representative on the main point; it loathes war; and it sees clearly
that war is always waged by working men who have no quarrel, but on the
contrary a supreme common interest. It steadily resists the dangerous
export of capital by pressing the need for uncommercial employment of
capital at home: the only practicable alternative. It knows that war, on
its romantic side, is "the sport of kings": and it concludes that we had
better get rid of kings unless they can kill their tedium with more
democratic amusements. It notes the fact that though the newspapers
shout at us that these battles on fronts a hundred miles long, where the
slain outnumber the total forces engaged in older campaigns, are the
greatest battles known to history, such machine-carnages bore us so
horribly that we are ashamed of our ingratitude to our soldiers in not
being able to feel about them as about comparatively trumpery scraps
like Waterloo or even Inkerman and Balaclava. It never forgets that as
long as higher education, culture, foreign travel, knowledge of the
world: in short, the qualification for comprehension of foreign affairs
and intelligent voting, is confined to one small class, leaving the
masses in poverty, narrowness, and ignorance, and being itself
artificially cut off at their expense from the salutary pressure of the
common burden which alone keeps men unspoilt and sane, so long will that
small class be forced to obtain the support of the masses for its wars
by flattering proclamations of the national virtues and indignant
denunciations of the villanies of the enemy, with, if necessary, a
stiffening of deliberate falsehood and a strenuous persecution of any
attempt at inconvenient truthtelling. Here there is no question of the
Junker being a monster. You must rule ignoramuses according to their
ignorance. The priest must work bogus miracles for them; the man of
science must offer them magical cures and prophylactics; the barrister
must win their verdict by sophistries, false pathos, and appeals to
their prejudices; the army and navy must dazzle them with pageants and
bands and thundering salvos and romantic tales; the king must cut
himself off from humanity and become an idol. There is no escape whilst
such classes exist. Mahomet, the boldest prophet that ever threw down
the gage of the singleness and supremacy of God to a fierce tribe of
warriors who worshipped stones as devotedly as we worship dukes and
millionaires, could not govern them by religious truth, and was forced
to fall back on revolting descriptions of hell and the day of judgment,
invented by him for the purpose. What else could he do if his people
were not to be abandoned to their own destruction? If it is an axiom of
diplomacy that the people must not be told the truth, that is not in the
least because, for example, Sir Edward Grey has a personal taste for
mendacity; it is a necessity imposed by the fact that the people are
incapable of the truth. In the end, lying becomes a reflex action with
diplomatists; and we cannot even issue a penny bluebook without
beginning it with the quite unprovoked statement that "no crime has ever
aroused deeper or more general horror throughout Europe" than the
assassination of the Archduke. The real tragedy was that the violent
death of a fellow creature should have aroused so little.
*Divided Against Ourselves*.
This state of things would be bad enough if the governing classes really
sought the welfare of the governed, and were deceiving them for their
own good. But they are doing nothing of the sort. They are using their
power secondarily, no doubt, to uphold the country in which they have so
powerful and comfortable a position; but primarily their object is to
maintain that position by the organized legal robbery of the poor; and
to that end they would join hands with the German Junkers as against the
working class in Germany and England as readily as Bismarck joined hands
with Thiers to suppress the Commune of Paris. And even if this were not
so, nothing would persuade the working classes that those who sweat them
ruthlessly in commercial enterprise are any more considerate in public
affairs, especially when there is any question of war, by which much
money can be made for rich people who deal in the things most wanted and
most highly paid for in war time: to wit, armaments and money. The
direct interest of our military caste in war accounts for a good deal;
but at least it involves personal risk and hardship and bereavement to
the members of that caste. But the capitalist who has shares in
explosives and cannons and soldiers' boots runs no risk and suffers no
hardship; whilst as to the investor pure and simple, all that happens to
him is that he finds the unearned income obtainable on Government
security larger than ever. Victory to the capitalists of Europe means
that they can not only impose on the enemy a huge indemnity, but lend
him the money to pay it with whilst the working classes produce and pay
both principal and interest.
As long as we have that state of things, we shall have wars and secret
and mendacious diplomacy. And this is one of many overwhelming reasons
for building the State on equality of income, because without it
equality of status and general culture is impossible. Democracy without
equality is a delusion more dangerous than frank oligarchy and
autocracy. And without Democracy there is no hope of peace, no chance of
persuading ourselves that the sacredness of civilization will protect it
any more than the sacredness of the cathedral of Rheims has protected
it, not against Huns and Vandals, but against educated German gentlemen.
