This poem is dramatic, and I am not to be supposed answerable for all
that it expresses; nevertheless I think that my own convictions about
aggressive war are very much those of my Village Wife. Of defensive war,
of war to save the lives of our children, of war to save humanity
itself, there cannot be two sane opinions: that is a pious duty forced
upon us; but it becomes every day more inconceivable to me how men can
engage in the other kind of war, and how, in particular, a people so
provident as the German people could have hoodwinked themselves into
believing that they could be better off by such a monstrous means as
warfare has now become. They had behind them the experience of the
Russians and Japanese; they had all about them the evidences of their
forty years' commercial activity; they must have known, or at least
their governors must have known, what kind of results might be looked
for from modern armament--and yet they dared risk the dereliction of
human morality, the cutting off of a generation of men, and their own
national bankruptcy. Whether it was the madness of lust, or of pride, or
of fear, it was a madness which has procured the greatest disaster of
recorded time, and revealed a criminal folly in themselves which it will
take more than two generations to efface. Indeed, German blood-lust will
become one of the standing legends of History.
The Village Wife knows nothing of the Germans, however, and her
reproaches strike at the heart of Mankind. So long as Mankind looks
upon aggressive war as a reasonable, if ultimate, appeal, her reproaches
will have force, and be deserved. They, or something like them (with the
sanction of inspiration upon them) will, I believe, be the means of our
redemption. As human nature still actually is, no League of Nations
conceivable to us will be able to save us from war. Rend your hearts and
not your armaments. Let us learn to look War in the face, and while the
blood is cold, so that we may know what we are meaning to do. Let us put
a moral taboo upon it, such as we have put upon parricide, or incest, or
cannibalism. For certain, in those matters, the reason has put a
sanction on the conscience. So will it in the matter of aggressive war.
Side by side with that, as we now see, we must change the governance of
nations. If those who do a nation's work are given their due share of
that nation's government, war I firmly believe, will become a dark
memory, a blotted cloud upon a past age. "Hundreds of years ago," it
will one day be said to some wondering child, "men hired men to murder
each other for the sake of their religion or their commerce. This they
had done for thousands of years until at last, in the most dreadful of
their wars, they killed or maimed a whole generation in the space of
about four years. Then it was that men saw what they had been doing, and
for a while the world was shamed, silent. That time of silence was long
enough to turn the hearts of men."
I have put into the mouth of my Village Wife thoughts which she may
never have formulated, but which, I am very sure, lie in her heart, too
deep for any utterance but that of tears. If I know anything of village
people I know this, that they shape their lives according to Nature, and
are outraged to the root of their being by the frustration of Nature's
laws and the stultification of man's function in the scheme of things.
What the function of man is, what the power, what the dignity have been
well paraphrased in these words:
"'Neither a fixed abode, nor a form in thine own likeness, nor any gift
peculiar to thyself alone, have we given thee, O Adam, in order that
what abode, what likeness, what gifts thou shalt choose may be thine to
have and to possess. The nature allotted to all other creatures, within
laws appointed by ourselves, restrains them. Thou, restrained by no
narrow bounds, according to thy own free will, in whose power we have
placed thee, shalt define thy nature for thyself. We have set thee
midmost the world, that thence thou mightest more conveniently survey
whatsoever is in the world. Nor have we made thee either heavenly or
earthly, mortal or immortal, to the end that thou, being, as it were,
thy own free maker and moulder, shouldst fashion thyself in what form
may like thee best. Thou shalt have power to decline unto the lower or
brute creatures. Thou shalt have power to be reborn unto the higher or
divine, according to the sentence of thy intellect.' Thus to Man, at his
birth, the Father gave seeds of all variety and germs of every form of
life."
That is near enough to the Nature of Man for present purposes.
"Teach us man's worth, that we may know it,
Who, being alone in power to lift
Above his nature, sinks below it!"
BROADCHALKE, _7th July_, 1918.
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