Chapter 16

Holland was in February 1911 compelled to buy twenty-four inferior big guns from Krupp, without contract or competition, for the defence of her Javanese possessions, which no one thinks of attacking. Do you suppose that Krupp's Company regards war as disadvantageous, or circulates Norman Angell's book for a new gospel? "What plunder!" cried Blücher, looking over London from St. Paul's. Nowadays he would not wait to plunder a foreign nation; he would invest in a Dreadnought company, and plunder his own. Our naval expenditure in 1911-12 amounted to £46,000,000; our army expenditure to nearly £28,000,000--a total of £73,650,000 for what is called defence! Ten years ago we were in the midst of a most expensive war. Nevertheless, in ten years the annual expenditure upon armaments has increased by £14,000,000--far more than enough to double our Old Age Pensions. Within thirty years the naval estimates have more than quadrupled. Are we to suppose that no one grows fat on the people's money? _Quidquid delirant reges_. The kings of the earth stood up and violently raged together; their subjects died. But now the kings of the earth are raging financiers with a shrewd eye to business, and their subjects starve to pay them. We used to be told that the man who paid the piper called the tune. Do the people call the tune of peace or war? Not at all. The ruling classes both call the tune and pocket the pay.

There is one other point that may obscure the hope arising from Norman Angell's book. His main contention concerns wars between great Powers, nearly equally matched--Powers of high civilisation, with elaborate systems of credit and complicated interdependence of trade. But most recent wars have been attacks--defensive attacks, of course--upon small, powerless, and semi-civilised nations by the great Powers. Under the pretext of extending law and order, justice, peace, good government, and the blessings of the Christian faith, a great Power attacks a small and half-organised people with the object of taking up the White Man's Burden, capturing markets, contracting for railways, and extending territory. To wars of this kind, I think, Norman Angell's comforting theory does not apply--the great illusion does not come in. A strong Power may conquer Morocco, or Persia, or seize Bosnia, or enslave Finland, or penetrate Tibet, or maintain its hold on India, or occupy Egypt, or even destroy the Dutch Republics of South Africa, without disorganising its own commerce or raising a panic on its own credit. Most actual fighting has lately been of this character. It aims at the suppression of freedom in small or unarmed nationalities, the absorption of independent countries into great empires. It is the modern counterpart of the slave-trade. It is supported by similar arguments, and may be quite lucrative, as the slave-trade was.

Actual warfare generally takes this form now, but behind it one may always feel the latent or diplomatic warfare that consists in the calculation of armaments. A great Power says: "How much of Persia, Turkey, China, or Morocco do I dare to swallow? Germany, Russia, France, Japan, England, or Spain (as the case may be) will not like it if I swallow much. But what force could she bring against me, if it came to extremities, and what force could I set against hers?" Then the Powers set to counting up army corps and Dreadnoughts. In Dreadnoughts they seldom get their addition-sums right, but they do their poor best, strike a balance, and declare that a satisfactory agreement has been come to. This latent war is expensive, but cheaper than real war--and it is not bloody; it does not shock credit, though it weakens it; it does not ruin commerce, though it hampers it. The drain upon the nations is exhausting, but it does not kill men so horribly, and our rulers do not feel it; for the people pay, and the concession-hunters, the contractors, the company directors, and suchlike people with whom our rulers chiefly associate, grow very fat.

If, then, Norman Angell's hopeful theory applies only partially to these common wars of Imperial aggrandisement and the perpetual diplomatic war by comparison of armaments, to what may we look for hope? Lord Rosebery would be the last person to whom one would look for hope in general. His hope is too like despair for prudence to smother. Yet, in his speech at the Press banquet during the Imperial Conference of 1909, when he spoke of our modern civilisation "rattling into barbarism," he gave a hint of the movement to which alone I am inclined to trust. "I can only foresee," he exclaimed, "the working-classes of Europe uniting in a great federation to cry: 'We will have no more of this madness and foolery, which is grinding us to powder!'" The words may not have been entirely sincere--something had to be said for the Liberal Press tables, which cheered while the Imperialists sat glum; but there, I believe, lies the ultimate and only possible chance of hope. We must revolutionise our Governments; we must recognise the abject folly of allowing these vital questions of peace, war, and armaments to be decided according to the caprice or advantage of a single man, a clique of courtiers, a gang of adventurers, or the Cabal of a Cabinet formed from the very classes which have most to gain and least to lose, whether from actual war or the competition in armaments. Over this Executive, whether it is called Emperor, King, Court, or Cabinet, the people of the nation has no control--or nothing like adequate control--in foreign affairs and questions of war. In England in the year 1910 not a single hour was allowed for Foreign Office debate in the Commons. In no country of Europe have the men and women of the State a real voice in a matter which touches every man and every woman so closely as war touches them--even distant war, but far more the kind of war that devastates the larder, sweeps out the drawing-room, encamps in the back garden, and at any moment may reduce the family by half.[17] One remembers that picture in Carlyle, how thirty souls from the British village of Dumdrudge are brought face to face with thirty souls from a French Dumdrudge, after infinite effort. The word "Fire!" is given, and they blow the souls out of one another:

"Had these men any quarrel?" asks the Sartor. "Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart--were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe there was even, unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their Governors had fallen out; and, instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot."

