Now that police-force, become an army, is no longer making for co-operation; it has simply and purely taken the place of the bandits; and to approximate such an army to a police-force, and to say that because both operations involve the employment of force they both stand equally justified, is to ignore half the facts, and to be guilty of those lazy generalizations which we a.s.sociate with savagery.[88]
But the difference is more than a moral one. If the reader will again return to the little sketch referred to above, he will probably agree that the diplomats of the larger Power are acting in an extraordinarily stupid fashion. I say nothing of their sham philosophy (which happens, however, to be that of European statecraft to-day), by which this aggression is made to appear in keeping with the law of man"s struggle for life, when, as a matter of fact, it is the very negation of that law; but we know _now_ that they are taking a course which gives the least result, even from _their_ point of view, for the effort expended.
Here we get the key also to the difference between the respective histories of the military empires, like Spain, France, and Portugal, and the more industrial type, like England, which has been touched upon in the preceding chapter. Not the mere hazard of war, not a question of mere efficiency in the employment of force, has given to Great Britain influence in half a world, and taken it from Spain, but a radical, fundamental difference in underlying principles however imperfectly realized. England"s exercise of force has approximated on the whole to the role of police; Spain"s to that of the diplomats of the supposit.i.tious Power just referred to. England"s has made for co-operation; Spain"s for the embarra.s.sment of co-operation. England"s has been in keeping with the real law of man"s struggle; Spain"s in keeping with the sham law which the "blood and iron" empiricists are forever throwing at our heads. For what has happened to all attempts to live on extorted tribute? They have all failed--failed miserably and utterly[89]--to such an extent that to-day the exaction of tribute has become an economic impossibility.
If, however, our supposit.i.tious diplomats, instead of asking for tribute, had said: "Your country is in disorder; your police-force is insufficient; our merchants are robbed and killed; we will lend you police and help you to maintain order; you will pay the police their just wage, and that is all;" and had honestly kept to this office, their exercise of force would have aided human co-operation, not checked it.
Again, it would have been a struggle, not against man, but against the use of force; the "predominant Power" would have been living, not on other men, but by more efficient organization of man"s fight with nature.
That is why, in the first section of this book, I have laid emphasis on the truth that the justification of past wars has no bearing on the problem which confronts us: the precise degree of fighting which was necessary a hundred and fifty years ago is a somewhat academic problem.
The degree of fighting which is necessary to-day is the problem which confronts us, and a great many factors have been introduced into it since England won India and lost part of North America. The face of the world has changed, and the factors of conflict have changed radically: to ignore that is to ignore facts and to be guided by the worst form of theorizing and sentimentalism--the theorizing that will not recognize the facts. England does not need to maintain order in Germany, nor Germany in France; and the struggle between those nations is no part of man"s struggle with nature--has no justification in the real law of human struggle; it is an anachronism; it finds its justification in a sham philosophy that will not bear the test of facts, and, responding to no real need and achieving no real purpose, is bound with increasing enlightenment to come to an end.
I wish it were not everlastingly necessary to reiterate the fact that the world has moved. Yet for the purposes of this discussion it is necessary. If to-day an Italian warship were suddenly to bombard Liverpool without warning, the Bourse in Rome would present a condition, and the bank-rate in Rome would take a drop that would ruin tens of thousands of Italians--do far more injury, probably, to Italy than to England. Yet if five hundred years ago Italian pirates had landed from the Thames and sacked London itself, not an Italian in Italy would have been a penny the worse for it.
Is it seriously urged that in the matter of the exercise of physical force, therefore, there is no difference in these two conditions: and is it seriously urged that the psychological phenomena which go with the exercise of physical force are to remain unaffected?
The preceding chapter is, indeed, the historical justification of the economic truths established in the first section of this book in the terms of the facts of the present-day world, which show that the predominating factor in survival is shifting from the physical to the intellectual plane. This evolutionary process has now reached a point in international affairs which involves the complete economic futility of military force. In the last chapter but one I dealt with the psychological consequence of this profound change in the nature of man"s normal activities, showing that his nature is coming more and more to adapt itself to what he normally and for the greater part of his life--in most cases all his life--is engaged in, and is losing the impulses concerned with an abnormal and unusual occupation.
