"Got mitt uns." One has the idea that He is—when the game is played in that spirit. God with us both, shaping brotherhood out of enmity.
Bernard Shaw in a moment of inspiration thinks that some way will have to be found enabling England and Germany to live together peaceably for the future. It is an idea that may possibly have occurred to others. Well, perhaps this is the way. Shaw would not approve of it. But then there is so much in human nature that Shaw does not approve of. There are times when one is compelled to a great pity for Shaw. He seems to have got into the wrong world. He is for ever thanking God that he is not as we other men—we Englishmen and Germans, mere publicans and sinners. It is a difficult world to understand, I admit, my dear Shaw, full of inconsistencies and contradictions. Perhaps there is a meaning in it somewhere that you have missed.
Perhaps we have got to fight one another before we understand one another. In the old Norse mythology Love is the wife of Strife; when we come to consider the nature of man, not such an odd union as it appears.
So long as the law runs that in sorrow woman shall bring forth her child; so long as the ground shall yield to the sons of Adam thorns also and thistles, so long will there be strife between man and man. So long, when the last word has been spoken and has failed, will there be war between the nations. The only hope of civilization is to treat it as a game. You cannot enforce a law without a policeman. You can only appeal to a man's honor—to his sporting instincts.
The mistake Germany is making is in not treating war as a game. To do so would be weakness and frivolity. War must be ruthless, must be frightful. It is not to be bound down by laws human or Divine. And even then she is not logical. Two German officers interned in Holland are released on parole. Taking their country at her word, they hasten back to rejoin their regiments. The German Staff is shocked, sends them back to be imprisoned.
So there really are rules to the game. An officer and gentleman may not lie. If a Sub-Lieutenant may not lie for the sake of his country, then what argument gives the right to the German Government to tear up its treaties, to the German Military Staff to disregard its Ambassador's signature to The Hague Convention?
Come, shade of Bismarck, and your disciples in Germany and other countries, (including a few in my own,) make up your mind. To be ruthless and frightful in a half-hearted, nervous, vacillating fashion is ridiculous. You have either got to go back to the beginning of things, and make war a battle of wild beasts, or you have got to go forward and make it a game—a grim game, I grant you, but one that the nations can play at and shake hands afterward. We have tried the ruthless and frightful method. We used to slaughter the entire population. To shoot a selected few is to court a maximum of contempt for a minimum of advantage. We used to lay waste the land. We did not content ourselves with knocking down a church spire and burning a library. We left not one stone upon another. We sowed salt where the cities had been. We tortured our prisoners before the ramparts. We did not "leave them their eyes to weep with"; we burned them out with hot irons; surely a much swifter means of striking terror! Why not return to these methods? They sound most effective.
They were not effective. God's chosen people—according to themselves—did not annihilate the Philistines, not even with the help of the Ark of the Covenant. The Philistines tightened their belts and acquitted themselves like men. Today the heathen rules in Canaan. Where Mohammed failed the shade of Bismarck is not likely to succeed. Poland is still a sore in European politics. The whole force of the Vatican could not suppress a handful of reformers. All the bloodthirsty edicts of the Revolution could not annihilate a few thousand aristocrats. These things cannot be done. War finishes nothing, it only interrupts. A nation cannot be killed; it can only die. This war is not going to be the end of all things either for Germany or for us. Germany can be beaten to her knees, as she beat France to her knees in 1870; as more than once before that France has beaten her. Later on we have all got to live together in peace, for a while.
Come, gentlemen, let us make an honorable contest of it, that shall leave as little of bitterness behind it as may be. Let us see if we cannot make a fine game of it that we shall be all the better for having played out to the end. From which we shall all come back home cleaner minded, clearer seeing, made kinder to one another by suffering. Come, gentlemen, you believe that God has called upon you to spread German culture through the lands. You are ready to die for your faith. And we believe God has a use for the thing called England. Well, let us fight it out. There seems no other way. You for St. Michael and we for St. George; and God be with us both.
But do not let us lose our common humanity in the struggle. That were the worst defeat of all—the only defeat that would really matter, that would really be lasting.