Chapter 1

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The William Penn Lectures

HEROES IN PEACE

1920 Walter H. Jenkins, Printer Philadelphia

This is the sixth of the series of lectures known as the WILLIAM PENN LECTURES. They are supported by the Young Friends' Movement of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which was organized on Fifth month 13th, 1916, at Race Street Meeting House in Philadelphia, for the purpose of closer fellowship, for the strengthening of such association and the interchange of experience, of loyalty to the ideals of the Society of Friends, and for the preparation by such common ideals for more effective work through the Society of Friends for the growth of the Kingdom of God on earth.

The name of William Penn has been chosen because he was a Great Adventurer, who in fellowship with his friends started in his youth on the holy experiment of endeavoring "to live out the laws of Christ in every thought and word and deed," that these might become the laws and habits of the State.

John Haynes Holmes, of the Community Church, New York City, delivered this sixth lecture on "Heroes in Peace," at Race Street Meeting House, on Fifth month 9th, 1920.

Philadelphia, 1920.

Heroes in Peace

In an essay published some years ago on Thomas Carlyle's famous book, _Heroes and Hero Worship_, Prof. MacMechan, a well-known student of literature in England, makes the following observation: "In 1840, 'hero' meant, most probably, to nine Englishmen out of every ten, a general officer who had served in the Peninsula, or taken part in the last great fight with Napoleon, and who dined year after year with the Duke at Apsley House on the anniversary of Waterloo. To most people 'hero' means simply 'soldier,' and implies a human soul greatly daring and greatly enduring."

What Prof. MacMechan here tells us about the Englishman of 1840 is equally true of the Englishman of today--is true, indeed, of all peoples in all ages of history. Heroism has nearly always been taken to imply physical courage; physical courage has always found its most terrible and dramatic expression in warfare; and, therefore, by a natural association of ideas, the hero has come to be identified with the soldier. When we think of heroes, we almost instinctively find ourselves thinking of armored champions of Greece and Rome, who were helped to immortality by Plutarch, whom Emerson calls "the doctor and historian of heroism"; of King Arthur, and his knights of the Round Table; of Harold and his men of iron on the field of Hastings; of the Crusaders, who marched to the East with the sword in the one hand and the crucifix in the other, to wrest the holy city from the profaning clutch of the hated Moslem. Or, coming down to the more modern times, if we speak of heroism to the Frenchman, he thinks of the first Emperor and the old guard which "dies but never surrenders"; to the Italian, he hails the names of Garibaldi and the Thousand; to the Englishman, he acclaims the "thin red line of heroes" who held the field of Waterloo, conquered India and Egypt, and recently defended the Empire from the onslaughts of the Germans. And the same thing holds true of the American! To you and to me, the word "hero" means George Washington and the ragged Continentals who starved and froze amid the snowdrifts of Valley Forge; Commodore Perry and the sailors who shattered the British fleet upon the waters of Lake Erie; General Grant and the boys in blue who fought and conquered General Lee and the equally heroic boys in gray. The national heroes of all countries are soldiers. Walk the streets of any city in any land, and everywhere you will see statues of military chieftains, as though these were the only heroes the world had ever produced who were worthy of commemorative monuments. "To most people," as Prof. MacMechan has well said, "'hero' means simply soldier"; or, if we be enlightened enough now and then to extend this title to men who have achieved fame in other walks of life, it is because we see in them some analogy to the warrior. "It is to the military attitude of the soul," says Emerson, "that we give the name of heroism."

