Armageddon—And After

by W. L. Courtney

The Military Caste

Militarism is another of our maladies. Here we must distinguish with some care. A military spirit is one thing: militarism is another. It is probable that no nation is worthy to survive which does not possess a military spirit, or, in other words, the instinct to defend itself and its liberties against an aggressor. It is a virtue which is closely interfused with high moral qualities—self-respect, a proper pride, self-reliance—and is compatible with real modesty and sobriety of mind. But militarism has nothing ethical about it. It is not courage, but sheer pugnacity and quarrelsomeness, and as exemplified in our modern history it means the dominion of a clique, the reign of a few self-opinionated officials. That these individuals should possess only a limited intelligence is almost inevitable. Existing for the purposes of war, they naturally look at everything from an oblique and perverted point of view. They regard nations, not as peaceful communities of citizens, but as material to be worked up into armies. Their assumption is that war, being an indelible feature in the history of our common humanity, must be ceaselessly prepared for by the piling up of huge armaments and weapons of destruction. Their invariable motto is that if you wish for peace you must prepare for war—"si vis pacem, para bellum"—a notoriously false apophthegm, because armaments are provocative, not soothing, and the man who is a swash-buckler invites attack. It is needless to say that thousands of military men do not belong to this category: no one dreads war so much as the man who knows what it means. I am not speaking of individuals, I am speaking of a particular caste, military officials in the abstract, if you like to put it so, who, because their business is war, have not the slightest idea what the pacific social development of a people really means. Militarism is simply a one-sided, partial point of view, and to enforce that upon a nation is as though a man with a pronounced squint were to be accepted as a man of normal vision. We have seen what it involves in Germany. In a less offensive form, however, it exists in most states, and its root idea is usually that the civilian as such belongs to a lower order of humanity, and is not so important to the State as the officer who discharges vague and for the most part useless functions in the War Office.[4] It is a swollen, over-developed militarism that has got us into the present mess, and one of our earliest concerns, when the storm is over, must be to put it into its proper place. Let him who uses the sword perish by the sword.

[4] Thus it was the Military party in Bulgaria which drove her to the disastrous second Balkan war, and the Military party in Austria which insisted on the ultimatum to Servia.

Diplomacy

And I fear that there is another ancient piece of our international strategy which has been found wanting. I approach with some hesitation the subject of diplomacy, because it contains so many elements of value to a state, and has given so many opportunities for active and original minds. Its worst feature is that its operations have to be conducted in secret: its best is that it affords a fine exemplification of the way in which the history and fortunes of states are—to their advantage—dependent upon the initiative of gifted and patriotic individuals. But if we look back over the history of recent years, we shall discover that diplomacy has not fulfilled its especial mission. According to a well-known cynical dictum a diplomatist is a man who is paid to lie for his country. And, indeed, it is one of the least gracious aspects of the diplomatic career that it seems necessarily to involve the use of a certain amount of chicanery and falsehood, the object being to jockey opponents by means of skilful ruses into a position in which they find themselves at a disadvantage. Clearly, however, there are better aims than these for diplomacy—one aim in particular, which is the preservation of peace. A diplomat is supposed to have failed if the result of his work leads to war. It is not his business to bring about war. Any king or prime minister or general can do that, very often with conspicuous ease. A diplomat is a skilful statesman versed in international politics, who makes the best provision he can for the interests of his country, carefully steering it away from those rocks of angry hostility on which possibly his good ship may founder.

Balance of Power

Now what has diplomacy done for us during the last few years? It has formed certain understandings and alliances between different states; it has tried to safeguard our position by creating sympathetic bonds with those nations who are allied to us in policy. It has also attempted to produce that kind of "Balance of Power" in Europe which on its own showing makes for peace. This Balance of Power, so often and so mysteriously alluded to by the diplomatic world, has become a veritable fetish. Perhaps its supreme achievement was reached when two autocratic monarchs—the Tsar of Russia and the German Emperor—solemnly propounded a statement, as we have seen, at Port Baltic that the Balance of Power, as distributed between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, had proved itself valuable in the interests of European peace. That was only two years ago, and the thing seems a mockery now. If we examine precisely what is meant by a Balance of Power, we shall see that it presupposes certain conditions of animosity and attempts to neutralise them by the exhibition of superior or, at all events, equivalent forces. A Balance of Power in the continental system assumes, for all practical purposes, that the nations of Europe are ready to fly at each other's throats, and that the only way to deter them is to make them realise how extremely perilous to themselves would be any such military enterprise. Can any one doubt that this is the real meaning of the phrase? If we listen to the Delphic oracles of diplomacy on this subject of the Balance of Power, we shall understand that in nine cases out of ten a man invoking this phrase means that he wants the Balance of Power to be favourable to himself. It is not so much an exact equipoise that he desires, as a certain tendency of the scales to dip in his direction. If Germany feels herself weak she not only associates Austria and Italy with herself, but looks eastward to get the assistance of Turkey, or, perhaps, attempts—as it so happens without any success—to create sympathy for herself in the United States of America. If, on the other hand, France feels herself in danger, she not only forms an alliance with Russia, but also an entente with England and, on the principle that the friends of one's friends ought to be accepted, produces a further entente between England and Russia. England, on her part, if for whatever reason she feels that she is liable to attack, goes even so far as to make an alliance with an Asiatic nation—Japan—in order to safeguard her Asiatic interests in India. Thus, when diplomatists invoke the necessity of a Balance of Power, they are really trying to work for a preponderance of power on their side. It is inevitable that this should be so. An exact Balance of Power must result in a stalemate.