New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 1, No. 1

But as I know quite well that the Churches are not going to do anything of the kind, I must not close on a note which might to some readers imply that I hope, as some highly respected friends of mine do, to build a pacific civilization on the ruins of the vast ecclesiastical organizations which have never yet been able to utter the truth, because they have had to speak to the poor according to their ignorance and credulity, and to the rich according to their power. When I read that the icon of the Russian peasant is a religious force that will prevail over the materialism of Helmholtz and Haeckel, I have to contain myself as best I can in the face of an assumption by a modern educated European which implies that the Irish peasants who tied scraps of rag to the trees over their holy wells and paid for masses to shorten the stay of their dead relatives in purgatory, were more enlightened than their countryman Tyndall, the Lucretian materialist, and to ask whether the Russian peasant may not find his religious opinions somewhat neutralized by his alliance with the countries of Paul Bert and Combes, of Darwin and Almroth Wright. If we are to keep up any decent show of talking sense on this point we must begin by recognizing that the lines of battle in this war cut right across all the political and sectarian lines in Europe, except the line between our Socialist future and our Commercialist past. Materialist France, metaphysical Germany, muddle-headed English, Byzantine Russia may form what military combinations they please: the one thing they cannot form is a Crusade; and all attempts to represent this war as anything higher or more significant philosophically or politically or religiously for our Junkers and our Tommies than a quite simple primitive contest of the pugnacity that bullies and the pugnacity that will not be bullied are foredoomed to the derision of history. However far-reaching the consequences of the war may be, we in England are fighting to shew the Prussians that they shall not trample on us nor on our neighbors if we can help it, and that if they are fools enough to make their fighting efficiency the test of civilization, we can play that game as destructively as they. That is simple, and the truth, and by far the jolliest and most inspiring ground to recruit on. It stirs the blood and stiffens the back as effectively and quickly as hypocrisy and cant and humbug sour and trouble and discourage. But it will not carry us farther than the end of the fight. We cannot go on fighting forever, or even for very long, whatever Lord Kitchener may think; and win, lose, or tie, the parties, when the fight is over, must fall back on their civil wisdom and political foresight for a settlement of the terms on which we are to live happily together ever after. The practicable conditions of a stable comity of nations cannot be established by the bayonet, which settles nothing but the hash of those who rely on it. They are to found, as I have already explained, in the substitution for our present Militarist kingdoms of a system of democratic units delimited by community of language, religion, and habit; grouped in federations of united States when their extent makes them politically unwieldy; and held against war by the bond of international Socialism, the only ground upon which the identity of interest between all workers never becomes obscured.

The Death of Jaures.

By far the greatest calamity wrought by the war has been the death of Jaurès, who was worth more to France and to Europe than ten army corps and a hundred Archdukes. I once proposed a press law that might have saved him. It was that every article printed in a newspaper should bear not only the name and address of the writer, but the sum paid him for the contribution. If the wretched dupe who assassinated Jaurès had known that the trashy articles on the Three Years Law he had been reading were not the voice of France in peril, but the ignorant scribbling of some poor devil at his wits' end to earn three francs, he would hardly have thrown away his own life to take that of the greatest statesman his country has produced since Mirabeau. It is hardly too much to say that this ghastly murder and the appalling war that almost eclipsed its horror, is the revenge of the sweated journalist on a society so silly that though it will not allow a man to stuff its teeth without ascertained qualifications for the task, it allows anyone, no matter how poor, how ignorant, how untrained, how imbecile, to stuff its brains without even taking the trouble to ask his name. When we interfere with him and his sweaters at all, we interfere by way of appointing a censorship to prevent him from telling, not lies, however mischievous and dangerous to our own people abroad, but the truth. To be a liar and a brewer of bad blood is to be a privileged person under our censorship, which, so far, has proceeded by no discoverable rule except that of concealing from us everything that the Germans must know lest the Germans should find it out.

Socialism Alone Keeps Its Head.

