Chapter 2

But there is a second circumstance peculiar to the life of the soldier, which makes martial heroism to be of an easier and therefore inferior type. I refer to the fact that the soldier performs his deeds of valor not only under the stimulus of "pomp and circumstance," but also under the sweet influences of companionship. The soldier is always one of a company or regiment. Except on occasional scout or sentry duty, he is always moving with the collective motion of a great host of his fellowmen. He is never working, fighting, suffering alone, and is therefore never left to the heart-breaking task of bearing his burden in solitude. On the contrary, as he walks, he keeps step with thousands of marching feet; as he advances into battle, he rubs shoulders with his "mates"; as he falls headlong in the trenches, he is picked up and ministered to by the hands of those he loves. And out of this solace of companionship, out of this inspiration of collective life, there comes creeping into his heart a sense of uplift, a contagion of spirit, which makes heroism inevitable. I have never seen this aspect of military experience more wonderfully expressed than by Prof. Perry, of Harvard, in an article in the New Republic, in which he describes his impressions as a Plattsburgh "rookie." "Soldierly experiences," he says, "are common experiences, and are hallowed by that fact. You are asked to do no more than hundreds of others * * * do with you. If you rinse your greasy mess-kit in a tub of greasier water, you are one of many gathered like thirsty birds about a road-side puddle. If you fill your lungs and the pores of your sweaty skin with dust, fellows in adversity are all about you, looking grimier than you feel; and your very complaints uttered in chorus partake of the quality of defiant song. To walk is one thing, to march albeit with sore feet and aching back is another and more triumphant. It is 'Hail! Hail! the gang's all here'--it matters not what the words signify, provided they have a rhythmic swing, and impart a choral sense of collective unity. * * * Every late afternoon," he continues, "the flag is lowered, and the band plays 'The Star Spangled Banner.' Men in ranks are ordered to attention. Men and officers out of ranks stand at attention where they are, facing a flag, and saluting as the music ceases. Thus to stand at attention toward sundown, listening to solemn music sounding faintly in the distance, to see and to feel that every fellow-soldier is standing also rigid and intent, to experience this reverent and collective silence * * * is at once to understand and to dedicate that day's work."

Now all this is very beautiful. But its very beauty is what makes the heroism of the soldier as easy as the heroism of others is oftentimes difficult. Compare, for example, the courage of even the most gallant soldier with the courage of the pioneer, who goes alone into vast and unfamiliar solitudes, and there amid killing labors and strange perils, hews out a path to life, with never the face of a comrade or the voice of a woman to give him cheer. I think that I never knew the meaning of loneliness, and never understood therefore the sublime heroism of the pioneer until I journeyed through the prairies of Kansas, the deserts of Arizona and the pasture lands of Idaho and Montana. Those of you who have traveled through the great west will recognize the sensation that came over me as, hour after hour, I gazed upon those uninhabited wastes and saw only at rarest intervals the traces of human beings. I remember looking out upon the prairies late one afternoon and watching the slow fading of the day. For three hours, from four until seven o'clock, I saw on the passing landscape one horseman, as lonely as a solitary sail at sea, one prairie wagon with three men gathered about the evening camp fire, and two houses on the far horizon. From seven to eight o'clock came on the darkness, and soon we were riding through impenetrable night; and twice, perhaps three times, at intervals of an hour or more, I saw a single light twinkling in the distance, marking where some man or perhaps some family, was living in the solitudes. And I dreamed that night of the men, and the women, too, who first came out into these vast spaces, leaving home, friends, companionship behind to make a trail, build a home, prepare the way for the coming of civilization. The very road over which my train was moving was the old trail of the Santa Fe, which had been trod by the feet of thousands of lonely and intrepid souls, who dared the wilderness and the desert as the forerunners of the nation's life. These men, and the women also who were with them, to rear their homes and bear their children, were heroes of a type sublime--heroes who never knew the joy of comradeship, the consolation of co-operation, but lived and toiled and died alone, with only a dream of the future in their hearts to give them courage. It was fitting, and yet how sadly belated recognition which was given them in the noble monuments at the World's Fair in Chicago, which bore these inscriptions from the pen of President Eliot:

"To the Brave Settlers Who Leveled Forests Cleared Fields Made Paths by Land and Water And Planted Commonwealths."