Slowly and dimly the Dumdrudges of the world--the peasants and artisans, the working people, the people who have most right to count--are beginning to recognise the absurdity of paying and dying for wars of which they know nothing, and in the quarrels of kings and ministers for whom they have neither reverence nor love. "What is the British Empire to me," I heard a Whitechapel man say, "when I have to open the window before I get room to put on my trousers?" A section of the country was opposed to the Crimean War; a far larger section was opposed to the Boer War. Both were ridiculed, persecuted, and maltreated; but nearly everyone now admits that both were right. In the next unjust or unreasonable war the peace party will be stronger still. Something has thus been gained; but the greatest gain ever yet won for the cause of peace was the refusal of the Catalonian reservists to serve in the war against the Riff mountaineers of Morocco in July 1909. "Risk our lives and the subsistence of our little families to secure dividends for shareholders in mining concessions illegally inveigled from a semi-savage chieftain? Never! We will raise hell rather, and die in revolution upon our native streets." So Barcelona flared to heaven, and for nearly a week the people held the vast city. I have seen many noble, as well as many terrible, events, but none more noble or of finer promise for mankind than the sudden uprising of the Catalan working people against a dastardly and inglorious war, waged for the benefit of a few speculators in Paris and Madrid. Ferrer had no direct part in that rising; his only part lay in sowing the seed of freedom by his writings. It was a pity he had no other part. He lost an opportunity such as comes in few men's lives--and he was executed just the same.[18]

The event was small and brief, but it was one of the most significant in modern times. If the working classes refuse to fight, what will the kings, ministers, speculators, and contractors do? Will they go out to fight each other? Then, indeed, warfare would become a blessing undisguised, and we could freely join the poet in calling carnage God's daughter. When I was a child I drew up a scheme for a vast British army recruited from our lunatic asylums. With lunatic soldiers, as I explained to my mother, the heavier our losses, the greater would be our gain. It seems to me still a promising idea. But an army recruited from kings, lords, Cabinet Ministers, Members of Parliament, speculators, contractors, and officials--the people who are the primary originators of our wars--would have even greater advantages, and the losses in battle would be balanced by still greater compensations.

The Barcelona rising was, indeed, full of promise. It marked the gradual approach of a time when the working-people, who always supply most of the men to be killed in war, will refuse to fight for the ruling classes, as they would now refuse to fight for dynasties. If they refuse to fight in the ordinary Government wars, either war will cease, or it will rise to the higher stage of war between class and class. It will become either civil war--the most terrible and difficult, but the finest kind of war, because some principle of the highest value must be at stake before civil war can arise; or it will become a combined war of the classes in various countries between whom there is a feeling of sympathy and common interest. That would take the form of a civil war extended throughout Europe, and perhaps America and the highly-developed parts of Asia. The allied forces in the various countries would then strike where the need was greatest, the French or English army corps of working-men going to the assistance of Russian or German working-men against the forces of despotism or capital. But a social war on that scale, however desirable, is like the Spanish fleet in the _Critic_--it is not yet in sight. The growing perfection of modern arms gives too enormous an advantage to established forces. The movement is much more likely to take the Barcelona form of refusal to fight; and if the peoples of Europe could combine in that determination, the effect would be irresistible. This international movement is, in fact, very slowly, growing. The telegraph, the railway, cheap tickets, Cook's tours, the power of reading, and even the peculiar language taught as French in our schools, combine to wear away the hostility of peoples. The "beastly foreigner" is almost extinct. The man who has been for a week in Germany, or for a trip to lovely Lucerne, feels a reflected glory in saying those foreigners are not so bad. There was a fine old song with a refrain, "He's a good 'un when you know him, but you've got to know him first." Well, we are getting to know the foreigner whom we once called "beastly."

