Part 4
Now that the inevitable has come to pass, now that the armaments have been put to the use for which they were always intended, and the tale of battle is too terrible to be told, press and pulpit are calling Christianity to account for its failure to preserve peace. Ethical societies are reminding us, with something which sounds like elation, that they have long pointed out “the relaxed hold of doctrine on the minds of the educated classes.” How they love that phrase, “educated classes,” and what, one wonders, do they mean by it? A Jewish rabbi, speaking in Carnegie hall, laments, or rejoices--it is hard to tell which--that Christian Churches are not taken, and do not take themselves, seriously. Able editors comment in military language upon the inability of religious forces to “mobilize” rapidly and effectively in the interests of peace, and turn out neat phrases like “anti-Christian Christendom,” which are very effective in editorials. Popular preachers, too broad-minded to submit to clerical authority, deliver “syndicated sermons,” denouncing the “creeds of the Dark Ages,” which still, in these electricity-lighted days, pander to war. Worse than all, troubled men, seeing the world suddenly bereft of justice and of mercy, lose courage, and whisper in the silence of their own sad hearts, “There is no God.”
Meanwhile, the assaulted churches take, as is natural, somewhat conflicting views of the situation. Roman Catholics have been disposed to think that the persecutions of the Church in France are bearing bitter fruit; and at least one American Cardinal has spoken of the war as God’s punishment for this offence. But if the Almighty appointed Belgium to be the whipping boy for the sins of France, we shall have to revise our notions of divine justice and beneficence. Belgium is the most Catholic country in Europe. Hundreds of the priests and nuns expelled from France found shelter within its frontiers. But if it were as stoutly Lutheran or Calvinistic, it would be none the less innocent of France’s misdemeanours. Moreover, it is worthy of note that French priests, far from moralizing over the situation, have rallied to their country’s call. The bugbear, “clerical peril,” has dropped out of sight. In its place are confidence on the one side, and unstinted devotion on the other. Exiled monks have returned to fight in the French army. Students of theological seminaries have been no less keen than other students to take up arms for France. Abbés have served as sergeants and ensigns, dying as cheerfully as other men in the monotonous carnage on the Aisne. Wounded priests have shrived their wounded comrades on the battlefield. Everywhere the clergy are playing manly and patriotic parts, forgetting what wrong was done them, remembering what name they bear.
England, with more precision, outlined her views in the manifesto issued September 29, 1914, and designed as a reply to those German theologians who had asked English “Evangelical Christians” to hold back their hands from blood-shed. The manifesto was signed by Bishops and Archbishops of the Church of England, and by leading Nonconformists, all of whom found themselves for once in heartfelt amity. It is a plain-spoken document, declaring that truth and honour (it might have added safety) are better things than peace; and that Christian England endorses without reservation the rightness of the war. One of the signers, the Bishop of London, is chaplain to the London Rifle Brigade. No doubt about _his_ sentiments. The words of another, the Archbishop of York, are simple, sincere, and pleasantly free from patronage of the Almighty. “I dare to say that we can carry this cause without shame or misgiving into the presence of Him who is the Judge of the whole earth, and ask Him to bless it.”
As for Germany, it may be, as some enthusiasts assert, that her “creative power in religion,” keeping pace with her “genius for empire,” will turn her out a brand-new faith, the “world-faith” foreseen by Treitschke, a religion of valour and of unceasing effort. Or it may be that the God of her fathers will content her, seeing that she leaves Him so little to do. Like Cromwell, who was a religious man (his thanksgiving for the massacre at Drogheda was as heartfelt as any offered by the Kaiser, or by the Kaiser’s grandfather), Germany keeps her powder dry.
Christianity and war have walked together down the centuries. How could it be otherwise? We have to reckon with humanity, and humanity is not made over every hundred years. Science has multiplied instruments of destruction, but the heart of the soldier is the same. It is an anachronism, this human heart, just as war is an anachronism, but it still beats. Nothing sacred and dear could have survived upon the earth had men not fought for their women, their homes, their individual honour, and their national life. And while men stay men, they must give up their lives when the hour strikes. How shall they believe that, dying on the frontiers of their invaded countries, or at the gates of their besieged towns, they sin against the law of Christ?
Heroism is good for the soul, and it bears as much practical fruit as lawmaking. It goes further in moulding and developing the stuff of which a great nation is made. “There is a flower of honour, there is a flower of chivalry, there is a flower of religion.” So Sainte-Beuve equips the spirit of man; and the soldier, no less than the civilian, cherishes this threefold bloom. Because he “lives dangerously,” he feels the need of God. Because his life is forfeit, there is about him the dignity of sacrifice. Anna Robeson Burr, in her volume on “The Autobiography,” quotes an illustrative passage from the Commentaries of that magnificent fighter and lucid writer, Blaise de Monluc, maréchal de France: “Que je me trouve, en voyant les ennemis, en telle peur que je sentois le cœur et les membres s’affoiblir et trembler. Puis, ayant dit mes petites prières latines, je sentois tout-à-coup venir un chaleur au cœur et aux membres.”
