[Note: SPANGENBERG was a literary "bummer." The real author was one
ANDREAS GUARNA of Salerno. See FRÄNKEL, Zeitschrift für
Litteraturgeschichte, xiii, 242.]
[Note: Pindar's words are: [Greek: glyky d' apeiroisi polemos].]
Concrete or abstract, there are general resemblances between any two
wars, and so war lends itself readily to allegories. Every one has read
Bunyan's Holy War. Not every one has read Spangenberg's Grammatical War.
It is an ingenious performance, which fell into my hands many years
after I had gone forth to see and to feel what war was like. In
Spangenberg's Grammatical War the nouns and the verbs are the contending
parties. Poeta is king of the nouns, and Amo king of the verbs. There is
a regular debate between the two sovereigns. The king of the verbs
summons the adverbs to his help, the king of the nouns the pronouns.
The camps are pitched, the forces marshalled. The neutral power,
participle, is invoked by both parties, but declines to send open
assistance to either, hoping that in this contest between noun and verb
the third party will acquire the rule over the whole territory of
language. After a final summons on the part of the king of the verbs,
and a fierce response from the rival monarch, active hostilities begin.
We read of raids and forays. Prisoners are treated with contumely, and
their skirts are docked as in the Biblical narrative. Treachery adds
excitement to the situation. Skirmishes precede the great engagement, in
which the nouns are worsted, though they have come off with some of the
spoils of war; and peace is made on terms dictated by Priscian, Servius,
and Donatus. Spangenberg's Grammatical War is a not uninteresting, not
uninstructive squib, and the salt of it, or saltpetre of it, has not all
evaporated after the lapse of some three centuries. There are bits that
remind one of the Greco-Turkish war of a few weeks ago.
[Note: Terror and Affright, Il. 15, 19: [Greek: hôs phato kai rh'
hippous keleto Deimon te Phobon te | zeugnymen]. These horses of Ares
furnished the names Deimos and Phobos for the two satellites of the
planet Mars. Such traces of familiarity with the classics are refreshing
to one who lives in an age when allusion is under the ban. How many
appreciate the appropriateness of the Baltimore County Timonium, named
after Mark Antony's growlery in Plutarch? Not many of the sports who
some years ago laid their bets on Irex recalled the line of the Odyssey
13, 86:
[Greek:
oude ken irêx
kirkos homartêseien elaphrotatos peteênôn.]]
But there is no military science in Bunyan's Holy War nor in
Spangenberg's Grammatical War: why should there be? Practical warfare is
rough work. To frighten, to wound, to kill,--these three abide under all
forms of military doctrine, and the greatest of these is frightening.
Ares, the god of war, has two satellites, Terror and Affright. Fear is
the Gorgon's head. The serpents are very real, very effective, in their
way, but logically they are unessential tresses. The Gorgon stares you
out of countenance, and that suffices. The object is the removal of an
obstacle. Killing and wounding are but means to an end. Hand-to-hand
fighting is rare, and it would be easy to count the instances in which
cavalry meets the shock of cavalry. Crossing sabres is not a common
pastime in the red game of war. It makes a fine picture, to be sure, the
finer for the rarity of the thing itself.
To frighten, to wound, to kill, being the essential processes, war
amounts to the same thing the world over, world of time and world of
space. Whether death or disability comes by Belgian ball or Spencer
bullet, by the stone of a Balearic slinger, by a bolt from a crossbow,
is a matter of detail which need not trouble the philosophic mind, and
the ancients showed their sense in ascribing fear to divine inspiration.
[Note: The Scandinavian scholar, JESPERSEN.]
If the processes of war are primitive, the causes of war are no less so.
It has been strikingly said of late by a Scandinavian scholar that
"language was born in the courting-days of mankind: the first utterance
of speech <was> something between the nightly love-lyrics of puss upon the
tiles and the melodious love-songs of the nightingale." "War, the father
of all things," goes back to the same origin as language. The serenade
is matched by the battle-cry. The fight between two cock-pheasants for
the love of a hen-pheasant is war in its last analysis, in its primal
manifestation. Selfish hatred is at the bottom of it. It is the
hell-fire to which we owe the heat that is necessary to some of the
noblest as to some of the vilest manifestations of human nature.
Righteous indignation, sense of injustice, sympathy with the oppressed,
consecration to country, fine words all, fine things, but so many of the
men who represent these fine things perish. It wrings the heart at a
distance of more than thirty years to think of those who have fallen,
and love still maintains passionately that they were the best. At any
rate, they were among the best, and both sides are feeling the loss to
this day, not only in the men themselves, but in the sons that should
have been born to them.