Socialism has lost its leader on the Continent; but it is solid and representative on the main point; it loathes war; and it sees clearly that war is always waged by working men who have no quarrel, but on the contrary a supreme common interest. It steadily resists the dangerous export of capital by pressing the need for uncommercial employment of capital at home: the only practicable alternative. It knows that war, on its romantic side, is "the sport of kings": and it concludes that we had better get rid of kings unless they can kill their tedium with more democratic amusements. It notes the fact that though the newspapers shout at us that these battles on fronts a hundred miles long, where the slain outnumber the total forces engaged in older campaigns, are the greatest battles known to history, such machine-carnages bore us so horribly that we are ashamed of our ingratitude to our soldiers in not being able to feel about them as about comparatively trumpery scraps like Waterloo or even Inkerman and Balaclava. It never forgets that as long as higher education, culture, foreign travel, knowledge of the world: in short, the qualification for comprehension of foreign affairs and intelligent voting, is confined to one small class, leaving the masses in poverty, narrowness, and ignorance, and being itself artificially cut off at their expense from the salutary pressure of the common burden which alone keeps men unspoilt and sane, so long will that small class be forced to obtain the support of the masses for its wars by flattering proclamations of the national virtues and indignant denunciations of the villanies of the enemy, with, if necessary, a stiffening of deliberate falsehood and a strenuous persecution of any attempt at inconvenient truthtelling. Here there is no question of the Junker being a monster. You must rule ignoramuses according to their ignorance. The priest must work bogus miracles for them; the man of science must offer them magical cures and prophylactics; the barrister must win their verdict by sophistries, false pathos, and appeals to their prejudices; the army and navy must dazzle them with pageants and bands and thundering salvos and romantic tales; the king must cut himself off from humanity and become an idol. There is no escape whilst such classes exist. Mahomet, the boldest prophet that ever threw down the gage of the singleness and supremacy of God to a fierce tribe of warriors who worshipped stones as devotedly as we worship dukes and millionaires, could not govern them by religious truth, and was forced to fall back on revolting descriptions of hell and the day of judgment, invented by him for the purpose. What else could he do if his people were not to be abandoned to their own destruction? If it is an axiom of diplomacy that the people must not be told the truth, that is not in the least because, for example, Sir Edward Grey has a personal taste for mendacity; it is a necessity imposed by the fact that the people are incapable of the truth. In the end, lying becomes a reflex action with diplomatists; and we cannot even issue a penny bluebook without beginning it with the quite unprovoked statement that "no crime has ever aroused deeper or more general horror throughout Europe" than the assassination of the Archduke. The real tragedy was that the violent death of a fellow creature should have aroused so little.

Divided Against Ourselves.

This state of things would be bad enough if the governing classes really sought the welfare of the governed, and were deceiving them for their own good. But they are doing nothing of the sort. They are using their power secondarily, no doubt, to uphold the country in which they have so powerful and comfortable a position; but primarily their object is to maintain that position by the organized legal robbery of the poor; and to that end they would join hands with the German Junkers as against the working class in Germany and England as readily as Bismarck joined hands with Thiers to suppress the Commune of Paris. And even if this were not so, nothing would persuade the working classes that those who sweat them ruthlessly in commercial enterprise are any more considerate in public affairs, especially when there is any question of war, by which much money can be made for rich people who deal in the things most wanted and most highly paid for in war time: to wit, armaments and money. The direct interest of our military caste in war accounts for a good deal; but at least it involves personal risk and hardship and bereavement to the members of that caste. But the capitalist who has shares in explosives and cannons and soldiers' boots runs no risk and suffers no hardship; whilst as to the investor pure and simple, all that happens to him is that he finds the unearned income obtainable on Government security larger than ever. Victory to the capitalists of Europe means that they can not only impose on the enemy a huge indemnity, but lend him the money to pay it with whilst the working classes produce and pay both principal and interest.

