[6]Many think the war will alter all this. I only wish I did.—J. G.
[6]
Many think the war will alter all this. I only wish I did.—J. G.
ON PEACE
The Will to Peace
(From theDaily Mail, 1909.)
I was walking in the district known as Notting Dale looking for signs of the Millennium, when I saw on a poster these words: “Why England and Germany must go to war.”
I stood gazing at them in the company of a woman the worse for drink, a brutal-looking man, a consumptive boy, and a half-starved horse harnessed to a cart. With the exception of the horse, these persons were soon replaced by a little labourer with a very sad face, and a sick-looking woman, in a ragged shawl. When they, in turn, passed on, I was joined in front of the poster by three girls going home from work—the sound of whose laughter was like the snapping of dried sticks—and by a whisky-perfumed man with that peculiar, brazen look in the eye which is liable to sudden eclipse. These, too, stayed but a short time, and their places before the poster were filled by two youths in ragged clothes, with dun-coloured faces, and the stumps of cigarettes between pale lips. Their foot-steps and obscenity having died away, I was left alone with the poster and the horse. This horse’s ribs were conspicuous, and from the size of eggcup-shaped hollows above eyes covered with a bluish film, he had evidently laboured to the limit of his capacity. He was resting one thin leg—too hairless at the knee, too hairy at the heel. Two very young children came now, and, holding each other’s hands, flattened their noses against the poster in the shop window. One of them moved her feet continually as if her boots hurt her, while on the feet of the other were the wrecks of boots.
And I said to myself: In hundreds of towns all over the country, people like this are standing before that poster, or passing by it. One third of the population are below the line of reasonable subsistence, another third are able by the constant employment of every energy to keep their heads just on that line. We are the richest country in the world, so that even in organised Germany conditions little better may very well be prevalent. This poster declares that England and Germany must go to war. And this poster is no joke, but the indication of a frame of mind. Moreover, I mused, credit for sincerity being due to all men until the opposite is proved against them, this frame of mind must be honest and founded on genuine fear—must be, in fact, the conviction of many, not only in this country, but in Germany. They contemplate a war between two nations, two thirds of whose respective populations are as yet barely able to make a living; a war that means wasting many hundred million pounds and the earning power of many hundred thousand lives; a war that will in six months cast on to the dust heap twenty years of social progress; a war that may well have no semblance of nobility, no great motto, no inspiring cause, but be a mere sordid struggle between two business communities, for so-called commercial ends; a war that may be unparalleled for cold-blooded horror and myopic puerility. And the poster speaks of this war as if it were inevitable!
Where, I asked myself, can the people who thus think and speak have lived? Where have they kept their hearts, and brains, and eyes, and noses? Can they not see these millions of ghosts in their midst? Or do they think to fatten them by war? Do they think by war to cheapen the price of bread and coals, to spread education, to foster the growth of science and of the arts? Will they by war preserve the strongest males for the improvement of the human stock? Will they by war advance in any single way the slow process of humanizing a civilization which still produces in millions the beings who have been standing with me here before that poster? No—I thought—they will certainly reply: “War is an evil, but it is necessary; for the human race is divided into breeds, distinct from one another, and plunged into struggle from their births up. Only in each country’s jealous preservation of itself can we look for the welfare of the whole. There is no avail in dreams of peace; no use in preparation for it; men have always killed each other for their own advantage and always will; if they did not so kill their neighbours they could not themselves survive. Life is so conditioned; there is not enough for all. We know, therefore, that this war must come. We see it coming. We have fastened our eyes on it. We cannot get out of its way. We must offer ourselves up in holy sacrifice before this bloody, predestined monster.”
Well!—I thought—if it is sacrifice you want, look at that horse! Look at all the people who have stood before this poster! They will take all your powers of sacrifice before you have done with them! And I, myself, looked at the horse; with his bleared eyes and the curves at the corners of his mouth, I thought I had never seen such a cynical-looking creature. “What are you, after all,” he seemed to be saying to me, “but a set of sanguinary tailless animals?”
But suddenly the eyes of my mind travelled beyond sight of that poster, and as in a vision I seemed to see all the great lives men have lived, all the high thoughts they have conceived, all their wonderful ingenuity and perseverance and strength of will; how they have always found a way to fulfil that on which they have set their hearts. And as background to that vision there seemed disclosed to me the untold, unexploited wealth of the fields, woods, and waters under the sun. And I thought: “What that poster says is only true of such aswillit to be true.Where there is a will to peace there is a way.[7]War between two such countries, two trustees of civilization need not be inevitable. To believe that is to blaspheme; to belittle human nature, to deny the Earth.”
[7]I recollect that the journal which this poster served to sell contained an article proposing to prove that war between England and Germany was inevitable, because of the rivalry between their trades. I thought then, and think now, that such a reason was revolting. In spite of all the bitter cry for commercial war that has now arisen, we did not begin, we never should have begun a war with Germany for such a reason alone. The war that—alas!—has come, has for us a better cause. None the less, I freely admit not gauging rightly the state of mind of Germany’s ruling classes. I always thought the question of war or no war was a great “toss-up” between the craze for armament and the growth of international feeling through social democracy. I thought the latter would win if people would set their wills on peace, and we could tide over the next few years. I was wrong.—J. G.