Now that the universal instinct of humanity to identify the hero and the soldier is sound and wholesome, to a large extent, we must all agree. I would be among the last, I trust, to deny to the soldier the possession of those heroic qualities which are so manifestly his. I must confess that I have both admiration and love for the men who march away to trench and battlefield, there to fling away their lives as little things for the sake of some great cause which they hold to be supremely dear. "Every heroic act," says Emerson again, in his essay on Heroism, "measures itself by its contempt of some external good"; and what man, I ask you, has more contempt for certain external goods, and therefore more heroism, than the loyal soldier? Material comfort, physical security, the familiar sights and sounds of home, the love of friends and kindred, the laughter of little children, the dreams of quiet old age, the precious boon of life--these are some of the more elementary things which a man shows to us that he holds in contempt, as compared with the happiness and safety of his native land, when he voluntarily enlists for active service. There are some soldiers, of course, who are mere adventurers. There are some others to whom war is nothing more nor less than a trade. There are still others who see in war only an opportunity for the release of the brutish passions which are inconsistent with the ordered ways of peace. But even these men bear a certain aspect of heroism. "I naturally love a soldier," says Sir Thomas Browne, in his _Religio Medica_, "and honor those tattered and contemptible regiments that will die at the command of a sergeant." And when we come to the ordinary man who goes to the front in time of war, such as the farmer described by John Masefield in his elegy, August, 1914, who looks with fond eyes upon his furrowed fields, his barns, his hay-ricks, his "friendly horses"--

"The rooks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen * * * The fields of home, the byres, the market towns"

and then, with weary heart, leaves all these things behind to perish in "the misery of the soaking trench," we find the sublimity of sacrifice. The true soldier is indeed a hero. In this age, of all ages of human history, are we unable to give denial to this fact. Millions of men, on a dozen different battle-fronts, have recently taught us the heroisms which make war almost as glorious as it is hideous. Not a day passed during more than four terrible years, but what we read with tingling hearts how brave men suffered without complaint, and died without fear, for the countries that they loved. I remember, for example, reading on a certain day in 1916, in a single copy of an evening newspaper, of three young soldiers who were heroes. One was a German lad, unnamed, who was found stricken unto death by the side of a dead Englishman, whose wounds he had tried to staunch, and whose thirst he had quenched from the water of his own canteen--a second Sir Philip Sidney, nobler than the first, since he gave succor not to a friend but to an enemy. The second man was an Englishman, Capt. Alexander Seaton, who fell fighting bravely at the Dardanelles. A classical scholar of repute, a fellow in Pembroke College, Cambridge, devoted to his work as a tutor and lecturer in history, it was written of him, by one who knew and loved him, "Not a soldier by inclination, he left his peaceful life at Pembroke solely because he conceived that his duty lay that way, and that the hour had come for every man to strike a blow for his country." The third man was a Frenchman, a poet, Ernest Psichari by name, who fell at Verton, in Belgium. "His battery had been ordered to keep the enemy in check while the army was falling back," ran the story. "They were expected to hold their ground for a few hours, and they did so for a whole day; and when the last shell had been spent, officers and gunners were killed to a man on the guns they had taken care to render unusable."

Such are the stories which came to us through the period of the Great War. All of them are eloquent of the fact, are they not, that the instinct of humanity is right in its ascription of heroism to the soldier? If this instinct has gone astray, it is only in the tendency which it has shown to ascribe heroism exclusively to the soldier. In attempting to do full justice to the man who has fought and died amid the terrors of the battlefield, it has been tempted again and again to do something less than justice to the man who has fought and died as gallantly in fields less dramatic but no less terrible than those of war. For whether we judge heroism as involving contempt of comfort, hazard of death, or the simple eager quest for fullness of life, we find it, I believe, even more truly, though less frequently, characteristic of the circumstances of peace than those of war. It was upon this plain fact that William James sought to vindicate the possibility of what he called, in his famous essay of that title, "a moral equivalent of war." He affirmed that "the war party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues are absolute and permanent human goods." But, he continues, "patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form"; nor, we may add, its only present form. "It would be simply preposterous," says James again, "if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or Japanese. Great indeed is fear, but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it. The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper." And it is here that James urges, as his "moral equivalent of war," the conscription of our young men "to coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, to the frames of sky-scrapers," there to pay "their blood-tax--in the immemorial human warfare against nature." All of which means, among other things, that those men and women today who are already mining coal, and washing dishes, and making tunnels, and stoking furnaces, and building sky-scrapers, are already heroes, trained like the soldier to "the military ideals of hardihood and discipline!"