Why have I presented the facts in this order, and dealt with the psychological result involved in this change before the change itself? I have adopted this order of treatment because the believer in war justifies his dogmatism for the most part by an appeal to what he alleges is the one dominating fact of the situation--_i.e._, that human nature is unchanging. Well, as will be seen from the chapter on that subject, that alleged fact does not bear investigation. Human nature is changing out of all recognition. Not only is man fighting less, but he is using all forms of physical compulsion less, and as a very natural result is losing those psychological attributes that go with the employment of physical force. And he is coming to employ physical force less because acc.u.mulated evidence is pushing him more and more to the conclusion that he can accomplish more easily that which he strives for by other means.
Few of us realize to what extent economic pressure--and I use that term in its just sense, as meaning, not only the struggle for money, but everything implied therein, well-being, social consideration, and the rest--has replaced physical force in human affairs. The primitive mind could not conceive a world in which everything was not regulated by force: even the great minds of antiquity could not believe the world would be an industrious one unless the great ma.s.s were made industrious by the use of physical force--_i.e._, by slavery. Three-fourths of those who peopled what is now Italy in Rome"s palmiest days were slaves, chained in the fields when at work, chained at night in their dormitories, with those who were porters chained to the doorways. It was a society of slavery--fighting slaves, working slaves, cultivating slaves, official slaves, and Gibbon adds that the Emperor himself was a slave, "the first slave to the ceremonies he imposed." Great and penetrating as were many of the minds of antiquity, none of them show much conception of any condition of society in which the economic impulse could replace physical compulsion.[90] Had they been told that the time would come when the world would work very much harder under the impulse of an abstract thing known as economic interest, they would have regarded such a statement as that of a mere sentimental theorist.
Indeed, one need not go so far: if one had told an American slaveholder of sixty years ago that the time would come when the South would produce more cotton under the free pressure of economic forces than under slavery, he would have made a like reply. He would probably have declared that "a good cowhide whip beats all economic pressure"--pretty much the sort of thing that one may hear from the mouth of the average militarist to-day. Very "practical" and virile, of course, but it has the disadvantage of not being true.
The presumed necessity for physical compulsion did not stop at slavery.
As we have already seen, it was accepted as an axiom in statecraft that men"s religious beliefs had to be forcibly restrained, and not merely their religious belief, but their very clothing; and we have hundreds of years of complicated sumptuary laws, hundreds of years, also, of forcible control or, rather, the attempted forcible control of prices and trade, the elaborate system of monopolies, absolute prohibition of the entrance into the country of certain foreign goods, the violation of which prohibition was treated as a penal offence. We had even the use of forced money, the refusal to accept which was treated as a penal offence. In many countries for years it was a crime to send gold abroad, all indicating the domination of the mind of man by the same curious obsession that man"s life must be ruled by physical force, and it is only very slowly and very painfully that we have arrived at the truth that men will work best when left to unseen and invisible forces. A world in which physical force was withdrawn from the regulation of men"s labor, faith, clothes, trade, language, travel, would have been absolutely inconceivable to even the best minds during the three or four thousand years of history which mainly concern us. What is the central explanation of the profound change involved here--the shifting of the pivot in all human affairs, in so far as they touch both the individual and the community, from physical ponderable forces to economic imponderable forces? It is surely that, strange as it may seem, the latter forces accomplish the desired result more efficiently and more readily than do the former, which even when they are not completely futile are in comparison wasteful and stultifying. It is the law of the economy of effort. Indeed, the use of physical force usually involves in those employing it the same limitation of freedom (even if in lesser degree) as that which it is desired to impose. Herbert Spencer ill.u.s.trates the process in the following suggestive pa.s.sage:
The exercise of mastery inevitably entails on the master himself some sort of slavery more or less p.r.o.nounced. The uncultured ma.s.ses and even the greater part of the cultured will regard this statement as absurd, and though many who have read history with an eye to essentials rather than to trivialities know that this is a paradox in the right sense--that is, true in fact though not seeming true--even they are not fully conscious of the ma.s.s of evidence establishing it, and will be all the better for having ill.u.s.trations recalled. Let me begin with the earliest and simplest which serves to symbolize the whole.