[7]
I recollect that the journal which this poster served to sell contained an article proposing to prove that war between England and Germany was inevitable, because of the rivalry between their trades. I thought then, and think now, that such a reason was revolting. In spite of all the bitter cry for commercial war that has now arisen, we did not begin, we never should have begun a war with Germany for such a reason alone. The war that—alas!—has come, has for us a better cause. None the less, I freely admit not gauging rightly the state of mind of Germany’s ruling classes. I always thought the question of war or no war was a great “toss-up” between the craze for armament and the growth of international feeling through social democracy. I thought the latter would win if people would set their wills on peace, and we could tide over the next few years. I was wrong.—J. G.
Peace of the Air
(A Letter toThe Times, 1911.)
Beyond all the varying symptoms of madness in the life of modern nations the most dreadful is this prostitution of the conquest of the air to the ends of warfare.
If ever men presented a spectacle of sheer inanity it is now—when, having at last triumphed in their struggle to subordinate to their welfare the unconquered element, they have straightway commenced to defile that element, so heroically mastered, by filling it with engines of destruction. If ever the gods were justified of their ironic smile—by the gods, it is now! Is there any thinker alive watching this still utterly preventable calamity without horror and despair? Horror of what must come of it if not promptly stopped; despair that men can be so blind, so hopelessly and childishly the slaves of their own marvellous inventive powers. Was there ever so patent a case for scotching at birth a hideous development of the black arts of warfare; ever such an occasion for the Powers in conference to ban once and for all a new and ghastly menace?
A little reason, a grain of common sense, a gleam of sanity before it is too late; before vested interests and the chains of a new habit have enslaved us too hopelessly. If this fresh devilry be not quenched within the next few years, it will be too late. Water and earth are wide enough for men to kill each other on. For the love of the sun, and stars, and the blue sky, that have given us all our aspirations since the beginning of time, let us leave the air to innocence! Will not those who have eyes to see, good-will, and the power to put that good-will into practice, bestir themselves while there is yet time, and save mankind from this last and worst of all its follies?
THE WAR
THE WAR
VALLEY OF THE SHADOW
(From theNation, 1915.)
God, I am travelling out to death’s sea,I, who exulted in sunshine and laughter,Thought not of dying—death is such waste of me!—Grant me one comfort: Leave not the hereafterOf mankind to war, as though I had died not—I, who in battle, my comrade’s arm linking,Shouted and sang—life in my pulses hotThrobbing and dancing! Let not my sinkingIn dark be for naught, my death a vain thing!God, let me know it the end of man’s fever!Make my last breath a bugle call, carryingPeace o’er the valleys and cold hills, for ever!
God, I am travelling out to death’s sea,I, who exulted in sunshine and laughter,Thought not of dying—death is such waste of me!—Grant me one comfort: Leave not the hereafterOf mankind to war, as though I had died not—I, who in battle, my comrade’s arm linking,Shouted and sang—life in my pulses hotThrobbing and dancing! Let not my sinkingIn dark be for naught, my death a vain thing!God, let me know it the end of man’s fever!Make my last breath a bugle call, carryingPeace o’er the valleys and cold hills, for ever!
God, I am travelling out to death’s sea,I, who exulted in sunshine and laughter,Thought not of dying—death is such waste of me!—Grant me one comfort: Leave not the hereafterOf mankind to war, as though I had died not—I, who in battle, my comrade’s arm linking,Shouted and sang—life in my pulses hotThrobbing and dancing! Let not my sinkingIn dark be for naught, my death a vain thing!God, let me know it the end of man’s fever!Make my last breath a bugle call, carryingPeace o’er the valleys and cold hills, for ever!
God, I am travelling out to death’s sea,
I, who exulted in sunshine and laughter,
Thought not of dying—death is such waste of me!—
Grant me one comfort: Leave not the hereafter
Of mankind to war, as though I had died not—
I, who in battle, my comrade’s arm linking,
Shouted and sang—life in my pulses hot
Throbbing and dancing! Let not my sinking
In dark be for naught, my death a vain thing!
God, let me know it the end of man’s fever!
Make my last breath a bugle call, carrying
Peace o’er the valleys and cold hills, for ever!
CREDO
(From theNeutral Press, 1914.)
To love peace with all one’s heart. To feel that war is a black stain on the humanity and fame of man. To hate militarism. To go any length to avoid war for material interests, war that involves no great principle, distrusting profoundly the common meaning of the phrase “national honour”—all this is my belief.
But there is a national honour charged with the future happiness of man; loyalty is due from those living to those that will come after; civilization can only wax and flourish in a world where faith is kept; for nations, as for individuals, there are laws of duty, whose violation harms the whole human race; in sum, stars of conduct shine for peoples, as for private men.