There is a heroism of peace comparable in every way to the heroism of war. Nay, we would go further and say that there is a heroism of peace superior in many ways to the heroism of war. The true soldier, as we have seen, is necessarily a hero; but the true hero is by no means necessarily a soldier. On the contrary, there have been thousands of men who have ascended to heights of heroic endeavor and achievement, to which the soldier from the very nature of his profession has never been able to attain. Emerson declares in his great essay that the heroism of war is heroism in "its rudest form." May we not also say, perhaps, that heroism of war is heroism in its easiest and therefore least extraordinary form? For there are certain circumstances surrounding the conduct of campaigns and the fighting of battles, which make heroism as simple and natural as, under other circumstances, it is difficult and unnatural. I am even tempted to go so far as to assert that a man can be a hero in war and still be a coward at heart. He can at least meet the test of heroism amid the fury of armed combat, with some degree of success, when he would crumple up before this test, like a rotten lance against a shield, under every other condition. Indeed, we have only to strip away the trappings, the artificial characteristics of militarism, in order to see how the heroism produced by war, even at its highest and best, is of an inferior type, as compared with the purer and nobler type of heroism produced by the ordinary and therefore more moral experience of peace. From this point of view, it seems to me that there are at least three circumstances, altogether peculiar to warfare, which make the heroism of the soldier to be easy, and therefore of a type distinctly lower than that manifested by men in other, more commonplace, less dramatic, but no less terrific crises of experience.

In the first place, let me point out that there is a pageantry about war, which makes even the meanest heart to beat with a deeper throb and thus feel a loftier courage than is its wont. There are the uniforms in which the soldiers are clad, the gleaming swords and rifles which they carry, the brilliant flags which flutter over their heads, the crashing music which marks the time for their marching feet. Everywhere, in camp, on the march, on the battlefield, there is color, glitter, glory, beauty of sight and sound, the whole paraphernalia of "pomp and circumstance." And all this has the inevitable effect of making it easy for the ordinary man to forget his fears and throw himself like a hero into the stress and strain of combat. Even those who hate war the worst and are therefore subject the least to its artificial glamor are swept away in spite of themselves. Richard Le Gallienne has written of this very experience in his famous poem, The Illusion of War. He starts out by confessing that he abhors war. "And yet," he says, "How sweet

"The sound along, the marching street of drum and fife" * * *

And he continues--

"* * * even my peace-abiding feet Go marching with the marching street, For yonder, yonder, goes the fife, And what care I for human life! The tears fill my astonished eyes And my full heart is like to break."

And then, recovering himself again, he points out how wicked it is to clothe such a monstrous thing as war in pageantry:

"* * * like a queen That in a garden of glory walks";

and brings against art the charge of "infamy" for hiding in music this "hideous grinning thing,"

"Till good men love the thing they loathe."

Now if all this tinsel glory of war has this effect on the mind of such a pacifist as Mr. Le Gallienne, what shall we say to its effect on the minds of men who have no particular convictions upon the subject? The fact of the matter is, there is no accident about all the artificial splendor which has been thrown about the conditions of warfare from time immemorial. The flags, the uniforms, the marching, the "heady music," have all attached themselves to war for the good and sufficient psychological reason that they exercise a transforming influence upon the human heart. Napoleon understood this when he issued his famous bulletins to his soldiers before going into battle. General Hancock understood this at Gettysburg when, in the fateful moments just preceding Pickett's charge, he rode along the crest of Cemetery Ridge clad in his dress uniform and mounted on a white horse with golden trappings. The Germans understood this when they sent their men into the conflict with the music of military bands and with the choral chants of Luther on their lips. Every humblest subaltern officer in any army understands this when he places the flag at the head of the moving regiment. Such appeals to the senses change men on the instant--make the best of them into saints and the worst of them into momentary heroes. They become stimulated as by some strange intoxicant, transformed as by some mystic conversion of the soul. They forget the horrors of the struggle, the peril of disaster, the chances of life and death. They are conscious only of glory and delight. Their eyes gleam, their hearts throb, the earth changes to beauty, the heavens break into song. And straightway deeds of valor become easy, heroism commonplace, and sacrifice the order of the day.