*Rheims.*
Commercial wage-slaves can never reproduce that wonderful company of
sculptured figures that made Rheims unlike any other place in the world;
and if they are now destroyed, or shortly about to be, it does not
console me that we still have--perhaps for a few days longer only--the
magical stained glass of Chartres and the choir of Beauvais. We tell
ourselves that the poor French people must feel as we should feel if we
had lost Westminster Abbey. Rheims was worth ten Westminster Abbeys; and
where it has gone the others may just as easily go too. Let us not sneer
at the German pretension to culture: let us face the fact that the
Germans are just as cultured as we are (to say the least) and that war
has nevertheless driven them to do these things as irresistibly as it
will drive us to do similar things tomorrow if we find ourselves
attacking a town in which the highest point from which our positions can
be spotted by an observer with a field glass in one hand and a telephone
in the other is the towering roof of the cathedral. Also let us be
careful how we boast of our love of medieval art to people who well
know, from the protests of Ruskin and Morris, that in times of peace we
have done things no less mischievous and irreparable for no better
reason than that the Mayor's brother or the Dean's uncle-in-law was a
builder in search of a "restoration" job. If Rheims cathedral were taken
from the Church to-morrow and given to an English or French joint stock
company, everything transportable in it would presently be sold to
American collectors, and the site cleared and let out in building sites.
That is the way to make it "pay" commercially.
*The Fate of The Glory Drunkard.*
But our problem is how to make Commercialism itself bankrupt. We must
beat Germany, not because the Militarist hallucination and our
irresolution forced Germany to make this war, so desperate for her, at a
moment so unfavourable to herself, but because she has made herself the
exponent and champion in the modern world of the doctrine that military
force is the basis and foundation of national greatness, and military
conquest the method by which the nation of the highest culture can
impose that culture on its neighbors. Now the reason I have permitted
myself to call General Von Bernhardi a madman is that he lays down quite
accurately the conditions of this military supremacy without perceiving
that what he is achieving is a _reductio ad absurdum_. For he declares
as a theorist what Napoleon found in practice, that you can maintain the
Militarist hold over the imaginations of the people only by feeding them
with continual glory. You must go from success to success; the moment
you fail you are lost; for you have staked everything on your power to
conquer, for the sake of which the people have submitted to your tyranny
and endured the sufferings and paid the cost your military operations
entailed. Napoleon conquered and conquered and conquered; and yet, when
he had won more battles than the maddest Prussian can ever hope for, he
had to go on fighting just as if he had never won anything at all. After
exhausting the possible he had to attempt the impossible and go to
Moscow. He failed; and from that moment he had better have been a
Philadelphia Quaker than a victor of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena and
Wagrarn. Within a short breathing time after that morning when he stood
outside Leipsic, whistling _Malbrook s'en va-t-en guerre_ whilst his
flying army gasped its last in the river or fled under a hail of bullets
from enemies commanded by generals without a tenth of his ability or
prestige, we find him disguised as a postillion, cowering abjectly
behind the door of a carriage whilst the French people whom he had
crammed with glory for a quarter of a century were seeking to tear him
limb from limb. His success had made him the enemy of every country
except France: his failure made him the enemy of the human race. And
that was why Europe rose up finally and smashed him, although the
English Government which profited by that operation oppressed the
English people for thirty years afterwards more sordidly than Napoleon
would have oppressed them, and its Allies replaced him on the throne of
France by an effete tyrant not worthy to unlace his shoe latchet.
Nothing can finally redeem Militarism. When even genius itself takes
that path its end is still destruction. When mere uppishness takes it
the end is not changed, though it may be reached more precipitately and
disastrously.
*The Kaiser.*
Prussia has talked of that path for many years as the one down which its
destiny leads it. Its ruler, with the kid gloves he called mailed fists
and the high class tailoring he called shining armour, did much of the
talking, though he is in practice a most peaceful teetotaller, as many
men with their imaginations full of the romance of war are. He had a
hereditary craze for playing at soldiers; and he was and is a naïve
suburban snob, as the son of The Englishwoman would naturally be,
talking about "the Hohenzollerns" exactly as my father's people in
Dublin used to talk about "the Shaws." His stage walk, familiar through
the cinematograph, is the delight of romantic boys, and betrays his own
boyish love of the _Paradeschritt_. It is frightful to think of the
powers which Europe, in its own snobbery, left in the hands of this
Peter Pan; and appalling as the results of that criminal levity have
been, yet, being by no means free from his romantic follies myself, I do
not feel harshly toward Peter, who, after all, kept the peace for over
twenty-six years. In the end his talk and his games of soldiers in
preparation for a toy conquest of the world frightened his neighbours
into a league against him; and that league has now caught him in just
such a trap as his strategists were laying for his neighbours. We please
ourselves by pretending that he did not try to extricate himself, and
forced the war on us; but that is not true. When he realized his peril
he tried hard enough; but when he saw that it was no use he accepted the
situation and dashed at his enemies with an infatuate courage not
unworthy of the Hohenzollern tradition. Blinded as he was by the false
ideals of his class, it was the best he could do; for there is always a
chance for a brave and resolute warrior, even when his back is not to
the wall but to the Russians.