Here is a prisoner, with his hands tied and a cord round his neck (as suggested by figures in a.s.syrian bas-reliefs), being led home by his savage conqueror, who intends to make him a slave. The one you say is captive and the other free. Are you quite sure the other is free? He holds one end of the cord and, unless he means his captive to escape, he must continue to be fastened by keeping hold of the cord in such way that it cannot easily be detached. He must be himself tied to the captive while the captive is tied to him. In other ways his activities are impeded and certain burdens are imposed on him. A wild animal crosses the track and he cannot pursue. If he wishes to drink of the adjacent stream he must tie up his captive, lest advantage be taken of his defenceless position. Moreover, he has to provide food for both. In various ways he is no longer, then, completely at liberty; and these worries adumbrate in a simple manner the universal truth that the instrumentalities by which the subordination of others is effected themselves subordinate the victor, the master, or the ruler.[91]
Thus it comes that all nations attempting to live by conquest end by being themselves the victims of a military tyranny precisely similar to that which they hope to inflict; or, in other terms, that the attempt to impose by force of arms a disadvantageous commercial situation to the advantage of the conqueror ends in the conqueror"s falling a victim to the very disadvantages from which he hoped by a process of spoliation to profit.
But the truth that economic force always in the long run outweighs physical or military force is ill.u.s.trated by the simple fact of the universal use of money--the fact that the use of money is not a thing which we choose or can shake off, but a thing imposed by the operation of forces stronger than our volition, stronger than the tyranny of the cruellest tyrant who ever reigned by blood and iron. I think it is one of the most astounding things, to the man who takes a fairly fresh mind to the study of history, that the most absolute despots--men who can command the lives of their subjects with a completeness and a nonchalance of which the modern Western world furnishes no parallel--cannot command money. One asks oneself, indeed, why such an absolute ruler, able as he is by the sheer might of his position and by the sheer force of his power to take everything that exists in his kingdom, and able as he is to exact every sort and character of service, needs money, which is the means of obtaining goods or services by a freely consented exchange. Yet, as we know, it is precisely, in ancient as in modern times, the most absolute despot who is often the most financially embarra.s.sed.[92] Is not this a demonstration that in reality physical force is operative in only very narrow limits? It is no mere rhetoric, but the cold truth, to say that under absolutism it is a simple thing to get men"s lives, but often impossible to get money. And the more, apparently, that physical force was exercised, the more difficult did the command of money become. And for a very simple reason--a reason which reveals in rudimentary form that principle of the economic futility of military power with which we are dealing. The phenomenon is best ill.u.s.trated by a concrete case. If one go to-day into one of the independent despotisms of Central Asia one will find generally a picture of the most abject poverty. Why? Because the ruler has absolute power to take wealth whenever he sees it, to take it by any means whatever--torture, death--up to the completest limit of uncontrolled physical force. What is the result? The wealth is not created, and torture itself cannot produce a thing which is non-existent. Step across the frontier into a State under British or Russian protection, where the Khan has some sort of limits imposed on his powers. The difference is immediately perceptible: evidence of wealth and comfort in relative profusion, and, other things being equal, the ruler, whose physical force over his subjects is limited, is a great deal richer than the ruler whose physical force over his subjects is unlimited. In other words, the farther one gets away from physical force, in the acquisition of wealth, the greater is the result for the effort expended. At the one end of the scale you get the despot in rags, exercising sway over what is probably a potentially rich territory, reduced to having to kill a man by torture in order to obtain a sum which at the other end of the scale a London tradesman will spend on a restaurant dinner for the purpose of sitting at table with a duke--or the thousandth part of the sum which the same tradesman will spend in philanthropy or otherwise, for the sake of acquiring an empty t.i.tle from a monarch who has lost all power of exercising any physical force whatsoever.
Which process, judged by all things that men desire, gives the better result, the physical force of blood and iron which we see, or the intellectual or psychic force which we cannot see? The principle which operates in the limited fashion which I have indicated, operates with no less force in the larger domain of modern international politics. The wealth of the world is not represented by a fixed amount of gold or money now in the possession of one Power, and now in the possession of another, but depends on all the unchecked multiple activities of a community for the time being. Check that activity, whether by imposing tribute, or disadvantageous commercial conditions, or an unwelcome administration which sets up sterile political agitation, and you get less wealth--less wealth for the conqueror, as well as less for the conquered. The broadest statement of the case is that all experience--especially the experience indicated in the last chapter--shows that in trade by free consent, carrying mutual benefit, we get larger results for effort expended than in the exercise of physical force, which attempts to exact advantage for one party at the expense of the other. I am not arguing over again the thesis of the first part of this book; but, as we shall see presently, the general principle of the diminishing factor of physical force in the affairs of the world carries with it a psychological change in human nature which modifies radically our impulses to sheer physical conflict. What it is important just now to keep in mind, is the incalculable intensification of this diminution of physical force by our mechanical development. The principle was obviously less true for Rome than it is for Great Britain or America: Rome, however imperfectly, lived largely by tribute. The sheer mechanical development of the modern world has rendered tribute in the Roman sense impossible. Rome did not have to create markets and find a field for the employment of her capital. We do. What result does this carry? Rome could afford to be relatively indifferent to the prosperity of her subject territory. We cannot. If the territory is not prosperous we have no market, and we have no field for our investments, and that is why we are checked at every point from doing what Rome was able to do.