And so I hold that without tarnishing true honour, endangering civilization present and to come, and ruining all hope of future tranquillity, my Country could not have refused to take up arms for the defence of her little neighbour Belgium’s outraged neutrality, which she had solemnly guaranteed.
I claim from the trend of events, and of national character, during the last century that in democracy alone lies any coherent hope of progressive civilization or any chance of lasting peace in Europe, or the world.
I believe that this democratic principle, however imperfectly developed, has so worked in France, in Britain, in the United States, that these countries are already nearly safe from inclination to aggress, or to subdue other nationalities that have reached approximately their stage of development.
And I believe that while there remain autocratic Governments basing themselves on militarism, hostile at heart to the democratic principle, Europe will never be free of the surcharge of swollen armaments, the nightmare menace of wars like this—the paralysis that creeps on civilizations which adore the god of force.
And so I hold that without betrayal of trusteeship, without shirking the elementary defence of beliefs coiled within its fibre, or beliefs vital to the future welfare of all men, my Country could not stand by and see the ruin of France, that very cradle of democracy.
I believe that democratic culture spreads from West to East, that only by maintenance of consolidate democracy in Western Europe can democracy ever hope to push on and prevail till the Eastern Powers have also that ideal under which alone humanity can flourish.
And so I hold that my Country is justified at this juncture in its alliance with the autocratic power of Russia, whose people will never know freedom till her borders are joined to the borders of a true democracy in Central Europe.
I do not believe that jealous, frightened jingoism has been more than the dirty fringe of Britain’s peace-loving temper, and I profess my sacred faith that my Country has gone to war, against her will, because she must—for honour, for democracy, and for the future of mankind.
FRANCE
(From theWestminster Gazette, 1914.)
France! Beautiful word! Beautiful land! What a proud soul lives in that France, now racked and tortured! What chimes will ring when the last invader is pushed back over the edge of the lost provinces! Land for whom, when you are hard driven, the heart most aches! Is it that you are Woman, with a caress in your eyes, and your floating robe; with mystery in your clear, woman’s smile, and that promise of eternal constancy which Man never offers? Is it that in you we feel, as in no other Land, a Presence, such as in some houses makes life assured, and lovely; a Presence inhabiting the air of every room, more precious than its garniture? Take away the trappings, make desolate that place of all material things, and there will yet be the loved one, there will yet be the gracious ardent spirit.
France! You, of all Countries, have the gift of Living Form, of a coherent grace, like that of your own flower of light, or such as haunts La Gioconda, listening to life.
When I think of you there comes into my mind the image of a lime-tree, in her spring garb of buds delicate, breaking to little gay leaves ecstatic in each wind; in her summer dress so full, so perfumed with honey-coloured blossoms; in her autumn robe of few golden leaves, flat on the clear air, and trembling, trembling with each breath of the day; and in her pale winter nakedness—ever the same essential goddess of a tree, perfect in form.
France! It is your power to see that “soul in things” which we call Ideals, to bring to life the truth you have seen, and so to concrete and shape your vision that it becomes the rock spiritual on which nations stand. Because you are the living incarnation of your clear, unflinching spirit, we others love you.
You stand before the world, true embodiment of your three immortal words; as your immortal tune is the true voice of a Land’s ardour and devotion.
You have sloughed off the gross and the vainglorious flesh of nations! You are the flame in the night! In this hour we see, and know you!
Great and touching comrade! Clear, invincible France! To-day, in your grave chivalry, you were never so high, so desirable, so true to yourself and to Humanity!
REVEILLE
(FromKing Albert’s Book, 1914.)
In my dream I saw a fertile plain, rich with the hues of autumn. Tranquil it was and warm. Men, women, children, and the beasts, worked and played and wandered there in peace. Under the blue sky and the white clouds low-hanging, great trees shaded the fields; and from all the land rose a murmur as from bees clustering on the rose-coloured blossoms of tall clover. In my dream I roamed, looking into faces—prosperous and well-favoured—of people living in a land of plenty, drinking the joy of life, caring nothing for the morrow. But I could not see their eyes, which seemed ever cast down, watching the progress of their feet over the rich grass and the golden leaves already fallen from the trees. The longer I walked among them the more I wondered that I could see the eyes of none, not even of the little children, not even of the beasts.
And, while I mused on this, the sky began to darken. A mutter as of distant waters came travelling. The children stopped their play, the beasts raised their heads; men and women halted and cried to each other: “The River is rising! If it floods, we are lost! Our beasts will drown; we, even we, shall drown! The River!” And women stood like images of stone, listening; men shook their fists at the black sky; the beasts sniffed the darkening air.
Then I heard a clear voice call: “Brothers! The dyke is breaking! Link arms; with the dyke of our bodies we will save our homes! Link arms behind us, Sisters! Children close in! The River!” And all that multitude, whom I had seen treading quietly the grass, came hurrying, their eyes no longer fixed on the rich plain, but lifted in trouble and defiance. And the Voice called: “Hasten! The dyke is broken.”
