It is as if there had never existed either Voltaire, or Montaigne, or
Pascal, or Swift, or Kant, or Spinoza, or hundreds of other writers who
have exposed, with great force, the madness and futility of war, and have
described its cruelty, immorality, and savagery; and, above all, it is as
if there had never existed Jesus and his teaching of human brotherhood
and love of God and of men.
One recalls all this to mind and looks around on what is now taking
place, and one experiences horror less at the abominations of war than at
that which is the most horrible of all horrors--the consciousness of the
impotency of human reason. That which alone distinguishes man from the
animal, that which constitutes his merit--his reason--is found to be an
unnecessary, and not only a useless, but a pernicious addition, which
simply impedes action, like a bridle fallen from a horse's head, and
entangled in his legs and only irritating him.
It is comprehensible that a heathen, a Greek, a Roman, even a mediaeval
Christian, ignorant of the Gospel and blindly believing all the
prescriptions of the Church, might fight and, fighting, pride himself on
his military achievements; but how can a believing Christian, or even a
sceptic, involuntarily permeated by the Christian ideals of human
brotherhood and love which have inspired the works of the philosophers,
moralists, and artists of our time,--how can such take a gun, or stand by
a cannon, and aim at a crowd of his fellow-men, desiring to kill as many
of them as possible?
The Assyrians, Romans, or Greeks might be persuaded that in fighting they
were acting not only according to their conscience, but even fulfilling a
righteous deed. But, whether we wish it or not, we are Christians, and
however Christianity may have been distorted, its general spirit cannot
but lift us to that higher plane of reason whence we can no longer
refrain from feeling with our whole being not only the senselessness and
the cruelty of war, but its complete opposition to all that we regard as
good and right. Therefore, we cannot do as they did, with assurance,
firmness, and peace, and without a consciousness of our criminality,
without the desperate feeling of a murderer, who, having begun to kill
his victim, and feeling in the depths of his soul the guilt of his act,
proceeds to try to stupefy or infuriate himself, to be able the better to
complete his dreadful deed. All the unnatural, feverish, hot-headed,
insane excitement which has now seized the idle upper ranks of Russian
society is merely the symptom of their recognition of the criminality of
the work which is being done. All these insolent, mendacious speeches
about devotion to, and worship of, the Monarch, about readiness to
sacrifice life (or one should say other people's lives, and not one's
own); all these promises to defend with one's breast land which does not
belong to one; all these senseless benedictions of each other with
various banners and monstrous ikons; all these _Te Deums_; all these
preparations of blankets and bandages; all these detachments of nurses;
all these contributions to the fleet and to the Red Cross presented to
the Government, whose direct duty is (whilst it has the possibility of
collecting from the people as much money as it requires), having declared
war, to organize the necessary fleet and necessary means for attending
the wounded; all these Slavonic, pompous, senseless, and blasphemous
prayers, the utterance of which in various towns is communicated in the
papers as important news; all these processions, calls for the national
hymn, cheers; all this dreadful, desperate newspaper mendacity, which,
being universal, does not fear exposure; all this stupefaction and
brutalization which has now taken hold of Russian society, and which is
being transmitted by degrees also to the masses; all this is only a
symptom of the guilty consciousness of that dreadful act which is being
accomplished.
Spontaneous feeling tells men that what they are doing should not be;
but, as the murderer who has begun to assassinate his victim cannot stop,
so also Russian people now imagine that the fact of the deadly work
having been commenced is an unanswerable argument in favor of war. War
has been begun, and therefore it should go on. Thus it seems to simple,
benighted, unlearned men, acting under the influence of the petty
passions and stupefaction to which they have been subjected. In exactly
the same way the most educated men of our time argue to prove that man
does not possess free will, and that, therefore, even were he to
understand that the work he has commenced is evil, he can no longer cease
to do it. And dazed, brutalized men continue their dreadful work.