That means that we have to conquer him and not to revile him and strike
moral attitudes. His victory over British and French Democracy would be
a victory of Militarism over civilization; it would literally shut the
gates of mercy on mankind. Leave it to our official fools and
governesses to lecture the Kaiser, and to let loose Turcos and Ghoorkas
on him: a dangerous precedent. Let Thomas Atkins, Patrick Murphy, Sandy
McAlister, and Pitou Dupont fight him under what leadership they can
get, until honour is satisfied, simply because if St. George does not
slay the dragon the world will be, as a friend of mine said of Europe
the other day, "no place for a gentleman."
*Recapitulation.*
1. The war should be pushed vigorously, not with a view to a final
crushing of the German army between the Anglo-French combination and the
Russian millions, but to the establishment of a decisive military
superiority by the Anglo-French combination alone. A victory
unattainable without Russian aid would be a defeat for Western European
Liberalism; Germany would be beaten not by us, but by a Militarist
autocracy worse than her own. By sacrificing Prussian Poland and the
Slav portions of the Austrian Empire Germany and Austria could satisfy
Russia, and merge Austria and Germany into a single German State, which
would then dominate France and England, having ascertained that they
could not conquer her without Russia's aid. We may fairly allow Russia
to conquer Austria if she can; that is her natural part of the job. But
if we two cannot without Russian help beat Potsdam, or at least hold her
up in such a stalemate as will make it clear that it is impossible for
her to subjugate us, then we shall simply have to "give Germany best"
and depend on an alliance with America for our place in the sun.
2. We cannot smash or disable Germany, however completely we may defeat
her, because we can do that only by killing her women; and it is
trifling to pretend that we are capable of any such villainy. Even to
embarrass her financially by looting her would recoil on ourselves, as
she is one of our commercial customers and one of our most frequently
visited neighbors. We must, if we can, drive her from Belgium without
compromise. France may drive her from Alsace and Lorraine. Russia may
drive her from Poland. She knew when she opened fire that these were the
stakes in the game; and we are bound to support France and Russia until
they are won or lost, unless a stalemate reduces the whole method of
warfare to absurdity. Austria, too, knew that the Slav part of her
empire was at stake. By winning these stakes the Allies will wake the
Kaiser from his dream of a Holy Teuton Empire with Prussia as the Head
of its Church, and teach him to respect us; but that once done, we must
not allow our camp followers to undo it all again by spiteful
humiliations and exactions which could not seriously cripple Germany,
and would make bad blood between us for a whole generation, to our own
great inconvenience, unhappiness, disgrace, and loss. We and France have
to live with Germany after the war; and the sooner we make up our mind
to do it generously, the better. The word after the fight must be _sans
rancune_; for without peace between France, Germany, and England, there
can be no peace in the world.
3. War, as a school of character and a nurse of virtue, must be formally
shut up and discharged by all the belligerents when this war is over. It
is quite true that ill-bred and swinish nations can be roused to a
serious consideration of their position and their destiny only by
earthquakes, pestilences, famines, comets' tails, Titanic shipwrecks,
and devastating wars, just as it is true that African chiefs cannot make
themselves respected unless they bury virgins alive beneath the
doorposts of their hut-palaces, and Tartar Khans find that the
exhibition of a pyramid of chopped-off heads is a short way to impress
their subjects with a convenient conception of their divine right to
rule. Ivan the Terrible did undoubtedly make his subjects feel very
serious indeed; and stupid people are apt to believe that this sort of
terror-stiffened seriousness is virtue. It is not. Any person who should
set-to deliberately to contrive artificial earthquakes, scuttle liners,
and start epidemics with a view to the moral elevation of his
countrymen, would very soon find himself in the dock. Those who plan
wars with the same object should be removed with equal firmness to
Hanwell or Bethlehem Hospital. A nation so degraded as to be capable of
responding to no higher stimulus than that of horror had better be
exterminated, by Prussian war lords or anyone else foolish enough to
waste powder on them instead of leaving them to perish of their own
worthlessness.
