Part 16
The first thing he does when he comes down each morning is to read his paper, and the moment he has finished breakfast he sticks the necessary flags into his big map. He began to do that very soon after the war broke out, and has never missed a day. It would seem to him almost as if peace had been declared, and the universe were suddenly unbottomed, if any morning he omitted to alter slightly three flags at least. What will he do when the end at last is reached, and he can no longer tear the paper open with a kind of trembling avidity; no longer debate within himself the questions of strategy, and the absorbing chances of the field, when he has, in fact, to sweep his flags into a drawer and forget they ever were? It would haunt him, if he thought of it. But sufficient unto his day is the good thereof. Yes! It has almost come to that with him; though he will still talk to you of “this dreadful war,” and never alludes to the days as “great” or to the times as “stirring” as some folk do. No, he sincerely believes that he is distressed beyond measure by the continuance of “the abominable business,” and would not confess for worlds that he would miss it, that it has become for him a daily “cocktail” to his appetite for life. It is not he, after all, who is being skinned; to the skinning of other eels the individual eel is soon accustomed. By proxy to be “making history,” to be witnessing the “greatest drama” known to man since the beginning of the world—after all it is something! He will never have such a chance again. He still remembers with a shudder how he felt the first weeks after war was declared; and the mere fact that he shudders shows that his present feelings are by no means what they were. After all, one cannot remain for ever prepossessed with suffering that is not one’s own, or with fears of invasion indefinitely postponed. True, he has lost a nephew, a second cousin, the sons of several friends. He has been duly sorry, duly sympathetic, but then, he was not dangerously fond of any of them. His own son is playing his part, and he is proud of it. If the boy should be killed he will feel poignant grief, but even then there is revenge to be considered. His pocket is suffering, but it is for the Country; and that almost makes it a pleasure. And he goes on sticking in his flags in spots where the earth is a mush of mangled flesh, and the air shrill with the whir of shells, the moans of dying men, and the screams of horses.
Is this pure fantasy, or does it hold a grain of truth?
§ 6.
The war brings up with ever greater insistence the two antagonistic feelings of which one was always conscious: That men are radically alike. And that there are two kinds of men, subtly but hopelessly divided from each other.
Men are radically alike in the way they meet danger and death, in their sentiment and in their laughter, in their endurance, their passions, their self-sacrifice, their selfishness, their superstitions, and their gratitude. They are radically divided by possession, or not, of that extra sensitiveness to proportion, form, colour, sound, which we call the sense of beauty. Would there still be war in a world the most of whose dwellers had the sense of beauty? I think not. And they who have it, so few by comparison, are tragically compelled to live and bear their part in this hell, created by a world of which they are not.
These two kinds of men shade subtly the one into the other; but the division is real, for all that—the bristles on the backs of each true specimen on either side of the line rise at sight of the other sort.
And the war with its toil and hardships, its common humanity, deaths and dangers and sacrifices shared, will not bring them one jot nearer one to the other. Is there evidence for thinking that a sense of beauty is more common than it was? I am not sure. But there is certainly no chance that the sense of beauty can increase within measurable time, so as to give its possessors a majority. No chance that wars will cease from that reason. The little world of beauty-lovers will for many ages yet, perhaps always, be pitifully in tow, half-drowned by the following surge of the big insensitive world when it loses for a time what little feeling for harmony it has, and goes full speed ahead.
§ 7.
Some argue earnestly that what really restrains and regulates the conduct of individuals is not force, but the general sense of decency, the public opinion of the community; and that the same rule applies to nations. In other words, that there is no reason why inter-State morality should be different from that prevailing amongst the individuals within a State.
This argument neglects to perceive, first: That the public opinion of a community is, in reality, latent force; that in a real community “Right is Might,” up to a certain point. And, secondly: That there is as yet no community within which the nations dwell.
An individual cannot pursue rank egotism to the complete overriding of his neighbours without knowing that those neighbours can and will give concrete expression to their resentment and suppress him. This latent force is at the back of all State-law, and of all public opinion, which is but State-law unwritten. The essence of its efficacy is the fact that individuals do live in community, each one perceiving with the non-rampant part of him that the rest are right in squashing his rampancy, since life in community would soon be impossible if they did not. He consents, subconsciously, to being squashed when he is rampant, because he recognizes himself to be part of a whole.
