As my own corrective I have at hand certain letters from a very able woman doctor who returned last week from Calais. Lockjaw, gangrene, men tied with filthy rags and lying bitterly cold in coaly sheds; men unwounded, but so broken by the chill horrors of the Yser trenches as to be near demented—such things make the substance of her picture. One young officer talked to her rather dryly of the operations, of the ruined towns and villages, of the stench of dead men and horses, of the losses and wounds and mutilations among his men, of the list of pals he had lost. "Suddenly he began to cry. He broke down just like an overtaxed child. And he could not stop crying. He cried and cried, and I could do nothing to help him." He was a strong man and a brave man, and to that three months of war had brought him.
And then this again:
There were a fair number of Belgian doctors, but no nurses except the usual untrained French girls, almost no equipment, and no place for clean surgery. We heard of a house containing sixty-one men with no doctor or nurses—several died without having received any medical aid at all. Mrs. —— and I even on the following Wednesday found four men lying on straw in a shop with leg and foot wounds who had not been dressed since Friday and had never been seen by a doctor. In addition there were hundreds and hundreds of wounded who could walk trying to find shelter in some corner, besides the many unwounded French and Belgian soldiers quartered in the town.
As if this inferno of misery were not enough, there were added the refugees! These were not Belgians, as I had imagined, but French. It appears that both English and French armies have to clear the civil population out of the whole fighting area—partly to prevent spying and treachery, (which has been a curse to both armies,) and partly because they would starve. They are sent to Calais, and then by boat to Havre.
That first Sunday evening an endless procession flowed from the station to the quays in the drenching rain. Each family had a perambulator, (a surprisingly handsome one, too,) piled with sticks of bread, a few bundles of goods, and, when we peered inside, a couple of crying babies. There were few young people; mostly it was whimpering, frightened-looking children and wretched, bent old men and women. It seemed too bad to be true; even when they brushed past us in the rain we could not believe that their sodden figures were real. They were dematerialized by misery in some odd way.
Some of them slept in skating rinks, trucks, some in the Amiral Ganteaume. (One's senses could not realize that to the horrors of exile these people had added those of shipwreck next day.) Some certainly stood in the Booking Hall outside our hotel all night through. This sort of thing went on all the week, and was going on when we left.
Nevertheless, I was stirred agreeably by the imagination of the shells smashing the Emden and the men inside the Emden, and when I read the other day that the naval guns had destroyed over 4,000 men in the German trenches about Middlekirche I remarked that we were "doing well." It is only on the whole that we who want to end war hate and condemn war; we are constantly lapsing into fierceness, and if we forget this lurking bellicosity and admiration for hard blows in our own nature then we shall set about the task of making an end to it under hopelessly disabling misconceptions. We shall underrate and misunderstand altogether the very powerful forces that are against pacifist effort.
Let us consider first, then, the forces that are directly opposed to the pacification of the world, the forces that will work openly and definitely for the preservation of war as a human condition. And it has to be remembered that the forces that are for a thing are almost always more unified, more concentrated and effective than the forces that are against it. We who are against war and want to stop it are against it for a great multitude of reasons. There are other things in life that we prefer, and war stops these other things. Some of us want to pursue art, some want to live industrious lives in town or country, some would pursue scientific developments, some want pleasures of this sort or that, some would live lives of religion and kindliness, or religion and austerity.
But we all agree in fixing our minds upon something else than war. And since we fix our minds on other things, war becomes possible and probable through our general inattention. We do not observe it, and meanwhile the people who really care for war and soldiering fix their minds upon it. They scheme how it shall be done, they scheme to bring it about. Then we discover suddenly—as the art and social development, the industry and pleasant living, the cultivation of the civil enterprise of England, France, Germany, and Russia have discovered—that everything must be pushed aside when the war thinkers have decided upon their game. And until we of the pacific majority contrive some satisfactory organization to watch the war-makers we shall never end war, any more than a country can end crime and robbery without a police. Specialist must watch specialist in either case. Mere expressions of a virtuous abhorrence of war will never end war until the crack of doom.
The people who actually want war are perhaps never at any time very numerous. Most people sometimes want war, and a few people always want war. It is these last who are, so to speak, the living nucleus of the war creature that we want to destroy. That liking for an effective smash which gleamed out in me for a moment when I heard of the naval guns is with them a dominating motive. It is not outweighed and overcome in them as it is in me by the sense of waste, and by pity and horror and by love for men who can do brave deeds and yet weep bitterly for misery and the deaths of good friends. These war-lovers are creatures of a simpler constitution. And they seem capable of an ampler hate.