You will discover, if you talk to them skillfully, that they hold that war "ennobles," and that when they say ennobles they mean that it is destructive to the ten thousand things in life that they do not enjoy or understand or tolerate, things that fill them, therefore, with envy and perplexity—such things as pleasure, beauty, delicacy, leisure. In the cant of modern talk you will find them call everything that is not crude and forcible in life "degenerate." But back to the very earliest writings, in the most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew prophets, for example, you will find that at the base of the warrior spirit is hate for more complicated, for more refined, for more beautiful and happier living.
The military peoples of the world have almost always been harsh and rather stupid peoples, full of a virtuous indignation of all they did not understand. The modern Prussian goes to war today with as supreme a sense of moral superiority as the Arabs when they swept down upon Egypt and North Africa. The burning of the library of Alexandria remains forever the symbol of the triumph of a militarist "culture" over civilization. This easy belief of the dull and violent that war "braces" comes out of a real instinct of self-preservation against the subtler tests of peace. This type of person will keep on with war if it can. It is to politics what the criminal type is to social order; it will be resentful and hostile to every attempt to fix up a pacific order in the world.
This heavy envy which is the dominant characteristic of the pro-military type is by no means confined to it. More or less it is in all of us. In England one finds it far less frequently in professional soldiers than among sedentary learned men. In Germany, too, the more uncompromising and ferocious pro-militarism is to be found in the frock coats of the professors. Just at present England is full of virtuous reprehension of German military professors, but there is really no monopoly of such in Germany, and before Germany England produced some of the most perfect specimens of aggressive militarist conceivable. To read Froude upon Ireland or Carlyle upon the Franco-German War is to savor this hate-dripping temperament in its perfection.
Much of this literary bellicosity is pathological. Men overmuch in studies and universities get ill in their livers and sluggish in their circulations; they suffer from shyness, from a persuasion of excessive and neglected merit, old maid's melancholy, and a detestation of all the levities of life. And their suffering finds its vent in ferocious thoughts. A vigorous daily bath, a complete stoppage of wine, beer, spirits, and tobacco, and two hours of hockey in the afternoon would probably make decently tolerant men of all these fermenting professional militarists. Such a regimen would certainly have been the salvation of both Froude and Carlyle. It would probably have saved the world from the vituperation of the Hebrew prophets—those models for infinite mischief.
The extremist cases pass to the average case through insensible degrees. We are all probably, as a species, a little too prone to intolerance, and if we do in all sincerity mean to end war in the world we must prepare ourselves for considerable exercises in restraint when strange people look, behave, believe, and live in a manner different from our own. The minority of permanently bitter souls who want to see objectionable cities burning and men fleeing and dying form the real strength in our occasional complicities.
The world has had its latest object lesson in the German abuse of English and French as "degenerates," of the Russians as "Mongol hordes," of the Japanese as "yellow savages," but it is not only Germans who let themselves slip into national vanity and these ugly hostilities to unfamiliar life. The first line of attack against war must be an attack upon self-righteousness and intolerance. These things are the germ of uncompromising and incurable militarism everywhere.
Now, the attack upon self-righteousness and intolerance and the stern, self-satisfied militarism that arises naturally out of these things is to be made in a number of ways. The first is a sedulous propaganda of the truth about war, a steadfast resolve to keep the pain of warfare alive in the nerves of the careless, to keep the stench of war under the else indifferent nose. It is only in the study of the gloomily megalomaniac historian that aggressive war becomes a large and glorious thing. In reality it is a filthy outrage upon life, an idiot's smashing of the furniture of homes, a mangling, a malignant mischief, a scalding of stokers, a disemboweling of gunners, a raping of caught women by drunken soldiers. By book and pamphlet, by picture and cinematograph film, the pacifist must organize wisdom in these matters.
And not only indignation and distress must come to this task. The stern, uncompromising militarist will not be moved from his determinations by our horror and hostility. These things will but "brace" him. He has a more vulnerable side. The ultimate lethal weapon for every form of stupidity is ridicule, and against the high silliness of the militarist it is particularly effective. It is the laughter of wholesome men that will finally end war. The stern, strong, silent man will cease to trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality at the head of the present war. Not the slaughter of ten million men can make the quality of the German Kaiser other than theatrical and silly.
The greater part of the world is in an agony, a fever, but that does not make the cause of that fever noble or great. A man may die of yellow fever through the bite of a mosquito; that does not make a mosquito anything more than a dirty little insect or an aggressive imperialist better than a pothouse fool.
Henceforth we must recognize no heroic war but defensive war, and as the only honorable warriors such men as those peasants of Visé who went out with shotguns against the multitudinous overwhelming nuisance of invasion that trampled down their fields.