(From _Scribner’s Magazine_, 1914.)
§ 1.
Three hundred thousand church spires raised to the glory of Christ!
Three hundred million human creatures baptized into His service!
And—War to the death of them all! “I trust the Almighty to give the
victory to my arms!” “Let your hearts beat to God, and your fists in the
face of the enemy!” “In prayer we call God’s blessing on our valiant
troops!”
God on the lips of each potentate, and under a hundred thousand spires
prayer that twenty-two million servants of Christ may receive from God
the blessed strength to tear and blow each other to pieces, to ravage
and burn, to wrench husbands from wives, fathers from their children, to
starve the poor, and everywhere destroy the works of the spirit! Prayer
under the hundred thousand spires for the blessed strength of God, to
use the noblest, most loyal instincts of the human race to the ends of
carnage! “God be with us to the death and dishonour of our foes”—whose
God He is no less than ours! The God who gave His only begotten Son to
bring on earth peace and good-will toward men! No supernatural creed—in
these days when two and two are put together—can stand against such
reeling subversion. After this monstrous mockery, beneath this grinning
skull of irony, how shall there remain faith in this personal outside
God, whom we can thus divide, appropriate, and invoke; how remain faith
in the articles, the formal structure of a religion preached and
practised to such ends? When this war is over and reason resumes its
sway, our dogmas will be found to have been scored through for ever.
Whatever else be the outcome of this business, let us at least realize
the truth: It is the death of dogmatic Christianity! Let us will that it
be the birth of a God within us, and an ethic Christianity that men
really practise!
§ 2.
Yes! Dogmatic Christianity was dying before this war began. When it is
over, or as soon as men’s reason comes back to them, it will be dead. In
France, England, Germany, in Belgium, and the other small countries,
dead; and only kept wonderingly alive in Russia and some parts of
Austria through peasant simplicity. “Tell me, brother, what have the
Japanese done to us that we should kill them?” So said the Russian
peasant in the Japanese war. So they may say in this war. And at the end
go back and resume praise of the tribal God who fought for Holy Russia
against the tribal God who fought for valiant Austria and the mailed
fists of Germany.
This superstitional Christianity will not die in the open and be buried
with pomp and ceremony; it will merely be dead—a very different thing;
like the nerve in a tooth, that, to the outward eye, is just as it was.
That which will take its place has already been a long time preparing to
come forward. It will be too much in earnest to care for forms and
ceremonies. And one thing is certain—it will be far more Christian than
the so-called Christianity which has brought us to these present ends.
Its creed will be a noiseless and passionate conviction that man can be
saved, not by a far-away, despotic God who can be enlisted by each
combatant for the destruction of his foes, but by the Divine element in
man, the God within the human soul. That, in proportion as man is high,
so will the life of man be high, safe from shames like this, and devoid
of his old misery. The creed will be a fervent, almost secret
application of the saying: “Love thy neighbour as thyself!” It will be
ashamed of appeal to God to put right that which man has bungled; of
supplications to the deity to fight against the deity. It will have the
pride of the artist and the artizan. And it will have its own mysticism,
its own wonder, and reverence for the mystery of the all-embracing
Principle which has produced such a creature as this man, with such
marvellous potentiality for the making of fine things, and the living of
fine lives; such heroism, such savagery; such wisdom and such black
stupidity; such a queer insuperable instinct for going on and on and
ever on!
§ 3.
The Western world has had its lesson now—the lesson indelibly writ in
death: There is no longer room in civilization for despotic Governments.
In Germany, in Austria, in the country where despotism most reigns
supreme—our ally, Russia—they are doomed in theory, if not as yet in
fact.
The Slav is no more by nature the enemy of the Teuton than is the Briton
of the Frank. That enmity is a fostered thing of imperial and
bureaucratic dreams.
What stands out from all this welter? The ambitious diplomacy of the
despotic Powers, in pursuit of so-called “national ideals,” a diplomacy
begotten of vicious traditions and the misconceptions of egomania,
removed by a ring fence from the people of the nations for whom it
professes to speak. An ambitious and cynical diplomacy, battening on the
knowledge that it can at almost any time raise for its ends a whirlwind
of feeling out of the love men ever have for the land wherein they are
born.