Ultimately the best, the only hope for peace lies in the determination of the peoples not to do anything so silly as to settle the quarrels of their rulers by killing each other. But then come the deeper questions: Do people love peace? Do they hate war? Would the total abolition of war be a good thing for the world? After a lengthy period of peace there usually arises a craving for battle. Nearly fifty years of peace followed the defeat of the Persians in Greece, and at the end of that time, just before the Peloponnesian War, which was to bring ruin on the country, Thucydides tells us that all Greece, being ignorant of the realities of war, stood a-tiptoe with excitement. It was the same in England just before our disastrous South African War, when readers of Kipling glutted themselves with imaginary slaughter, and Henley cried to our country that her whelps wanted blooding. In England this martial spirit was more violent than in Greece, because, when war actually came, the Greeks were themselves exposed to all its horrors and sufferings, but in England the bloodthirsty mind could enjoy the conflict in a suburban train with a half-penny paper. As in bull-fights or gladiatorial shows, the spectators watched the expensive but entertaining scene of blood and death from a safe and comfortable distance. They gave the cash and let the credit go; they thoroughly appreciated the rumble of a distant drum. "Blood! blood!" they cried. "Give us more blood to make our own blood circulate more agreeably under our unbroken skins!" Christianity joined in the cry through the mouths of its best accredited representatives. As at the Crucifixion it is written, "On that day Herod and Pilate were friends," so on the outbreak of a singularly unjust, avaricious, and cruel war, the Christian Churches of England displayed for the first and last time some signs of unity. Canterbury and Armagh kissed each other, and the City Temple applauded the embraces of unrighteousness and war. Dean Farrar of Canterbury, concluding his glorification of the hell which I then saw enacted in South Africa, quoted with heartfelt approval the Archbishop of Armagh's poem:--

"And, as I note how nobly natures form Under the war's red rain, I deem it true That He who made the earthquake and the storm Perhaps makes battles too.

Thus as the heaven's many-coloured flames At sunset are but dust in rich disguise, The ascending earthquake-dust of battle frames God's picture in the skies."[19]

We are no longer compelled to regard the dogmas of Christianity or the opinions of eminent Christians as authoritative. The appeal to Christianity, which used to be regarded as decisive in favour of peace, is no longer decisive one way or other. Christ's own teaching is submitted to critical examination like any other teacher's, and I should be the last to decry the representatives of the Prince of Peace for acclaiming the virtues of war, if they think their Master was mistaken. When bishops and deans and leading Nonconformists thirst for war's red rain, we must take account of their craving as part of man's nature. We must remember also that war has popular elements sometimes overlooked in its general horror. It is believed that in the American Civil War nearly a million men lost their lives; but against this loss we must set the peculiar longevity with which the survivors have been endowed, and the increasing number of heroes who enjoyed the State's reward for their services of fifty years before. Even during the South African War certain compensations were found. A charitable lady went on a visit of condolence to a poor woman whose husband's name had just appeared in the list of the killed at Spion Kop. "Ah, Mum," exclaimed the widow with feeling, "you don't know how many happy homes this war has made!"

Before we absolutely condemn war we must take account of these religious, medicinal, and domestic considerations. On the side of peace I think it is of little avail to plead the horrors and unreason of war. We all know how horrible and silly it is for two countries to pretend to settle a dispute by ordering large numbers of innocent men to kill each other. If horrors would stop it, anyone who has known war could a tale unfold surpassing all that the ghost of Hamlet's father had seen in hell. There are sights on a battlefield under shell-fire, and in a country devastated by troops, so horrible that even war correspondents have silently agreed to leave them undescribed. But the truth is that people who are not present in war enjoy the horror. That is what they like reading about in their back-gardens, clubs, and city offices. The more you talk of the horrors of war the more warlike they become, and I have met no one quite so bloodthirsty as the warrior of peace. Nor is it any good pleading for reason when about ninety-nine per cent. of every man's motives are not reasonable, but spring from passion, taste, or interest. The appeal even to expense falls flat in a country like ours, where about 200,000 horses, valued at £12,000,000, and maintained at a charge of £8,000,000 a year, are kept entirely for the pursuit of foxes, which are preserved alive at great cost in order that they may be pursued to death.[20] Protests against the horrors, the unreason, and even the expense of war have hitherto had very small effect.

The real argument in favour of war welcomes horror, defies reason, and disregards expense. There are certain military qualities and aspects of life, it says, that are worth preserving at the cost of all the horror, unreason, and waste of war. The stern military character, brave but tender, is a type of human nature for which we cannot pay too much. Consider physical courage alone, how valuable it is, and how rare. With what speed the citizen runs at the first glimpse of danger! With what pleasure or shamefaced cowardice citizens look on while women are being violently and indecently assaulted when attempting to vindicate their political rights! How gladly everyone shouts with the largest crowd! Consider how many noble actions men leave undone through fear of being hurt or killed. "Dogs! would you live for ever?" cried Frederick the Great to his soldiers, in defeat; and most of us would certainly answer: "Yes, we would, if you please!" Only through war, or the training for war, says the argument, can this loathly cowardice be kept in check. Only by war can the spirit be maintained that redeems the world from sinking into a Pigs' Paradise. Only in the expectation or reality of war can life be kept sweet, strong, and at its height. War is life in extremes; it is worth preserving even for its discipline and training.