You can to some extent exact tribute by force; you cannot compel a man to buy your goods by force if he does not want them, and has not got the money to pay for them. Now, the difference which we see here has been brought about by the interaction of a whole series of mechanical changes--printing, gunpowder, steam, electricity, improved means of communication. It is the last-named which has mainly created the fact of credit. Now, credit is merely an extension of the use of money, and we can no more shake off the domination of the one than we can that of the other. We have seen that the bloodiest despot is himself the slave of money, in the sense that he is compelled to employ it. In the same way no physical force can, in the modern world, set at nought the force of credit.[93] It is no more possible for a great people of the modern world to live without credit than without money, of which it is a part.
Do we not here get an ill.u.s.tration of the fact that intangible economic forces are setting at nought the force of arms?
One of the curiosities of this mechanical development, with its deep-seated psychological results, is the general failure to realize the real bearings of each step therein. Printing was regarded, in the first instance, as merely a new-fangled process which threw a great many copying scribes and monks out of employment. Who realized that in the simple invention of printing there was the liberation of a force greater than the power of kings? It is only here and there that we find an isolated thinker having a glimmering of the political bearing of such inventions of the conception of the great truth that the more man succeeds in his struggle with nature, the less must be the role of physical force between men, for the reason that human society has become, with each success in the struggle against nature, a completer organism. That is to say, that the interdependence of the parts has been increased, and that the possibility of one part injuring another without injury to itself, has been diminished. Each part is more dependent on the other parts, and the impulses to injury, therefore, must in the nature of things be diminished. And that fact must, and does, daily redirect human pugnacity. And it is noteworthy that perhaps the best service which the improvement of the instruments of man"s struggle with nature performs is the improvement of human relations.
Machinery and the steam-engine have done something more than make fortunes for manufacturers: they have abolished human slavery, as Aristotle foresaw they would. It was impossible for men in the ma.s.s to be other than superst.i.tious and irrational until they had the printed book.[94] "Roads that are formed for the circulation of wealth become channels for the circulation of ideas, and render possible that simultaneous action upon which all liberty depends." Banking done by telegraphy concerns much more than the stockbroker: it demonstrates clearly and dramatically the real interdependence of nations, and is destined to transform the mind of the statesman. Our struggle is with our environment, not with one another; and those who talk as though struggle between the parts of the same organism must necessarily go on, and as though impulses which are redirected every day can never receive the particular redirection involved in abandoning the struggle between States, ignorantly adopt the formula of science, but leave half the facts out of consideration. And just as the direction of the impulses will be changed, so will the character of the struggle be changed; the force which we shall use for our needs will be the force of intelligence, of hard work, of character, of patience, self-control, and a developed brain, and pugnacity and combativeness which, instead of being used up and wasted in world conflicts of futile destructiveness, will be, and are being, diverted into the steady stream of rationally-directed effort. The virile impulses become, not the tyrant and master, but the tool and servant of the controlling brain.
The conception of abstract imponderable forces by the human mind is a very slow process. All man"s history reveals this. The theologian has always felt this difficulty. For thousands of years men could only conceive of evil as an animal with horns and a tail, going about the world devouring folk; abstract conceptions had to be made understandable by a crude anthropomorphism. Perhaps it is better that humanity should have some glimmering of the great facts of the universe, even though interpreted by legends of demons, and goblins, and fairies, and the rest; but we cannot overlook the truth that the facts are distorted in the process, and our advance in the conception of morals is marked largely by the extent to which we can form an abstract conception of the fact of evil--none the less a fact because unembodied--without having to translate it into a non-existent person or animal with a forked tail.