"To the Brave Women Who in Solitudes Amid Strange Dangers and Heavy Toils Reared Families And Made Homes."

Such is the heroism of solitude! But not yet have we reached its purest and noblest form. These men and women were lonely, it is true; but they were sustained, after all, by a great hope of the future, by dreams of prosperity and happiness to come as the fruit of toil, by ambitions for the children who would survive to better and fuller days. Braver even than these are the men who have faced loneliness without hope--who have looked not merely on solitude, but on solitude ending in defeat and death--and still have lived as those who had no fear. The classic example of this great heroism has been given to the world by our own age, in the story of Captain Scott. Whenever my own faint heart begins to fail under the strain of burdens absurdly light, I take up a copy of Captain Scott's Journals, as I would take up a copy of holy scripture, and I read as long as my tear-filled eyes can see the page the items that he jotted down in his diary on those last terrible days before he died. Here he is in the midst of the vast solitudes of the arctic wastes, struggling along with his two half-dead companions, his feet frozen, food gone, fuel gone, and a hurricane beating him helpless to the ground. He knows he cannot get through to his goal, he knows there is no living soul within hundreds of miles to bring him succor. On March 19th he speaks of their "forlorn hope"; on the 22nd he confesses that "he must be near the end"; on the 29th he speaks of death and says flatly, "I do not think we can hope for any better things now. * * * We are getting weaker, and the end cannot be far." But never once, for all his anguish and solitude, does he give way. "We shall stick it out to the end," is his word. He can even joke at one time in a grim and terrible sort of way. "No human being could face (this) storm," he writes on March 18th, "and we are nearly worn out. My right foot is gone--two days ago I was the proud possessor of the best feet. These are the steps of my downfall." And then there come the last hours. His two companions lie dead, one on either side of him. Outside of his little snow hut is the raging storm. He is alone with death. And as calmly as though he were writing a report in the naval offices in London, he scrawls with frozen fingers those immortal letters, first to Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Bowers, the mothers of the two men whose bodies are beside him, then to his own mother and his wife, then to his friends, Sir James M. Barrie and Vice-Admiral Egerton, then the statement to the public with its closing words, "I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another and meet death with as great fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. But had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman." Eight months later his body was found, sitting erect, his arms extended to his dead companions on either side as though his lonely soul sought at the end the comfort of even their frozen bodies, and on his face a smile as beautiful as that of a child just fallen into slumber.

Heroism! my friends! What is the heroism of even the bravest soldier compared to heroism such as this? I would not disparage the men who have suffered and died on the fields of Flanders and Galicia. But is it not true, after all, that we can do much if only we have the dear friends to bear us company, and that the real test comes when we stand "alone, alone, all, all alone," with the universe and God. To work alone, like the pioneer, with never a hand to clasp and help his own; to die alone, like Captain Scott, with wife, child, mother, friends thousands of miles away, all ignorant of his fate, and "still to do the best to the last"--this is heroism. The soldier as a soldier for all his courage cannot match it.

But there is still a third aspect of the soldier's life which touches very vitally upon this question of heroism. I refer to the fact that the soldier, in the vast majority of cases, is engaged in a business which has the enthusiastic endorsement of his fellowmen. He is distinctly on the right side. He is doing the popular thing. The eyes of the people are upon him. He marches away to the waving of flags and the applause of multitudes. Children cheer him, women embrace him, old men bless him. If he is wounded, he is tenderly cared for by the nation. If he performs some gallant deed, he is rewarded by orders of merit, and perhaps by the gift of the Victoria Cross. If he dies, he is buried amid sounding eulogies and commemorated by statues and inscriptions. "Victory, or Westminster Abbey," cried Lord Nelson as he sailed into the battle of Trafalgar. And similar, to the degree of humble deserts, is the cry of every soldier or sailor who takes up arms for his country. For the moment he is the symbol of the nation. He embodies within his own single person the hopes and praises of an entire people. He lives, and, if he dies, he dies in the good opinion of mankind. And I can tell you that nothing makes life so smooth and death so comparatively simple as this good opinion of which I speak. The hardest suffering seems easy, and the most untimely death not altogether unwelcome, if only we can know that all men are our friends, and we live or die with their blessings upon our heads. "A good name," says the preacher, "is better than precious ointment"; and again he declares, "A good name is better than riches." By which he means, I take it, that there is nothing in the outer world, however desirable in itself, which can give us compensation for the loss of favor of mankind.