"Manhood training [said Mr. Garvin, editor of the _Observer_, in the issue of January 22, 1911]--manhood training has become the basis of public life, not only in every great European State, but in young democratic countries, like Australia and South Africa. 'One vote, one rifle,' says ex-President Steyn.... As a means of developing the physical efficiency of whole nations, of increasing their patriotic cohesion, of implanting in individuals the sense of political reality and responsibility, no substitute for manhood training has yet been discovered."

This kind of argument implies despair of perpetual, or even of long-continued, peace. It is true that those who advocate a national training of all our manhood for war generally urge upon us that it is the best security for peace. In the same way, peaceful Anarchists might plead that they maintained several enormous bomb-factories in order to impress upon rulers the advantages of freedom. But if peace were the real and only object of Conscription, and if Conscription precluded the probability of war, military training, after some years, would almost certainly decline, and its supposed advantages would be lost. When you breed game-cocks, they will fight; but if you forbid cock-fighting, the breed will decline. You cannot have training for war without the expectation of war. For many years I was a strong advocate of national service, even though I knew it would never be adopted in this country until we had seen the realities of war in our very midst, and had sat in morning trains to the City stopped by the enemy's batteries outside Liverpool Street and London Bridge. I also foresaw the extreme difficulty of enforcing military training upon Quakers, the Salvation Army, the Peace Society, and many Nonconformists and Rationalists. Nevertheless, twenty-five years ago I advocated Conscription in a carefully-reasoned article that appeared in Mr. Stead's _Pall Mall Gazette_. It was received with a howl of rage and derision by both parties in the State, and by all newspapers that noticed it at all. It is significant--perhaps terribly significant--that it would not be received with derision now, but that nearly the whole of one party and the great majority of newspapers would welcome it only too gladly.

It seemed to me at that time--and it seems to me still--one of the most horrible things in modern British life that we bribe the unemployed, that we compel them by fear of starvation, to do our killing and dying for us. I have passed more men into the army, probably, than any recruiting sergeant, and I have never known a man who wished to recruit unless he was unemployed. The Recruiting Report issued by the War Office for 1911 shows ninety per cent. of the recruits "out of work." I should have put the percentage still higher. But when you next see a full company of a hundred soldiers, and reflect that ninety of them have been persuaded to kill and die for you simply through fear of starvation under our country's social system--I say, whether you seek peace or admire war, the thought is horrible; it is hardly to be endured.

To wipe out this hideous shame, to put ourselves all in one boat, and, if war is licensed murder, at all events to share the murder that we license, and not to starve the poor into criminals for our own relief, perhaps Conscription would not be too high a price to pay. Other advantages are more obvious--the physical advantage of two years' regular food and healthy air and exercise for rich and poor alike, the social advantage of the mixture of all classes in the ranks, the moral advantage of giving the effeminate sons of luxury a stern and bitter time. For all this we would willingly pay a very heavy price. I would pay almost any price.

But should we pay the price of compulsion? That is the only price that makes me hesitate. I used to cherish a frail belief in discipline and obedience to authority and the State. My belief in discipline is still alive--discipline in the sense of entire mutual confidence between comrades fighting for the same cause; but I have come to regard obedience to external authority as one of the most dangerous virtues. I doubt if any possible advantage could balance an increase of that danger; and every form of military life is almost certain to increase it. To me the chief peril of our time is the growing power of the State, its growing interference in personal opinion and personal life, the intrusion of an inhuman being called an expert or official into the most intimate, inexplicable, and changing affairs of our lives and souls, and the arrogant social legislation of a secret and self-appointed Cabal or Cabinet, which refuses even to consult the wishes of that half of the population which social restrictions touch most nearly. If general military service would tend to increase respect and obedience to external authority of this kind, it might be too big a price to pay for all its other advantages. And I do think it would tend to increase that abhorrent virtue of indiscriminate obedience. Put a man in uniform, and ten to one he will shoot his mother, if you order him. Yet the shame of our present enlistment by hunger is so overwhelming that I confess I still hesitate between the two systems, if we must assume that the continuance of war is inevitable, or to be desired.