1. War is not simply the struggle of one force against another; it brings into play every faculty possessed by man, compelling him to contract habits that will interest and influence his entire life.
(1) There are, in the first place, physical habits: sobriety, endurance, flexibility, the capacity for extraordinary effort, a resolute resistance to fatigue and suffering of every kind. War enables us to set an altogether different value on the merits of the body. It makes us look upon physical qualities as necessary for all and on all occasions. It enables us to distinguish between qualities that are useful and substantial and a virtuosity devoid of object. It also gives us a keen sense of the intrinsic and absolute value of a healthy, vigorous, and beautiful body, the free and complete unfoldment of nature’s work.
(2) Not only is war a physical education: it is also an intellectual education. The danger that threatens intellect, in schools and academies, is that it takes itself as an end—i.e., allows itself to be led astray by the evidence and the harmony of its conceptions or by the elegance of its reasonings and thus confuses its own ideas with reality. That intellect which feels responsible only to itself constantly risks plunging into one or other of these two shoals: dogmatism or dilettantism. In war, however, this dual danger is eliminated. Here, every conception is an action, and every action is immediately confronted with reality. In war, a false conception or a sophistical reasoning constitutes a defeat or a disaster; we are compelled never to think except in terms of deeds, to entertain only such ideas and reasonings as are at the same time tangible realities.
(3) And war is manifestly a moral education. From the very beginning, it teaches us to put earnestly into practice that duty of tolerance as regards the opinions of others which we have so much trouble to carry out ourselves in times of peace. How abstract and superficial now appear those political, religious and social divisions which but recently we regarded as irremediable! Differences of every kind deal more with words than with things, since the minds and hearts of all alike are now aware that they are united, that they think and feel the same regarding the primary conditions of our honour, even of our very existence. Who could persuade that they belong to different camps, those soldiers who met and embraced after a battle, conscious that a common trial had united them for ever? In those times of patriotic anxiety, it was quite unnecessary to teach men of good-will and mutual affection to tolerate and bear with one another. They did more than tolerate one another, for they brought together all their strength and thought, heart and experience, to the performance of a common duty.
2. War is a discipline. What do we mean by “discipline”? With the possible exception of the word “character,” there is no word which has been the occasion of so much cant, of so much insincerity, both intellectual and sentimental. In Belgium and France, during the war, the highly disciplined German troops are said to have drunk to excess, outraged women, murdered peaceful citizens, looted property, and so forth. Are these among the fruits of “iron discipline”? Whatever else their training might have done for the soldiers who did those things, it had not taught them to control their own lusts and passions, it had not taught them to discipline themselves.
(1) The function of military discipline, of the discipline which is based on systematic drill, is to enable many men to obey, promptly, accurately, and at whatever cost, the orders of one man. This it does by substituting the blind force of habit for other and more genuinely human motives. Sustained by the force of habit, which has perhaps come within a little of making him an automaton, the well-drilled soldier will both execute complicated manoeuvres with speed and precision and advance steadily, in obedience to orders, into a zone of fire. As long as we have wars we must have trained armies; and as long as we have trained armies we must have discipline of this type.
But let us not delude ourselves with the belief that the discipline of drill, because it is good to make soldiers, is therefore good to make men. The more machine-like it makes the soldier, the more successful it is from its own point of view; and though, when combined with other and more vitalizing influences, it may give a hardening alloy to a man’s character, and help him to pull himself together, and strengthen him to subdue self-will, if overemphasized, if regarded as an end in itself, it will tend to atrophy will and conscience, and will thus become the most demoralizing influence to which a man’s life can be exposed.
(2) But when discipline is a means and not an end, it has the makings in it of the finest natural character. And yet finer is the result when discipline is regarded as the obedience to Christ and becomes free and loyal self-control. The soldierly character at its best attracts our admiration in the very highest degree. We love it with a frank appreciation which we give to few things in this imperfect world. Such are our feelings just now when we think of Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener. Soldiers such as Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener were men who faced the grimmest facts of life and death with the utmost courage and simplicity of heart. We know perfectly well that there was no duplicity or unreality about them—imperfections that the world is apt to suspect in many prominent men, politicians and ecclesiastics especially.
