And now every landmark has been submerged in an Atlantic of blood. There has been forced upon us a dispensation in which our very souls are steeped in blood. The horizon of the future, such horizon as is discernible, is visible only through a mist of blood. Now this was not a war demanded by the peoples of the world. It was not, like the Great Revolution, created by the universal uprising of oppressed men, to be marred and to pass over into murder, lust and tyranny. It was not like the old wars of religion. The sort of religion that tortures its enemies and puts them to death no longer flourishes under the standard of the Cross. It does flourish under that of the Crescent, as the corpses of eight hundred thousand slain Armenians terribly testify. There was indeed before the war one people in Europe, but only one, whose leaders preached war as a national duty and function. How far the militarism of his rulers had penetrated to the common man in Germany must remain something of a question. Personally, I do not think that the peasant who knelt by the wayside crucifix in the Tyrol, or the comfortable, stout farmer in Bavaria or Würtemberg, or the miner in Westphalia, or any typical Rhinelander wanted to dip his hands in blood. He bore with rulers who did so want. In the rest of Europe the atmosphere was one of profound peace. That it was so in France even German witnesses testify.
It will be said that all such considerations are now empty, that we have experienced war and realise all that it means, and that it is the part of wisdom to banish such memories from the human imagination. This sort of plea is, indeed, likely to be popular; it has all the qualities of popularity—that is to say, it is feeble, edifying, and free from all the roughness of truth. But it is precisely the truth in all its roughness of which we stand in need. Our duty is not to banish the memories of war as we have experienced it, but to burn them in beyond effacement, every line and trait, every dot and detail. Civilised men, in the mass, have not yet begun to understand the baseness and the magnitude of this adventure in de-civilisation. There is no calculus of suffering that can sum up the agonies endured since the sentence of blood was daubed on the lintel of every cottage in Europe. The story of war is not yet realised because it has not yet been told; there has not been time for the telling even to begin. It is the part of wisdom to see that it is not slurred over, but written and remembered.
We shall have the usual fluttered imputations of “rhetoric” and “extravagance,” the usual “scientific historians” with their deprecating gesture, against “the introduction of feeling” into any narrative. Such people, I suppose, have their place in the world. This is a scientific age, and the function of science may be exhausted when it has counted the corpses on a battlefield, unless indeed it goes on to append an estimate of their manurial value. It can render both these accounts without admitting a hint of emotion into its voice. But to the conscience the killing of men remains the most terrible of all acts. A mutilated corpse not only overwhelms it with horror, but also suggests at once that there is a murderer somewhere on the earth who must be sought out and punished. Passion will break into the voice, and anger into the veins at such a confrontation, for to be above passion is to be below humanity. I have no apology, then, to make for any “emotional” phrase or sentence in this book. It is in the main a narrative of facts—verified by evidence which stands unshaken by criticism—but I confess that, being no more than human, I have slipped into the luxury of occasional indignation.
When I call this war a crime I use the word in its fullest and simplest sense, an evil act issuing from the deliberate choice of certain human wills. There is a sort of pietism, hardly distinguishable from atheism, to which war appears as a sort of natural calamity, produced by overmastering external conditions. You will hear people of this school of thoughtlessness chattering away as if the earthquake of Lisbon, the cholera outbreak of 1839, and the war of 1914 all belonged to the same category of evil. But the first was plainly beyond the reach of human power; the second was an evil imposed from without which might have been nullified by a wise organization of medical knowledge; and the third was, on the part of its authors, just as plainly a thing of deliberate human choice. Another type of mind, numerously represented, considers that it has settled everything philosophically when to war it has added the label “inevitable.” Everything is apparently involved in a sort of gelatinous determinism; everybody is somewhat to blame for everything, and nobody is very definitely to blame for anything. According to this notion because Germany is rather big, and the British Empire, France, Russia, Italy, and Austria-Hungary are also rather big, and because they all manufacture goods and sell them, the fabric of civilisation is to blow up in minute fragments from time to time under the explosion of an “inevitable war.” No casual connection is indicated. Before thought begins these two doctrines must be dismissed. War is not a calamity of nature, and there are no “inevitable wars.” Or rather the only war inevitable is a war against aggression, and aggression itself is never inevitable.