As our advance in the understanding of morality is marked by our dropping these crude physical conceptions, is it not likely that our advance in the understanding of those social problems, which so nearly affect our general well-being, will be marked in like manner?
Is it not somewhat childish and elementary to conceive of force only as the firing off of guns and the launching of _Dreadnoughts_, of struggle as the physical struggle between men, instead of the application of man"s energies to his contest with the planet? Is not the time coming when the real struggle will inspire us with the same respect and even the same thrill as that now inspired by a charge in battle; especially as the charges in battle are getting very out of date, and are shortly to disappear from our warfare? The mind which can only conceive of struggle as bombardment and charges is, of course, the Dervish mind. Not that Fuzzy-Wuzzy is not a fine fellow. He is manly, st.u.r.dy, hardy, with a courage, and warlike qualities generally, which no European can equal.
But the frail and spectacled English official is his master, and a few score of such will make themselves the masters of teeming thousands of Sudanese; the relatively unwarlike Englishman is doing the same thing all over Asia, and he is doing it simply by virtue of superior brain and character, more thought, more rationalism, more steady and controlled hard work. The American is doing the same in the Philippines.
It may be said that it is superior armament which does it. But what is the superior armament but the result of superior thought and work? And even without the superior armament the larger intelligence would still do it; for what the Englishman and American do, the Roman did of old, with the same arms as the inhabitants of his va.s.sal worlds. Force is indeed the master, but it is the force of intelligence, character, and rationalism.
I can imagine the contempt with which the man of physical force greets the foregoing. To fight with words, to fight with talk! No, not words, but ideas. And something more than ideas. Their translation into practical effort, into organization, into the direction and administration of organization, into the strategy and tactics of human life.
What, indeed, is modern warfare in its highest phases but this? Is it not altogether out of date and ignorant to picture soldiering as riding about on horseback, bivouacking in forests, sleeping in tents, and dashing gallantly at the head of shining regiments in plumes and breastplates, and pounding in serried ranks against the equally serried ranks of the cruel foe, storming breaches as the "war," in short, of Mr.
Henty"s books for boys? How far does such a conception correspond to the reality--to the German conception? Even if the whole picture were not out of date, what proportion of the most military nation would ever be destined to witness it or to take part in it? Not one in ten thousand.
What is the character even of military conflict but, for the most part, years of hard and steady work, somewhat mechanical, somewhat divorced from real life, but not a whit more exciting? That is true of all ranks; and in the higher ranks of the directing mind war has become an almost purely intellectual process. Was it not the late W.H. Steevens who painted Lord Kitchener as the sort of man who would have made an admirable manager of Harrod"s Stores; who fought all his battles in his study, and regarded the actual fighting as the mere culminating incident in the whole process, the dirty and noisy part of it, which he would have been glad to get away from?
The real soldiers of our time--those who represent the brain of the armies--have a life not very different from that of men of any intellectual calling; much less of physical strife than is called for in many civil occupations; less than falls to the lot of engineers, ranchers, sailors, miners, and so on. Even with armies the pugnacity must be translated into intellectual and not into physical effort.[95]
The very fact that war was long an activity which was in some sense a change and relaxation from the more intellectual strife of peaceful life, in which work was replaced by danger, thought by adventure, accounted in no small part for its attraction for men. But, as we have seen, war is becoming as hopelessly intellectual and scientific as any other form of work: officers are scientists, the men are workmen, the army is a machine, battles are "tactical operations," the charge is becoming out of date; a little while and war will become the least romantic of all professions.
In this domain, as in all others, intellectual force is replacing sheer physical force, and we are being pushed by the necessities even of this struggle to be more rational in our att.i.tude to war, to rationalize our study of it; and as our att.i.tude generally becomes more scientific, so will the purely impulsive element lose its empire over us. That is one factor; but, of course, there is the greater one. Our respect and admiration goes in the long run, despite momentary setbacks, to those qualities which achieve the results at which we are all, in common, aiming. If those results are mainly intellectual, it is the intellectual qualities that will receive the tribute of our admiration. We do not make a man President because he holds the light-weight boxing championship, and n.o.body knows or cares whether Mr. Wilson or Mr. Taft would be the better man at golf. But in a condition of society in which physical force was still the determining factor it would matter all in the world, and even when other factors had obtained considerable weight, as during the Middle Ages, physical combat went for a great deal: the knight in his shining armor established his prestige by his prowess in arms, and the vestige of this still remains in those countries that retain the duel. To some small extent--a very small extent--a man"s dexterity with sword and pistol will affect his political prestige in Paris, Rome, Budapest, or Berlin. But these are just interesting vestiges, which in the case of Anglo-Saxon societies have disappeared entirely. My commercial friend who declares that he works fifteen hours a day mainly for the purpose of going one better than his commercial rival across the street, must beat that rival in commerce, not in arms; it would satisfy no pride of either to "have it out" in the back garden in their shirt-sleeves. Nor is there the least danger that one will stick a knife into the other.
