there are degrees in our vast family; the elder and stronger brethren
are bound to succour the younger and weaker; the young must look up to
their elders; and the Father of all will perhaps preserve peace among us
if we only forget our petty selves and look to Him. Alas, it is so hard
to forget self! The dullest of us can see how excellent and divine is
brotherhood, if we do assuredly carry out the conception of fraternity
thoroughly; but again I say, How hard it is to banish self and follow
the teaching of our divine Brother! If we cast our eyes over the world
now, we may see--perhaps indistinctly--things that might make us weep,
were it not that we must needs smile at the childish ways of men. In the
very nation that first chose to put forward the word "fraternity" as one
of the symbols for which men might die we see a strange spectacle. Half
that nation is brooding incessantly on revenge; half the nation is bent
only on slaying certain brother human beings who happen to live on the
north and east of a certain river instead of on the south and west. The
home of the solacing doctrine of fraternity is also the home of
incessant preparations for murder, rapine, bitter and brutal vengeance.
About a million of men rise every morning and spend the whole day in
practising so that they may learn to kill people cleverly; hideous
instruments, which must cause devastation, torture, bereavement, and
wreck, should they ever be used in earnest, are lovingly handled by men
who hope to see blood flow before long. The Frenchman cannot yet venture
to smite his Teutonic brother, but he will do so when he has the chance;
and thus two bands of brethren, who might have dwelt together amicably,
may shortly end by inflicting untold agonies on each other. Both nations
which so savagely await the beginning of a mad struggle are supposed to
be followers of the Brother whose sweet message is read and repeated by
nearly all the men who live on our continent, yet they only utter bitter
words and think sullen thoughts, while the more acrid of the two
adversaries is the country which once inscribed "Brotherhood" on its
very banners. All round the arena wherein the two great peoples defy
each other the nations wait anxiously for the delivery of the first
stroke that shall give the signal for wrath and woe; and, strangely, no
one can tell which of the onlookers is the more fervent professor of our
Master's faith. "Let brotherly love continue!"--that was the behest laid
on us all; and we manifest our brotherly love by invoking the spirit of
murder.
We know what exquisite visions floated around the twelve who first
founded the Church on the principle of fraternity. No brother was to be
left poor; all were to hold goods in common; every man should work for
what he could, and receive what he needed; but evil crept in, and
dissension and heart-burning, and ever since then the best of our poor
besotted human race have been groping blindly after fraternity and
finding it never. I always deprecate bitter or despondent views, or
exaggerating the importance of our feeble race--for, after all, the
whole time during which man has existed on earth is but as a brief
swallow-flight compared with the abysmal stretches of eternity; but I
confess that, when I see the flower of our race trained to become
killers of men and awaiting the opportunity to exercise their murderous
arts I feel a little sick at heart. Even they are compelled to hear the
commands of the lovely gospel of fraternity, and, unless they die
quickly in the fury of combat, their last moments are spent in listening
to the same blessed words. It seems so mad and dreamlike that I have
found myself thinking that, despite all our confidence, the world may be
but a phantasmagoria, and ourselves, with our flesh that seems so solid,
may be no more than fleeting wraiths. There is no one to rush between
the scowling nations, as the poor hermit did between the gladiators in
wicked Rome; there is no one to say, "Poor, silly peasant from pleasant
France, why should you care to stab and torment that other poor
flaxen-haired simpleton from Silesia? Your fields await you; if you were
left to yourselves, then you and the Silesian would be brothers,
worshipping like trusting children before the common Father of us all.