“Petites prières latines!” A monkish patter. And this was a man belonging to the “educated classes,” and a citizen of the world. Sully, in his memoirs, tells us that, at the siege of Montmélian, a cannon-shot struck the ground close to the spot where he and the king were standing, showering upon them earth and little flint stones; whereupon Henry swiftly and unconsciously made the sign of the cross. “Now I know,” said the delighted Sully,--himself an unswerving Protestant,--“now I know that you are a good Catholic.”
We must always reckon with humanity, unless, indeed, we are orators, living in a world of words, and marshalling unconquerable theories against unconquered facts. The French priest at Soissons who distributed to the Turcos little medals of the Blessed Virgin may not have been an advanced thinker, but he displayed a pleasant acquaintance with mankind. There was no time to explain to these unbelievers the peculiar efficacy of the medals; for that he trusted to Our Lady; but their presentation was a link between the Catholic soldier and the Moslem, who were fighting side by side for France. Perhaps this priest remembered that close at hand, in the hamlet of Saint-Médard, lie the relics of Saint Sebastian, Christian gentleman and martyr, who was an officer in the imperial bodyguard of Diocletian, rendering to Cæsar the service that was Cæsar’s, until the hour came for him to render to God the life that was always God’s.
The wave of religious emotion which sweeps over a nation warring for its life is not the mere expression of that nation’s sharpened needs; it is not only a cry for help where help is sorely needed. It is part of man’s responsiveness to the call of duty, his sense of self-sacrifice in giving his body to death in order that his country may live. “Religion,” says Mr. Stephen Graham, “is never shaken down by war. The intellectual dominance is shaken and falls; the spiritual powers are allowed to take possession of men’s beings.” That a truth so simple and so often illustrated should fail to be understood, proves the torpor of materialism. A sad-minded American writer, commenting on the destruction of the Cathedral of Rheims, made the amazing discovery that the sorrow and indignation evoked by this national crime showed an utter collapse of Christianity. Every one, he said, bewailed the loss to the world. No one bewailed the loss to religion. Therefore faith lay dead.
That religion can lose nothing by the destruction of her monuments is the solace of Christian souls. Her churches lie in crumbling ruins. Ypres, Pervyse, Soissons, Revigny, Souain, Maurupt, Étavigny. Everywhere stand the shattered walls of what was once a church, with here and there an altar burned or hacked, and a mutilated crucifix. But the faith that built these churches is as unassailable as the souls of the men who died for them. There are things beyond the reach of “high explosives,” and it is not for them we grieve.
It is a common saying that the New Testament affords no vindication of war, which is natural enough, not being penned as a manual for nations. But Catholic theology, having been called on very early to pronounce judgment upon this recurrent incident of life, has defined with absolute exactitude what, in the eyes of the Church, justifies, and what necessitates war. From a mass of minute detail,--laws laid down by Saint Thomas Aquinas and other doctors of the Church,--I venture to quote two salient points, the first dealing with the nature of a right, the second with the nature of a title.
“Every perfect right, that is, every right involving in others an obligation in justice of deference thereto, if it is to be an efficacious, and not an illusory power, carries with it as a last appeal the subsidiary right of coercion. A perfect right, then, implies the right of physical force to defend itself against infringement, to recover the subject-matter of right unjustly withheld, or to exact its equivalent, and to inflict damage in the exercise of this coercion, wherever coercion cannot be exercised without such damage.”
“The primary title of a state to go to war is, first, the fact that the state’s rights are menaced by foreign aggression not otherwise to be prevented than by war; second, the fact of actual violation of right not otherwise reparable; third, the need of punishing the threatening or invading power, for the security of the future. From the nature of the proved right, those three facts are necessarily just titles, and the state whose rights are in jeopardy is itself the judge thereof.”
I am aware that theology is not popular, save with theologians; but after reading Treitschke and Bernhardi on the one hand, and the addresses delivered at “peace demonstrations” on the other, it is inexpressibly refreshing to follow straight thought instead of crooked thought, or words that hold no thought at all. I am also aware that Catholic wars have not always been waged along the lines laid down by Catholic theology; but this is beside the point. The Mosaic law was not the less binding upon the Jews because they were always breaking it. Nor are we prepared to say that they would have been as sound morally without a law so constantly infringed. It is well to know that, even in the spirit, there is such a thing as justice and admitted right.