4. Neither England nor Germany must claim any moral superiority in the
negotiations. Both were engaged for years in a race for armaments. Both
indulged and still indulge in literary and oratorical provocation. Both
claimed to be "an Imperial race" ruling other races by divine right.
Both shewed high social and political consideration to parties and
individuals who openly said that the war had to come. Both formed
alliances to reinforce them for that war. The case against Germany for
violating the neutrality of Belgium is of no moral value to England
because (_a_) England has allowed the violation of the Treaty of Paris
by Russia (violation of the neutrality of the Black Sea and closing of
the free port of Batoum), and the high-handed and scandalous violation
of the Treaty of Berlin by Austria (seizure of Bosnia and Herzegovina),
without resorting to arms or remedying the aggression in any other way;
(_b_) because we have fully admitted that we should have gone to war in
defence of France in any case, whether the Germans came through Belgium
or not, and refused to give the German Ambassador any assurance that we
should remain neutral if the Germans sacrificed the military advantage
of attacking through Belgium for the sake of avoiding a war with us;
(_c_) that the apparent moral superiority of the pledge given by France
and England to respect Belgian neutrality is illusory in face of the
facts that France and England stood to gain enormously, and the Germans
to lose correspondingly, by confining the attack on France to the
heavily fortified Franco-German frontier, and that as France and England
knew they would be invited by the Belgians to enter Belgium if the
Germans invaded it, the neutrality of Belgium had, as far as they were
concerned, no real existence; (_d_) that as all treaties are valid only
_rebus sic stantibus_, and the state of things which existed at the date
of the Treaty of London (1839) had changed so much since then (Belgium
is no longer menaced by France, at whom the treaty was aimed, and has
acquired important colonies, for instance) that in 1870 Gladstone could
not depend on it, and resorted to a special temporary treaty not now in
force, the technical validity of the 1839 treaty is extremely doubtful;
(_e_) that even if it be valid its breach is not a _casus belli_ unless
the parties for reasons of their own choose to make it so; and (_f_)
that the German national peril pleaded by the Imperial Chancellor in his
Peer Gynt speech (the _durchhauen_ one), when he rashly but frankly
threw away the strong technical case just stated and admitted a breach
of international law, was so great according to received Militarist
ideas in view of the Russian mobilization, that it is impossible for us
or any other Militarist-ridden Power to feel sure ourselves, much less
to convince others, that we should have been any more scrupulous in the
like extremity. It must be added that nothing can extenuate the enormity
of the broad fact that an innocent country has been horribly devastated
because her guilty neighbors formed two huge explosive combinations
against one another instead of establishing the peace of Europe, but
that is an offence against a higher law than any recorded on diplomatic
scraps of paper, and when it comes to judgment the outraged conscience
of humanity will not have much patience with the naughty child's plea of
"he began it."
5. Militarism must not be treated as a disease peculiar to Prussia. It
is rampant in England; and in France it has led to the assassination of
her greatest statesman. If the upshot of the war is to be regarded and
acted upon simply as a defeat of German Militarism by Anglo-French
Militarism, then the war will not only have wrought its own immediate
evils of destruction and demoralization, but will extinguish the last
hope that we have risen above the "dragons of the prime that tare each
other in their slime." We have all been equally guilty in the past. It
has been steadily assumed for years that the Militarist party is the
gentlemanly party. Its opponents have been ridiculed and prosecuted in
England; hanged, flogged or exiled in Russia; and imprisoned in France:
they have been called traitors, cads, cranks, and so forth: they have
been imprisoned for "bad taste" and for sedition whilst the most
virulent sedition against Democracy and the most mutinous military
escapades in the commissioned ranks have been tolerated obsequiously,
until finally the practical shelving of Liberal Constitutionalism has
provoked both in France and England a popular agitation of serious
volume for the supersession of parliament by some sort of direct action
by the people, called Syndicalism. In short Militarism, which is nothing
but State Anarchism, has been carried to such a pitch that it has been
imitated and countered by a movement of popular Anarchism, and has
exploded in a European war because the Commercialist Governments of
Europe had no faith in the effective guidance of any modern State by
higher considerations than Lord Roberts's "will to conquer," the weight
of the Kaiser's mailed fist, and the interest of the Bourses and Stock
Exchanges. Unless we are all prepared to fight Militarism at home as
well as abroad, the cessation of hostilities will last only until the
belligerents have recovered from their exhaustion.
