On the island of Corfu is a giant statue of Achilles, with his heel transfixed by the arrow. Countless hours the ex-Kaiser spent gazing at this statue, yet its message apparently made no impression. “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make ...”—blind.
THE MEANS TO THE MORAL OBJECTIVE
After this brief historical survey, let us turn to consider the means by which the moral objective, of subduing the enemy’s will to resist, can be attained. These means can be exercised in the military, the economic, the political, or the social spheres. Further, the weapons by which they are executed may be military, economic, or diplomatic—with which is included propaganda.
As war is our subject, the diplomatic and economic weapons, except in a military guise, are outside our purview. There appears little doubt, however, that the economic weapon in the struggle between rival national policies during so-called peace has possibilities still scarcely explored or understood. Again, the military weapon can be wielded in the economic sphere without any open state of war existing. In the Ruhr we saw the French aiming, by a military control of Germany’s industrial resources, to subdue the latter’s will to resist French policy, and with the further motive of a moral disruption between the German states.
What, however, are the ways in which the military weapon can be employed to subdue the enemy’s will to resist in war?
The question demands that we first examine how the moral attack takes effect, and how the will of an enemy people is reduced to such a degree that they will sue for peace rather than face a continuation of the struggle. Put in a nutshell, the result is obtained by dislocating their normal life to such a degree that they will prefer the lesser evil of surrendering their policy, and by convincing them that any return to “normalcy”—to use President Harding’s term—is hopeless unless they do so surrender. It is an old proverb that “So long as there is life, there is hope,” and this Ciceronian saw may be adduced to support the argument that in the case of people who fight best “with their backs to the wall” only death will end their resistance. This may be true of individuals, or even of considerable bodies of men; the annals of the Anglo-Saxon race afford examples—though such cases have almost always occurred when surrender was as fatal as continued resistance. As soldiers know well, time throws an heroic glamour over events of the past, and national pride leads to pardonable exaggeration of great deeds. Such résistance à mort is probably as rare as that mythical bayonet charge and hand-to-hand clash with cold steel so beloved of tradition and the painter of battle scenes. The latter myth was exposed by the long-dead Ardant du Picq, that French soldier-realist who refused to bow before the altar of the martial tradition. And the Great War finally dissipated it. Imaginative soldiers, especially those in the supply services, might write letters home describing such close quarter fights, war-correspondents safely behind the lines might retail such martial exploits for the benefit of a sensation-loving public, but the real fighting soldier soon found that two sides did not cross bayonets in mortal conflict. The weaker broke and fled, or else threw up their hands as token of surrender the moment they realized the actual shock could no longer be warded off.
The normal man, immediately he recognizes a stronger, directly he realizes the hopelessness of overcoming his enemy, always yields. Nor is man unique in this respect, as any study of animal life will confirm.
Armies and nations are mainly composed of normal men, not of abnormal heroes, and once these realize the permanent superiority of the enemy they will surrender to force majeure.
History, even Anglo-Saxon history, shows that nations bow to the inevitable, and abandon their policy rather than continue a struggle once hope has vanished. No war between civilized people has been carried, nor anywhere near carried, to the point of extermination. The living alone retain the power to admit defeat, and since wars, therefore, are ended by surrender and not by extermination, it becomes apparent that defeat is the result not of loss of life, save, at the most, indirectly and partially, but by loss of moral.