Until nations have come to be parts of communities, or group-States, there will be no really effective analogy between individual morality and State morality. There is, of course, a growing international decency, a reaching out toward co-operation, a recognition that certain things are “not done”; but it is liable to be violated, as we have seen, at any moment by any State which is, or thinks itself, strong enough to override laws which have no adequate latent force behind them. To create this latent controlling force we have paramount need of a system of group-States, leading on by slow degrees, through the linking of one group with another, to a United States of the world. The necessary line of progression is sufficiently disclosed by the violation of Belgian neutrality and other matters in this war. Public opinion not backed by latent force has been proved useless. There is no such thing, I fear, as public opinion worth the name except within a definite community. The task of statesmen when peace comes is the formation of a United States of Europe—linked if possible with the countries of America—the creation of a real public opinion backed by a real, if latent, force.
§ 8.
Nietzsche was an individualist, a hater of the State and of the Prussians, a sick man, a great artist in words to be read with delight and—your tongue in your cheek. By quaint irony his central idea, “the ego-rampant,” was temperamentally suited to those Prussians whom he hated. The Neo-German conception of the State, (if one may fairly judge it out of the mouths of certain Germans) as a law unto itself, demanding all from the individuals who compose it, and taking all it can get from the world at large, may be inverted Nietzscheism, but it is the creature of Prussian history, and of very different men. It is based on what we others, and I should imagine many Germans, think is a transient and false notion of what States should be. We say they should not roam the earth considering only their own strength. True that, in the absence as yet of the system of group-States, States still can seize here or seize there, if they be strong enough, but we emphatically deny that they should do so _on principle_, as the new German philosophy seems to teach, and set the robber’s ideal, the robber’s fashion of morality, for the individuals who compose those States. The philosophy, not only of the rest of Europe, but of Germany, before all, in the days of Kant and Hegel, presumed that the hard-won morality of individuals amongst themselves would ultimately become the morality of States.
“The fact that the sense of community among the peoples of the earth has gone so far that the violation of right in one place is felt everywhere, has made the idea of a Citizenship of the world no fantastic dream, but a necessary extension of the unwritten Code of States and Peoples.” (Kant.)
“The binding cord is not force, but the deep-seated feeling of order that is possessed by us all.” (Hegel.)
The new German philosophy has anointed the present immorality of States and thereby fixed it as the morality for individuals. I think these philosophers in their characteristic German exuberance, with its habit of over-statement, have been hard on Germany. For the German people at large have presumably been acquiring throughout the ages some such instincts toward altruism as the peoples of other countries. The new German philosophy has succeeded to a dismal extent in its inoculation of the German people, but it cannot in the long run impose its logical ideal of the wild man in the forest, though never so gorgeously decked out, on the Germans, any more than the old German philosophy made the Germans replicas of Christ.
Man never attains to his philosophical ideal; but it is just as well that he should see clearly its apotheosis before he tries too hard to reach it.
§ 9.
Our enemy now proclaims that his objective is the crushing of Britain’s world-power in the interests of mankind.
Are we justified in retaining if we can what, in a by no means unstained past, we have acquired, or should we hand over our position, well and ill-gotten, to this new claimant, with his new culture, for the benefit of the world?
Man has a somewhat incurable belief that he can manage his own affairs, and we Britons hold the faith that our character, ideals, and experience fit us to control our own lives and property for the general good of mankind, side by side with other nations of like mind. The fortunate possessors of the greater Empire and the greater trade are not perhaps the most convincing advocates of the principle “Live and let live.” For all that, we find it impossible to admit the right of any nation to an aggressive policy toward us. Germany, after being petrified with surprise at our intervention, now accuses us of having planned the war and deliberately attacked her. It is divinely easy to claim things both ways when you are at war. We all see just now rather as in a glass darkly. And yet, with an immense Empire, an immense trade, and nothing that we wanted anywhere, with a crop of serious social and political troubles on hand, “a contemptible little army,” a tradition of abstention from European quarrels, a Free Trade policy, a democratic system of government, a Foreign Minister remarkable up to then for his services to peace, and a “degenerate, wealth-rotted, huckstering” population, it still seems to us (always excepting our handful of pre-war Jingoes) as improbable as it once seemed to Germany that we hatched and set on foot such a wildcat enterprise.
§ 10.
“A war of exhaustion.” How often we use those words! They are current in all the belligerent countries, and in all they are unreally used, as yet. But they are, I fear, literally true. It is a war which—save for some happy chance—can hardly end till one group or the other have no longer the men to hold their lines. The sway of the fighting is of no great moment; it does not seem to matter where precisely the killing, maiming, and capturing go on, so long as they do go on with a certain mathematical regularity. A year or so hence, when the total disablement is nearer twenty than ten millions, the meaning of the words will be a little clearer, and they will probably only then be used by the side whose united population is still more than twice that of the other side. Two years hence they will be seen to have meant exactly what they said. All the swinging from optimism to pessimism and back again, the cock-a-hoop of the Press one day, the dirge of the Press the next; the alarms and excursions about the failure of this or that—they are all storms in teacups. The wills of the nations fighting are equally engaged, and will not break; the energies will not break; the food will probably not quite fail; the money will be found somehow; but the human flesh will give out, in time—that is all; on which side it will give out first may be left to the child who can count up to two. No glory about this business—just ding-dong shambles!
