1. WE ought to thank Germany for the ruthlessness with which she fought. She made us realize, if we had never done so before, what war means and what it ultimately involves. Having taught us that patriotism, when divorced from love of Humanity, degenerates into national ego-mania of a peculiarly malignant type, she next taught us that war is, in the last resort, a brutal, barbarous, and insane method of settling international disputes. For centuries we have been trying in various ways to mitigate the horrors of war. Germany has opened our eyes to the fact that the real horror of war is war itself. For war is an attempt to settle disputes by an appeal to force instead of to justice, and in the present stage of our social development the appeal to force, whatever form it may take, is in itself so profoundly immoral, so gross an outrage on truth and right, that our attempts to refine and humanize it are as futile as would be the attempt of a legislator to secure humanity in the commission of murder or decency in the commission of rape. By taking war quite seriously, by going into it with the full intention of winning at whatever cost and by whatever means, Germany has torn asunder the flimsy veil of respectability with which our conventions had invested it, and has shown us in all its naked hideousness the murderous madness which we had tried to regulate and control.
It is easy enough for a poet to adorn his tale, as Tennyson did in Maud, with the thought of a nation, sunk in commercial materialism, being set all aglow by the pleasure of tearing invaders limb from limb. But it seems to me that war is, after all, but a barbarous and horrible convention, which in spite of all that Christianity and civilization can do, stands out a bloodstained and a cruel evil among our wiser and more temperate designs.
To glorify war seems to me but the unchaining and hounding on of the ferocious beast that lies below the surface in most of us. To condone it is like defending the institution of slavery on the ground that cruel treatment may develop a noble endurance in the downtrodden slave, like encouraging bullying in schools, that the bullied may learn hardness and courage. [Note: A. C. Benson, Along the Road, 358.]
War, indeed, has the property of exciting much generous and noble feeling on a large scale; but with this special recommendation it has, in its modern forms especially, peculiar and unequalled evils. As it has a wider sweep of desolating power than the rest, so it has the peculiar quality that it is more susceptible of being decked in gaudy trappings, and of fascinating the imagination of those whose proud and angry passions it inflames. But it is, on this very account, a perilous delusion to teach that war is a cure for moral evil, in any other sense than as the sister tribulations are. The eulogies of the frantic hero in Maud, however, deviate into grosser folly. It is natural that such vagaries should overlook the fixed laws of Providence. Under these laws the mass of mankind is composed of men, women, and children who can but just ward off hunger, cold, nakedness; whose whole ideas of Mammon-worship are compromised in the search for their daily food, clothing, shelter, fuel; whom any casualty reduces to positive want; and whose already low estate is yet further lowered and ground down, when “the blood-red blossom of war flames with its heart of fire.” [Note: W. E. Gladstone, in Morley’s Life of Gladstone, iii. 547.]
In the course of a sermon preached last Sunday at St. Margaret’s, Oxford, the Rev. C. B. Mortlock, who has recently been invalided out of the Army after serving as a chaplain to the forces, made a vigorous protest against the “extravagant nonsense” that is uttered by popular preachers and others at home in regard to the war, and the men who are engaged in it. Talk of this kind, he declared, often made soldiers resolve never to enter a church.
A vast amount of harm has been done, he said, by the utterly unreal and extravagant nonsense that has been talked and written about soldiers. War is a foul mixture of brutality and ugliness, and bad smells, and a hundred horrors that cannot be named or described. To pretend, if not to believe, that soldiers exult in it is to go a long way towards brutalizing the national character by investing the horrors of warfare with a romantic glamour. To read as I did the other day—the writer was probably a woman—of the soldier hero waiting “with eager heart and starry eyes” to go over the top is as sickening as it is silly. Soldiers hate it. They recognize it for the hysterical tosh it is, and if some of our “popular” preachers and speakers had heard, as I have, the soldiers’ comments on this sort of gush they would be astounded. It is stupid, false, dishonouring and wicked, and I know that many soldiers stay away from church because they are afraid of hearing more of it.
No, the splendour and wonder of our men in France and Belgium, and no praise can possibly be too high, lies not so much in the dash and glory of it all, but in their grimly doing their duty: sticking to a hateful task amid conditions that every right-minded man must hate and loathe with fierce intensity.
When I first went to France and expressed horror at the pitiful waste and desolation, I was told I should “soon get used to it.” My retort was that I hoped that I should never get used to it. It is just in this getting used to it that the danger lies. Insensibly we are all of us getting brutalized—and we at home not the least. The first thing to do is to cut out all the cant talk that has gone on too long, and accord to our men the honour that is really theirs —the honour due to men who endure without talk or swagger horrors we shall never know of. [Note: The Church, Timm, Aug. 17, 1917, p. 125]
War
I abhor,
And yet how sweet
The sound along the marching street
Of drum and fife! And I forget
Wet eyes of widows, and forget
Broken old mothers, and the whole
Dark butchery without a soul.
Without a soul—save this bright drink
Of heady music, sweet as death ;
And e’en my peace-abiding feet
Go marching with the marching street,
For yonder, yonder goes the fife,
And what care I for human life?
The tears fill my astonished eyes,
And my full heart is like to break ;
And yet ‘tis all embannered lies,
A dream those little drummers make.