It is the divorce of executive power from popular sanction that has made
possible this greatest of all the disasters in history. In democratic
countries the aggressive faculty is imperceptibly yet continually
weakened by the obscure but real link between ministers elect and the
people. Only in those countries where, under a cloak perhaps of
democratic forms, the administrative force is responsible to none save
an imperial director, is a ruthless and unchecked pursuit of so-called
national dreams, an aggressive parade of so-called national honour,
possible.
If only autocracies—masquerading or naked—go down in the wreckage of
this war!
§ 4.
The superstition that unmilitarized nations suffer from fatty
degeneration of the heart has perished in the forty-fourth year of its
age, at the siege of Liège, blown away by the heroism of a little
unmilitary nation!
Democracy and citizen armies! If this war brings that in its train its
horror will not have been all hateful. But so surely as States remain
autocratic at heart will the dire spirit that animates almighty
bureaucracy rear its head again and demand revenge. So surely will this
war bring another, and yet another! In these last twenty years
civilization has not even marked time; it has gone backward under the
curb and pressure of professional armaments masquerading under the words
“Si vis pacem, para bellum.” The principle of universal service by men
not professionally soldiers, the principle that no man shall be called
to fight one step outside his native land—save as part of an
international Police to enforce the authority of a League for
Peace—these are the only principles that will in the future still the
gnawings of anxiety and gradually guarantee the peace of the West. They
are principles that, I fear, will never obtain while States are subject
to military bureaucracy and dynastic ambitions. If they cannot be purged
of these we are “doomed to something great” every generation—the
greatness of the shambles! It is enough to make heart stand still and
brain reel for ever if one must believe that man is never to find better
means of keeping his spirit from rust, his body from decay, than these
sporadic outbursts of “greatness.” “War is the only cleanser!”
Ah!—because the word “patriotism” has so limited a meaning. But—to
believe that this must always be . . . ! When men have ceased to look on
war as the proper vehicle for self-sacrifice, will they not turn to a
greatness that is not soaked with blood and black with the crows of
death, to save their souls alive? Will there not, can there not, arise
an emotion as strong as this present patriotism—a sentiment as
passionate and sweeping, bearing men on to the use of every faculty and
the forgetfulness of self, for the salvation, instead of the
destruction, of their fellow-man? Or is this a dream, and are we forever
doomed, each generation, to the greatness of tearing each other limb
from limb?
§ 5.
Three weeks before this war began I was in one of those East End London
parishes whose inhabitants exist from hand to mouth on casual employment
and sweated labour; where the women, poor, thin, overworked souls, have
neither time nor strength nor inclination for cleanliness and comeliness
in person or house; where the men are undersized and underfed, with the
faces of those without a future; where pale and stunted children playing
in the gutters have a monopoly of any mirthless gaiety there is.
In one household of two rooms they were “free of debt, thank Gawd!”
having just come back from fruit-picking, and were preparing to take up
family existence again on the wife’s making of matchboxes at a maximum
of six shillings a week, the husband not having found a job as yet. In
another household, of one room swarming with flies and foul with a
sickly acrid odour, a baby was half-asleep on the few rags of a bed
bereft of bedclothes, its lips pressed to something rubbery, and flies
about its eyes; dirty bowls of messes stood about; an offal heap lay in
the empty grate; and at a table in the little window a pallid woman of
forty with a running cold was desperately sewing the soles on to tiny
babies’ shoes. Beside her was a small dirty boy, who had just been lost
and brought home by a policeman, because he had remembered the name of
the street he lived in. The woman looked up at us wistfully, and said:
“I thought I’d lost ’im too, I did; like the one that fell in the
canal.” Though she still had seven, though her husband was out of work,
though she only made five to six shillings a week, she could not spare
any of the children she had borne.
Prices have gone up. What is happening to such as these? They exist in
all countries. You military bureaucrats, who safeguard and pursue
“national aspirations,” who open the gates of the kennel and let loose
these mad dogs of war; who rive husbands from their wives, sons from
their mothers, and send them out by the hundred thousand to become lumps
of bloody clay—spare a fraction of time to see the peoples for “whose
good” you launch this glorious murder; come and sniff for one moment
that sickly, acrid smell in the homes of the poor! And then talk of
national aspirations and necessities!