"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife, To all the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name."

Now heroism, which is performed under circumstances such as these, is heroism still. But I want to lay down the principle that such heroism is of a type inferior to that performed under the drab, uninspiring, familiar circumstances of daily life. The soldier who goes marching into battle with the flag before his eyes and wild music in his ears, is a brave man--but the sailor who leaps into the foaming sea, the miner who descends into the flaming pit, the locomotive engineer who dies at his post of duty, without so much as a single human voice, perhaps, to give him cheer, is a braver man. I always recall in this connection, as a type and symbol of what we may term the heroism of common life, a story which I read some years ago in the newspapers. It concerned two laborers, William Phelps and James Stansbury, who were one day cleaning out the inside of a large boiler at the Cerealine mills in Indianapolis. By the error of another workman, live steam was turned into the boiler before the cleaners had left it. Instantly, by a common impulse, the two men jumped for the single ladder which led to safety. Phelps got there first, but no sooner had his foot touched the rounds than he stepped aside, seized his companion and boosted him up. "You first, Jim," was his gasping cry, "you first." Pushed and thrust by his friend, Stansbury escaped, but Phelps was rescued only to die two hours later in dreadful agony. And when told, just before he died, that Jim was all right, he said, "That's good--nobody'll miss me, but Jim had the wife and the kids." It was a wise reporter who put the story on the wire, for he closed it with the words, "No soldier in the siege of Pekin or the battle of Santiago ever proved himself a greater hero."

Stories of this kind might be multiplied indefinitely, but I can sum up all that I would say upon this point by describing a strange little building which I chanced to discover in an out-of-the-way corner of London some years ago. For many weeks I had been looking upon cathedrals and public buildings and city squares, where monuments to soldiers were as common as daisies in a summer field. Suddenly, on a certain morning, I came upon a little plot of grass and trees, near the great postoffice in St. Botolph's, Aldergate, which is called the "Postman's Park," and at one end of it saw the little open gallery, erected in 1887 by the great painter, George F. Watts, with its forty-eight tablets placed in commemoration of certain heroes and heroines who died unknown in the endeavor to save the lives of others. Here was name after name which meant nothing, but story after story which meant everything. Tablet 1 was in memory of Tom Griffin, aged 21, a steamfitter, who on April 12, 1899, was scalded to death while trying to save his "mate" from an exploded boiler; Tablet 3, in memory of Mary Rogers, stewardess of the steamship Stella, who on March 30, 1899, went down with her ship after embarking into life boats all the women passengers committed to her care; Tablet 5, in memory of Elizabeth Boxall, aged 17, who on January 20, 1888, died from injuries received in trying to rescue a little child from being run over; Tablet 8, in memory of Dr. Samuel Rabbath, officer of the Royal Free Hospital, who died on October 20, 1884, from diphtheria contracted by sucking through a glass tube into his mouth the infected membrane from the throat of a strangling child; Tablet 10, in memory of William Goodrum, aged 60, a railway flagman, who on February 28, 1880, stepped in front of a flying train to rescue a fellow-laborer, and was instantly killed; Tablet 16, in memory of Ella Donovan, a woman of the slums, who on July 28, 1873, entered a burning tenement to rescue little children, not her own; Tablet 23, in memory of Henry Bristow, a boy of 8, who on January 5, 1891, died from injuries received in trying to save his little sister, aged 3, from being burned to death. And so the tablets tell their pathetic tales! You read one after another until your eyes are dimmed with tears and you can read no more. And then you seat yourself for a moment in the quiet park, with all London roaring in your ears, and you think of these humble men and obscure women who, without the blare of any music or the flashing colors of any flag or the thrilling excitement of charge and countercharge, "laid down their lives for their friends." "Is my face cut?" said William Peart, a locomotive driver commemorated on Tablet 2, as he was pulled from out the wreckage of his exploded engine. He was told that it was. "Never mind," he replied, with his last breath, "I stopped the train." Here is heroism of a new type--dull, commonplace, everyday, without one trace of color or romance. But for this very reason do I believe it to be heroism of a higher type than that of the soldier.