As long as we have that state of things, we shall have wars and secret and mendacious diplomacy. And this is one of many overwhelming reasons for building the State on equality of income, because without it equality of status and general culture is impossible. Democracy without equality is a delusion more dangerous than frank oligarchy and autocracy. And without Democracy there is no hope of peace, no chance of persuading ourselves that the sacredness of civilization will protect it any more than the sacredness of the cathedral of Rheims has protected it, not against Huns and Vandals, but against educated German gentlemen.

Rheims.

Commercial wage-slaves can never reproduce that wonderful company of sculptured figures that made Rheims unlike any other place in the world; and if they are now destroyed, or shortly about to be, it does not console me that we still have—perhaps for a few days longer only—the magical stained glass of Chartres and the choir of Beauvais. We tell ourselves that the poor French people must feel as we should feel if we had lost Westminster Abbey. Rheims was worth ten Westminster Abbeys; and where it has gone the others may just as easily go too. Let us not sneer at the German pretension to culture: let us face the fact that the Germans are just as cultured as we are (to say the least) and that war has nevertheless driven them to do these things as irresistibly as it will drive us to do similar things tomorrow if we find ourselves attacking a town in which the highest point from which our positions can be spotted by an observer with a field glass in one hand and a telephone in the other is the towering roof of the cathedral. Also let us be careful how we boast of our love of medieval art to people who well know, from the protests of Ruskin and Morris, that in times of peace we have done things no less mischievous and irreparable for no better reason than that the Mayor's brother or the Dean's uncle-in-law was a builder in search of a "restoration" job. If Rheims cathedral were taken from the Church to-morrow and given to an English or French joint stock company, everything transportable in it would presently be sold to American collectors, and the site cleared and let out in building sites. That is the way to make it "pay" commercially.

The Fate of The Glory Drunkard.

But our problem is how to make Commercialism itself bankrupt. We must beat Germany, not because the Militarist hallucination and our irresolution forced Germany to make this war, so desperate for her, at a moment so unfavourable to herself, but because she has made herself the exponent and champion in the modern world of the doctrine that military force is the basis and foundation of national greatness, and military conquest the method by which the nation of the highest culture can impose that culture on its neighbors. Now the reason I have permitted myself to call General Von Bernhardi a madman is that he lays down quite accurately the conditions of this military supremacy without perceiving that what he is achieving is a reductio ad absurdum. For he declares as a theorist what Napoleon found in practice, that you can maintain the Militarist hold over the imaginations of the people only by feeding them with continual glory. You must go from success to success; the moment you fail you are lost; for you have staked everything on your power to conquer, for the sake of which the people have submitted to your tyranny and endured the sufferings and paid the cost your military operations entailed. Napoleon conquered and conquered and conquered; and yet, when he had won more battles than the maddest Prussian can ever hope for, he had to go on fighting just as if he had never won anything at all. After exhausting the possible he had to attempt the impossible and go to Moscow. He failed; and from that moment he had better have been a Philadelphia Quaker than a victor of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena and Wagrarn. Within a short breathing time after that morning when he stood outside Leipsic, whistling Malbrook s'en va-t-en guerre whilst his flying army gasped its last in the river or fled under a hail of bullets from enemies commanded by generals without a tenth of his ability or prestige, we find him disguised as a postillion, cowering abjectly behind the door of a carriage whilst the French people whom he had crammed with glory for a quarter of a century were seeking to tear him limb from limb. His success had made him the enemy of every country except France: his failure made him the enemy of the human race. And that was why Europe rose up finally and smashed him, although the English Government which profited by that operation oppressed the English people for thirty years afterwards more sordidly than Napoleon would have oppressed them, and its Allies replaced him on the throne of France by an effete tyrant not worthy to unlace his shoe latchet. Nothing can finally redeem Militarism. When even genius itself takes that path its end is still destruction. When mere uppishness takes it the end is not changed, though it may be reached more precipitately and disastrously.

The Kaiser.