Oh, it is wickedness to clothe
You hideous, grinning thing, that stalks
Hidden in music, like a queen
That in a garden of glory walks,
Till good men love the thing they loathe !
Art, thou hast many infamies,
But not an infamy like this.
Oh, snap the fife and still the drum,
And show the monster as she is! [Note: Richard Le Gallienne.]
2. It is from those who have seen it that we receive the most unsparing denunciation of war. Mr. A. G. Hales, the newspaper correspondent, says: “It is one of the most ruthless, bitter things on God’s earth. I am not sentimental, but I would like to see the men in Parliament who shriek and yell for war compelled by the laws of their country to take up arms and fight in the front rank. Why are men so willing to shed other people’s blood, and so loth to shed their own? I think statesmen rarely realise the fearful responsibility that rests upon the men who make war. It is awful. If the men who bring war about by their reckless talking, the men who talk war, and the men who write war, could be sent to the front lines to get some of the butchery and put up with the misery and hardship of it, we should have less shrieking and less fighting.”
In concluding his great book The Soul of the War, Mr. Philip Gibbs says: “In this book I have set down simply the scenes and character of this war as they have come before my own eyes and as I have studied them for nearly a year of history. If there is any purpose in what I have written beyond mere record it is to reveal the soul of war so nakedly that it cannot be glossed over by the glamour of false sentiment and false heroics. More passionate than any other emotion that has stirred me through life, is my conviction that any man who has seen these things must, if he has any gift of expression, and any human pity, dedicate his brain and heart to the sacred duty of preventing another war like this. A man with a pen in his hand, however feeble it may be, must use it to tell the truth about the monstrous horror, to etch its images of cruelty into the brains of his readers, and to tear down the veils by which the leaders of the peoples try to conceal its obscenities. The conscience of Europe must not be lulled to sleep again by the narcotics of old phrases about ‘the ennobling influence of war,’ and its ‘purging fires.’ It must be shocked by the stark reality of this crime in which all humanity is involved, so that from all the peoples of the civilized world there will be a great cry of rage and horror if the spirit of militarism raises its head again and demands new sacrifices of blood and life’s beauty. The Germans have revealed the meaning of war, the devilish soul of it, in a full and complete way, with a most ruthless logic. The chiefs of their great soldier caste have been more honest than ourselves in the business, with the honesty of men who, knowing that war is murder, have adopted the methods of murderers, wholeheartedly, with all the force of their intellect and genius, not weakened by any fear of public opinion, by any prick of conscience, or by any sentiment of compassion. Their logic seems to me flawless, though it is diabolical. If it is permissible to hurl millions of men against each other with machinery which makes a wholesale massacre of life, tearing up trenches, blowing great bodies of men to bits with the single shot of a great gun, strewing battlefields with death, and destroying defended towns so that nothing may live in their ruins, then it is foolish to make distinctions between one way of death and another, or to analyse degrees of horror. Asphyxiating gas is no worse than a storm of shells, or if worse then the more effective.”
In a review of “Georgian Poetry” published in The Cambridge Magazine, Professor Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has a few refreshingly vigorous sentences which deserve reproduction:
“Our new poets scarcely touch on this beastly war; as it seems to me, for the sufficient reason that it is beastly. I don’t know if readers of The Cambridge Magazine will agree, but I for one have no use at all for patriotic lyricism in this business. When it is over, indeed, no words shall be too solemn, as no thoughts can be too sad and holy, for the young who so blithely accepted their fate and went out to suffer and die for us all. Their recollected laughter is the noblest song we shall hear in our time. But the lads known to me, of all ranks, went off nursing no such pretty romantic bloodthirsty illusions about war as seem to be clung to by some of their elders at home.
I only know
That as he turned to go,
And waved his hand,
In his young eyes a sudden glory shone.
—Yes: but it was the glory of gay sacrifice, not of gay ambition. In fact (pace Professor Ridgeway) the youth of France and England had found War out even before this inferno started. They have had to accept it as the alternative to the ruination of better things: but I shall be surprised if they come back with any high opinion of War for War’s sake—War as a “purifier,” “degeneracy’s antiseptic,” “toughener of the moral fibre”—or indeed are not impatient of all the maudlin disguises under which our pulpiteers and journalists present it. The stuffing had oozed out of that idol some while before August 1914; and, since poetry is not concerned with rubbish, I respect these younger poets for spurning it and occupying themselves with things of permanent value.” [Note: A. Quiller-Couch, in Goodwill, vol. ii. No. 1, p. 22.]
Only when you see it
Will you dare to think you know it.
And the more you see, the more you’ll know
That no man e’er can know it.
It’s only when you sense it in each fibre of your being ;-
It’s only when it smites the very life-chords of your being ;-
It’s only when its thunders strike like death-drums on your soul,
That you confess that mortal man can never know the whole ;-
That though he sees, and sees, and sees,—in spite of all his seeing,—
No mortal man shall know the whole,
Is God’s all-wise decreeing.
For at the most ‘tis but the crust
That you can see,—the surfaced things,—
The upper, outside face of things,
Not the horrors down below it.
No mortal man shall ever know
In fullest full what lies below ;
The awful whole would crush his soul,
And so no man may know it.
God only knows in full the woes
That fester down below it. [Note: J. Oxenham, Hearts Courageous, 53.]