There is only one national aspiration worth the name, only one national
necessity—to have from roof to basement a clean, healthy, happy
national house. “War the cleanser! Without war—no sacrifice, no
nobility!” I refer you to that mother, slaving without hope and without
glory, starved and ill, and slaving in a war with death that lasts all
her life, for the children she has borne.
§ 6.
The Russian people is not Russia, unless it should become so in this
war. There has hitherto been an almost absolute divorce between the
essentially democratic nature of the Russian and the despotic methods by
which Russia is governed. We English and French, fighting not only for
our lives, but for democracy, for the decent preservation of treaty
rights, and a humanity that we believe can only flourish under
democratic rule, find it somewhat ironical that we have with us a
despotism. And there is a profound reason why it has been and will be
difficult for Russia to change its form of government. The emotional,
uncalculating Russian has little sense of money, space, or time; he
falls an easy prey to those sterner, more matter-of-fact than himself.
Bureaucracy attracts the hard and practical elements of a population;
there are, or were, many of Teutonic origin manning Russian officialdom.
And Russia is so huge; democratic rule will find it difficult to be
swift enough; in decentralization there is danger of disruption.
Nevertheless, we welcome the help of Russia, for, if France and we were
beaten, it would not only be our own deaths, but the death of democracy
and humanism in Europe—perhaps in the world. The tide of democracy sets
from the West. It must permeate Germany before it reaches Russia. Out of
this war many things may come. If Fate grant that military despotisms
fall in any country, they may well fall in all, and our ally, Russia,
gain at last a Constitution and some real measure of democratic freedom,
some real coherence between the Russian people and Russian policy.
§ 7.
When the conscript souls disembodied by this war meet, if they meet at
all, how will they talk of this last madness? Perhaps one in each
hundred will be able to say from his heart: “I was happy with a rifle or
sword and some of you to be killed in front of me!” The remaining
ninety-nine will say: “Like you I loved the sun, and a woman, and the
good things of life; like you I meant well by others; I had no wish to
kill any man; no wish to die. But I was told that it was necessary. I
was told that, unless I killed as many of you as I could, my country
would suffer. I don’t know whether in my heart I believed what I was
told, but I did know that I should feel disgraced if I did not take
rifle and sword and try to kill some of you; I knew, too, that unless I
did, they would shoot me for a deserter. So I went. Nearly all the time
that I was marching, or resting dead-tired, or lying in the trenches, I
thought; ‘Shall I ever see home again? Let me see home again!’ But I
knew that my first duty was to kill you, so that _you_ should never see
home again. I did not _want_ to kill you, but I knew I had to. When I
was under fire or tired or hungry, it is true I hated you so that I had
only a savage wish to kill you. But when it was over I had an ache in my
heart. We used to sing while marching, make jokes, enjoy the feel of our
comrades’ shoulders touching our own, say to ourselves: ‘We’re fine
fellows, serving our country, doing our duty!’ But still the ache went
on underneath, very deep, as if one were asleep and could not come to
the end of a bad dream. We seldom knew what our bullets were doing, but
sometimes we came to fighting hand to hand. The first time, I remember,
we had advanced through a wood under shell-fire, and were lying down at
the edge. I had that ache all the time I was coming through the wood; it
was fine weather, and the larches smelled sweet. But when I saw you
charging down on us with the sun gleaming on your bayonets, it left me;
I felt weak and queer down the backs of my legs, wondering which of you,
yelling and running towards me, would plunge his steel into my stomach.
Then my officer shouted; I fired once, twice, three times, and began to
run forward. If I had not, I should have turned and fled. I did not feel
savage, but I knew I must move every bit of me as quick as I could, and
defend myself and stab. Then our supports came through the wood, and you
were beaten. My bayonet was bloody. One or more of you I must have
killed; I had been brave, we had won; I felt excited and yet sick. In
the evening when I lay down my ache was worse than ever. All my life I
had been taught that to kill a fellow-man was the worst thing man can
do; it did not come natural to me to kill. It was having to risk my life
so dear to me, _in order that I might kill_, that gave me that ache. If
I had been risking it trying to save you, it would have been more
natural; I should not have ached then!”
