The World Decision

by Robert Herrick

To-day under the shadow of world war we are taking thought of national protection, projecting schemes of defense including the enrollment of citizens who may be called upon to fight for their country. It is less important to teach our youth the military lessons of self-protection than it is to teach them the greater lesson of self-forgetfulness, of devotion to a national ideal—so that they may be ready to give their lives for that national ideal as the youth of Europe have given their lives to settle this world cause. Not a few hundreds of thousands of national guards, then, in order to secure ourselves from invasion are what we need, but that every man or woman born into the nation or adopting it as home should be made to feel the obligation of national service. It matters less what form that service should take, whether purely military or partly military and partly social. It is the service, the sense of obligation that counts for the individual and for the nation. The responsibility of service teaches the importance of ideas, the necessity of sacrifice. And he who is ready to sacrifice himself, to forget himself and become absorbed in the life that surrounds him, of which he is but an infinitesimal unit, to which he owes the best in him, has already achieved a larger peace than the pacifist dreams of.

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Consider what happened to the youth of France a little more than a year ago. Suddenly with no preparation or warning they were called to defend their country from invasion. It was no longer possible to argue the rights of that diplomatic tangle into which European statesmen had muddled. Whatever the ultimate truth, the ultimate right of the controversy, the state—that larger self which was their home, their mesh of loves and interests and beliefs—demanded their service. The youth of France had been brought up with the knowledge that any day such a sacrifice might be required, with the consciousness deeply rooted in their beings that one of the necessary conditions of their living was to give their all at the call of the state. They conceived of no honorable alternative: it was as inevitable to pay this obligation as it is for decently minded citizens to pay their legal debts. They hurried to their mobilization posts, donned uniforms and equipment, and were shipped away in regiments to the front. Most of them did not worry about the possibility of death, but acted like all healthy human beings, ignoring what they could not affect, caught up in the novelty and the requirements of the new life. Yet deep in the consciousness of the most careless must have lain some thought that he might never return, that the cross-marked grave on the hillside, the pit, or the hospital might be waiting for him.

This consciousness that he can no longer dispose of himself, at least for the finer spirit, must act as a great release. Having accepted his fate, and therefore willed it as the only possible choice for him, he becomes another person, a largely selfless person, a strangely older, calmer being capable of thinking and acting clearly, nobly. Once the great personal decision made, the resolve to forego life and happiness and personal achievement, a clogging burden of selfish considerations drop from within. So one can read the experience of those two young officers preserved in Henry Bordeaux's "Two Heroes." They were free as never before to do what lay before them,—their officers' duty,—simply, directly. Many things that they had previously valued seemed to have lost color, to have become trivial. They thought solely of acquitting themselves with, honor in what it was their fate to do. They were ready to obey because before death they were humble. They had begun to glimpse the blind mystery that is life, in which every one must needs act his part without questioning, with faith in its ultimate meaning, with the will to trust its end. They were brave because they were simple and single-hearted, selfless. They were strong because they disdained to be weak, having renounced all. If it were to be their fate to die unnoted, they were content with the satisfaction of having done what was expected of them. And if they died in glory, they were unaware of their honor, believing that they had done no more than any of their fellows would have done in the same opportunity.

Thus, having laid down their lives for the cause that commanded their faith and loyalty, they found their real lives—larger, more beautiful, stronger…. Not once, but many thousands of times, has this miracle happened! Their graves are strewn, singly and in groups, over every field of eastern France. They paid the debt, did their part little or great, unknown or glorified by men. Literally they have given their blood for the soil of their fathers' land.

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We know that they have given much more than their blood to that soil. Just as at the call to arms, the selfish, the mean, the vicious qualities of these lives dropped from them in the freedom of sacrifice accepted, and in place of egotistic preoccupations rose once more to the surface of their natures the ancient virtues of their race, so in their going they left for the others who lived, who were to be born, a tremendous legacy of honor and noble responsibility. By watering the soil with their blood they have made it infinitely more precious for every human being that treads upon it. They have helped to make mere life more significant for those who remain to mourn them. It can never again be quite the same commonplace affair, so lightly, cheaply spent, as it had been before. They have not left behind them joy, but faith. And that is why the faces of the earnest living who are able to realize this sacrifice of youth have a grave sternness in them which touches even the most careless stranger. Something of the glory created by the dead and the wounded radiates out even to us in a distant, peaceful land….

But why, we ask, all this sacrifice, this cruel, agonizing sacrifice of war? That is a mystery too deep for any to fathom. It is better not to probe too insistently, to accept it as the man in Rheims,—"It must be better for the others afterward because of what we have endured." That is the expression of faith in life which is the better part of any religion. For what we suffer now, for what we give now of our most precious, it will be repaid to those who are to come. Life will be freer, grander, more significant: it will be a better world. Nobody who has seen or felt the heavy tragedy of this world war could endure its horror if he were not sustained by that faith. But with that faith the losses seem not too vast. One by one the world's great decisions must be made, in suffering, in blood and tears. Peace comes not through evasion or compromise, either for the individual or for the state.