By thousands and thousands they pressed, shoulder to shoulder—men, women, children, and the beasts lying down behind, till the living dyke was formed. And the black flood came travelling till its wave crests glinted like the whites of glaring eyes, and the harsh clamour of the waters was as a roar from a million mouths. But the Voice called: “Hold, brothers!” And from the living dyke came answer: “We hold!”
Then the dark water broke; and from all the wall of bodies rose the cry of struggle.
But above it ever the Voice called: “Hold!”
And the answer still came from the mouths of drowning men and women, of the very children: “We hold!”
But the water rolled over and on. Down in its black tumult, beneath its cruel rush, I saw men still with arms linked; women on their knees, clinging to earth; little children drifting—all dead. But the shades of the dead with arms yet linked were fronting the edge of the savage waters. None had turned away . . .
Once more I dreamed. The plain was free of darkness, free of waters. The River, shrunk and muddied, flowed again within its banks. And Dawn was breaking.
At first it seemed to me that only trees stood on that plain; then, in the ground mist fast clearing, I saw the forms of men and women, children, beasts; and I moved among them, looking at their faces—not broad and prosperous, but grave from suffering, carved and strong. And their eyes were shining.
While I stood thus watching, the sun rose, and, above the plain clad in the hues of spring, the heaven brightened to full morning. Amazed, I saw that the stars had not gone in, but shone there in the blue.
And clear I heard the same Voice call: “Brothers! Behold! The Stars are lit for ever!”
FIRST THOUGHTS ON THIS WAR
(FromScribner’s Magazine, 1914.)
Three hundred thousand church spires raised to the glory of Christ! Three hundred million human creatures baptized into His service! And—War to the death of them all! “I trust the Almighty to give the victory to my arms!” “Let your hearts beat to God, and your fists in the face of the enemy!” “In prayer we call God’s blessing on our valiant troops!”
God on the lips of each potentate, and under a hundred thousand spires prayer that twenty-two million servants of Christ may receive from God the blessed strength to tear and blow each other to pieces, to ravage and burn, to wrench husbands from wives, fathers from their children, to starve the poor, and everywhere destroy the works of the spirit! Prayer under the hundred thousand spires for the blessed strength of God, to use the noblest, most loyal instincts of the human race to the ends of carnage! “God be with us to the death and dishonour of our foes”—whose God He is no less than ours! The God who gave His only begotten Son to bring on earth peace and good-will toward men! No supernatural creed—in these days when two and two are put together—can stand against such reeling subversion. After this monstrous mockery, beneath this grinning skull of irony, how shall there remain faith in this personal outside God, whom we can thus divide, appropriate, and invoke; how remain faith in the articles, the formal structure of a religion preached and practised to such ends? When this war is over and reason resumes its sway, our dogmas will be found to have been scored through for ever. Whatever else be the outcome of this business, let us at least realize the truth: It is the death of dogmatic Christianity! Let us will that it be the birth of a God within us, and an ethic Christianity that men really practise!
Yes! Dogmatic Christianity was dying before this war began. When it is over, or as soon as men’s reason comes back to them, it will be dead. In France, England, Germany, in Belgium, and the other small countries, dead; and only kept wonderingly alive in Russia and some parts of Austria through peasant simplicity. “Tell me, brother, what have the Japanese done to us that we should kill them?” So said the Russian peasant in the Japanese war. So they may say in this war. And at the end go back and resume praise of the tribal God who fought for Holy Russia against the tribal God who fought for valiant Austria and the mailed fists of Germany.
This superstitional Christianity will not die in the open and be buried with pomp and ceremony; it will merely be dead—a very different thing; like the nerve in a tooth, that, to the outward eye, is just as it was. That which will take its place has already been a long time preparing to come forward. It will be too much in earnest to care for forms and ceremonies. And one thing is certain—it will be far more Christian than the so-called Christianity which has brought us to these present ends. Its creed will be a noiseless and passionate conviction that man can be saved, not by a far-away, despotic God who can be enlisted by each combatant for the destruction of his foes, but by the Divine element in man, the God within the human soul. That, in proportion as man is high, so will the life of man be high, safe from shames like this, and devoid of his old misery. The creed will be a fervent, almost secret application of the saying: “Love thy neighbour as thyself!” It will be ashamed of appeal to God to put right that which man has bungled; of supplications to the deity to fight against the deity. It will have the pride of the artist and the artizan. And it will have its own mysticism, its own wonder, and reverence for the mystery of the all-embracing Principle which has produced such a creature as this man, with such marvellous potentiality for the making of fine things, and the living of fine lives; such heroism, such savagery; such wisdom and such black stupidity; such a queer insuperable instinct for going on and on and ever on!
The Western world has had its lesson now—the lesson indelibly writ in death: There is no longer room in civilization for despotic Governments. In Germany, in Austria, in the country where despotism most reigns supreme—our ally, Russia—they are doomed in theory, if not as yet in fact.
