The Ways of War

by Tom Kettle

So much is liminal; it lies across the threshold of any temple of peace that can be imagined. Until the objects for which the Allies went into the war are achieved it must go on, and we mean it to go on, regardless of any waste of life or substance. But there is another proposition just as basal against the ignoring of which the writer of this article enters his protest. No statesman has the right to change, behind the backs of the fighting men, the aim and purpose of the war. No government has a mandate to substitute markets for justice. The necessary blood must be spent, it will spend itself freely and without question. But the diplomatist who lavishes one life in excess, in order to achieve objects other than that for which peaceful citizens transformed themselves into soldiers, is a criminal against civilisation. There are many, very many, men in the New Army who believe that no war merely for trade can be justifiable or other than an abomination. If another Power launches war in the name of trade, your resistance is a very different matter: it is the answer of a higher to a lower morality. It must succeed in order precisely to punish those who are willing to make war solely for trade.

Is the fear well founded that powerful men are in fact working behind the stages to bring about such a transformation as has been indicated? Is it merely fancy that discovers the assiduous and not over-clean finger of predatory finance in certain pies that are now on the menu? If so, Liberalism cannot too soon awaken. The New Army attested to die, if need be, for the public law of Europe: there was no mention of tariffs in the bond.

It will be obvious that I am not here speaking of co-operation and co-ordination, economic as well as military, between the Allies for the speeding on of victory. That exists, and has existed in greater or less measure since the beginning; whatever strengthens it is plainly sound and desirable. What is spoken of is the attempt to encumber purely military issues with a whole new economic programme, and to make the length of the war turn as much on the latter as on the former. It is time for somebody to say quite brutally that this is a struggle to destroy Prussian militarism, not to establish British Protectionism. To this last we may come, but blood and more especially the blood of men enrolled on another appeal, must not be the argument of the innovators. Nor is it suggested that the influence of economic on military resources should be overlooked. The economic factor has indeed proved to be far less decisive, or far less rapidly decisive, than many forecasters of events had anticipated, and for two very valid reasons. For one thing the enemy has at his command the whole centre of Europe, a vast geographical bloc interknit in almost all its parts by an uninterrupted system of intercourse which so far remains intact. For another the operation of the economic motive turns on the assumption of a minimum standard of life below which man will not consent to fall, willingly or at all. In normal times of peace this is rigid, and any serious depression of it will produce widespread commotion and revolt. But in war, when the struggle is or is conceived to be for national existence, belligerent peoples will agree to the lopping away of luxury after luxury and conventional necessary after conventional necessary. For a considerable part of the process they find the society in which they live actually stronger and not weaker. Even when the weakening pinch comes it is countered by a spirit of sacrifice, altogether abnormal and not easily to be measured. So long as the army has a rag to its back, a crust of bread, and a cartridge, economic exhaustion is not complete. The end will probably come sooner, and defeat will be accepted out of calculation before it is accepted out of sheer necessity. What is much more probable is that a military decision will have been obtained at a much earlier stage, but with all this said there remains a perfectly clear distinction between assigning their due rôle to economic conditions on the one hand, and transforming an honour-war into a trade-war on the other hand.

The worst sin of those who desire or seem to desire such a change is that of effecting a deterioration of the moral ideal of the Allies. This is no affair of fine words but of abiding realities. Either this is on our part a war into which we were forced by aggressive militarism—come to overt baseness in the Prussian breach of faith with Belgium and assault on peaceful France, and the Austrian blow of destruction at Serbia—or else it is a mere struggle for domination between greedy Powers. If it were the latter it would be wise to say no more of the antithesis between barbarism and civilisation. It would be wise to finish the nightmare of blood as well as we could, to pouch the spoils, and be silent. But since it is the former we must resist any debasement of purpose. Since it is a war for the ending of militarism it must include in its ultimate historical sweep the liberation of all peoples who desire liberation, even the Germans. So long as it continues unwarped from its original intention that hope may be fulfilled. Not only is a locus pœnitentiæ left for the democracy which must one day arise even in Prussia, but much more is involved. An opportunity is given for that immediate repudiation of a government by a people which in the past has always taken the form of a revolution. Nobody is able to say dogmatically that there is any prospect of such a development within the Central Powers, and nobody is able to say dogmatically that there is not: we are not allowed to know. It is the habit of those countries to surround their frontiers with a wall of brass. We do catch, through the species of man like Liebknecht and Haase, certain rumblings and rumours of discontent, but cannot even guess at their significance. When certain writers profess to find the solidarity in crime of the whole body of the Germanic populations established by the absence of protest against notorious outrages they show little acquaintance with the condition of public opinion in these countries. Prussian militarism and intellectualism begin by lying to and mentally debauching their own citizens. Every German newspaper has represented the Zeppelin raids as successful attacks on purely military and naval establishments, any other damage being incidental and not designed. Till the end of the war the average ignorant peasant and mechanic will have heard no other story than that the Lusitania was a war-ship treacherously disguised. One has only to read the German White Book on Belgium, as translated by Professor Morgan, to understand the sort of scientific denigration of that little people that has been invoked to justify so much of the tale of Louvain and Aerschot and the rest as has been allowed to penetrate to the masses. Penny editions of the Bryce Report do not circulate under either Habsburgs or Hohenzollerns. If fragments of the truth do find a surreptitious way in, the police are there to see that natural indignation shall not express itself. We gather from Liebknecht that the official shepherding of opinion in this regard goes as far as penal servitude and even capital punishment. The actual state of mind of a democratic remnant that may exist is, therefore, to us a clasped and sealed book.

