* * * * *

This war is leading us all back to the basic commonplaces of

thinking. Is life under any and all conditions worth the having? Our

reason says not. It tells us that the diseased and the weak-minded

should not be permitted to breed, that an anaemic existence under

degenerating influences is not worth calling life. We shudder in our

armchairs at the thought of "cannon food," but why not shudder

equally at the words "factory food," "mine food," and "sweat-shop

food"? We are inclined to sentimentalize over those brave lives that

have been spent by the hundreds of thousands on the battlefields of

France and Poland, but for the most part we live placidly unconscious

of the lives ground out in industrial competition all about us.

Between the two methods of eating up, of maiming, of suppressing

human lives, the battle method may be the more humane--I should

prefer it for myself, for my child. What our pacifists desire is not

so much peace as bloodlessness. We should be honest enough to

recognize that for many human beings,--possibly a majority even in

our prosperous, war-free society,--a violent death may not be by any

means the worst event. And it may be the happiest if the individual

is convinced that the sacrifice of his existence will help others to

realize a better life. That is the hope, the faith of every loyal

soldier who dies for his country, of every soldier's father and

mother who pays with a son for the endurance of those ideals more

precious than life itself.

The higher one rises in consciousness, the more nearly free and

self-determined life becomes, the greater are the rewards of complete

sacrifice. There are many who have "fallen on the field of honor"

whose lives, if lived out under normal peace conditions, might have

meant much to themselves, possibly to humanity. They have given

themselves freely, without question, for what seems to them of more

importance than life. Wounded, mutilated past all usefulness, dying,

they have not rebelled. Doctors and nurses in the hospitals tell the

story of their endurance without complaint of their bitter fate. Much

as we must feel the awful price which they have felt obliged to pay,

it is not sentimental to say that the finer spirits among them have

lived more fully in the few crowded weeks of their struggle than if

they had been permitted to live out their lives in all the

gratifications of our comfortable civilization. Letters from them

give an extraordinary revelation of priceless qualities gained by

these soldiers through complete renunciation and sacrifice. War, it

must not be denied, is a great developer as well as a destroyer of

life. Nothing else, it would seem, in our present state of evolution

presses the cup of human experience so full of realization and

understanding as battle and death. The men who are paying for their

beliefs with their lives are living more in moments and hours than we

who escape the ordeal can ever live. For life cannot be measured by

time or comfort or enjoyment. It is too subtle for that! A supreme

effort, even a supreme agony, may have more real living worth than

years of "normal" existence. The youths whose graves now dot so

plentifully the pleasant fields of France have drunk deeper than we

can fathom of the mystery of life.

As for the nation, that greater mother for whose existence they have

given their individual lives, there is even less question of the

benefit of this war. We Americans are fond of measuring loss and gain

in figures: we reckon up the huge war debts, the toll of killed and

wounded, and against this heavy account we set down--nothing. It is

all dead loss. Yet even to-day, in the crisis of their struggle,

there is not a Frenchman who will not admit the immense good that has

already come to his people, that will come increasingly out of the

bloody sacrifice. The war has united all individuals, swept aside the

trivial and the base, revealed the nation to itself. The French have

discovered within their souls and shown before the world qualities,

unsuspected or forgotten, of chivalry, steadfastness, seriousness,

and they have renewed their familiar virtues of bravery and good

humor and intelligence. The French soldier, the French citizen, and

the French woman are to-day marvelously moulded in the heroic type

of their best tradition: in the full sense of the word they are

gallant--chivalrous, self-forgetful, devoted. Is there any price

too great to pay for such a resurrection of human nobility?

The pacifist is fain to babble of the "disciplines of peace." No

one denies them. But how can humanity be compelled to embrace these

disciplines of peace? The German lesson of thoroughness and social

organization and responsibility was as necessary before the war as it

is to-day, but neither England nor France, neither Russia nor our own

America gave heed to it until the terrible menace of extermination

in this war ground the lesson into their unwilling souls. It may be

lamentable that humanity should still be held so firmly in the grip

of biologic law that it must kill and be killed in order to save

itself, but there are things worse than death. Until humanity learns

the secret of self-discipline it will create diseases that can be

eradicated only with the knife; it is merely blind to assume that

the insanity of war can be prevented by any system of parliamenting,

or litigation, or paper schemes of international arbitration. Some

issues are of a primary importance, unarguable, fundamental. No

man--and no nation--is worthy of life who is not ready to lay it down

in their settlement. I know that some Americans are still unable to

perceive that any such fundamental principle is at stake in Europe

to-day. Extraordinary as it seems to me I hear intelligent men refer

to the great war as if it were a local quarrel of no real consequence

to us. Even the humblest _poilu_ in the trenches, the simplest

working-woman in France, know that they are giving themselves not

merely in the righteous cause of self-defense, but in the world's

cause in defense of its best tradition, its highest ideals. Their

cause is big enough to consecrate them.