Prussia has talked of that path for many years as the one down which its destiny leads it. Its ruler, with the kid gloves he called mailed fists and the high class tailoring he called shining armour, did much of the talking, though he is in practice a most peaceful teetotaller, as many men with their imaginations full of the romance of war are. He had a hereditary craze for playing at soldiers; and he was and is a naïve suburban snob, as the son of The Englishwoman would naturally be, talking about "the Hohenzollerns" exactly as my father's people in Dublin used to talk about "the Shaws." His stage walk, familiar through the cinematograph, is the delight of romantic boys, and betrays his own boyish love of the Paradeschritt. It is frightful to think of the powers which Europe, in its own snobbery, left in the hands of this Peter Pan; and appalling as the results of that criminal levity have been, yet, being by no means free from his romantic follies myself, I do not feel harshly toward Peter, who, after all, kept the peace for over twenty-six years. In the end his talk and his games of soldiers in preparation for a toy conquest of the world frightened his neighbours into a league against him; and that league has now caught him in just such a trap as his strategists were laying for his neighbours. We please ourselves by pretending that he did not try to extricate himself, and forced the war on us; but that is not true. When he realized his peril he tried hard enough; but when he saw that it was no use he accepted the situation and dashed at his enemies with an infatuate courage not unworthy of the Hohenzollern tradition. Blinded as he was by the false ideals of his class, it was the best he could do; for there is always a chance for a brave and resolute warrior, even when his back is not to the wall but to the Russians.

That means that we have to conquer him and not to revile him and strike moral attitudes. His victory over British and French Democracy would be a victory of Militarism over civilization; it would literally shut the gates of mercy on mankind. Leave it to our official fools and governesses to lecture the Kaiser, and to let loose Turcos and Ghoorkas on him: a dangerous precedent. Let Thomas Atkins, Patrick Murphy, Sandy McAlister, and Pitou Dupont fight him under what leadership they can get, until honour is satisfied, simply because if St. George does not slay the dragon the world will be, as a friend of mine said of Europe the other day, "no place for a gentleman."

Recapitulation.

1. The war should be pushed vigorously, not with a view to a final crushing of the German army between the Anglo-French combination and the Russian millions, but to the establishment of a decisive military superiority by the Anglo-French combination alone. A victory unattainable without Russian aid would be a defeat for Western European Liberalism; Germany would be beaten not by us, but by a Militarist autocracy worse than her own. By sacrificing Prussian Poland and the Slav portions of the Austrian Empire Germany and Austria could satisfy Russia, and merge Austria and Germany into a single German State, which would then dominate France and England, having ascertained that they could not conquer her without Russia's aid. We may fairly allow Russia to conquer Austria if she can; that is her natural part of the job. But if we two cannot without Russian help beat Potsdam, or at least hold her up in such a stalemate as will make it clear that it is impossible for her to subjugate us, then we shall simply have to "give Germany best" and depend on an alliance with America for our place in the sun.

2. We cannot smash or disable Germany, however completely we may defeat her, because we can do that only by killing her women; and it is trifling to pretend that we are capable of any such villainy. Even to embarrass her financially by looting her would recoil on ourselves, as she is one of our commercial customers and one of our most frequently visited neighbors. We must, if we can, drive her from Belgium without compromise. France may drive her from Alsace and Lorraine. Russia may drive her from Poland. She knew when she opened fire that these were the stakes in the game; and we are bound to support France and Russia until they are won or lost, unless a stalemate reduces the whole method of warfare to absurdity. Austria, too, knew that the Slav part of her empire was at stake. By winning these stakes the Allies will wake the Kaiser from his dream of a Holy Teuton Empire with Prussia as the Head of its Church, and teach him to respect us; but that once done, we must not allow our camp followers to undo it all again by spiteful humiliations and exactions which could not seriously cripple Germany, and would make bad blood between us for a whole generation, to our own great inconvenience, unhappiness, disgrace, and loss. We and France have to live with Germany after the war; and the sooner we make up our mind to do it generously, the better. The word after the fight must be sans rancune; for without peace between France, Germany, and England, there can be no peace in the world.

