the woman you get with child, of the God you reverence. It is loyalty to life as it has been poured into you by your forefathers, to those ideals which your race has conceived and given to the world. "Viva Italia!" "Vive la France!" is a prayer of the deepest, purest sort that the Italian or the Frenchman can breathe. Without these subconscious devotions and loyalties the human animal would be a forlorn complex of mind and sense. Those amorphous beings who, thanks to our modern economic wealth, have become "citizens of the world," who wander physically and intellectually from land to land, who taste of this and that without incorporating any supreme devotion in their blood, our cosmopolites and expatriates and intellectuals, froth of a too comfortable existence, give forth a hollow sound at the savage touch of war. They become pacifists. They can see neither good nor evil: all is a vague blur of "humanity."
Patriotism is the supreme loyalty to life of the individual. Wherever this loyalty is instinctive, vivid, there some precious tradition has been bequeathed to a people that still burns in their blood. Latin patriotism is ardent like man's one great love for woman, ennobling the giver as well as the loved one; it is tender like the son's love for the mother, with the sanctity of acknowledgment of the debt of life. Can any vision of "internationalism" take the place of these powerful personal loyalties to racial ideals?… "Mere boys led to the slaughter" is the sentimentality one hears of the marching conscripts of European armies. Better even so than the curse of no supreme allegiance, or devotion, or readiness to sacrifice—than the aimless selfishness in which our American youth are brought up!
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For every boy in Europe knows, as soon as he knows anything, that he owes one certain fixed debt, and that is service to his country, to that larger whole that has given him the best part of his own being. If need be, he owes it his life itself. It is an obligation he must fulfill before all other obligations, at no matter what inconvenience or sacrifice to himself, unquestioningly, immediately.
What takes the place for the American youth of this primary obligation? Himself! He is expensively nurtured, schooled, put forward into life—for what? To help himself as best he can at the general table of society. He can never forget himself, subordinate his personal ambition to any transcendent loyalty. He becomes from his cradle the egotist.