But we do know by the mere inner light of our own principles a great deal that is relevant. The decree of democracy to a whole nation, however bedevilled and misled, can never be one of unconditional destruction. It is not our message to the Germans. So long as their populations identify themselves with the policy of their present miscreant governments they must share their fate. Defeat and, after defeat, outlawry will be their portion. That outlawry will continue until the historical crime of 1914 is purged by chastisement. But the moment the first internal fissure appears a new order has begun. A Germany that has punished her own crowned and helmeted criminals will come before Europe in a very different guise from one that has naturally adopted them. The breaking away of Austria from Prussia—an unnatural alliance—will fix for us a very wide gulf between Austrian and Prussian. There have been wars in which the greatest internal changes took place without influencing the course of the conflict. The fall of Napoleon III did not bring the struggle of 1870 to an end. But the fall of Wilhelm II would undoubtedly bring this war to an end. If the Teutonic masses desire an early peace, and an early re-entry into the fabric of civilisation, they have but to destroy the false gods they adored. The diplomatist of the old pattern will tell us that these are fantastic suggestions. But the truth is that nothing could seem to our awakened eyes half as fantastic as the old diplomacy, with its suave blindness and sham omniscience. The new diplomacy should help to release imprisoned forces. The inner disruption of the Central Alliance is never very far from practical politics. When the full toll of blood and disillusionment, exacted by Hohenzollernism, comes to be realised, strange births may issue into being. So many men have died for liberty that we have no right to disbelieve in any of its possibilities. And so long as we adhere, as we must adhere, with a loyalty even meticulous, to the true cause and first spirit of the Allies, no such possibility is ruled out.

But consent to the substitution of “trade” for “honour” as our device, and mark the malign transformation. Some of our less well-inspired publicists have already done something to communicate to the bloc of enemy countries a unity which does not inhere in its nature. Things breaking up from within may be held together by pressure from without, and such pressure has been in some measure supplied by those to whom reference is made. By steadily ignoring every impulse of disintegration, racial, economic and moral, they have plastered over although they have not sealed up the structural cracks. The new programme, if adopted, will, however, go far to harden the plaster into cement. The spokesmen of Prussianism will be presented with a complete triumph over any faint voice of civilisation that may still be lifted within the enemy realms. They will say quite legitimately: “Our opponents babbled of honour, and moral ideas. We said that that was all hypocrisy, and that their real aim was to isolate, impoverish, and if possible destroy the whole Germanic race. Who now is right? The shopkeepers’ programme has now been openly proclaimed. The struggle of the Germanies is now a struggle for the mere right to exist. What have you to say now in reply to the Kaiser’s resolve to arm every man and boy and woman, aye, and every cat and dog in the Fatherland before submitting to extinction?”

In truth there would be nothing to say. Our ideal would have fallen in the common mud, the last hope of humanity would have perished, and the war must be indefinitely prolonged. If you have driven an enemy into a corner and hold your bayonet pointed at his breast; if he asks on what terms you will accept his surrender and your answer is that in that case he will be not bayoneted but hanged, you must expect resistance à outrance. It will become an affair not of courage but of mere sanity. Whatever the divagations of their statesmanship, the Allies will, of course, win. The nations, however stampeded, will not sacrifice the least element of their unity, and the armies, to whatever new deflection their inspiration be submitted, will fight their unwavering way to victory. But it will be a victory tainted with ambiguous and selfish ends. History will write of us that we began nobly, but that our purpose corrupted. The Great War for freedom will not, indeed, have been waged in vain; that is already decided: but it will have but half kept its promises. Blood and iron will have been once more established as the veritable masters of men, and nothing will open before the world save a vista of new wars.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.