3. War, as a school of character and a nurse of virtue, must be formally shut up and discharged by all the belligerents when this war is over. It is quite true that ill-bred and swinish nations can be roused to a serious consideration of their position and their destiny only by earthquakes, pestilences, famines, comets' tails, Titanic shipwrecks, and devastating wars, just as it is true that African chiefs cannot make themselves respected unless they bury virgins alive beneath the doorposts of their hut-palaces, and Tartar Khans find that the exhibition of a pyramid of chopped-off heads is a short way to impress their subjects with a convenient conception of their divine right to rule. Ivan the Terrible did undoubtedly make his subjects feel very serious indeed; and stupid people are apt to believe that this sort of terror-stiffened seriousness is virtue. It is not. Any person who should set-to deliberately to contrive artificial earthquakes, scuttle liners, and start epidemics with a view to the moral elevation of his countrymen, would very soon find himself in the dock. Those who plan wars with the same object should be removed with equal firmness to Hanwell or Bethlehem Hospital. A nation so degraded as to be capable of responding to no higher stimulus than that of horror had better be exterminated, by Prussian war lords or anyone else foolish enough to waste powder on them instead of leaving them to perish of their own worthlessness.

4. Neither England nor Germany must claim any moral superiority in the negotiations. Both were engaged for years in a race for armaments. Both indulged and still indulge in literary and oratorical provocation. Both claimed to be "an Imperial race" ruling other races by divine right. Both shewed high social and political consideration to parties and individuals who openly said that the war had to come. Both formed alliances to reinforce them for that war. The case against Germany for violating the neutrality of Belgium is of no moral value to England because (a) England has allowed the violation of the Treaty of Paris by Russia (violation of the neutrality of the Black Sea and closing of the free port of Batoum), and the high-handed and scandalous violation of the Treaty of Berlin by Austria (seizure of Bosnia and Herzegovina), without resorting to arms or remedying the aggression in any other way; (b) because we have fully admitted that we should have gone to war in defence of France in any case, whether the Germans came through Belgium or not, and refused to give the German Ambassador any assurance that we should remain neutral if the Germans sacrificed the military advantage of attacking through Belgium for the sake of avoiding a war with us; (c) that the apparent moral superiority of the pledge given by France and England to respect Belgian neutrality is illusory in face of the facts that France and England stood to gain enormously, and the Germans to lose correspondingly, by confining the attack on France to the heavily fortified Franco-German frontier, and that as France and England knew they would be invited by the Belgians to enter Belgium if the Germans invaded it, the neutrality of Belgium had, as far as they were concerned, no real existence; (d) that as all treaties are valid only rebus sic stantibus, and the state of things which existed at the date of the Treaty of London (1839) had changed so much since then (Belgium is no longer menaced by France, at whom the treaty was aimed, and has acquired important colonies, for instance) that in 1870 Gladstone could not depend on it, and resorted to a special temporary treaty not now in force, the technical validity of the 1839 treaty is extremely doubtful; (e) that even if it be valid its breach is not a casus belli unless the parties for reasons of their own choose to make it so; and (f) that the German national peril pleaded by the Imperial Chancellor in his Peer Gynt speech (the durchhauen one), when he rashly but frankly threw away the strong technical case just stated and admitted a breach of international law, was so great according to received Militarist ideas in view of the Russian mobilization, that it is impossible for us or any other Militarist-ridden Power to feel sure ourselves, much less to convince others, that we should have been any more scrupulous in the like extremity. It must be added that nothing can extenuate the enormity of the broad fact that an innocent country has been horribly devastated because her guilty neighbors formed two huge explosive combinations against one another instead of establishing the peace of Europe, but that is an offence against a higher law than any recorded on diplomatic scraps of paper, and when it comes to judgment the outraged conscience of humanity will not have much patience with the naughty child's plea of "he began it."