6. It had better be admitted on our side that as to the conduct of the
war there is no trustworthy evidence that the Germans have committed any
worse or other atrocities than those which are admitted to be inevitable
in war or accepted as part of military usage by the Allies. By "making
examples" of towns, and seizing irresponsible citizens as hostages and
shooting them for the acts of armed civilians over whom they could exert
no possible control, the Germans have certainly pushed these usages to a
point of Terrorism which is hardly distinguishable from the deliberate
murder of non-combatants; but as the Allies have not renounced such
usages, nor ceased to employ them ruthlessly in their dealings with the
hill tribes and fellaheen and Arabs with whom they themselves have to
deal (to say nothing of the notorious domestic Terrorism of the Russian
Government), they cannot claim superior humanity. It is therefore waste
of time for the pot to call the kettle black. Our outcry against the
Germans for sowing the North Sea with mines was followed too closely by
the laying of a mine field there by ourselves to be revived without
flagrant Pharisaism. The case of Rheims cathedral also fell to the
ground as completely as a good deal of the building itself when it was
stated that the French had placed a post of observation on the roof.
Whether they did or not, all military experts were aware that an officer
neglecting to avail himself of the cathedral roof in this way, or an
opposing officer hestitating to fire on the cathedral so used, would
have been court-martialed in any of the armies engaged. The injury to
the cathedral must therefore be suffered as a strong hint from
Providence that though we can have glorious wars or glorious cathedrals
we cannot have both.
7. To sum up, we must remember that if this war does not make an end of
war in the west, our allies of to-day may be our enemies of to-morrow,
as they are of yesterday, and our enemies of to-day our allies of
to-morrow as they are of yesterday; so that if we aim merely at a fresh
balance of military power, we are as likely as not to negotiate our own
destruction. We must use the war to give the _coup de grace_ to medieval
diplomacy, medieval autocracy, and anarchic export of capital, and make
its conclusion convince the world that Democracy is invincible, and
Militarism a rusty sword that breaks in the hand. We must free our
soldiers, and give them homes worth fighting for. And we must, as the
old phrase goes, discard the filthy rags of our righteousness, and fight
like men with everything, even a good name, to win, inspiring and
encouraging ourselves with definite noble purposes (abstract nobility
butters no parsnips) to face whatever may be the price of proving that
war cannot conquer us, and that he who dares not appeal to our
conscience has nothing to hope from our terrors.
*"Shaw's Nonsense About Belgium"*
By Arnold Bennett.
Written for THE NEW YORK TIMES.
Mr. Bernard Shaw's "Common Sense About the War" is the talk of the town,
and it deserves to be. One of its greatest values is its courage, for in
it Shaw says many things no one else would have dared to say. It
therefore, by breaking the unearthly silence on certain aspects of the
situation, perhaps inaugurates a new and healthier period of discussion
and criticism on such subjects as recruiting, treatment of soldiers and
sailors' dependents, secret diplomacy, militarism, Junkerism, churches,
Russia, peace terms, and disarmament. It contains the most magnificent,
brilliant, and convincing common sense that could possibly be uttered.
No citizen, I think, could rise from the perusal of this tract with a
mind unilluminated or opinions unmodified. Hence everybody ought to read
it, though everybody will not be capable of appreciating the profoundest
parts of it.
Mixed up with the tremendous common sense, however, is a considerable
and unusual percentage of that perverseness, waywardness, and
arlequinading which are apparently an essential element of Mr. Shaw's
best work. This is a disastrous pity, having regard to the immense
influence and vogue of Shaw, not only in Germany, but in America, and
the pity is more tragic as Shaw has been most absurd about the very
matter which most Englishmen regard as most important, namely, Great
Britain's actual justification for going to war.
*Shaw's Admitted Prejudice.*
Mr. Shaw begins by conceiving the possibility of his being blinded by
prejudice or perversity, and admits his capacity for criticising England
with a certain slight malicious taste for taking the conceit out of her.
Seemingly he belongs to that numerous class who think that to admit a
fault is to excuse it. As a highwayman might say before taking your
purse, "Now, I admit, I have a certain slight taste for thieving," and
expect you to smile forgiveness of his depredation, Shaw's bias is
evident wherever he discusses the action and qualities of Great Britain.
Thus he contrasts Bernhardi's brilliant with our own very dull
militarists' facts, the result being that the intense mediocrity of
Bernhardi leaps to the eye on every page, and that events have
thoroughly discredited all his political and many of his military ideas,
whereas we possess militarists of first-class quality.