The Ways of War

by Tom Kettle

We have lived to see Europe—that Europe which carried the fortunes and the hopes of all mankind—degraded to a foul something which no image can so much as shadow forth. To a detached intelligence it must resemble nothing so much as a sort of malign middle term between a lunatic asylum and a butcher’s stall.

We have seen committed, under our own amazed eyes, the greatest crime against civilisation of which civilisation itself keeps any record. The Blood-and-Ironmongers have entered into possession of the soul of humanity. No one who remembers our social miseries will say that that was a house swept and garnished, but it did seem secure against such an invasion of diabolism: that was an illusion, and it has perished. The face of things is changed, and all the streams are flowing up the hills and not down them. If in the old world it was the task of men to build, develop, redeem, integrate, carnage and destruction are now imposed upon us as the first conditions of human society. We are gripped in the ancient bloodiness of that paradox which bids us kill life in order to save life.

Nations are at war on land and sea, and under and above both usque ad cœlum et infernum. Millions of men have been marched to this Assize of Blood to be torn with shells and bullets, gutted with bayonets, tortured with vermin, to dig themselves into holes and grovel there in mud and fragments of the flesh of their comrades, to rot with disease, to go mad, and in the most merciful case to die.

Worse, if possible, is the malign transformation of the mind of mankind. Dr. Jekyll has been wholly submerged in Mr. Hyde. Killing has become an hourly commonplace—for the aggressor as the mere practice of his trade, for the assailed as a necessity of defence and victory. The material apparatus of butchery and destruction has proven to be far more tremendous in its effects than even its planners had imagined. The fabric of settled life has disappeared not by single houses, but by whole towns. Cathedrals are mere dust and shards of stained glass. Strong forts have all but vanished under the Thor’s hammer of a single bombardment. The very earth, that a few months ago gave us food and iron and coal, is wealed, pitted, scarred, mounded, entrenched into the semblance of some devil’s nightmare.

All this came upon a world which was more favourable to the hopes of honest, Christian men than any save the Golden Ages of fable. Being myself a plain, Christian man, I am not going to suggest that in 1914 the Earthly Paradise had arrived or was in sight. Coventry Patmore is entirely right when he says that belief in the perfectibility of man on earth is the last proof of weakmindedness. If we fall to rise, it is also true that we rise to fall. It is, perhaps, the chief gain of the agony of war that men have come once more to recognise that in their proudest exaltations sin stands chuckling at their elbows; that moral evil is a reality, and that the opposite notion was a spider-web spun by German metaphysics out of its own entrails. But with these limitations the world before the war promised well for all reasonable human hopes. The old materialism was all but dead. It is true that a few antiquated German heresiarchs like Professor Haeckel still expounded a thing called Monism in sixpenny editions. It is true that a tribe of German professors were still engaged (with much aid and abetment from English savants and publishers) in an attempt to shred into myth those plain historical documents, the Gospels. But on the whole the reigning philosophy was that of Bergson, a philosophy of life, Latin and lucid, which was a distinct return to St. Thomas Aquinas, to Aristotle, and to the common daylight. And in the region of Higher Criticism people were asking themselves very earnestly whether savants like Harnack and the rest, having regard to their general flat-footedness of apprehension, were likely to be good judges of any evidence of anything whatever, human or divine.

In the field of social problems the outlook was of the hopefullest. The conscience of men had been aroused more sharply than ever before to the mass of evil in our society which was inevitable only as a fruit of selfish apathy, and could be exterminated by sound knowledge and strong action. The very loud clamour of the indecently rich was in itself the best proof that the main cause had been bull’s-eyed, and the best guarantee of approaching change. On the other hand the emptiness of the old Socialism, its inadequacy not only to the spiritual but to the bodily business of life, had emerged into clear vision. Property for every man, and not too much property for any man, had become the watchword of sensible men. Trusts, combines, and private conspiracies of every kind, economic and political, were growing more nervous and by consequence more honest under a growing acuteness of scrutiny. Conservatism, which, for all its faults, had kept the roots of life from being torn up, and Democracy, which, for all its, had been like the sap in the tree forcing itself out into new forms of life, were coming to understand that they were not enemies but allies. If you refused all change it was death; if you changed everything at once it was equally death.

There were, indeed, obvious blots. Men, and not irresponsible men, were playing with fire in these countries. The King’s conference at Buckingham Palace was known to have failed just twelve days before Armageddon. We were committed to the monstrous doctrine that only through the criminal madness of civil war could the political future of Ireland be settled. Women, or some women, were already at guerilla war with men, or with some men, and the failure to find a way out was a grave reproach to statesmanship. Perhaps our most damning defect of that vanished time before the war was our entire lack of the sense of proportion. All the little fishes of controversy talked like whales. The galled jade did not wince, it trumpeted and charged like a wounded bull-elephant. If you put another penny on the income tax the rich howled out in chorus that Dick Turpin had got himself into the Exchequer, that all industry would come to an end, that the stately homes of England would fall into decay, and that all capital would emigrate to Kamchatka. If a bilious works manager spoke crossly to a similarly indisposed Trade Union workman, there was grave danger that in a week we should have a national crisis and a national strike.

The scene has changed. There must be many a man who, looking out on the spectacle of blood and disaster which now passes for Europe, exclaims: “If I had only known!” There is many a home, deep in the mourning of this titanic tragedy, in which they sigh: “If we could only bring back that 1914 in which we were not wise!”

These are not vain regrets; they have the germ of future wisdom. But they are not our immediate business. Enough for the present to remember that we were playing with unrealities while this crime of all history was being prepared.

All our civilisation of that time, however disturbed, had in it a principle of growth and reconciliation. The temper of these countries might have permitted inflammatory verbiage, and even scattered anarchical outbursts, but it would have revolted to sanity at the first actual shedding of blood.