The Slav is no more by nature the enemy of the Teuton than is the Briton of the Frank. That enmity is a fostered thing of imperial and bureaucratic dreams.
What stands out from all this welter? The ambitious diplomacy of the despotic Powers, in pursuit of so-called “national ideals,” a diplomacy begotten of vicious traditions and the misconceptions of egomania, removed by a ring fence from the people of the nations for whom it professes to speak. An ambitious and cynical diplomacy, battening on the knowledge that it can at almost any time raise for its ends a whirlwind of feeling out of the love men ever have for the land wherein they are born.
It is the divorce of executive power from popular sanction that has made possible this greatest of all the disasters in history. In democratic countries the aggressive faculty is imperceptibly yet continually weakened by the obscure but real link between ministers elect and the people. Only in those countries where, under a cloak perhaps of democratic forms, the administrative force is responsible to none save an imperial director, is a ruthless and unchecked pursuit of so-called national dreams, an aggressive parade of so-called national honour, possible.
If only autocracies—masquerading or naked—go down in the wreckage of this war!
The superstition that unmilitarized nations suffer from fatty degeneration of the heart has perished in the forty-fourth year of its age, at the siege of Liège, blown away by the heroism of a little unmilitary nation!
Democracy and citizen armies! If this war brings that in its train its horror will not have been all hateful. But so surely as States remain autocratic at heart will the dire spirit that animates almighty bureaucracy rear its head again and demand revenge. So surely will this war bring another, and yet another! In these last twenty years civilization has not even marked time; it has gone backward under the curb and pressure of professional armaments masquerading under the words “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” The principle of universal service by men not professionally soldiers, the principle that no man shall be called to fight one step outside his native land—save as part of an international Police to enforce the authority of a League for Peace—these are the only principles that will in the future still the gnawings of anxiety and gradually guarantee the peace of the West. They are principles that, I fear, will never obtain while States are subject to military bureaucracy and dynastic ambitions. If they cannot be purged of these we are “doomed to something great” every generation—the greatness of the shambles! It is enough to make heart stand still and brain reel for ever if one must believe that man is never to find better means of keeping his spirit from rust, his body from decay, than these sporadic outbursts of “greatness.” “War is the only cleanser!” Ah!—because the word “patriotism” has so limited a meaning. But—to believe that this must always be . . . ! When men have ceased to look on war as the proper vehicle for self-sacrifice, will they not turn to a greatness that is not soaked with blood and black with the crows of death, to save their souls alive? Will there not, can there not, arise an emotion as strong as this present patriotism—a sentiment as passionate and sweeping, bearing men on to the use of every faculty and the forgetfulness of self, for the salvation, instead of the destruction, of their fellow-man? Or is this a dream, and are we forever doomed, each generation, to the greatness of tearing each other limb from limb?
Three weeks before this war began I was in one of those East End London parishes whose inhabitants exist from hand to mouth on casual employment and sweated labour; where the women, poor, thin, overworked souls, have neither time nor strength nor inclination for cleanliness and comeliness in person or house; where the men are undersized and underfed, with the faces of those without a future; where pale and stunted children playing in the gutters have a monopoly of any mirthless gaiety there is.
In one household of two rooms they were “free of debt, thank Gawd!” having just come back from fruit-picking, and were preparing to take up family existence again on the wife’s making of matchboxes at a maximum of six shillings a week, the husband not having found a job as yet. In another household, of one room swarming with flies and foul with a sickly acrid odour, a baby was half-asleep on the few rags of a bed bereft of bedclothes, its lips pressed to something rubbery, and flies about its eyes; dirty bowls of messes stood about; an offal heap lay in the empty grate; and at a table in the little window a pallid woman of forty with a running cold was desperately sewing the soles on to tiny babies’ shoes. Beside her was a small dirty boy, who had just been lost and brought home by a policeman, because he had remembered the name of the street he lived in. The woman looked up at us wistfully, and said: “I thought I’d lost ’im too, I did; like the one that fell in the canal.” Though she still had seven, though her husband was out of work, though she only made five to six shillings a week, she could not spare any of the children she had borne.
Prices have gone up. What is happening to such as these? They exist in all countries. You military bureaucrats, who safeguard and pursue “national aspirations,” who open the gates of the kennel and let loose these mad dogs of war; who rive husbands from their wives, sons from their mothers, and send them out by the hundred thousand to become lumps of bloody clay—spare a fraction of time to see the peoples for “whose good” you launch this glorious murder; come and sniff for one moment that sickly, acrid smell in the homes of the poor! And then talk of national aspirations and necessities!
There is only one national aspiration worth the name, only one national necessity—to have from roof to basement a clean, healthy, happy national house. “War the cleanser! Without war—no sacrifice, no nobility!” I refer you to that mother, slaving without hope and without glory, starved and ill, and slaving in a war with death that lasts all her life, for the children she has borne.