5. Militarism must not be treated as a disease peculiar to Prussia. It is rampant in England; and in France it has led to the assassination of her greatest statesman. If the upshot of the war is to be regarded and acted upon simply as a defeat of German Militarism by Anglo-French Militarism, then the war will not only have wrought its own immediate evils of destruction and demoralization, but will extinguish the last hope that we have risen above the "dragons of the prime that tare each other in their slime." We have all been equally guilty in the past. It has been steadily assumed for years that the Militarist party is the gentlemanly party. Its opponents have been ridiculed and prosecuted in England; hanged, flogged or exiled in Russia; and imprisoned in France: they have been called traitors, cads, cranks, and so forth: they have been imprisoned for "bad taste" and for sedition whilst the most virulent sedition against Democracy and the most mutinous military escapades in the commissioned ranks have been tolerated obsequiously, until finally the practical shelving of Liberal Constitutionalism has provoked both in France and England a popular agitation of serious volume for the supersession of parliament by some sort of direct action by the people, called Syndicalism. In short Militarism, which is nothing but State Anarchism, has been carried to such a pitch that it has been imitated and countered by a movement of popular Anarchism, and has exploded in a European war because the Commercialist Governments of Europe had no faith in the effective guidance of any modern State by higher considerations than Lord Roberts's "will to conquer," the weight of the Kaiser's mailed fist, and the interest of the Bourses and Stock Exchanges. Unless we are all prepared to fight Militarism at home as well as abroad, the cessation of hostilities will last only until the belligerents have recovered from their exhaustion.

6. It had better be admitted on our side that as to the conduct of the war there is no trustworthy evidence that the Germans have committed any worse or other atrocities than those which are admitted to be inevitable in war or accepted as part of military usage by the Allies. By "making examples" of towns, and seizing irresponsible citizens as hostages and shooting them for the acts of armed civilians over whom they could exert no possible control, the Germans have certainly pushed these usages to a point of Terrorism which is hardly distinguishable from the deliberate murder of non-combatants; but as the Allies have not renounced such usages, nor ceased to employ them ruthlessly in their dealings with the hill tribes and fellaheen and Arabs with whom they themselves have to deal (to say nothing of the notorious domestic Terrorism of the Russian Government), they cannot claim superior humanity. It is therefore waste of time for the pot to call the kettle black. Our outcry against the Germans for sowing the North Sea with mines was followed too closely by the laying of a mine field there by ourselves to be revived without flagrant Pharisaism. The case of Rheims cathedral also fell to the ground as completely as a good deal of the building itself when it was stated that the French had placed a post of observation on the roof. Whether they did or not, all military experts were aware that an officer neglecting to avail himself of the cathedral roof in this way, or an opposing officer hestitating to fire on the cathedral so used, would have been court-martialed in any of the armies engaged. The injury to the cathedral must therefore be suffered as a strong hint from Providence that though we can have glorious wars or glorious cathedrals we cannot have both.

7. To sum up, we must remember that if this war does not make an end of war in the west, our allies of to-day may be our enemies of to-morrow, as they are of yesterday, and our enemies of to-day our allies of to-morrow as they are of yesterday; so that if we aim merely at a fresh balance of military power, we are as likely as not to negotiate our own destruction. We must use the war to give the coup de grace to medieval diplomacy, medieval autocracy, and anarchic export of capital, and make its conclusion convince the world that Democracy is invincible, and Militarism a rusty sword that breaks in the hand. We must free our soldiers, and give them homes worth fighting for. And we must, as the old phrase goes, discard the filthy rags of our righteousness, and fight like men with everything, even a good name, to win, inspiring and encouraging ourselves with definite noble purposes (abstract nobility butters no parsnips) to face whatever may be the price of proving that war cannot conquer us, and that he who dares not appeal to our conscience has nothing to hope from our terrors.