From Homeric warfare to subterranean conflict of modern trenches is a
far cry, and Ares, God of Battles, may well yawn at the entertainment
with which the Demon of War is providing him. But the spectator of
this grim “revue” lacks something of the patience of its creator, and
our Mephistopheles, marking the god’s protest, will doubtless hurry
the scene and diversify it with new devilries to restore his interest.
Indeed, that has happened since Raemaekers made his picture.
The etiquette of butchery has become more complicated since Troy fell,
yet it has been so far preserved till now that the fiend measures
Ares with his eyes and speculates as to how far the martial god may
be expected to tolerate his novel engines. Will asphyxiating gas, and
destruction of non-combatants and neutrals on land and sea, trouble
him? Or will he demand the rules of the game, and decline to applaud
this satire on civilisation, although mounted and produced regardless
of cost and reckoning?
As the devil’s own entertainment consists in watching the effects of
his masterpiece on this warlike spectator, so it may be that those
who “staged” the greatest war in mankind’s history derive some bitter
instruction from its reception by mankind. They know now that it is
condemned by every civilised nation on earth; and before these lines
are published their uncivilised catspaws will have ample reason to
condemn it also. Neutrals there must be, but impartials none.
The sense and spirit of the thinking world now go so far with human
reason that they demand a condition of freedom for all men and nations,
be they weak or powerful. That ideal inspires the majority of human
kind, and it follows that the evolution of morals sets strongly on the
side of the Allies.
“War,” says Bernhardi, “gives a biologically just decision, since its
decisions rest on the very nature of things.” So be it.