THE WAR THAT ENDS IN EXHAUSTION SOMETIMES MISTAKEN FOR PEACE
When a skirl of pipes came down the street,
And the blare of bands, and the march of feet,
I could not keep from marching, too;
For the pipes cried "Come!" and the bands said "Do,"
And when I heard the pealing fife,
I cared no more for human life!
Away back in the cave-dwelling days, there was a simple and definite
distribution of labor. Men fought and women worked. Men fought
because they liked it; and women worked because it had to be done. Of
course the fighting had to be done too, there was always a warring
tribe out looking for trouble, while their womenfolk stayed at home and
worked. They were never threatened with a long peace. Somebody was
always willing to go "It." The young bloods could always be sure of
good fighting somewhere, and no questions asked. The masculine
attitude toward life was: "I feel good today; I'll go out and kill
something." Tribes fought for their existence, and so the work of the
warrior was held to be the most glorious of all; indeed, it was the
only work that counted. The woman's part consisted of tilling the
soil, gathering the food, tanning the skins and fashioning garments,
brewing the herbs, raising the children, dressing the warrior's wounds,
looking after the herds, and any other light and airy trifle which
might come to her notice. But all this was in the background. Plain
useful work has always been considered dull and drab.
Everything depended on the warrior. When "the boys" came home there
was much festivity, music, and feasting, and tales of the chase and
fight. The women provided the feast and washed the dishes. The
soldier has always been the hero of our civilization, and yet almost
any man makes a good soldier. Nearly every man makes a good soldier,
but not every man, or nearly every man makes a good citizen: the tests
of war are not so searching as the tests of peace, but still the
soldier is the hero.
Very early in the lives of our children we begin to inculcate the love
of battle and sieges and invasions, for we put the miniature weapons of
warfare into their little hands. We buy them boxes of tin soldiers at
Christmas, and help them to build forts and blow them up. We have
military training in our schools; and little fellows are taught to
shoot at targets, seeing in each an imaginary foe, who must be
destroyed because he is "not on our side." There is a song which runs
like this:
If a lad a maid would marry
He must learn a gun to carry.
thereby putting love and love-making on a military basis--but it goes!
Military music is in our ears, and even in our churches. "Onward
Christian soldiers, marching as to war" is a Sunday-school favorite.
We pray to the God of Battles, never by any chance to the God of
Workshops!
Once a year, of course, we hold a Peace Sunday and on that day we pray
mightily that God will give us peace in our time and that war shall be
no more, and the spear shall be beaten into the pruning hook. But the
next day we show God that he need not take us too literally, for we go
on with the military training, and the building of the battleships, and
our orators say that in time of peace we must prepare for war.
War is the antithesis of all our teaching. It breaks all the
commandments; it makes rich men poor, and strong men weak. It makes
well men sick, and by it living men are changed to dead men. Why,
then, does war continue? Why do men go so easily to war--for we may as
well admit that they do go easily? There is one explanation. They
like it!
When the first contingent of soldiers went to the war from Manitoba,
there stood on the station platform a woman crying bitterly. (She was
not the only one.) She had in her arms an infant, and three small
children stood beside her wondering.
"'E would go!" she sobbed in reply to the sympathy expressed by the
people who stood near her, "'E loves a fight--'e went through the South
African War, and 'e's never been 'appy since--when 'e 'ears war is on
he says I'll go--'e loves it--'e does!"
'"E loves it!"
That explains many things.
"Father sent me out," said a little Irish girl, "to see if there's a
fight going on any place, because if there is, please, father would
like to be in it!" Unfortunately "father's" predilection to fight is
not wholly confined to the Irish!
But although men like to fight, war is not inevitable. War is not of
God's making. War is a crime committed by men and, therefore, when
enough people say it shall not be, it cannot be. This will not happen
until women are allowed to say what they think of war. Up to the
present time women have had nothing to say about war, except pay the
price of war--this privilege has been theirs always.