Among Ruskin’s schoolfellows were the sons of Colonel Watson of Woolwich. They sometimes invited Ruskin to their home, and in the Colonel “I saw,” he says, “such calm type of truth, gentleness, and simplicity as I have myself found in soldiers and sailors only, and so admirable to me that I have never been able since those Woolwich times to gather myself up against the national guilt of war, seeing that such men were made by the discipline of it.” [Note: Sir E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, i. 46.]
3. But what makes war a blessing, if ever it is a blessing, is that it offers the opportunity for self-sacrifice. This side of the moral character of war is strikingly and unexpectedly in harmony with the Model of all Christianity. Mozley, in his sermon on war, brings this thought forward very forcibly. He says, “There is a mediatorial function which pervades the whole dispensation of God’s natural providence, by which men have to suffer for each other, and one member of the human body has to bear the burden and participate in the grief of another. It is this serious and sacred function which consecrates war.”
(1) The spirit of self-sacrifice is inherent in the very idea of the individual encountering death for the sake of the body to which he belongs; the regiment in the front line of attack is taking the prominent place, and is, thereby, in a measure, saving the whole army; the soldier who falls in battle does so because he is placing himself in front of his family, his home, his country, and it is perfectly justifiable, in speaking of his action, to say that “he gives his life a ransom for many.” It is this feature in war which can, and almost alone can, consecrate it. That the nation may rise in honour; that the nation may reform a great abuse, work a great righteousness upon earth, deliver the oppressed with a great deliverance, and earn real glory and worship—that the nation may do this, the individual must sink, but he does so voluntarily; he is willing, if it is God’s will, that he shall be taken if others may be left. And if he does not murmur, and we do not murmur, it is because we know that it is by that sacrifice of himself which the individual makes that great States rise and become powerful; and if those States again, in their turn, employ their influence, postpone their temporal advantage, repeating in their corporate state the sacrifice of the individual, to the wider and higher interests of the Greater Kingdom, well—and the individual empire, like the individual soldier, sinking its own interest in the higher and wider Kingdom of Heaven, through that action, or that policy of self-effacement, becomes immortal.
It will be enough to quote a single example out of many reported in the newspapers during the War, of heroic endurance and self-sacrifice. It was reported in The Times of October 14, 1918.
Very hard fighting has been going on along the line of the Selle River, and I think the determination with which our men have broken yet one more line of German defence here has been as fine as anything in all these battles.
In my last dispatch I told how we were almost everywhere up to the line of the Selle, where the enemy held his formidable line of partly continuous trenches and partly shell-holes, all strongly wired, along the high ground on the farther side. No yard of the river was not covered by his machine-guns, and the river itself, which in places is upwards of 40 ft. wide and averages from 4 ft. to 7 ft. deep, was before us. At two points, just below and above Neuvilly, to the north of Le Cateau, we had already got a foothold on the farther bank. Neuvilly itself was still in enemy hands. We had fought our way into Briastre, and above here, in a big bend of the river by Solesmes, had reached as far as Au Tertre farm. Avesnes-les-Aubert and Aubert itself, upon the Ereclin, were ours, though St. Vaast remained a German stronghold, from which sweeping machine-gun fire made approach to the south of it very difficult. Between the Ereclin and the Selle the enemy were known to be in strength along the high ground before Avesnes-le-Sec and Villersen-Cauchies. The German artillery fire had grown much heavier during the last few days, and everywhere there was evidence of the enemy’s intention to hold us back on the line as long as possible. It was not very long.