And now you can find nothing better to do than to do each other to
death!" Like the sanguine creatures who carried out the revolutionary
movements of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1860, the weak among us are apt to
cry out--"Surely the time of fraternity has come at last!" Then, when
the murderous Empire, or the equally murderous Republic, or the grim
military despotism arrives instead of fraternity, the weak ones are
smitten with confusion. I pity them, for a bitterness almost as of death
must be lived through before one learns that God indeed doeth all things
well. The poor Revolutionists thought that they must have rapid changes,
and their hysterical visions appeared to them like perfectly wise and
accurate glances into the future. They were in a hurry, forgetting that
we cannot change our marvellous society on a sudden, any more than we
can change a single tissue of our bodies on a sudden--hence their
frantic hopes and frantic despair. If we gaze coolly round, we see that,
in spite of a muttering, threatening France and a watchful Germany, in
spite of the huge Russian storm-cloud that lowers heavily over Europe,
in spite of the venomous intrigues with which Austria is accredited,
there are still cheerful symptoms to be seen, and it may happen that the
very horror of war may at last drive all men to reject it, and declare
for fraternity. Look at that very France which is now so electric with
passion and suspicion, and compare it with the France of long ago. The
Gaul now thinks of killing the Teuton; but in the time of the good King
Henry IV. he delighted in slaying his brother Gaul. The race who now
only care to turn their hands against a rival nation once fought among
themselves like starving rats in a pit. Even in the most polished
society the men used to pick quarrels to fight to the death. In one year
of King Henry's reign nine thousand French gentlemen were killed in
duels! Bad as we are, we are not likely to return to such a state of
things as then was seen. The men belonged to one nation, and they ought
to have banded together so that no foreign foe might take advantage of
them; and yet they chose rather to slaughter each other at the rate of
nearly one hundred and ninety per week. Certainly, so far as France is
concerned, we can see some improvement; for, although the cowardly and
abominable practice of duelling is still kept up, only one man was
killed during the past twelve months, instead of nine thousand. In
England we have had nearly two hundred years of truce from civil wars;
in Germany the sections of the populace have at any rate stopped
fighting among themselves; in Italy there are no longer the shameful
feuds of Guelf and Ghibelline. It would seem, then, that civil strife is
passing away, and that countries which were once the prey of
bloodthirsty contending factions are now at least peaceful within their
own borders.
If we reason from small things to great, we see that the squabbling
nests of murderers, or would-be murderers, who peopled France, England,
Germany, Austria, and Italy have given way to compact nations which
enjoy unbroken internal peace. The struggles of business go on; the weak
are trampled under foot in the mad rush of the cities of men, but the
actual infliction of pain and death is not now dreamed of by Frenchman
against Frenchman or German against German. We must remember that there
never was so deadly and murderous a spirit displayed as during the
Thirty Years' War, and yet the peoples who then wrestled and throttled
each other are now peaceful under the same yoke. May we not trust that a
time will come when nations will see on a sudden the blank folly of
making war? Day by day the pressure of armaments is growing greater, and
we may almost hope that the very fiendish nature of modern weapons may
bring about a blessed _reductio ad absurdum_, and leave war as a thing
ludicrous, and not to be contemplated by sane men! I find one gun
specially advertised in our Christian country, and warranted to kill as
many men in one minute as two companies of infantry could in five! What
will be the effect of the general introduction of this delightful
weapon? No force can possibly stand before it; no armour or works can
keep out the hail of its bullets. Supposing, then, that benevolent
science goes on improving the means of slaughter, must there not come a
time when people will utterly refuse to continue the mad and miserable
folly of war? Over the whole of Britain we may find even now the marks
of cannon-shot discharged by Englishmen against the castles of other
Englishmen. Is there one man in Britain who can at this present moment
bring his imagination to conceive such an occurrence as an artillery
fight between bodies of Englishmen? It is almost too absurd to be named
even as a casual supposition. So far has fraternity spread. Now, if we
go on perfecting dynamite shells which can destroy one thousand men by
one explosion; if we increase the range of our guns from twelve miles to
twenty, and fight our pieces according to directions signalled from a
balloon, we shall be going the very best way to make all men rise with
one spasm of disgust, and say, "No more of this!"
We cannot hope to do away with evil speaking, with verbal quarrelling,
with mean grasping of benefits from less fortunate brethren. Alas, the
reign of brotherhood will be long in eradicating the primeval combative
instinct; but, when we compare the quiet urbanity of a modern gathering
with the loud and senseless brawling which so often resulted from social
assemblies even at the beginning of this century we may take some heart
and hope on for the best. Our Lord had a clear vision of a time when
bitterness and evil-doing should cease, and His words are more than a
shadowy prediction. The fact is that, in striving gradually to introduce
the third of the conditions of life craved by the poor feather-witted
Frenchmen, the nations have a comparatively easy task. We cannot have
equality, physical conditions having too much to do with giving the
powers and accomplishments of men; we can only claim liberty under the
supreme guidance of our Creator; but fraternity is quite a possible
consummation. Our greatest hero held it as the Englishman's first duty
to hate a Frenchman as he hated the Devil; now that mad and cankered
feeling has passed away, and why should not the spread of common sense,
common honesty, bring us at last to see that our fellow-man is better
when regarded as a brother than as a possible assassin or thief?