* * * * *

Therefore a new, a larger, a more vital life has already begun for

invaded and unconquered France! In order to reap the blessings of

war, a nation must have an irreproachable cause, and aside from

Belgium, France has the clearest record of all the belligerents in

this world war. She will gain most from it, not in land or wealth,

but in honor and moral strength, in dignity and pride. She is ready

to pay the great price for her soul. This is the one supreme

inspiration that the French are giving an admiring world--their

readiness to give all rather than yield to the evil that threatens

them. With the light of such nobility in one's eyes, it is difficult,

indeed, to be patient with the cynical clamor of comfortable neutrals

for peace at any price. If there is anything of dignity and meaning

in human life, it lies in selfless devotion to beliefs, to

principles; it is readiness to sacrifice happiness, life, all, in

their defense.

And that is patriotism in its larger aspect. Our intellectuals

discuss coldly the primitive quality of patriotism and its unexpected

recrudescence in this world war. They talk of it in the jargon of

social science as "group consciousness." Before I felt its fervor

in the crisis of Italy's decision, in the sublime endurance of the

French, I did not realize what patriotism might mean. It is not

merely the instinctive love for the land of birth, loyalty to the

known and familiar. Much more than that! The natal soil is but the

symbol. Patriotism is human loyalty to the deeper, better part of

one's own being, to the loves and the ideals and the beliefs of one's

race. It is the love of family, of land, of tongue, of religion, of

the woman who bore you and of the woman you get with child, of the

God you reverence. It is loyalty to life as it has been poured into

you by your forefathers, to those ideals which your race has conceived

and given to the world. "_Viva Italia!_" "_Vive la France!_" is a

prayer of the deepest, purest sort that the Italian or the Frenchman

can breathe. Without these subconscious devotions and loyalties the

human animal would be a forlorn complex of mind and sense. Those

amorphous beings who, thanks to our modern economic wealth, have become

"citizens of the world," who wander physically and intellectually from

land to land, who taste of this and that without incorporating any

supreme devotion in their blood, our cosmopolites and expatriates and

intellectuals, froth of a too comfortable existence, give forth a

hollow sound at the savage touch of war. They become pacifists. They

can see neither good nor evil: all is a vague blur of "humanity."

Patriotism is the supreme loyalty to life of the individual. Wherever

this loyalty is instinctive, vivid, there some precious tradition has

been bequeathed to a people that still burns in their blood. Latin

patriotism is ardent like man's one great love for woman, ennobling

the giver as well as the loved one; it is tender like the son's love

for the mother, with the sanctity of acknowledgment of the debt of

life. Can any vision of "internationalism" take the place of these

powerful personal loyalties to racial ideals?... "Mere boys led to

the slaughter" is the sentimentality one hears of the marching

conscripts of European armies. Better even so than the curse of no

supreme allegiance, or devotion, or readiness to sacrifice--than the

aimless selfishness in which our American youth are brought up!

* * * * *

For every boy in Europe knows, as soon as he knows anything, that he

owes one certain fixed debt, and that is service to his country, to

that larger whole that has given him the best part of his own being.

If need be, he owes it his life itself. It is an obligation he must

fulfill before all other obligations, at no matter what inconvenience

or sacrifice to himself, unquestioningly, immediately.

What takes the place for the American youth of this primary

obligation? Himself! He is expensively nurtured, schooled, put

forward into life--for what? To help himself as best he can at the

general table of society. He can never forget himself, subordinate

his personal ambition to any transcendent loyalty. He becomes from

his cradle the egotist.

To-day under the shadow of world war we are taking thought of

national protection, projecting schemes of defense including the

enrollment of citizens who may be called upon to fight for their

country. It is less important to teach our youth the military lessons

of self-protection than it is to teach them the greater lesson of

self-forgetfulness, of devotion to a national ideal--so that they may

be ready to give their lives for that national ideal as the youth of

Europe have given their lives to settle this world cause. Not a few

hundreds of thousands of national guards, then, in order to secure

ourselves from invasion are what we need, but that every man or woman

born into the nation or adopting it as home should be made to feel

the obligation of national service. It matters less what form that

service should take, whether purely military or partly military and

partly social. It is the service, the sense of obligation that counts

for the individual and for the nation. The responsibility of service

teaches the importance of ideas, the necessity of sacrifice. And he

who is ready to sacrifice himself, to forget himself and become

absorbed in the life that surrounds him, of which he is but an

infinitesimal unit, to which he owes the best in him, has already

achieved a larger peace than the pacifist dreams of.