History, romance, legend and tradition having been written by men, have
shown the masculine aspect of war and have surrounded it with a false
glory and have sought to throw the veil of glamour over its hideous
face. Our histories have followed the wars. Invasions, conquests,
battles, sieges make up the subject-matter of our histories.
Some glorious soul, looking out upon his neighbors, saw some country
that he thought he could use and so he levied a heavy tax on the
people, and with the money fitted out a splendid army. Men were called
from their honest work to go out and fight other honest men who had
never done them any harm; harvest fields were trampled by their horses'
feet, villages burned, women and children fled in terror, and perished
of starvation, streets ran blood and the Glorious Soul came home
victorious with captives chained to his chariot wheel. When he drove
through the streets of his own home town, all the people cheered, that
is, all who had not been killed, of course.
What the people thought of all this, the historians do not say. The
people were not asked or expected to think. Thinking was the most
unpopular thing they could do. There were dark damp dungeons where
hungry rats prowled ceaselessly; there were headsmen's axes and other
things prepared for people who were disposed to think and specially
designed to allay restlessness among the people.
The "people" were dealt with in one short paragraph at the end of the
chapter: "The People were very poor" (you wouldn't think they would
need to say that, and certainly there was no need to rub it in), and
they "ate black bread," and they were "very ignorant and
superstitious." Superstitious? Well, I should say they would
be--small wonder if they did see black cats and have rabbits cross
their paths, and hear death warnings, for there was always going to be
a death in the family, and they were always about to lose money! The
People were a great abstraction, infinite in number, inarticulate in
suffering--the people who fought and paid for their own killing. The
man who could get the people to do this on the largest scale was the
greatest hero of all and the historian told us much about him, his
dogs, his horses, the magnificence of his attire.
Some day, please God, there will be new histories written, and they
will tell the story of the years from the standpoint of the people, and
the hero will not be any red-handed assassin who goes through peaceful
country places leaving behind him dead men looking sightlessly up to
the sky. The hero will be the man or woman who knows and loves and
serves. In the new histories we will be shown the tragedy, the
heartbreaking tragedy of war, which like some dreadful curse has
followed the human family, beaten down their plans, their hopes, wasted
their savings, destroyed their homes, and in every way turned back the
clock of progress.
We have all wondered what would happen if the people some day decided
that they would no longer be the tools of the man higher up, what would
happen if the men who make the quarrel had to fight it out. How
glorious it would have been if this war could have been settled by
somebody taking the Kaiser out behind the barn! There would seem to be
some show of justice in a hand-to-hand encounter, where the best man
wins, but modern warfare has not even the faintest glimmering of fair
play. The exploding shell blows to pieces the strong, the brave, the
daring, just as readily as it does the cowardly, weak, or base.
War proves nothing. To kill a man does not prove that he was in the
wrong. Bloodletting cannot change men's spirits, neither can the evil
of men's thoughts be driven out by blows. If I go to my neighbor's
house, and break her furniture, and smash her pictures, and bind her
children captive, it does not prove that I am fitter to live than
she--yet according to the ethics of nations it does. I have conquered
her and she must pay me for my trouble; and her house and all that is
left in it belongs to my heirs and successors forever. That is war!
War twists our whole moral fabric. The object of all our teaching has
been to inculcate respect for the individual, respect for human life,
honor and purity. War sweeps that all aside. The human conscience in
these long years of peace, and its resultant opportunities for
education, has grown tender to the cry of agony--the pallid face of a
hungry child finds a quick response to its mute appeal; but when we
know that hundreds are rendered homeless every day, and countless
thousands are killed and wounded, men and boys mowed down like a field
of grain, and with as little compunction, we grow a little bit numb to
human misery. What does it matter if there is a family north of the
track living on soda biscuits and turnips? War hardens us to human
grief and misery.