Our corporate life and progress as nations, or even as a race of God's
creatures, is much like the life and progress of the individual. The
children of men stumble often, fall often, despair often, and yet the
great universal movement goes on, and even the degeneracy which must
always go on side by side with progress does not appreciably stay our
advance. The individual man cannot walk even twenty steps without
actually saving himself by a balancing movement from twenty falls. Every
step tends to become an ignominious tumble, and yet our poor body may
very easily move at the rate of four miles per hour, and we gain our
destinations daily. The human race, in spite of many slips, will go on
progressing towards good--that is, towards kindness--that is, towards
fraternity--that is, towards the gospel, which at present seems so
wildly and criminally neglected. The mild and innocent Anarcharsis
Clootz, who made his way over the continent of Europe, and who came to
our little island, in his day always believed that the time for the
federation of mankind would come. Poor fellow--he died under the
murderous knife of the guillotine and did little to further his
beautiful project! He was esteemed a harmless lunatic; yet,
notwithstanding the twelve millions of armed men who trample Europe, I
do not think that Clootz was quite a lunatic after all. Moreover, all
men know that right must prevail, and they know also that there is not a
human being on earth who does not believe by intuition that the gospel
of brotherhood is right, even as the life of its propounder was holy.
The way is weary toward the quarter where the rays of dawn will first
break over the shoulder of the earth. We walk on hoping, and, even if we
fall by the way, and all our hopes seem to be tardy of fruition, yet
others will hail the slow dawn of brotherhood when all now living are
dead and still.
_September, 1888._
_LITTLE WARS_.
Just at this present our troops are engaged in fighting various savage
tribes in various parts of the world, and the humorous journalist speaks
of the affairs as "little wars." There is something rather gruesome in
this airy flippancy proceeding from comfortable gentlemen who are in
nice studies at home. The Burmese force fights, marches, toils in an
atmosphere which would cause some of the airy critics to faint; the
Thibetan force must do as much climbing as would satisfy the average
Alpine performer; and all the soldiers carry their lives in their hands.
What is a little war? Is any war little to a man who loses his life in
it? I imagine that when a wounded fighter comes to face his last hour he
regards the particular war in which he is engaged as quite the most
momentous affair in the world so far as he is concerned. To me the whole
spectacle of the little wars is most grave, both as regards the nation
and as regards the individual Britons who must suffer and fall. Our
destiny is heavy upon us; we must "dree our weirde," for we have begun
walking on the road of conquest, and we must go forward or die. The man
who has the wolf by the ears cannot let go his hold; we cannot slacken
our grip on anything that once we have clutched. But it is terrible to
see how we are bleeding at the extremities. I cannot give the figures
detailing our losses in little wars during the past forty years, but
they are far worse than we incurred in the world-shaking fight of
Waterloo. Incessantly the drip, drip of national blood-shedding goes on,
and no end seems to be gained, save the grim consciousness that we must
suffer and never flinch. The graves of our best and dearest--our hardy
loved ones--are scattered over the ends of the earth, and the little
wars are answerable for all. England, in her blundering, half-articulate
fashion, answers, "Yes, they had to die; their mother asked for their
blood, and they gave it." So then from scores of punctures the
life-blood of the mother of nations drops, and each new bloodshed leads
to yet further bloodshed, until the deadly series looks endless. We sent
Burnes to Cabul, and we betrayed him in the most dastardly way by the
mouth of a Minister. England, the great mother, was not answerable for
that most unholy of crimes; it was the talking men, the glib Parliament
cowards. Burnes was cut to pieces and an army lost. Crime brings forth
crime, and thus we had to butcher more Afghans. Every inch of India has
been bought in the same way; one war wins territory which must be
secured by another war, and thus the inexorable game is played on. In
Africa we have fared in the same way, and thus from many veins the red
stream is drained, and yet the proud heart of the mother continues to
beat strongly. It is so hard for men to die; it is as hard for the Zulu
and the Afghan and the Ghoorka as it is for the civilized man, and that
is why I wish it were Britain's fortune to be allowed to cease from the
shedding of blood. If the corpses of the barbarians whom we have
destroyed within the past ten years could only be laid out in any open
space and shown to our populace, there would be a shudder of horror felt
through the country; yet, while the sweet bells chime to us about peace
and goodwill, we go on sending myriads of men out of life, and the
nation pays no more heed to that steady ruthless killing than it does to
the slaughter of oxen. Alas!
