Mr. Shaw's words are identical with those that are preached by Socialists every day, especially on the Continent.
"No soldier is asked to think for himself," he says, "to judge for himself, to consult his own honor and manhood, to dread any consequence except the consequence of punishment to his own person. The rules are plain and simple; the ceremonies of respect and submission are as easy and mechanical as a prayer wheel, the orders are always to be obeyed thoughtlessly, however inept or dishonorable they may be.... No doubt this weakness is just what the military system aims at, its ideal soldier being, not a complete man, but a docile unit or cannon fodder which can be trusted to respond promptly and certainly to the external stimulus of a shouted order, and is intimidated to the pitch of being afraid to run away from a battle."
Nor is Mr. Shaw less sparing to the officer, and he represents in this case also the most unanimous Socialist view:—
"If he [the officer] calls his men dogs," says Shaw, "and perverts a musketry drill order to make them kneel to him as an act of personal humiliation, and thereby provokes a mutiny among men not yet thoroughly broken in to the abjectness of the military condition, he is not, as might be expected, shot, but, at the worst, reprimanded, whilst the leader of the mutiny, instead of getting the Victoria Cross and a public testimonial, is condemned to five years' penal servitude by Lynch Law (technically called martial law) administered by a trade union of officers."
Like all Socialists, Mr. Shaw recognizes that the evils of militarism rest even more heavily on subject peoples than on the soldiers, citizens, or taxpayers of the dominating races. He says of the officer he has been describing, who is humane and intelligent in civil life, that in his military capacity he will frantically declare that "he dare not walk about in a foreign country unless every crime of violence against an Englishman in uniform is punished by the bombardment and destruction of a whole village, or the wholesale flogging and execution of every native in the neighborhood; and also that unless he and his fellow officers have power, without the intervention of a jury, to punish the slightest self-assertion or hesitation to obey orders, however grossly insulting or disastrous those orders may be, with sentences which are reserved in civil life for the worst crimes, he cannot secure the obedience and respect of his men, and the country would accordingly lose all of its colonies and dependencies, and be helplessly conquered in the German invasion which he confidently expects to occur in the course of a fortnight or so."
"That is to say," Mr. Shaw continues, "in so far as he is an ordinary gentleman he behaves sensibly and courageously; and in so far as he is a military man he gives way without shame to the grossest folly, cruelty, and poltroonery. If any other profession in the world had been stained by those vices and by false witness, forgery, swindling, torture, compulsion of men's families to attend their executions, digging up and mutilation of dead enemies, all of which is only added to the devastation proper to its own business, as the military profession has been within recent memory in England, France, and the United States of America (to mention no other countries), it would be very difficult to induce men of capacity and character to enter it. And in England, it is, in fact, largely dependent for its recruits on the refuse of industrial life, and for its officers on the aristocratic and plutocratic refuse of political and diplomatic life, who join the army and pay for their positions in the more or less fashionable clubs which the regimental messes provide them with—clubs, which, by the way, occasionally figure in ragging scandals as circles of extremely coarse moral character."[283]
It is not surprising that those who view armies in this light preach desertion and insubordination. A recent cable dispatch sums up some of the results of the activity in this direction of the French Federation of Labor with its million members, and of the Socialist Party with its still larger following:—
"Last year there were 13,500 desertions and 53,000 who refused to answer their call to military service. Loss to France in 1910, two army corps. These figures are given by La France Militaire, a soldiers' newspaper. In a fund called 'le sou du soldat et des insoumis,' the idea was to develop antimilitarism and antipatriotism. Five per cent, on the subscriptions of the workmen, belonging to the labor unions, was ordered to be set apart for this fund. The conscripts before departing were requested to leave the name of their regiment and their number so that sums of money might be sent to them for antimilitary propaganda in the barracks. For eight years that sort of thing has been going on, but things never reached to the extent they do now.
"'The comrades of the workshop count on them to spread among those around ideas of revolt and rebellion,' is an extract from a letter read by M. Georges Berry in Parliament, and he added that he had a score of such letters emanating from the unions. In M. Jaurès's organ, L Humanité, there appeared an article on December 22, 1910, inviting all the conscripts of the Labor Federation to send in their names so that financial aid might be sent to help them in organizing 'insubordination and desertion.'"
When the Caillaux Ministry came into power in 1911, a large number of the most prominent leaders of the Federation of Labor were arrested for participation in this agitation. But for every arrest many other unionists signed declarations favoring identical principles, and as the whole Federation is wedded to this propaganda, it is more than doubtful if the whole million can be arrested and the propaganda done away with.
This agitation is not directed primarily against possible war, or even exclusively against compulsory military service. Just as the preparations for an insurrectionary general strike in case of war tend to break down the power and prestige of the army, even if war is never declared, so the teaching of insubordination and desertion have the same effect, even if the compulsory armies are replaced by a compulsory militia, having only a few weeks of drill every year, as in Australia, or by a voluntary militia, as in this country. The Socialist world accepts the word of the American Socialists that a militia, if less burdensome, and less obnoxious in many ways than a standing army, may be just as thoroughly reactionary, and quite as hostile to the working class. The French Socialists and unionists encourage all general and organized movements among common soldiers. And their ideal in this regard is reached when a whole body of soldiers, for any good cause, revolts—especially at a time of popular demonstrations. During the wine troubles in the south of France, a whole regiment refused to march—and for years afterwards was toasted at Socialist gatherings.