If one believed, with a certain Englishman, that there was no real struggle of ideals involved, these words “a war of exhaustion,” meaning what they really do, would be too intolerable even to think of. He who denies this to be a struggle of ideals may have a brilliant intellect, but he can surely have none of that instinctive perception of the essence and atmosphere of things, which is a so much surer guide than reason. He has perceived doubtless that autocratists and force-worshippers in England, in Russia, in Italy (there are but few in France) are fighting against the Central Empires as furiously as if they were the most ardent lovers of liberty; and that the democrats and humanists in Central Europe are fighting for their countries as devotedly as their force-worshipping rulers, and he has thought: “This is a mere blind game of ‘kill your neighbour,’ with nothing real at stake save the aggrandizement of one group of countries or the other.” But behind all this is the psychological heart of the matter—the states of mind in the belligerent countries before they began to fight. There are racial temperaments to which certain ideals are fatal. The Teuton of all men requires the Christian, or shall we say the humanistic, ethic, to modify something science-ridden, overbearing, and heady in his soul. The Teuton, before the new philosophy of self-expansion at all costs laid hold on him, was welcome, from his many great qualities, in a world of other men. But his was the last nature that could afford to succumb wholesale to the faith that his race was the only race that mattered. If he could see himself he would realize that the very thoroughness and over-exaltation of his nature made it ruinous for him to tamper with this particular ideal, for he was bound sooner or later to run it to death, to the danger and alarm of all other races. No one outside Germany, unless his mind was warped, could miss this latter-day Teutonic absorption in self; the Teuton has dinned it into every ear, and forgotten, in so doing, that we should not take off discount for temperamental extravagance of diction. The German imperialistic patriot has done an incalculable, perhaps fatal, harm to the country he loves so passionately. But even discounting for rhodomontade, no observer who has feelers, can fail to be aware of the spiritual change in Germany. I remember one tiny instance out of many—a mere straw showing the direction of the wind. The winter before the war there were in a certain hotel in Egypt four Teutons. A quiet, dignified old man, his tiny, quiet, dignified wife, and their two big sons. The difference between the two generations was distressing. In the older, such an air of unassuming goodness, in the younger a demeanour so intolerant, and domineering; those two sons were respectful and good to their father and mother; but toward the rest of the world—to natives, English, Americans, and other small fry—they displayed an astounding contempt.
The Berlin Concordia has just issued maxims of conduct to the German people, in a little book called “Let Germany Learn.” I cull two of them: “The soft corner in your heart for the foreigner will never give you his affection, but only his contempt!” And: “Everything depends on your own strength.”
It would be easy to make out some sort of case against any of the belligerent nations. It would not be easy to show that any nation save Germany was in that peculiar state of full-blooded self-confidence which upholds the Will to Power, and denies the Will to Equity.
§ 11.
It seems certain that the practice of doping soldiers with ether or other spirit before an attack has been largely resorted to by certain nations in this war. Nothing that is happening so illuminates the nature of modern warfare; illustrates more utterly the absorption of human bodies and souls into the Machines that are crashing into each other. Men have become mere lumps of coal to be converted into driving power. And in supreme moments, lest the bewildered spirit, brought up to peace, should move hand or foot in protest or recoil, that spirit is first stolen away. The usage is not prompted by motives of mercy, yet has in it a kind of awful humanity. Granted the premises, who dare grudge this anodyne to the doomed?
Verily on every man who in time of peace speaks or writes one word to foster bad spirit between nations a curse should rest; he is part and parcel of that malevolence which at last sets these great Engines, fed by lumps of human coal, to crash along, and pile up against each other, in splintered wreckage. Only too well he plays the game of those grim schemers to whose account lie the death, the dehumanization, the despair of millions of their brother men.
§ 12.
A wonderful night to-night, so that the spirit goes forth a little, enters the harmony of things, drinks the magic of the world. How beauty moves the heart! And war cannot destroy it, cannot take from us the feeling that—living or dead—we belong to such perfection. It cannot take the voice from the streams, remove the flight of small wings in the darkness, the gleam of moonlight, the whisper of night about us, nor that bright star. It cannot take from within us the soul that vibrates to loveliness, to the universal rhythm round us.