War takes the fit and leaves the unfit. The epileptic, the
consumptive, the inebriate, are left behind. They are not good enough
to go out to fight. So they stay at home, and perpetuate the race!
Statistics prove that the war is costing fifty millions a day, which is
a prodigious sum, but we would be getting off easy if that were all it
costs. The bitterest cost of war is not paid by us at all. It will be
paid by the unborn generations, in a lowered vitality, the loss of a
strong fatherhood, which they have never known. Napoleon lowered the
stature of the French by two inches, it is said. That is one way to
set your mark on your generation.
But the greatest evil wrought by war is not the wanton destruction of
life and property, sinful though it is; it is not even the lowered
vitality of succeeding generations, though that is attended by
appalling injury to the moral nature--the real iniquity of war is that
it sets aside the arbitrament of right and justice, and looks to brute
force for its verdict!
In the first days of panic, pessimism broke out among us, and we cried
in our despair that our civilization had failed, that Christianity had
broken down, and that God had forgotten the world. It seemed like it
at first. But now a wiser and better vision has come to us, and we
know that Christianity has not failed, for it is not fair to impute
failure to something which has never been tried. Civilization has
failed. Art, music, and culture have failed, and we know now that
underneath the thin veneer of civilization, unregenerate man is still a
savage; and we see now, what some have never seen before, that unless a
civilization is built upon love, and mutual trust, it must always end
in disaster, such as this. Up to August fourth, we often said that war
was impossible between Christian nations. We still say so, but we know
more now than we did then. We know now that there are no Christian
nations.
Oh, yes. I know the story. It was a beautiful story and a beautiful
picture. The black prince of Abyssinia asked the young Queen of
England what was the secret of England's glory and she pointed to the
"open Bible."
The dear Queen of sainted memory was wrong. She judged her nation by
the standard of her own pure heart. England did not draw her policy
from the open Bible when in 1840 she forced the opium traffic on the
Chinese. England does not draw her policy from the open Bible when she
takes revenues from the liquor traffic, which works such irreparable
ruin to countless thousands of her people. England does not draw her
policy from the open Bible when she denies her women the rights of
citizens, when women are refused degrees after passing examinations,
when lower pay is given women for the same work than if it were done by
men. Would this be tolerated if it were really so that we were a
Christian nation? God abominates a false balance, and delights in a
just weight.
No, the principles of Christ have not yet been applied to nations. We
have only Christian people. You will see that in a second, if you look
at the disparity that there is between our conceptions of individual
duty and national duty. Take the case of the heathen--the people whom
we in our large-handed, superior way call the heathen. Individually we
believe it is our duty to send missionaries to them to convert them
into Christians. Nationally we send armies upon them (if necessary)
and convert them into customers! Individually we say: "We will send
you our religion." Nationally: "We will send you goods, and we'll make
you take them--we need the money!" Think of the bitter irony of a boat
leaving a Christian port loaded with missionaries upstairs and rum
below, both bound for the same place and for the same people--both for
the heathen "with our comp'ts."
Individually we know it is wrong to rob anyone. Yet the state robs
freely, openly, and unashamed, by unjust taxation, by the legalized
liquor traffic, by imposing unjust laws upon at least one half of the
people. We wonder at the disparity between our individual ideals and
the national ideal, but when you remember that the national ideals have
been formed by one half of the world--and not the more spiritual
half--it is not so surprising. Our national policy is the result of
male statecraft.
There is a curative power in human life just as there is in nature.
When the pot boils--it boils over. Evils cure themselves eventually.
But it is a long hard way. Yet it is the way humanity has always had
to learn. Christ realized that when he looked down at Jerusalem, and
wept over it: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I would have gathered
you, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, but you would
not." That was the trouble then, and it has been the trouble ever
since. Humanity has to travel a hard road to wisdom, and it has to
travel it with bleeding feet.
But it is getting its lessons now--and paying double first-class rates
for its tuition!