* * * * *

Consider what happened to the youth of France a little more than

a year ago. Suddenly with no preparation or warning they were called

to defend their country from invasion. It was no longer possible to

argue the rights of that diplomatic tangle into which European

statesmen had muddled. Whatever the ultimate truth, the ultimate

right of the controversy, the state--that larger self which was their

home, their mesh of loves and interests and beliefs--demanded their

service. The youth of France had been brought up with the knowledge

that any day such a sacrifice might be required, with the

consciousness deeply rooted in their beings that one of the necessary

conditions of their living was to give their all at the call of the

state. They conceived of no honorable alternative: it was as

inevitable to pay this obligation as it is for decently minded

citizens to pay their legal debts. They hurried to their mobilization

posts, donned uniforms and equipment, and were shipped away in

regiments to the front. Most of them did not worry about the

possibility of death, but acted like all healthy human beings,

ignoring what they could not affect, caught up in the novelty and the

requirements of the new life. Yet deep in the consciousness of the

most careless must have lain some thought that he might never return,

that the cross-marked grave on the hillside, the pit, or the hospital

might be waiting for him.

This consciousness that he can no longer dispose of himself, at

least for the finer spirit, must act as a great release. Having

accepted his fate, and therefore willed it as the only possible

choice for him, he becomes another person, a largely selfless person,

a strangely older, calmer being capable of thinking and acting

clearly, nobly. Once the great personal decision made, the resolve

to forego life and happiness and personal achievement, a clogging

burden of selfish considerations drop from within. So one can read

the experience of those two young officers preserved in Henry

Bordeaux's "Two Heroes." They were free as never before to do what

lay before them,--their officers' duty,--simply, directly. Many things

that they had previously valued seemed to have lost color, to have

become trivial. They thought solely of acquitting themselves with,

honor in what it was their fate to do. They were ready to obey

because before death they were humble. They had begun to glimpse

the blind mystery that is life, in which every one must needs act

his part without questioning, with faith in its ultimate meaning,

with the will to trust its end. They were brave because they were

simple and single-hearted, selfless. They were strong because they

disdained to be weak, having renounced all. If it were to be their

fate to die unnoted, they were content with the satisfaction of having

done what was expected of them. And if they died in glory, they were

unaware of their honor, believing that they had done no more than

any of their fellows would have done in the same opportunity.

Thus, having laid down their lives for the cause that commanded

their faith and loyalty, they found their real lives--larger, more

beautiful, stronger.... Not once, but many thousands of times, has

this miracle happened! Their graves are strewn, singly and in groups,

over every field of eastern France. They paid the debt, did their

part little or great, unknown or glorified by men. Literally they

have given their blood for the soil of their fathers' land.

* * * * *

We know that they have given much more than their blood to that soil.

Just as at the call to arms, the selfish, the mean, the vicious

qualities of these lives dropped from them in the freedom of

sacrifice accepted, and in place of egotistic preoccupations rose

once more to the surface of their natures the ancient virtues of

their race, so in their going they left for the others who lived, who

were to be born, a tremendous legacy of honor and noble

responsibility. By watering the soil with their blood they have made

it infinitely more precious for every human being that treads upon

it. They have helped to make mere life more significant for those who

remain to mourn them. It can never again be quite the same

commonplace affair, so lightly, cheaply spent, as it had been before.

They have not left behind them joy, but faith. And that is why the

faces of the earnest living who are able to realize this sacrifice of

youth have a grave sternness in them which touches even the most

careless stranger. Something of the glory created by the dead and the

wounded radiates out even to us in a distant, peaceful land....

But why, we ask, all this sacrifice, this cruel, agonizing sacrifice

of war? That is a mystery too deep for any to fathom. It is better

not to probe too insistently, to accept it as the man in Rheims,--"It

must be better for the others afterward because of what we have

endured." That is the expression of faith in life which is the better

part of any religion. For what we suffer now, for what we give now of

our most precious, it will be repaid to those who are to come. Life

will be freer, grander, more significant: it will be a better world.

Nobody who has seen or felt the heavy tragedy of this world war could

endure its horror if he were not sustained by that faith. But with

that faith the losses seem not too vast. One by one the world's great

decisions must be made, in suffering, in blood and tears. Peace comes

not through evasion or compromise, either for the individual or for

the state.