Then, if we think of the lot of those who fight for us and slaughter our
hapless enemies by deputy as it were, their luck seems very hard. When
the steady lines moved up the Alma slope and the men were dropping so
fast, the soldiers knew that they were performing their parts as in a
vast theatre; their country would learn the story of their deed, and the
feats of individuals would be amply recorded. But, when a man spends
months in a far-off rocky country, fighting day after day, watching
night after night, and knowing that at any moment the bullet of a
prowling Ghilzai or Afridi may strike him, he has very little
consolation indeed. When one comes to think of the matter from the
humorous point of view--though there is more grim fact than fun in
it--it does seem odd that we should be compelled to spend two thousand
pounds on an officer's education, and then send him where he may be
wiped out of the world in an instant by a savage little above the level
of the Bushman. I pity the poor savages, but I certainly pity the
refined and highly-trained English soldier more. The latest and most
delightful of our Anglo-Indians has put the matter admirably in verse
which carries a sting even amidst its pathos. He calls his verses
"Arithmetic on the Frontier."
A great and glorious thing it is
To learn for seven years or so
The Lord knows what of that or this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe,
The flying bullet down the pass,
That whistles clear, "All flesh is grass."
Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in villainous saltpetre!
And after--ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our 'ologies.
A scrimmage in a border station,
A canter down some dark defile--
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail!
The crammer's boast, the squadron's pride
Shot like a rabbit in a ride.
No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulae the text-book know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow;
Strike hard who cares--shoot straight who can--
The odds are on the cheaper man.
One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.
With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem;
The troop-ships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The captives of our bow and spear
Are cheap, alas, as we are dear!
There is a world of meaning in those half-sad, half-smiling lines, and
many an hour-long discourse might fail to throw more lurid light on one
of the strangest historical problems in the world. The flower of
England's manhood must needs go; and our most brilliant scholars, our
boldest riders, our most perfect specimens of physical humanity drop
like rabbits to the fire of half-naked savages! The bright boy, the hero
of school and college, the brisk, active officer, passes away into
obscurity. The mother weeps--perhaps some one nearer and dearer than all
is stricken: but the dead Englishman's name vanishes from memory like a
fleck of haze on the side of the valley where he sleeps. England--cold,
inexorable, indifferent--has other sons to take the dead man's place and
perhaps share his obscurity; and the doomed host of fair gallant youths
moves forward ever in serried, fearless lines towards the shadows. That
is what it costs to be a mighty nation. It is sorrowful to think of the
sacrificed men--sacrificed to fulfil England's imposing destiny; it is
sorrowful to think of the mourners who cannot even see their darling's
grave; yet there is something grandiose and almost morbidly impressive
in the attitude of Britain. She waves her imperial hand and says, "See
what my place in the world is! My bravest, my most skilful, may die in a
fight that is no more than a scuffling brawl; they go down to the dust
of death unknown, but the others come on unflinching. It is hard that I
should part with my precious sons in mean warfare, but the fates will
have it so, and I am equal to the call of fate." Thus the sovereign
nation. Those who have no very pompous notions are willing to recognize
the savage grandeur of our advance; but I cannot help thinking of the
lonely graves, the rich lives squandered, the reckless casting away of
human life, which are involved in carrying out our mysterious mission in
the great peninsula. Our graves are spread thickly over the deadly
plains; our brightest and best toil and suffer and die, and they have
hardly so much as a stone to mark their sleeping-place; our blood has
watered those awful stretches from the Himalayas to Comorin, and we may
call Hindostan the graveyard of Britain's noblest. People who see only
the grizzled veterans who lounge away their days at Cheltenham or
Brighton think that the fighting trade must be a very nice one after
all. To retire at fifty with a thousand a year is very pleasant no
doubt; but then every one of those war-worn gentlemen who returns to
take his ease represents a score who have perished in fights as
undignified as a street brawl. "More legions!" said Varus; "More
legions!" says England; and our regiments depart without any man
thinking of _Morituri te salittant!_ Yes; that phrase might well be in
the mind of every British man who fares down the Red Sea and enters the
Indian furnace. Those about to die, salute thee, O England, our mother!