The actual crossing of the river itself gave opportunities for a display of as dogged courage and fine heroism as any Army could show. There were places where the Germans had felled trees close beside the river, branches of which, as they fell, reached part of the way across the stream. By the aid of these, Scottish and English troops, who had already advanced 16 miles in this battle, fighting nearly all the way, dragged themselves, half swimming, half wading, across the water under heavy fire. On the south side of Neuvilly, between there and Montay, where we had one gallant outpost across the river, our engineers threw nearly a dozen single-plank bridges over the river, and here others crossed under cover of the rifles of the Worcesters on this bank, and fought their way up the opposite slope as far as Amerval, which crowns the highest ground, in face of a stout resistance.
On the other side of Neuvilly, Lancashire troops and men of the East Yorks crossed the river by wading or swimming, fording their way through deep belts of wire on the lower slope, and stormed a camouflaged trench with the bayonet. They were exposed to heavy fire from the north, where the Germans were entrenched along the railway line, east of Briastre about Bellevue. Later in the day, heavy counter-attacks developed, and our men, exhausted with the long day’s fighting, after swimming and wading the river, were compelled to fall back again to the western bank. The same counter-attacks on the south side of Neuvilly forced us to abandon our foremost positions of Amerval, and to withdraw to this side of the railway where we still held the farther bank of the stream.
On Saturday morning we re-attacked, and this time most of our infantry re-crossed the river fairly dry through the heroism of our engineers. Bridges were hastily made, but could not be moored at the farther bank, so sappers, wading into the stream, made themselves into living piers, and stood waist-deep or chest-deep under heavy fire, while water splashed around them by machine-gun bullets, and some were wounded; thus they stood supporting the bridge on their shoulders while the infantry crossed over. The Germans had by now re-occupied their old positions and the same camouflaged trench on the farther bank, and again Manchesters and men of the East Yorks cleared it with the bayonet, and worked their way, largely in hand-to-hand fighting, up to the high ground. The enemy counter-attacked, but was beaten back, and then our men set themselves to clear the line northwards towards Briastre and southeastwards behind Neuvilly. [Note: The Times, Oct. 14, 1918, p. 8.]
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene
That men call age; and those who would have been
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage. [Note: Rupert Brooke.]
(2) But again, is war the only opportunity of the exercise of self-sacrifice? Says the Rev. R. J. Campbell, “I utterly and entirely dissent from the view that there is something essentially uplifting in war as war. The late Mr. Lecky, in his History of European Morals, says: ‘That which invests war, in spite of all the evils that attend it, with a certain moral grandeur, is the heroic self-sacrifice it elicits. With perhaps the single exception of the Church, it is the sphere in which mercenary motives have least sway, in which performance is least weighed and measured by strict obligation, in which a disinterested enthusiasm has most scope. A battlefield is the scene of deeds of self-sacrifice so transcendent, and at the same time so dramatic, that, in spite of all its horrors and crimes, it awakens the most passionate moral enthusiasm.’ Is there no other way of arousing this moral enthusiasm, no other way of evoking to the same degree the spirit of self-sacrifice? Yes, if civilization as a whole could rise to the moral level requisite for it. The late Professor William James of Harvard used to maintain that one great thing which modern civilization had yet to do was to find a moral substitute for war, an incentive to action that would bring out the grandest qualities of human nature without the accompaniment of slaughter and the suffering and anguish that follow in its train. Oh that we were sufficiently great of soul to do it, and to do it as one man! Every normal human being must dread, loathe, and detest war, for if it reveals some things that savour of heaven it reveals more that reek of hell. See what the glorification of war has done for Germany. I have not the slightest hesitation in admitting that as a people the Germans are intellectually better trained and more efficient than we, their resources better organized and developed, their manhood better disciplined and equipped for the business of life in its material aspects. But look at the temper of mind that goes with it —hard, arrogant, domineering, unable to appreciate the rights of others or even to understand others’ point of view. As sure as you get a nation mastered by the monster of militarism, a nation in which everything else in administration is subordinated to militaristic ideals, you get a Government without sentiment, without humanity, without respect for the ordinary obligations of truth and honour.” [Note: R. J. Campbell, The War and the Soul, 65.]