Are all these factors to leave the national relationship unaffected?
Have they left it unaffected? Does the military prowess of Russia or of Turkey inspire any particular satisfaction in the minds of the individual Russian or of the individual Turk? Does it inspire Europe with any especial respect? Would not most of us just as soon be a non-military American as a military Turk? Do not, in short, all the factors show that sheer physical force is losing its prestige as much in the national as in the personal relationship?
I am not overlooking the case of Germany. Does the history of Germany, during the last half-century, show the blind instinctive pugnacity which is supposed to be so overpowering an element in international relationship as to outweigh all question of material interest? Does the commonly accepted history of the trickery and negotiation which preceded the 1870 conflict, the cool calculation of those who swayed Germany"s policy during those years, show that subordination to the blind l.u.s.t for battle which the militarist would persuade us is always to be an element in our international conflict? Does it not, on the contrary, show that German destinies were swayed by very cool and calculating motives of interest, though interest interpreted in terms of political and economic doctrines which the development of the last thirty years or so has demonstrated to be obsolete? Nor am I overlooking the "Prussian tradition," the fact of a firmly entrenched, aristocratic status, the intellectual legacy of pagan knighthood and Heaven knows what else. But even a Prussian Junker becomes less of an energumen as he becomes more of a scientist,[96] and although German science has of late spent its energies in somewhat arid specialization, the influence of more enlightened conceptions in sociology and statecraft must sooner or later emerge from any thoroughgoing study of political and economic problems.
Of course, there are survivals of the old temper, but can it seriously be argued that, when the futility of physical force to accomplish those ends towards which we are all striving is fully demonstrated, we shall go on maintaining war as a sort of theatrical entertainment? Has such a thing ever happened in the past, when our impulses and "sporting"
instincts came into conflict with our larger social and economic interests?
All this, in other words, involves a great deal more than the mere change in the character of warfare. It involves a fundamental change in our psychological att.i.tude thereto. Not only does it show that on every side, even the military side, conflict must become less impulsive and instinctive, more rational and sustained, less the blind strife of mutually hating men, and more and more the calculated effort to a definite end; but it will affect the very well-springs of much of the present defence of war.
Why is it that the authorities I have quoted in the first chapter of this section--Mr. Roosevelt, Von Moltke, Renan, and the English clergymen--sing the praises of war as such a valuable school of morals?[97] Do these war advocates urge that war itself is desirable?
Would they urge going to war unnecessarily or unjustly merely because it is good for us? Emphatically no. Their argument, in the last a.n.a.lysis, resolves itself into this: that war, though bad, has redeeming qualities, as teaching staunchness, courage, and the rest. Well, so has cutting our legs off, or an operation for appendicitis. Whoever composed epics on typhoid fever or cancer? Such advocates might object to the efficient policing of a town because, if it was full of cut-throats, the inhabitants would be taught courage. One can almost imagine this sort of teacher pouring scorn upon those weaklings who want to call upon the police for protection, and saying, "Police are for sentimentalists and cowards and men of slothful ease. What will become of the strenuous life if you introduce police?"[98]
The whole thing falls to the ground; and if we do not compose poems about typhoid it is because typhoid does not attract us and war does.
That is the bottom of the whole matter, and it simplifies things a great deal to admit honestly that while no one is thrilled by the spectacle of disease, most of us are thrilled by the spectacle of war--that while none of us are fascinated by the spectacle of a man struggling with a disease, most of us are by the spectacle of men struggling with one another in war. There is something in warfare, in its story and in its paraphernalia, which profoundly stirs the emotions and sends the blood tingling through the veins of the most peaceable of us, and appeals to I know not what remote instincts, to say nothing of our natural admiration for courage, our love of adventure, of intense movement and action. But this romantic fascination resides to no small extent in that very spectacular quality of which modern conditions are depriving war.