Any two wars, then, will yield a sufficient number of resemblances, in
killed, wounded, and missing, in the elemental matter of hatred, or, if
you choose to give it a milder name, rivalry. These things are of the
essence of war, and the manifestations run parallel even in the finer
lines. One cock-pheasant finds the drumming of another cock-pheasant a
very irritating sound, Chanticleer objects to the note of Chanticleer,
and the more articulate human being is rasped by the voice of his
neighbor. The Attic did not like the broad Boeotian speech. Parson
Evans's "seese and putter" were the bitterest ingredients in Falstaff's
dose of humiliation. "Yankee twang" and "Southern drawl" incited as well
as echoed hostility.
[Note: Ach. 527.]
Borderers are seldom friends. "An Attic neighbor" is a Greek proverb.
Kentucky and Ohio frown at each other across the river. Cincinnati looks
down on Covington, and Covington glares at Cincinnati. Aristophanes, in
his mocking way, attributes the Peloponnesian war to a kidnapping affair
between Athens and Megara. The underground railroad preceded the
aboveground railroad in the history of the great American conflict.
There were jealousies enough between Athens and Sparta in the olden
times, which correspond to our colonial days, and in the Persian war,
which was in a sense the Greek war of independence. In like manner the
chronicles of our Revolutionary period show that there was abundance of
bad blood between Northern colonies and Southern colonies. The Virginian
planter whom all have agreed to make the one national hero was after all
a Virginian, and Virginians have not forgotten the impatient utterances
of the "imperial man" on the soil of Massachusetts and in the streets of
New York. Nobody takes Knickerbocker's History of New York seriously, as
owlish historians are wont to take Aristophanes. Why not? We accept the
hostility of Attica and Boeotia, of Attica and Megara; and there are
no more graphic chapters than those which set forth the enmity between
New York and Maryland, between New Amsterdam and Connecticut.
[Note: The Peloponnesians called it the Attic War (Thuc. 5, 28, 3); the
Ionians the Doric War. In a recent number of the Jahrbücher, xxxv, No. 2
(1915), there is a discussion of the name of the Peloponnesian War
apropos of the present "World-war," or, if you choose, "Wirrwarr." For
our war the misnomer "The Civil War" has been adopted as the official
designation.]
Business is often more potent than blood. Nullification, the forerunner
of disunion, rose from a question of tariff. The echoes had not died out
when I woke to conscious life. I knew that I was the son of a nullifier,
and the nephew of a Union man. It was whispered that our beloved family
physician found it prudent to withdraw from the public gaze for a while,
and that my uncle's windows were broken by the palmettoes of a
nullification procession; and I can remember from my boyhood days how
unreconciled citizens of Charleston shook their fists at the revenue
cutter and its "foreign flag." Such an early experience enables one to
understand our war better. It enables one to understand the
Peloponnesian war better, the struggle between the union of which Athens
was the mistress and the confederacy of which Sparta was the head.
Non-intercourse between Athens and Megara was the first stage. The
famous Megarian decree of Pericles, which closed the market of Athens to
Megarians, gave rise to angry controversy, and the refusal to rescind
that decree led to open war. But Megara was little more than a pretext.
The subtle influence of Corinth was potent. The great merchant city of
Greece dreaded the rise of Athens to dominant commercial importance, and
in the conflict between the Corinthian brass and the Attic clay, the
clay was shattered. Corinth does not show her hand much in the
Peloponnesian war. She figures at the beginning, and then disappears.
But the old mole is at work the whole time, and what the Peloponnesians
called the Attic war, and the Attics the Peloponnesian war, might have
been called the Corinthian war. The exchange, the banking-house, were
important factors then as now. "Sinews of war" is a classical
expression. The popular cry of "Persian gold" was heard in the
Peloponnesian war as the popular cry of "British gold" is heard now.
True, there was no slavery question in the Peloponnesian war, for
antique civilization without slavery is hardly thinkable; but after all,
the slavery question belongs ultimately to the sphere of economics. The
humanitarian spirit, set free by the French Revolution, was at work in
the Southern States as in the Northern States, but it was hampered by
economic considerations. Virginia, as every one knows, was on the verge
of becoming a free State. Colonization flourished in my boyhood. A
friend of my father's left him trustee for his "servants," as we called
them. They were quartered opposite our house in Charleston, and the
pickaninnies were objects of profound interest to the children of the
neighborhood. One or two letters came from the emigrants after they
reached Liberia. Then silence fell on the African farm.
Some of the most effective anti-slavery reformers were Charlestonians by
birth and breeding. I cannot say that Grimké was a popular name, but
homage was paid to the talent of Frederick, as I remember only too well,
for I had to learn a speech of his by heart, as a schoolboy exercise.
But the economic conditions of the South were not favorable to the
spread of the ideas represented by the Grimkés. The slavery question
kept alive the spirit that manifested itself in the tariff question.
State rights were not suffered to slumber. The Southerner resented
Northern dictation as Pericles resented Lacedæmonian dictation, and our
Peloponnesian war began.