Now we begin to get just a glimpse, at least, of a nobler and rarer type of heroism than that of the soldier, when we look upon the man who, in obedience to some inner impulse of the soul, deliberately alienates himself from the sympathy and the applause of his fellows. Such a man must be regarded as a kind of pioneer or explorer, who goes into the solitudes not of the physical but of the spiritual realm, there to blaze new trails, and, perhaps like Captain Scott, to die alone. A striking example of heroism of this kind, presented in exact antithesis to the ordinary heroism of the soldier, may be found in John Galsworthy's play, The Mob. At first accepted only as a brilliant piece of imagination, the drama becomes charged with real significance when we learn that its action is a more or less exact reproduction of the situation which was precipitated in England during the Boer War by Lloyd-George and his famous "Stop-the-War party." The story of the play, and to a large extent of English history in 1899, is that of a Cabinet Minister, Stephen More by name, who opposes from his seat in the House of Commons a war threatened by England against a weaker nation, and continues his opposition after the war has been declared and an English army has been slaughtered. Resigning his office, he stumps the country in a campaign for peace, alienates his wife, who is outraged by his attitude, faces persistently the attacks of angry mobs, and at last is murdered and thus made a martyr to his cause. The spiritual, if not the dramatic, climax of the play comes in the second scene of the last act, where Stephen More, in answer to his wife and his father-in-law, who are appealing to him for the last time to abandon his mad purpose, contrasts his deeds with those of the soldiers at the front. "Our men," answers More, "are dying out there for the faith that's in them. I believe my faith the higher, the better for mankind. Am I now to shrink away? (Mine's) a forlorn hope--not to help let die a fire--a fire that's sacred--not only now in this country, but in all countries for all time." And in this spirit, with the execrations of his family and of an entire people on his head, he goes alone to a cruel death.

What we see in this drama of Mr. Galsworthy is only what we see again and again after all in the infinitely greater drama of humanity. The noblest testimony to the quality of men's souls that we have anywhere, is that which has been given to us by the "noble company of the apostles, the goodly fellowship of the prophets, the noble army of martyrs," who, refusing to take the easy road of popularity, have deliberately chosen the thorny path of insult, ignominy, destruction, for the faith that glowed within their souls. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Socrates, St. Paul, Wycliff, Huss, Savanarola, Martin Luther, John Knox, George Fox, John Wesley, Joseph Priestly, Theodore Parker--how the names multiply, all as sweet as honey to our lips, of those who refused to barter their souls even for the good will of men. And first among them all, of course, is Jesus, the Nazarene. The noblest thing that was ever said of the Carpenter-Prophet was this--that "he made himself of no reputation." The noblest and also the most pathetic thing that He ever said of Himself was this--that "the birds have nests and the foxes holes, but the son of man hath nowhere to lay his head." The noblest thing He ever did was this--to walk from the house of Pilate to the crest of Calvary, with the cross upon His back and the railing mob behind Him and before, and never once to falter and complain. Hated and hooted by the multitudes who at one time followed Him gladly, deserted even by the twelve who had pledged to Him their lives, misunderstood, despised, condemned, spat upon--a stranger even to His mother and His brethren--what a fate was this! And what consummate heroism was needed to meet it unafraid! In the face of such a supreme spectacle of sacrifice as this, how foolish, how unjust to identify the hero, to any degree of exclusiveness with the soldier. The soldier is a hero, without doubt, but greater than he is the hero who bears not arms but a cross, wears not a crown of laurel but a crown of thorns, and dies not on the field of battle but on "the field of the skull." "He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; one from whom men hid their faces; * * * he was oppressed, stricken, smitten of God * * * yet when he was afflicted he opened not his mouth"--of whom such things as this may be truly said, He is the noblest hero of them all. James Russell Lowell has set forth this abiding truth in his Present Crisis:

"Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes--they were souls who stood alone, While the men they agonized for, hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline, To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design."

