1. A nation engaged in a bloody war can seldom escape the Nemesis of spiritual deterioration. To become accustomed to acts of bloodshed, to read daily of scenes of carnage, to be obliged to rejoice in the news of sinking ships, of the blowing up of troop-trains, and the intercepting of communications—all this must tend to blunt the moral sense and to make callous the spirit of compassion. We begin to hate our enemies and all that pertains to them.
War necessarily involves a complete suspension of great portions of the moral law. This is not merely the case in unjust wars; it applies also, though in a less degree, to those which are most necessary and most righteous. War is not, and never can be, a mere passionless discharge of a painful duty. It is in its essence, and it is a main condition of its success, to kindle into fierce exercise among great masses of men the destructive and combative passions—passions as fierce and as malevolent as that with which the hound hunts the fox to its death, or the tiger springs upon its prey. Destruction is one of its chief ends. Deception is one of its means, and one of the great arts of skilful generalship is to deceive in order to destroy. Whatever other elements may mingle with and dignify war, this at least is never absent; and however reluctantly men may enter into war, however conscientiously they may endeavour to avoid it, they must know that when the scene of carnage has once opened these things must be not only accepted and condoned, but stimulated, encouraged and applauded. It would be difficult to conceive a disposition more remote from the morals of ordinary life, not to speak of Christian ideals, than that with which the soldiers most animated with the fire and passion that lead to victory rush forward to bayonet the foe. [Note: W. E. H. Lecky, The Map of Life, 92.]
I am shocked to recognize myself approving acts that I should normally detest. I loathe bombs, until I succeed in throwing them. A submarine seems to me a piece of devilish craftiness when it sends our poor fellows in the cruisers to the bottom: but it seems to me the symbol of the most glorious courage and skill, when it strikes a German destroyer under the guns of Emden. The natural conscience is dislocated. I read quite calmly, and with gentle satisfaction, the assurances of the Press that the losses of the enemy were most gratifying. This is the war-temper. Such a temper is an outrage against man, a sin against GOD. It is under the curse of CHRIST. It puts His Cross to an open shame. [Note: H. Scott Holland, So as by Fire, 1. 22.]
Mr. Wilson McNair witnessed the hunting of spies in Brussels on the declaration of war. If you lingered, he says, “by a shop door the passer-by viewed you with quick suspicion; if you lingered long they gathered about you. In a moment you might be the centre of one of those furious crowds which have neither reason nor pity. The poison corrupted wherever it spread as fear and hatred corrupt. Like an evil presence, War spread her black wings over this city. At night you might see fierce mobs destroying the shops of the enemy or chasing suspects through the street; men but yesterday turned soldier paced the streets and demanded proof of identity at the bayonet point. This transformation is one of the most hideous of the features of war. It is like the process of a soul’s damnation made universal to all souls and quickened within the space of a few days. Damnation comes too by force; there is no escape from it. As you look upon their faces, men are debased, brutalised—out of the very nobility of their spirits, out of their heroism and out of their self-sacrifice is wrought the abomination. [Note: W. McNair, Blood and Iron, 36.]
That is the worst of war; it ostracises, demoralises, brutalises reason. Even Nelson, our glorious and most lovable of heroes, swore that he would like to hang every Frenchman who came near him, Royalist and Republican alike. Hate takes root as a tradition, and lasts. [Note: Viscount Morley, Recollections, ii. 88.]
2. If the whole nation suffers moral deterioration, most of all do the men suffer who are engaged in fighting. For the time being men put behind them the principles, the habits, and the customs of civilized humanity, and relapse into the elemental stage of savagery, in which they face one another with murder in their eyes, and know no law save the necessity which makes them seek their own safety and the destruction of their enemy. We read of outrages which shock every feeling of humanity—and who are the men that do these things, or look on without protest? For the most part they were to be met with a few weeks before pursuing their peaceful avocations as peasants and shopkeepers, as factory-workers and clerks, as business men and professional men—they were industrious, well-living citizens, upright and kindly as the average among whom we do our daily work; and as if by the touch of a magic wand of the diabolic kind, some of them have been transformed into savage creatures lusting for blood and hunting for loot. Is it possible that ordinary men can pass through experiences like these, can be transplanted for a season into a world in which the ordinary maxims of conduct are turned upside down, without some damage from the kind of work which they have to do, and the quality of the atmosphere which they have to breathe? And if we follow them further into the heart of the battle, where men are falling dead or dying amid shot and shell, and the hand-to-hand struggle is raging round the guns or in the trenches; if we can take away our thoughts from the suffering that claims our human sympathy, and think of the spiritual conditions under which men are there facing death—how different seem the conditions from those in which one would desire to bid farewell to the world, how different is that place of rage and violence and blasphemy from the sanctuary of prayer and silence in which we feel it meet that the soul should prepare to meet its God.
War brings all the fantastic idiosyncrasies of human nature to the surface. Men will rob and pillage and rape and burn in war who would have lived very passable and decent lives in peace. Many of them think that it is part of the business; and, of course, the meaner and more sordid the war is, the more that part of the programme becomes possible. I have seen, even at a peaceful railway station in England, a plethoric captain of Volunteers, proceeding to his summer camp in uniform, begin to leer and ogle at the passing female sex generally, who, had he been in his usual dress and at his daily business vocations, would have been the picture of decorous provincial family respectability. [Note: Sir William Butler: an Autobiography, 199.]