The Russian people is not Russia, unless it should become so in this war. There has hitherto been an almost absolute divorce between the essentially democratic nature of the Russian and the despotic methods by which Russia is governed. We English and French, fighting not only for our lives, but for democracy, for the decent preservation of treaty rights, and a humanity that we believe can only flourish under democratic rule, find it somewhat ironical that we have with us a despotism. And there is a profound reason why it has been and will be difficult for Russia to change its form of government. The emotional, uncalculating Russian has little sense of money, space, or time; he falls an easy prey to those sterner, more matter-of-fact than himself. Bureaucracy attracts the hard and practical elements of a population; there are, or were, many of Teutonic origin manning Russian officialdom. And Russia is so huge; democratic rule will find it difficult to be swift enough; in decentralization there is danger of disruption. Nevertheless, we welcome the help of Russia, for, if France and we were beaten, it would not only be our own deaths, but the death of democracy and humanism in Europe—perhaps in the world. The tide of democracy sets from the West. It must permeate Germany before it reaches Russia. Out of this war many things may come. If Fate grant that military despotisms fall in any country, they may well fall in all, and our ally, Russia, gain at last a Constitution and some real measure of democratic freedom, some real coherence between the Russian people and Russian policy.
When the conscript souls disembodied by this war meet, if they meet at all, how will they talk of this last madness? Perhaps one in each hundred will be able to say from his heart: “I was happy with a rifle or sword and some of you to be killed in front of me!” The remaining ninety-nine will say: “Like you I loved the sun, and a woman, and the good things of life; like you I meant well by others; I had no wish to kill any man; no wish to die. But I was told that it was necessary. I was told that, unless I killed as many of you as I could, my country would suffer. I don’t know whether in my heart I believed what I was told, but I did know that I should feel disgraced if I did not take rifle and sword and try to kill some of you; I knew, too, that unless I did, they would shoot me for a deserter. So I went. Nearly all the time that I was marching, or resting dead-tired, or lying in the trenches, I thought; ‘Shall I ever see home again? Let me see home again!’ But I knew that my first duty was to kill you, so thatyoushould never see home again. I did notwantto kill you, but I knew I had to. When I was under fire or tired or hungry, it is true I hated you so that I had only a savage wish to kill you. But when it was over I had an ache in my heart. We used to sing while marching, make jokes, enjoy the feel of our comrades’ shoulders touching our own, say to ourselves: ‘We’re fine fellows, serving our country, doing our duty!’ But still the ache went on underneath, very deep, as if one were asleep and could not come to the end of a bad dream. We seldom knew what our bullets were doing, but sometimes we came to fighting hand to hand. The first time, I remember, we had advanced through a wood under shell-fire, and were lying down at the edge. I had that ache all the time I was coming through the wood; it was fine weather, and the larches smelled sweet. But when I saw you charging down on us with the sun gleaming on your bayonets, it left me; I felt weak and queer down the backs of my legs, wondering which of you, yelling and running towards me, would plunge his steel into my stomach. Then my officer shouted; I fired once, twice, three times, and began to run forward. If I had not, I should have turned and fled. I did not feel savage, but I knew I must move every bit of me as quick as I could, and defend myself and stab. Then our supports came through the wood, and you were beaten. My bayonet was bloody. One or more of you I must have killed; I had been brave, we had won; I felt excited and yet sick. In the evening when I lay down my ache was worse than ever. All my life I had been taught that to kill a fellow-man was the worst thing man can do; it did not come natural to me to kill. It was having to risk my life so dear to me,in order that I might kill, that gave me that ache. If I had been risking it trying to save you, it would have been more natural; I should not have ached then!”
“The glories of war!”
Courage, devotion, endurance, contempt of death! These are glories that the unmartial may not deride. Even the humblest of brave soldiers is a hero, for all that his heroism coins the misery of others; but what does the soldier know, see, feel, of the real “glories of war”? That knowledge is confined to the readers of newspapers and books! The Pressman, the romancer, the historian can with glowing pen call up in the reader a feeling that war is glorious; that there is something in itself desirable and to be admired in that licensed murder, arson, robbery that we call war. Glorious war! Every penny thrill of each reader of the newspaper, every spasm of each one who sees armed men passing, or hears the fifes and drums, is manufactured out of blood and groans, wrung out of the torments of the human heart and the torture of human flesh.
When I read in the paper of some glorious charge and the great slaughter of the enemy, I feel a thrill through every fibre. It is grand, it is splendid! I take a deep breath of joy, almost of rapture. Grand, splendid! That there should be lying, with their faces haggard to the stars, hundreds, thousands of men like myself, better men than myself! Hundreds, thousands, who loved life as much as I; whose women loved them as much as mine love me! Grand, splendid! That the blood should be oozing from them into grass that once smelled as sweet to them as it does to me! That their eyes which delighted in sunlight and beauty as much as mine, should be glazing fast with death; that their mouths, which mothers and wives and children are aching to kiss again, should be twisted into gaps of horror! Grand, splendid! That other men, no more savage than myself, should have strown them, there! Grand, splendid! That in thousands of far-off houses women, children, and old men will soon lie quivering with anguished memories of those lying there dead. . .