If in this war the figures of cruelty and death have surpassed themselves in darkness, the figure of Humanity has never been so radiant and so lovely. Perhaps we do not know enough what man was really like in past ages to compare him with man to-day. But it does seem as if he had grown in power for evil, and even more in power for good. Or perhaps it is only that, being more sensitive and highly strung, the story of his doings is altogether more poignant.
From the letters of a young French painter, who, after months in the trenches, disappeared in an engagement on April 7th, 1915, I quote these sayings:
“You know what I call religion—that which binds together in man all his thoughts of the universal and of the eternal, those two forms of God! . . . Don’t let’s lose hope; the trials of hope are many, but all beauty lives for ever. . . . The dead won’t hurt the Spring! . . . Did you see yesterday’s sun? How noble the country is, and how good Nature! She seems to say to him who listens that nothing will be lost. . . . We know not whether all this violence and disorder may not be leading us toward a crowning good. . . . Out of this torment we shall be left with one great aspiration toward pity, fraternity, and goodness. . . . Never has life brought me such abundance of noble feelings;—never, perhaps, have I had such freshness of sensibility for their recording; such a sensation of safety in my spirit. . . . We spend the days like children. . . . And the good from this war will be the making young again the hearts of those who have been through it.”
And his last written words: “Beloved mother, I send you all my love. Whatever happens, life will have been beautiful.”
Not to many is given so clear a soul as this, so fine a spirit. Peace and loveliness be with him, and with all who die like him before their time, following the light within them. And with all who live on in this world of beauty, where the Dead harm not the Spring, may there be—in his words—the longing for pity, fraternity, and goodness!
TOTALLY DISABLED
(From _The Observer_, 1916.)
If I were that! Not as one getting into the yellow leaf, but with all the Spring-running in me. If I lay, just turning my eyes here and there! How should I feel?
How do _they_ feel—those helpless soldiers and sailors already lying in the old ball-room of the “Star and Garter”?
In that hospital ward, a ghostly officer is ever crying:
“Stick it, men! Stick it! Only for life! Stick it!”
Only for life—how many years! In the year only three hundred and sixty-five awakenings; only all those returns from merciful sleep!
“Stick it, men! Stick it!”
Totally disabled—incurably helpless! No! One can’t realize what it feels like to be caught young and strong in such a net; to be caught—not for your own folly and excesses, not through accident or heredity, but as reward for giving yourself body and soul to your country. Better so, more easily borne; and yet how much more ironically tragic!
Who knows what the freedom of limbs means, till he has lost it? Who can measure the ecstasy of vigour, till every power of movement has been cut off? Who really grasps what it’s like to lie like a log dependent for everything on others, save those who have to? Think of the trout in the streams, of the birds of the air, the winged creatures innumerable, think of each beast and creeping thing—can one even imagine them without movement? Men, also, are meant to be free of their world, masters of their limbs and senses.
They who lie helpless are no longer quite bodies, for the essence of body is movement; already they are almost spirits. It is as if, in passing, one looked at minds, nearly all in the heyday of consciousness and will.
Sometimes I vaguely fancy that after violent death a man’s spirit may go on clinging above the earth just so long as his normal life would have run; that a spirit rived before its time wanders till such date as consciousness would have worn itself out in the body’s natural death. If that random fancy were true, we to-day would all be passing among unseen crowds of these rived spirits, watching us, without envy perhaps, being freer than ourselves. But those who lie hopelessly disabled, having just missed that enfranchisement, are tied to what still exists, and yet in truth has died already. Of all men they have the chance to prove the mettle of the human soul—that mysterious consciousness capable of such heights and depths; no, not a greater chance than men tortured by long solitary confinement, or even than those who through excess or through heredity lie for ever helpless—but yet so great a chance that they are haloed for all of us happier ones, who are free of our limbs and our lives. Some among those prisoned spirits must needs shrink and droop, and become atrophied in the long helplessness of a broken body. But many will grow finer; according to their natures—some pursuing the ideal of recompense in another world; some, in the stoic belief that serenity and fortitude are the fine flowers of life, unconsciously following the artist’s creed—that to make a perfect thing, even if it be only of his own spirit, is in itself all the reward.
Whichever it be, slow decay or slow perfecting, we others approach them with heads bowed, in as great reverence as we give to the green graves of our brave dead. And if pity—that pity which to some, it seems, is but ignoble weakness—be not driven from this earth, then with pity we shall nerve our resolve that never shall anything be lacking to support or comfort those who gave all for us and are so broken by their sacrifice.
As I write the sun is hot for the first time this year, and above the snow spring is in the air. Under Richmond Hill the river will be very bright, winding among trees not yet green. And the helpless who are lying there already will be thinking “I shall never walk under trees again—nor by a riverside.”