If any fault has ever been urged against Belgium it was that of a too great and apathetic complacency. The average Englishman—bating the unreal fever-frenzy regarding Ireland—so little planned attack on anyone that events have proved his complete unpreparedness, an unpreparedness common and creditable to all the Allies. Russia wanted no war, Italy wanted none, Serbia, ravaged with disease, wanted none. Yet suddenly there was launched upon us this abomination of desolation.
Who launched it? Who was guilty of this crime above all crimes? The author of it, whether a ruler, a junta, or a whole nation, comes before history stained with an infamy to which no language can reach. If his assassin’s stroke is not beaten down into the dust it is all over with Europe and civilisation. Who, then, was the criminal? There is an invertebrate view according to which everybody is equally blameable and blameless for everything. The holders of this view have never gone quite so far as to take up the New Testament story, and argue that Judas Iscariot was a misunderstood man; but, were they logical, they would do so. Since they are not logical they must not be allowed to apply their mechanical and deterministic formula to the tragedy of world-history. No nation in this war is without a blot, and many blots on its past, not even Ireland. Any people that claims complete worthiness to bear the sword and shield of justice is a people intoxicated with vanity. The participants in this struggle are, like the participants and witnesses in a murder-trial, human. That does not prevent a jury adjudging the supreme guilt of blood to that one of the many imperfect individuals on whom it lies.
The Great War was in its origin a Great Crime, and the documents are there to prove it. That is one advantage we possess formerly forbidden to public opinion. The Press and popular education have done much harm, but this solid good stands to their credit: they have made it impossible, as in old times, to order war in secret councils for motives undisclosed, or not disclosed till long after the events. Every belligerent Government has found itself under the necessity of issuing to the world diplomatic correspondence relating to the outbreak of the war. All the publications of the Powers engaged will be found in a single volume, Collected Diplomatic Documents relating to the Outbreak of the European War (E. Ponsonby, 1s. net). To that volume frequent reference will be made in these pages. One omission must be noted, a hiatus more significant and sinister than any printed evidence. The influence exercised by Berlin on Vienna must be, for the historian, the central pivot of all ante-bellum negotiations. But in neither of the books published by the Germanic Powers is there any real disclosure of what passed between Berlin and Vienna during that fateful period. Allegations of atrocities, too, no longer rest merely on the evidence of private persons. Formal Commissions, composed of lawyers and statesmen of international reputation, have sifted the whole mass of charges, eliminated hearsay, and committed themselves to a verdict that nothing can shake. That great prince of the Church, Cardinal Mercier, and his Bishops, have issued documents with every solemnity of form and occasion which in the early days of the struggle were not available. A whole library of comment, in which the ablest minds not only of the United Kingdom and France but also of the United States and Germany itself have collaborated in a reasoned examination of the issues at stake, is at our disposal.
The evidence in the whole case is indeed at once so clear and so voluminous that one might well have supposed any further survey of it to be superfluous. That is not so. It is a far from frequent experience to find a man in Ireland, even among those who assume to themselves a new leadership of opinion, who has made an honest study of documents within reach of all the world. You will still hear “intellectuals” explaining at length that they “don’t believe the Germans committed any atrocities in Belgium.” You will hear facile sneers at the notion that attacks of Great Powers on small nationalities had anything to do with the war. The sooner the unworthiness of this familiar attitude is recognised by everybody in Ireland the better.
No man has the right to offer an opinion on any subject that is a matter of evidence until he has read the evidence. Upon anyone who has read it in this instance the twin niaiseries just cited make the impression merely of blank unreason. What would one make of a man, and a writer to boot, who began modern French history by dismissing the alleged existence of Napoleon with a shrug and a gibe? Or who “didn’t believe” that there ever were evictions in Ireland? The parallel is exact. The evidence in proof of the first pair of propositions differs from that in proof of the second pair only in being fresher and more abundant. Going upon that evidence, any branch of which can be pursued in detail by any enquirer, I propose to establish this following argument.
This war originated in an attempt by Austria-Hungary, a large Empire, to destroy the independence of Serbia, a small nation.