Pressmen, romancers, historians—you have given me a noble thrill in recounting these glories of war!
This is the grand defeat of all Utopians, dreamers, poets, philosophers, idealists, humanitarians, lovers of peace and the arts; bag and baggage they are thrown out of a world that has for a time no use for them. To the despot, the bureaucrat, the militarist, the man of affairs, they have always been hateful. They are soft, yet dangerous, because they venture to hold up another flag in the face of the big flag of force; venture to distract men’s attention from dwelling on the beauty of its size. I believe solemnly that we English have had to join this carnival of force to guard democracy, honour, and the sanctity of treaty rights. It was a sacred necessity; let us keep it sacred, without the loathsome reek of a satisfaction that peace, humanism, and the arts are down, and the country once more showing the stuff of which it is made, a tusky lover of a fight, as jealous and afraid of a rival as ever.
The idealist said in his heart: The god of force is dead, or dying. He has been proven the fool that the man of affairs and the militarist always said he was. But the fools of this world—generally after they are gone—have a way of moving men which the wise and practical believers in force have not. If they had not this power man would still be, year in year out, the savage that the believers in force have for the moment once more made him. The battle between the god of love and the god of force endures for ever. Fools of the former camp, drummed out and beaten to their knees, in due time will get up again and plant their poor flag a little farther on. “All men shall be brothers,” said the German fool, Schiller; so shall the fools say again when the time comes; and again, and again, after every beating!
Last night, when the half-moon was golden and the white stars very high, I saw the souls of the killed passing. They came riding through the dark—some on grey horses, some on black; they came marching, white-faced—hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands.
The night smelled sweet, the breeze rustled, the stream murmured; and past me on the air the souls of the killed came marching. They seemed of one great company, no longer enemies. All had the same fixed stare, braving something strange that they were trying terribly to push away. All had their eyes narrowed yet fixed open in their grey-white, smoke-grimed faces. They made no sound as they passed. Whence were they coming, where going, trailing the ghosts of guns, riding the ghosts of horses; into what river of oblivion—far from horror, and the savagery of man!
They passed. The golden half-moon shone, and the high white stars. The fields smelled sweet; the wind gently stirred the trees. The moon and stars would be shining over the battlefields, the wind rustling the trees there, the earth sleeping in dark beauty. So would it be all over the Western world. The peace of God doth indeed pass our understanding!
THE HOPE OF LASTING PEACE
(From aSymposium on“Nationality,” 1915.)
In these times one dread lies heavy on heart and brain—the thought that after all the unimaginable suffering, waste, and sacrifice of this war nothing may come of it, no real relief, no permanent benefit to Europe, no improvement to the future of mankind.
The pronouncements of publicists: “This must never happen again,” “Conditions for abiding peace must be secured,” “The United States of Europe must be founded,” “Militarism must cease”—all such are the natural outcome of this dread. They are proclamations admirable in sentiment and intention. But, human nature being what it has been and is likely to remain, we must face the possibility that nothing will come of the war, save the restoration of Belgium (that, at least, is certain); some alterations of boundaries; a long period of economic and social trouble more bitter than before; a sweeping moral reaction after too great effort. Cosmically regarded, this war is a debauch rather than a purge, and debauches have always to be paid for.
Confronting the situation in this spirit, we shall be the more rejoiced if any of our wider hopes should by good fortune be attained.
Leaving aside the restoration of Belgium—for what do we continue to fight? We go on, as we began, because we all believe in our own countries and what they stand for. And in considering how far the principle of nationality should be exalted, one must remember that it is in the main responsible for the present state of things. In truth, the principle of nationality of itself and by itself is a quite insufficient ideal. It is a mere glorification of self in a world full of other selves; and only of value in so far as it forms part of that larger ideal, an international ethic, which admits the claims and respects the aspirations of all nations. Without that ethic little nations are (as at the present moment) the prey—and, according to the naked principle of nationality, the legitimate prey—of bigger nations. Germany absorbed Schleswig, Alsace-Lorraine, and now Belgium, by virtue of nationalism, of an overweening belief in the perfection of its national self. Austria would subdue Serbia from much the same feeling. France does not wish to absorb or subdue any European people of another race, because France, as ever, a little in advance of her age, is already grounded in this international ethic of solid respect for the rights of all nationswhich belong, broadly speaking, to the same stage of development. The same may now be said of the other Western democratic Powers, Britain and America, “To live and let live,” “To dwell together in unity,” are the guiding maxims of the international ethic, by virtue of which alone have the smaller communities of men—the Belgiums, Bohemias, Polands, Serbias, Denmarks, Irelands, Switzerlands of Europe—any chance of security in the maintenance of their national existence. In short, the principle of nationality, unless it is prepared to serve this international ethic, is but a frank abettor of the devilish maxim: “Might is right.” All this is truism; but truisms are often the first things we forget.
