people of the Western European countries with these explanations, these
assurances, these suggestions that are necessary for the proper ending
of this war? I could wish we had a Government capable of something more
articulate than “Wait and see!” a Government that dared confess a
national intention to all the world. For what a Government says is
audible to all the world. King George, too, has the ear of a thousand
million people. If he saw fit to say simply and clearly what it is we
fight for and what we seek, his voice would be heard universally,
through Germany, through all America. No other voice has such
penetration. He is, he has told us, watching the war with interest, but
that is not enough; we could have guessed that, knowing his spirit. As a
nation, we need expression that shall reach the other side. But our
Government is, I fear, one of those that obey necessity; it is only very
reluctantly creative; it rests, therefore, with us who, outside all
formal government, represent the national will and intention, to take
this work into our hands. By means of a propaganda of books, newspaper
articles, leaflets, tracts in English, French, German, Dutch, Swedish,
Norwegian, Italian, Chinese and Japanese we have to spread this idea,
repeat this idea, and _impose upon this war_ the idea that this war must
end war. We have to create a wide common conception of a re-mapped and
pacified Europe, released from the abominable dangers of a private trade
in armaments, largely disarmed and pledged to mutual protection. This
conception has sprung up in a number of minds, and there have been
proposals at once most extraordinary and feasible for its realisation,
projects of aeroplanes scattering leaflets across Germany, of armies
distributing tracts as they advance, of prisoners of war much afflicted
by such literature. These ideas have the absurdity of novelty, but
otherwise they are by no means absurd. They will strike many soldiers as
being indecent, but the world is in revolt against the standards of
soldiering.
Never before has the world seen clearly as it now sees clearly, the
_rôle_ of thought in the making of war. This new conception carries with
it the corollary of an entirely new campaign.
How can we get at the minds of our enemies? How can we make explanation
more powerful than armies and fleets? Failing an articulate voice at the
head of our country, we must needs look for the resonating appeal we
need in other quarters. We look to the Church that takes for its
purposes the name of the Prince of Peace. In England, except for the
smallest, meekest protest against war, any sort of war, on the part of a
handful of Quakers, Christianity is silent. Its universally present
organisation speaks no coherent counsels. Its workers for the most part
are buried in the loyal manufacture of flannel garments and an
inordinate quantity of bed-socks for the wounded. It is an extraordinary
thing to go now and look at one’s parish church and note the pulpit, the
orderly arrangements for the hearers, the proclamations on the doors, to
sit awhile on the stone wall about the graves and survey the comfortable
vicarage, and to reflect that this is just the local representation of a
universally present organisation for the communication of ideas; that
all over Europe there are such pulpits, such possibilities of gathering
and saying, and that it gathers nothing and has nothing to say. Pacific,
patriotic sentiment it utters perhaps, but nothing that anyone can act
upon, nothing to draw together, will, and make an end. It is strange to
sit alive in the sunshine and realise that, and to think of how
tragically that same realisation came to another mind in Europe.
Several things have happened during the past few weeks with the
intensest symbolical quality; the murder of Jaurès, for example; but
surely nothing has occurred so wonderful and touching as the death of
the Pope, that faithful, honest, simple old man. The war and the
perplexity of the war darkened his last hours. “Once the Church could
have stopped this thing,” he said, with a sense of threads missed and
controls that have slipped away—it may be with a sense of vivifying help
discouraged and refused. The _Tribuna_ tells a story that, if not true,
is marvellously invented, of the Austrian representative coming to ask
him for a blessing on the Austrian arms. He feigned not to hear, or
perhaps he did not hear. The Austrian asked again, and again there was
silence. Then, at the third request, when he could be silent no longer,
he broke out: “No! _Bless peace!_” As the temperature of his weary body
rose, his last clear moments were spent in attempts to word telegrams
that should have some arresting hold upon the gigantic crash that was
coming, and in his last delirium he lamented war and the impotence of
the Church....
Intellect without faith is the devil, but faith without intellect is a
negligent angel with rusty weapons. This European catastrophe is the
tragedy of the weak though righteous Christian will. We begin to see
that to be right and indolent, or right and scornfully silent, or right
and abstinent from the conflict is to be wrong. Righteousness has need
to be as clear and efficient and to do things as sedulously in the right
way as any evil doer. There is no meaning in the Christianity of a
Christian who is not now a propagandist for peace—who is not now also a
politician. There is no faith in the Liberalism that merely carps at the
manner of our entanglement in a struggle that must alter all the world
for ever. We need not only to call for peace, but to seek and show and
organise the way of peace....
One thinks of Governments and the Church and the Press, and then,
turning about for some other source of mental control, we recall the
organisations, the really quite opulent organisations, that are
professedly devoted to the promotion of peace. There is no voice from
The Hague. The so-called peace movement in our world has consumed money
enough and service enough to be something better than a weak little
grumble at the existence of war. What is this movement and its
organisations doing now? Ninety-nine people in Europe out of every
hundred are complaining of war now. It needs no specially endowed
committees to do that. They preach to a converted world. The question is
how to end it and prevent its recurrence. But have these specially
peace-seeking people ever sought for the secret springs of war, or
looked into the powers that war for war, or troubled to learn how to
grasp war and subdue it? All Germany is knit by the fighting spirit, and
armed beyond the rest of the world. Until the mind of Germany is
changed, there can be no safe peace on earth. But that, it seems, does
not trouble the professional peace advocate if only he may cry Peace,
and live somewhere in comfort, and with the comfortable sense of a
superior dissent from the general emotion.
How are we to gather together the wills and understanding of men for the
tremendous necessities and opportunities of this time? Thought, speech,
persuasion, an incessant appeal for clear intentions, clear statements
for the dispelling of suspicion and the abandonment of secrecy and
trickery; there is work for every man who writes or talks and has the
slightest influence upon another creature. This monstrous conflict in
Europe, the slaughtering, the famine, the confusion, the panic and
hatred and lying pride, it is all of it real only in the darkness of the
mind. At the coming of understanding it will vanish as dreams vanish at
awakening. But never will it vanish until understanding has come. It
goes on only because we, who are voices, who suggest, who might
elucidate and inspire, are ourselves such little scattered creatures
that though we strain to the breaking point, we still have no strength
to turn on the light that would save us. There have been moments in the
last three weeks when life has been a waking nightmare, one of those
frozen nightmares when, with salvation within one’s reach, one cannot
move, and the voice dies in one’s throat.
Transcriber's Notes:
Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.
Typographical errors were silently corrected.
Spelling and hyphenation were made consistent when a predominant form
was found in this book; otherwise it was not changed.
Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
End of Project Gutenberg's The War That Will End War, by H. G. Wells