As we become a little more educated, we realize that human psychology is a complex and not a simple thing; that because we yield ourselves to the thrill of the battle spectacle we are not bound to conclude that the processes behind it, and the nature behind it, are necessarily all admirable; that the readiness to die is not the only test of virility or a fine or n.o.ble nature.
In the book to which I have just referred (Mr. Steevens" "With Kitchener to Khartoum") one may read the following:
And the Dervishes? The honor of the fight must still go with the men who died. Our men were perfect, but the Dervishes were superb--beyond perfection. It was their largest, best, and bravest army that ever fought against us for Mahdism, and it died worthily for the huge empire that Mahdism won and kept so long. Their riflemen, mangled by every kind of death and torment that man can devise, clung round the black flag and the green, emptying their poor, rotten home-made cartridges dauntlessly. Their spearmen charged death every minute hopelessly. Their hors.e.m.e.n led each attack, riding into the bullets till nothing was left.... Not one rush, or two, or ten, but rush on rush, company on company, never stopping, though all their view that was not unshaken enemy was the bodies of the men who had rushed before them. A dusky line got up and stormed forward: it bent, broke up, fell apart, and disappeared. Before the smoke had cleared another line was bending and storming forward in the same track.... From the green army there now came only death-enamored desperadoes, strolling one by one towards the rifles, pausing to take a spear, turning aside to recognize a corpse, then, caught by a sudden jet of fury, bounding forward, checking, sinking limply to the ground. Now under the black flag in a ring of bodies stood only three men, facing the three thousand of the Third Brigade. They folded their arms about the staff and gazed steadily forward. Two fell. The last Dervish stood up and filled his chest; he shouted the name of his G.o.d and hurled his spear. Then he stood quite still, waiting. It took him full; he quivered, gave at the knees, and toppled with his head on his arms and his face towards the legions of his conquerors."
Let us be honest. Is there anything in European history--Cambronne, the Light Brigade, anything you like--more magnificent than this? If we are honest we shall say, No.
But note what follows in Mr. Steevens" narrative. What sort of nature should we expect those savage heroes to display? Cruel, perhaps; but at least loyal. They will stand by their chief. Men who can die like that will not betray him for gain. They are uncorrupted by commercialism.
Well, a few chapters after the scene just described, one may read this:
As a ruler the Khalifa finished when he rode out of Omdurman.
His own pampered Baggara hors.e.m.e.n killed his herdsmen and looted the cattle that were to feed them. Somebody betrayed the position of the reserve camels.... His followers took to killing one another.... The whole population of the Khalifa"s capital was now racing to pilfer the Khalifa"s grain....
Wonderful workings of the savage mind! Six hours before they were dying in regiments for their master; now they were looting his corn. Six hours before they were slashing our wounded to pieces; now they were asking us for coppers.
This difficulty with the soldier"s psychology is not special to Dervishes or to savages. An able and cultivated British officer writes:
Soldiers as a cla.s.s are men who have disregarded the civil standard of morality altogether. They simply ignore it. It is no doubt why civilians fight shy of them. In the game of life they do not play the same rules, and the consequence is a good deal of misunderstanding, until finally the civilian says he will not play with Tommy any more. In soldiers" eyes lying, theft, drunkenness, bad language, etc., are not evils at all.
They steal like jackdaws. As to language, I used to think the language of a merchant ship"s forecastle pretty bad, but the language of Tommies, in point of profanity and in point of obscenity, beats it hollow. This department is a speciality of his. Lying he treats with the same large charity. To lie like a trooper is quite a sound metaphor. He invents all sorts of elaborate lies for the mere pleasure of inventing them.
Looting, again, is one of his preferred joys, not merely looting for profit, but looting for the sheer fun of the destruction.[99]
(Please, please, dear reader, do not say that I am slandering the British soldier. I am quoting a British officer, and a British officer, moreover, who is keenly in sympathy with the person that he has just been describing.) He adds:
Are thieving, and lying, and looting, and b.e.s.t.i.a.l talk very bad things? If they are, Tommy is a bad man. But for some reason or other, since I got to know him, I have thought rather less of the iniquity of these things than I did before.