§ 8.
“The glories of war!”
Courage, devotion, endurance, contempt of death! These are glories that
the unmartial may not deride. Even the humblest of brave soldiers is a
hero, for all that his heroism coins the misery of others; but what does
the soldier know, see, feel, of the real “glories of war”? That
knowledge is confined to the readers of newspapers and books! The
Pressman, the romancer, the historian can with glowing pen call up in
the reader a feeling that war is glorious; that there is something in
itself desirable and to be admired in that licensed murder, arson,
robbery that we call war. Glorious war! Every penny thrill of each
reader of the newspaper, every spasm of each one who sees armed men
passing, or hears the fifes and drums, is manufactured out of blood and
groans, wrung out of the torments of the human heart and the torture of
human flesh.
When I read in the paper of some glorious charge and the great slaughter
of the enemy, I feel a thrill through every fibre. It is grand, it is
splendid! I take a deep breath of joy, almost of rapture. Grand,
splendid! That there should be lying, with their faces haggard to the
stars, hundreds, thousands of men like myself, better men than myself!
Hundreds, thousands, who loved life as much as I; whose women loved them
as much as mine love me! Grand, splendid! That the blood should be
oozing from them into grass that once smelled as sweet to them as it
does to me! That their eyes which delighted in sunlight and beauty as
much as mine, should be glazing fast with death; that their mouths,
which mothers and wives and children are aching to kiss again, should be
twisted into gaps of horror! Grand, splendid! That other men, no more
savage than myself, should have strown them, there! Grand, splendid!
That in thousands of far-off houses women, children, and old men will
soon lie quivering with anguished memories of those lying there
dead. . .
Pressmen, romancers, historians—you have given me a noble thrill in
recounting these glories of war!
§ 9.
This is the grand defeat of all Utopians, dreamers, poets, philosophers,
idealists, humanitarians, lovers of peace and the arts; bag and baggage
they are thrown out of a world that has for a time no use for them. To
the despot, the bureaucrat, the militarist, the man of affairs, they
have always been hateful. They are soft, yet dangerous, because they
venture to hold up another flag in the face of the big flag of force;
venture to distract men’s attention from dwelling on the beauty of its
size. I believe solemnly that we English have had to join this carnival
of force to guard democracy, honour, and the sanctity of treaty rights.
It was a sacred necessity; let us keep it sacred, without the loathsome
reek of a satisfaction that peace, humanism, and the arts are down, and
the country once more showing the stuff of which it is made, a tusky
lover of a fight, as jealous and afraid of a rival as ever.
The idealist said in his heart: The god of force is dead, or dying. He
has been proven the fool that the man of affairs and the militarist
always said he was. But the fools of this world—generally after they
are gone—have a way of moving men which the wise and practical
believers in force have not. If they had not this power man would still
be, year in year out, the savage that the believers in force have for
the moment once more made him. The battle between the god of love and
the god of force endures for ever. Fools of the former camp, drummed out
and beaten to their knees, in due time will get up again and plant their
poor flag a little farther on. “All men shall be brothers,” said the
German fool, Schiller; so shall the fools say again when the time comes;
and again, and again, after every beating!
§ 10.
Last night, when the half-moon was golden and the white stars very high,
I saw the souls of the killed passing. They came riding through the
dark—some on grey horses, some on black; they came marching,
white-faced—hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands.
The night smelled sweet, the breeze rustled, the stream murmured; and
past me on the air the souls of the killed came marching. They seemed of
one great company, no longer enemies. All had the same fixed stare,
braving something strange that they were trying terribly to push away.
All had their eyes narrowed yet fixed open in their grey-white,
smoke-grimed faces. They made no sound as they passed. Whence were they
coming, where going, trailing the ghosts of guns, riding the ghosts of
horses; into what river of oblivion—far from horror, and the savagery
of man!
They passed. The golden half-moon shone, and the high white stars. The
fields smelled sweet; the wind gently stirred the trees. The moon and
stars would be shining over the battlefields, the wind rustling the
trees there, the earth sleeping in dark beauty. So would it be all over
the Western world. The peace of God doth indeed pass our understanding!