The whole question of nationality in Europe bristles with difficulties. It cannot be solved by theory and rule of thumb. What is a nation? Shall it be determined by speech, by blood, by geographical boundary, by historic tradition? The freedom and independence of a country can and ever should be assured when with one voice it demands the same. It is seldom so simple as that. Belgium, no doubt, is as one man. Poland is one man in so far as the Poles are concerned, but what of the Austrians, Russians, Germans settled among them? What of Ireland split into two camps? What of the Germans in Bohemia; in Alsace; in Schleswig? Compromise alone is possible in many cases, going by favour of majority. And there will always remain the very poignant question of the rights and aspirations of the minorities. Let us by all means clear the air by righting glaring wrongs, removing palpable anomalies, redressing obvious injustices, securing so far as possible the independent national life of homogeneous groups; but let us not, dazzled by the glamour of a word, dream that by restoring a few landmarks, altering a few boundaries, and raising a pæan to the word “nationality” we can banish all clouds from the sky of Europe and muzzle the ambitions of the stronger nations.
In my belief the best hope for lasting peace, the chief promise of security for the rights and freedom of little countries, the most reasonable guarantee of international justice and general humanity, lies in the gradual growth of democracy, of rule by consent of the governed. When Europe is all democratic, and its civilization on one plane—instead of as now on two—then and then only we shall begin to draw the breath of real assurance. Then only will the little countries sleep quietly in their beds. It is conceivable, nay probable, that an ideal autocracy could achieve more good for its country and for the world at large in a given time than the rule of the most enlightened democracy. It is certain that ideal autocracies hold sway but once in a blue moon.
If proof be needed that the prevalence of democracy will end aggression among nations that belong to the same stage of development, secure the rights of small peoples, foster justice and humaneness in man, let the history of this last century and a half be well examined, and let the human probabilities be weighed. Which is the more likely to advocate wars of aggression? They who, by age, position, wealth, are secure against the daily pressure of life, they who have passed their time out of touch with the struggle for existence, in an atmosphere of dreams, ambitions, and power over other men? Or they who every hour are reminded how hard life is, even at its most prosperous moments, who have nothing to gain by war, and all, even life, to lose; who by virtue of their own struggles have a deep knowledge of the struggles of their fellow-creatures; an instinctive repugnance to making those struggles harder; who have heard little and dreamed less of those so-called “national interests” that are so often mere chimeras; who love, no doubt, in their inarticulate way, the country where they were born and the modes of life and thought to which they are accustomed, but know of no traditional and artificial reasons why the men of other countries should not be allowed to love their own lands and modes of thought and life in equal peace and security?
Assuredly, the latter of these two kinds of men are the less likely to favour ambitious projects and aggressive wars. According as “the people,” through their representatives, have or have not the final decision in such matters, the future of Europe shall be made of war or peace, of respect or of disregard for the rights of little nations.
It is advanced against democracies that the workers of a country, ignorant and provincial in outlook, have no grasp of international politics. True—in a Europe where national ambitions and dreams are still for the most part hatched and nurtured in nests perched high above the real needs and sentiments of the simple working folk who form nine-tenths of the population in each country. But once those nests of aggressive nationalism have fallen from their high trees, so soon as all Europe conforms to the principle of rule by consent of the governed, it will be found—as it has already been found in France and in this country—that the general sense of the community informed by growing publicity (through means of communication ever speeding-up) is quite sufficient trustee of national safety; quite able, even enthusiastically able, to defend its country from attack.
It is said that democracies are liable to be swept by gusts of passion, in danger of yielding to Press or mob sentiment. But are not the peoples of democratic countries as firmly counselled and held in check by their responsible ministers and elected representatives as are the peoples of autocratically governed countries? What power of initiative have “the people” in either case? They act only through their leaders. But their leadersare elected—that is the point.
Representative Governments must answer for their actions to their fellow-men. Autocratic Governments need only answer to their gods. The eyes of representative Governments are turned habitually inwards towards the condition of the people whom they represent. The eyes of autocratic Governmentsmayindeed be turned inwards, but what they usually see of the people whom they do not represent is liable to make them turn outwards. In other words, they find in successful foreign adventure and imperialism a potent safeguard against internal troubles.
The problem before the world at the end of this war is how to eliminate the virus of an aggressive nationalism that will lead to fresh outbursts of death. It is a problem that I, for one, fear will beat the powers and good-will of all, unless there should come a radical change of Governments in Central Europe; unless the real power in Germany and Austria-Hungary passes into the hands of the people of those countries, through their elected representatives, as already it has passed in France and Britain. This is in my belief the only chance for the defeat of militarism, of that raw nationalism, which, even if beaten down at first, will ever be lying in wait, preparing secret revenge and fresh attacks. How this democratization of Central Europe can be brought about I cannot tell. It is far off as yet. But if this be not at long last the outcome of the war, we may still, I fear, talk in vain of the rights of little nations, of peace, disarmament, of chivalry, justice, and humanity. We may whistle for a changed Europe.