Such are the types of heroism which I have thought it well to bring to your attention this afternoon. Accepting the soldier as the traditional and not unworthy standard of all heroic types, I have nevertheless tried to show that there are other men who meet all the hazards of suffering and death which he encounters, and yet are denied the aids and comforts which are his. I have contrasted the utter commonplaces of the obscure heroisms of daily life with the pomp and pageantry of martial life. I have contrasted the awful solitude of the men who made new paths and faced unfamiliar perils on prairie, desert and arctic sea, with the cheerful comradeship which hallows the experience of the soldier. And I have contrasted the popular acclaim which is the very breath of the warrior's nostrils with the popular odium and hatred which kill the prophets of the new and better day. Thus have I moved from what I believe to be, from its very nature, the lowest, or "rudest," grade of heroism, to those which I believe to be the higher and finer grades. And it must have long since become evident to you, that every step that I have taken in the progress of my argument has been away from what we may well call the more physical expression of heroic endeavor, to those which are more moral, or spiritual. That the true soldier is possessed of something more than mere brute courage, I would be among the very last, I trust, to deny. But however fine and pure may be the valor of his soul, it still must be admitted, in the last analysis, that the soldier never rids himself of the material accessories and trappings of the world. The flag that greets his eye and the music that beats upon his ear, the personal contact of his fellows upon the march and in the trenches, the medals and monuments that embody a nation's applause and gratitude--all these things, with however high an admixture of spiritual elements, are still fundamentally "of the earth, earthy." And so essential are they to the soldier's life, that we cannot think of that life without them. But how different is the situation when we turn to these other types of heroism of which I have made mention! How do the earthly foundations seem to disappear, and those foundations which are only spiritual take their place! These unknown heroes, whose names and deeds are recorded on the tablets in the Postman's Park--what stirred them to action save the spontaneous promptings of their own hearts? Those "brave settlers," and "brave women" who "cleared fields" and "made homes" in solitary places--Captain Scott who faced death all alone in terrifying storms of the Antarctic--what sustained them but the secret counsel of their inward spirits? And Jesus of Nazareth as he hung upon the cross--upon what did he rely, if not upon God and his own soul? The heroism of the soldier, even at its best, is more or less a fleshy, worldly thing. The heroism of these others is more and more a spiritual unworldly thing, until, at the topmost grade of all, we meet the prophet, the saint, the martyr, who matches his naked soul against the world, and gladly loses the one that he may save the other.

It is when we attain to this viewpoint, that we begin to understand the mistake of ordinary opinion in identifying the hero with the soldier. Especially in this age of waxing militarism, it is well for us to note the fallacy which is involved in this primeval superstition. Heroism, at its truest and best, is spiritual. It is "an obedience," says Emerson, "to a secret impulse of an individual's character." It needs no other stimulus, hides in no gorgeous trappings, craves no companionship in suffering, accepts no rewards of merit or applause. Contemptuous of "external good," it seeks its own counsel and obeys the mandates of its own spirit. Heroism of this kind flourishes in times of war as in all times of terror. But so essentially brutal, hideous, cruel is every circumstance of war, that even the noblest heroism is degraded and defiled by it. It is only when the arms of the flesh are broken and cast aside, and the soul stands naked before its Maker, that heroism becomes transcendant in obscurity, loneliness, persecution; when all things that the world can give have failed and dropped away it reveals itself, like a star at midnight, shining to the glory of Almighty God. Emerson has summed it all up, in his introductory lines to his essay on Heroism--

"Ruby wine is drunk by knaves, Sugar spends to fatten slaves, Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons; Thunder clouds are Jove's festoons, Drooping oft in wreaths of dread Lightning-knotted round his head; The hero is not fed on sweets Daily his own soul he eats."

* * * * *

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE by Elbert Russell

THE QUAKER OF THE FUTURE TIME by George A. Walton

THE CHRISTIAN PATRIOT by Norman H. Thomas

THE CHRISTIAN DEMAND FOR SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION by Harry F. Ward

RELIGION AS REALITY, LIFE AND POWER by Rufus M. Jones

HEROES IN PEACE by John Haynes Holmes

William Penn Lectures are published by the Young Friends' Movement. Copies may be obtained from the Headquarters, at the Central Bureau Office, 154 N. 15th Street, or from Walter H. Jenkins, 140 N. 15th Street, Philadelphia, Pa. Paper-bound copies at -- cents; in cloth, -- cents.