Here’s a scene I shall remember always: A misty summer morning—I went along a sap-head running towards the German line at right-angles to our own. Looking out over the country, flat and uninteresting in peace, I beheld what at first would seem to be a land ploughed by the ploughs of giants. In England you read of concealed trenches—here we do not trouble about that. Trenches rise up, grey clay, 3 or 4 feet above the ground. Save for one or two men—snipers—at the sap-head, the country was deserted. No sign of humanity—a dead land. And yet thousands of men were there, like rabbits concealed. The artillery was quiet; there was no sound but a cuckoo in a shell-torn poplar. Then, as a rabbit in the early morning comes out to crop grass, a German stepped over the enemy trench—the only living thing in sight. “I’ll take him,” says the man near me. And like a rabbit the German falls. And again complete silence and desolation. [Note: Ivar Campbell, in E. B. Osborn, The New Elizabethans, 206.]
I remember a characteristic case in the first advance. A German machine-gun post had been holding up the British advance and inflicting murderous casualties. The machine was enveloped and rushed, and the Germans held up their hands and surrendered. An old-time sergeant goes up to his officer, who, by the bye, was a poet, and wrote some very charming lyrics and had a taste in Art, and salutes: “Leave to shoot the prisoners, sir?” “What do you want to shoot them for?” says the poet. “To avenge my brother’s death,” says the sergeant. I suppose the poet tells him to carry on. He pinks the Germans one after one, and some of our fellows say “Bravo!” and in others the blood runs cold. I remember the disgust of one of our American volunteers at this episode. For a few days it caused a reaction in him, and made him quite warm-hearted toward Germans. But when he had been in one or two more frays he also caught the regimental point of view, and was ready to kill “Huns ad libitum.” [Note: Stephen Graham, A Private in the Guards, 218.]
3. The atrocious cruelties that are perpetrated in war may not be worse in themselves than those which have been committed in peace, but they are done on a different scale and with a most startling indifference. These acts are possible only when war has blunted the moral sense. No doubt war must involve suffering, but it need not involve wanton cruelty. There is perhaps no needless cruelty in shooting down the enemy in fair fight, or in driving country folk from their homes within the battle area.
Miserable and terrible as such things are, they are the inevitable consequences of war. Cruelty in warfare begins only when suffering is inflicted in illegitimate ways, and without any strategical necessity. When the rules which civilized nations have laid down for the conduct of war are disregarded. When poison is used as a weapon. When non-combatants are shot on the mere suspicion of resistance. When women and children are ill-treated or driven in front of troops, or murdered. When wounded men are killed as they lie helpless on the field. When no attempt is made to save life after a fight at sea; or when unarmed merchantmen are torpedoed without due notice being given to the crews. These and similar acts are the cruelties of war.
I do not want to go into a long list of German atrocities; much less do I want to denounce the enemy. As Mr. Balfour put it in his whimsical way: “We take our enemy as we find him.” But it has been the method throughout this war—the method the enemy has followed—to go at each step outside the old conventions. We have sometimes followed. Sometimes we have had to follow. But the whole history of the war is a history of that process. The peoples fought according to certain rules, but one people got outside the rules right from the beginning. The broken treaty, the calculated ferocity in Belgium and Northern France, the killing of women and non-combatants by sea and land and air, the shelling of hospitals, the treatment of wounded prisoners in ways they had never expected; all the doctoring of weapons with a view to torture; the explosive bullets; the projectiles doctored with substances which would produce a gangrenous wound; the poisoned gases; the infected wells. It is the same method throughout. The old conventions of humanity, the old arrangements which admitted that beneath our cruelties, beneath our hatreds, there was some common humanity and friendliness between us, these have been systematically broken one after another. Now observe; these things were done not recklessly but to gain a specific advantage; they were done as Mr. Secretary Zimmermann put it in the case of Miss Cavell, “to inspire fear.” And observe that in many places they have been successful. They have inspired fear. Only look at what has happened and what is happening now in the Balkans. Every one of these Balkan States has looked at Belgium. The German agents have told them to look at Belgium. They have looked at Belgium and their courage has failed them. Is that the way in which we wish the government of the world to be conducted in future? It is the way it will be conducted unless we and our Allies stand firm to the end. [Note: Professor Gilbert Murray, in Ethical and Religious Problems of the War, 9.]
There was no sound at all, no crying in the village,
Nothing you would count as sound, that is, after the shells;
Only behind a wall the low sobbing of women,
The creaking of a door, a lost dog—nothing else.
Silence which might be felt, no pity in the silence,
Horrible, soft like blood, down all the blood-stained ways;
In the middle of the street two corpses lie unburied,
And a bayoneted woman stares in the market-place.
Humble and ruined folk—for these no pride of conquest,
Their only prayer: “O! Lord, give us our daily bread!”
Not by the battle fires, the shrapnel are we haunted;
Who shall deliver us from the memory of these dead? [Note: M. Sackville, The Pageant of War, 32.]