Is it worth while? Sometimes I have my doubts. Moreover, I never talk
with one of our impassive, masterful Anglo-Indians without feeling sorry
that their splendid capacities should be so often cast into darkness,
and their fame confined to the gossip of a clump of bungalows. Verily
our little wars use up an immense quantity of raw material in the shape
of intellect and power. A man whose culture is far beyond that of the
mouthing politicians at home and whose statesmanship is not to be
compared to the ignorant crudities of the pigmies who strut and fret on
the English party stage--this man spends great part of a lifetime in
ruling and fighting; he gives every force of a great intellect and will
to his labours, and he achieves definite and beneficent practical
results; yet his name is never mentioned in England, and any vulgar
vestryman would probably outweigh him in the eyes of the populace.
Carlyle says that we should despise fame. "Do your work," observes the
sage, "and never mind the rest. When your duty is done, no further
concern rests with you." And then the aged thinker goes on to snarl at
puny creatures who are not content to be unknown. Well, that is all very
stoical and very grand, and so forth; but Carlyle forgot human nature.
He himself raged and gnashed his teeth because the world neglected him,
and I must with every humility ask forgiveness of his _manes_ if I
express some commiseration for the unknown braves who perish in our
little wars. Our callousness as individuals can hardly be called lordly,
though the results are majestic; we accept supreme services, and we
accept the supreme sacrifice (Skin for skin: all that a man hath will he
give for his life), and we very rarely think fit to growl forth a chance
word of thanks. Luckily our splendid men are not very importunate, and
most of them accept with silent humour the neglect which befalls them.
An old fighting general once remarked, "These fellows are in luck since
the telegraph and the correspondents have been at work. We weren't so
fortunate in my day. I went through the Crimea and the Mutiny, and there
was yet another affair in 1863 that was hotter than either, so far as
close fighting and proportional losses of troops were concerned. A
force of three thousand was sent against the Afghans, and they never
gave us much rest night or day. They seemed determined to give their
lives away, and they wouldn't be denied. I've seen them come on and grab
at the muzzles of the rifles. We did a lot of fighting behind rough
breastworks, but sometimes they would rush us then. We lost thirty
officers out of thirty-four before we were finished. Well, when I came
home and went about among the clubs, the fellows used to say to me,
'What was this affair of yours up in the hills? We had no particulars
except the fact that you were fighting.' And that expedition cost ten
times as many men as your Egyptian one, besides causing six weeks of
almost constant fighting; yet not a newspaper had a word to say about
it! We never grumbled much--it was all in the day's work; but it shows
how men's luck varies."
There spoke the old fighter, "Duty first, and take your chance of the
rest." True; but could not one almost wish that those forlorn heroes who
saved our frontier from savage hordes might have gained just a little of
that praise so dear to the frivolous mind of man? It was not to be; the
dead men's bones have long ago sunk into the kindly earth, the wind
flows down the valleys, and the fighters sleep in the unknown glens and
on far-distant hillsides with no record save the curt clerk's mark in
the regimental list--"Dead."
When I hear the merry pressman chatting about little wars and proudly
looking down on "mere skirmishes," I cannot restrain a movement of
impatience. Are our few dead not to be considered because they were few?
Supposing they had swarmed forward in some great battle of the West and
died with thousands of others amid the hurricane music of hundreds of
guns, would the magnitude of the battle make any difference?