To prate about the wickedness of war without drawing a clear line of demarcation between aggressive and defensive warfare, between violating a treaty and upholding it, is to lose our mental balance, to substitute sentiment for truth. The very wrongness of the one implies logically the rightness of the other. And whatever is morally right is in accord with Christianity. To speak loosely of war as unchristian is to ignore not only the Christian right, but the Christian duty, which rests with every nation and with every man to protect that of which nation and man are lawful protectors. Even aggressive warfare is not necessarily a denial of the Christianity it affronts. Crooked thinking comes naturally to men, and the power of self-deception is without bounds. God is not deceived; but the instinctive desire of the creature to hoodwink the Creator, to induce Him--for a consideration--to compound a felony, is revealed in every page of history, and under every aspect of civilization. The necessity which man has always felt of being on speaking terms with his own conscience, built churches and abbeys in the days of faith, and endows educational institutions in this day of enlightenment; but it very imperfectly controlled, or controls, the actions of men or of nations. If our confidence in the future were not based upon ignorance of the past, we should better understand, and more courageously face, the harsh realities of life.
Two lessons taught by the war are easily learned. There is no safety in talk, and there is no assurance that the world’s heritage of beauty, its triumphs of art and of architecture, will descend to our children and our grandchildren. We never reckoned on this loss of our common inheritance. We never thought that the gracious gifts made by the far past to the dim future could be so speedily destroyed, and that a single day would suffice to impoverish all coming generations. What can the pedantry, the “culture,” of the twentieth century give to compensate us for the loss of Rheims Cathedral? The deficit is too heavy to be counted. Not France alone, but the civilized world, has been robbed beyond measure and beyond retrievement. Life is less good to all of us, and will be less good to those who come after us, because this great sacrilege has been committed. As for culture,--the careful destruction of the University of Louvain proves once and forever that scholarship is no more sacred than art or than religion, when the tide of invasion breaks upon a doomed and helpless land.
This affords food for thought. Italy, for example, is the treasure-house of the world. She is the guardian of the beauty she created, and to her shrine goes all mankind in pilgrimage. How long would her cathedrals, her palaces, her galleries, survive assault? What would be left of Venice after a week’s bombardment? What of Florence, or of Rome? There is no such thing as safety in war. There is no such thing as safety in neutrality. Italy has more to lose than all the other nations of Europe, and is there one of us who would not be a partner in her loss?
And the United States? “God’s own land”? Are we forever secure? True we have little to fear in the destruction of our public monuments, which are rather like the public monuments of Prussia, the ornate edifices and ramping statues of Hamburg and Berlin. It might be a pious duty to let them go. But we have homes which are as precious to us as were once the devastated homes of Belgium to happy men and women; and we confide their safety to treaties, to scraps of paper, like the one which made Belgium inviolate. If we are in search of life’s ironies, let us note that a Roman Catholic Peace Conference was to have been convened in Liège, the very month that Germany struck her blow. A fortnight’s delay, and delegates might have been making speeches on the concord of nations, while the streets of Aerschot ran blood, and Wespelaer was looted and burned.
Yet so deep-rooted is sentiment in our souls, so averse are we to facing facts, that to-day a “peace meeting” will pack a convention hall in any town of any state in the Union. We are as pleased to hear that “the brotherhood of man is the only basis for enduring peace among the nations” as if this shadowy brotherhood had taken form and substance. We listen with undiminished trustfulness to Mr. Bryan’s oft-repeated plans for ending the war by remonstrating soberly with the warriors. We see hope in conferences, in speeches, in telegrams to Washington, in appeals “from the mothers of the nation.” How many months have passed since Mr. La Follette evoked our enthusiastic response to these well-timed, well-balanced words? “The accumulated and increasing horrors of the European wars are creating a great tidal wave of public opinion that sweeps aside all specious reasoning, and admits of but one simple, common-sense, humane conclusion,--a demand for peace and disarmament among civilized nations.”
To this we all cried Amen! But as there was nobody to bell the cat, the war went bloodily on. The question who was to “demand” peace, and of whom it was to be demanded, was one which Mr. La Follette could not, or at least did not, answer. “Public opinion” has a weighty sound. All our lives we have pinned our faith to this bodiless thing, and it has failed us in our need. Why, if it can work miracles in the future, should it have been so helpless in these two sad years? The Hague Conference of 1907 laid down definite rules of warfare,--rules to which the nations of Europe subscribed with cheerful unanimity. They forbade pillage, the levying of indemnities, the seizure of funds belonging to local authorities, collective penalties for individual acts, the conveying of troops or munitions across the territory of a neutral power, and all terrorization of a country by harshness to its civilian population. The object of these rules, every one of which has been broken in Belgium, was to keep war within the limits set by what Mr. Henry James calls the “high decency” of Christian civilization. Public opinion has been as powerless to enforce the least of these rules as it has been powerless to prevent the sinking of unarmed merchant ships, the drowning of men, women and children belonging to neutral nations. How can we hope that a force so feeble to-day will control the world to-morrow?
If the Allies emerge triumphantly from the war, and England demands the reduction of armaments, then this good result will have been gained by desperate fighting, not by noble sentiments. We, whose sentiments have been of the noblest, shall have had no real share in the work. If Germany conquers, and stands unassailable, a great military world-power, fired with a sense of her exalted destiny, rich with the spoils of Europe, and holding in her mailed hands the power to enforce her will, is it at all likely that our excellent arguments will prevail upon her to reverse her policy, and enfeeble herself for our safety? A successful aggressive warfare does not pave the way to a lasting and honourable peace. This is one of the truths we may learn, if we will, from history.
For years we have chosen to believe that arbitration would ensure for the world a maximum of comfort at a minimum of cost, and that the religion of humanity would achieve what the religion of Christ has never achieved,--the mythical brotherhood of man. From this dream we have been rudely awakened; but, being awake, let us at least recognize and respect that simple and great quality which makes every man the defender of his home, the guardian of his rights, the avenger of his shameful wrongs.
We, too, have fought bravely in our day. We, too, have known what it is to do all that man can do, and to bear all that man must bear; and it was not in the hour of our trial that we talked about bankrupt Christianity. When Serbia made her choice between death and the uttermost dishonour, she vindicated the sacred right of humanity. When Belgium with incredible courage defended her own good name and the safety of France, she stood erect before God and man, and laid down her life for her friend.
Women and War
The only agreeable thing to be recorded in connection with Europe’s sudden and disastrous war is the fact that people stopped talking about women, and began to talk about men. For the past decade, women have persistently occupied the front of the stage, and men have seemed a negligible factor; useful in their imperfect way, but hopelessly unproblematic. Then Austria delivered her ultimatum, Germany marched her armies across a peaceful earth, and men, plain men, became supremely important, as defenders of their imperilled homes. In this swift return to primitive conditions, primitive qualities reasserted their value. France, Belgium, England called to their sons for succour, and the arms of these men were strengthened because they had women to protect.
A casual study of newspapers before and after the proclamation of war is profoundly instructive. Even the illustrated papers and periodicals tell their tale, and spare us the printed page. Pictures of recruits in place of club-women. Pictures of camps in place of convention halls. Pictures of Red Cross nurses bending over hospital beds, in place of militants raiding Buckingham Palace. Pictures of peaceful ladies sewing and knitting for soldiers, in place of formidable committees baiting Mr. Wilson, or pursuing the more elusive Mr. Asquith. Pictures of pitying young girls handing cups of broth and the ever-welcome cigarettes to weary volunteers, in place of suffragists haranguing the mob of Hyde Park. Never was there such a noteworthy illustration of Scott’s archaic line,--
“O woman! in our hours of ease.”
Never did the simplicities of life so triumphantly efface its complexities.
As the war deepened, and the tale of its devastations and brutalities robbed even the saddened onlooker of all gladness in life, it was natural that women, while faithful to their rôle of ministering angels, should mingle blame with pity. It was also natural, though less pardonable, that their censure should be of that vague order which holds everybody responsible for what somebody has done. Perhaps it was even natural that, confident in their own unproved wisdom and untried efficiency, they should believe and say that, had women shared the control of civilized governments, the world would now be at peace.
Here we enter the realms of pure conjecture,--realms in which everything can be asserted and denied, nothing proved or disproved. It may be that when women become voters, legislators, and officeholders, they will do the better work for this profound and touching belief in their own perfectibility. Or it may be that a perilous self-confidence will--until corrected by experience--lead them astray. These speculations would be of small concern, were it not that the claim to moral superiority, which women advance without a blush, disposes many of them to ignore the hard conditions under which men struggle, and fail, and struggle again. It narrows their outlook, confuses their judgment, and cheapens their point of view.
When a prominent American feminist said smartly that war is the hysteria of men, she betrayed that lamentable lack of perspective which ignorance can only partly excuse. The heartless shallowness of such a speech commended it to many hearers; but of all generalizations it is the least legitimate. There was as little hysteria in the well-ordered, deeply laid plans of Germany as there was in the heroic defence of France and Belgium, or in the slow awakening of England, who took a deal of rousing from her sleep. “Most women,” says Mr. Martin Chaloner, “regard politics as a kind of foolishness that men play at.” But the campaign in Belgium is not to be classed as “foolishness” or “hysteria.” The attack was a crime past all forgiveness; the defence was one of flawless valour. If it be hysterical to prize home and country more than life, then we must re-write that temperate old axiom which has swayed men’s souls for centuries: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”