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The World Decision, a non-fiction book by Robert Herrick |
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Part 3. America - Chapter 3. Peace |
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_ Part Three. America Chapter III. Peace The real cynics of the war are the pacifists. They see nothing more serious in the European agony than what can be disposed of easily at any time in a peace conference--by talk and adjustment. So obsessed are some of them by the slaughter of men, by the woe and travail of Europe, that they would turn the immense sacrifice into a grotesque farce by any sort of compromise--a peace that could be no peace, merely the armistice for further war. Their eyes are so blinded by the economic waste of the war and its suffering that they are incapable of seeing the great underlying principle that must be decided. Americans, having evaded the responsibility of pronouncing a decisive moral judgment on the rape of Belgium, the sinking of the Lusitania, and the extermination of the Armenians, play the buffoon with women's peace conferences, peace ships, and endless impertinent peace talk. We, who have forfeited our right to sit at the peace conference, who are busily making money off the war, having prudently kept our own skins out of danger, are officiously ready with proposals of peace. What a peace! The only peace that could be made to-day would be a dastardly treason to every one of the millions whose blood has watered Europe, to every woman who has given a son or a father or a husband to the settlement of the cause. The parochialism of the American intelligence has never been more humiliatingly displayed than in the activities of our busy peacemakers. * * * * * No sane person believes in war. The sordidness and the horror of war have never been so fully revealed as during this past year. War has been stripped of its every romantic feature. Modern war is worse than hell--it is pure insanity. We do not need peace foundations, peace conferences, peace ships to demonstrate the awfulness of war. But crying peace, thinking peace, willing peace will not bring peace unless conditions that make peace exist. Here in America we use the word peace too loosely, as if it meant some absolute state of being which we had achieved through our innate wisdom rather than from the happy accident of our world position. But peace is an entirely relative term, as any one who has given heed to the social conditions we have created should realize. We have enjoyed a certain kind of peace, the value of which is debatable. And now, alarmed at the exposed condition of our eastern seaboard, we are agitatedly preparing to arm to protect ourselves--from what? From Germany? Or is it from England? And still we recommend an instant peace to Europe! Awful as are the waste and suffering caused by war, hideous as modern warfare is, there are worse evils for humanity. To my thinking the perpetuation of the lawless, materialistic creed of the new Germany would be infinitely worse for the world than any war could be. When the German tide broke into Belgium and poured out over northern France, sweeping all before it, killing, burning, raping, the pacifists no doubt would have accepted the conqueror as the will of God and have made peace then!... There are none more eager for peace than the soldiers in the trenches who are giving their lives to press back the barbarian flood. But no peace until their "work has been done, the cause won." I have heard Americans express the fear that European civilization is in danger of annihilation from the prolonged conflict. Even that were preferable to submission to the wrong ideal. But I see, rather, the possibility of a higher civilization through the settlement of fundamental principles, the reaffirmation of necessary laws. It is surely with this abiding faith that the enormous sacrifices are being freely made by the allied nations. "It is of little importance what happens to us," a Frenchman said to me in Rheims, whose home had been destroyed that morning, whose son had already been killed in the trenches. "There will be a better world for the generations to come because of what we have endured." That is what the American pacifist cannot seem to understand--the necessity of present sacrifice for a better future, the cost in blood and agony of ultimate principles. * * * * * This war is leading us all back to the basic commonplaces of thinking. Is life under any and all conditions worth the having? Our reason says not. It tells us that the diseased and the weak-minded should not be permitted to breed, that an anaemic existence under degenerating influences is not worth calling life. We shudder in our armchairs at the thought of "cannon food," but why not shudder equally at the words "factory food," "mine food," and "sweat-shop food"? We are inclined to sentimentalize over those brave lives that have been spent by the hundreds of thousands on the battlefields of France and Poland, but for the most part we live placidly unconscious of the lives ground out in industrial competition all about us. Between the two methods of eating up, of maiming, of suppressing human lives, the battle method may be the more humane--I should prefer it for myself, for my child. What our pacifists desire is not so much peace as bloodlessness. We should be honest enough to recognize that for many human beings,--possibly a majority even in our prosperous, war-free society,--a violent death may not be by any means the worst event. And it may be the happiest if the individual is convinced that the sacrifice of his existence will help others to realize a better life. That is the hope, the faith of every loyal soldier who dies for his country, of every soldier's father and mother who pays with a son for the endurance of those ideals more precious than life itself. The higher one rises in consciousness, the more nearly free and self-determined life becomes, the greater are the rewards of complete sacrifice. There are many who have "fallen on the field of honor" whose lives, if lived out under normal peace conditions, might have meant much to themselves, possibly to humanity. They have given themselves freely, without question, for what seems to them of more importance than life. Wounded, mutilated past all usefulness, dying, they have not rebelled. Doctors and nurses in the hospitals tell the story of their endurance without complaint of their bitter fate. Much as we must feel the awful price which they have felt obliged to pay, it is not sentimental to say that the finer spirits among them have lived more fully in the few crowded weeks of their struggle than if they had been permitted to live out their lives in all the gratifications of our comfortable civilization. Letters from them give an extraordinary revelation of priceless qualities gained by these soldiers through complete renunciation and sacrifice. War, it must not be denied, is a great developer as well as a destroyer of life. Nothing else, it would seem, in our present state of evolution presses the cup of human experience so full of realization and understanding as battle and death. The men who are paying for their beliefs with their lives are living more in moments and hours than we who escape the ordeal can ever live. For life cannot be measured by time or comfort or enjoyment. It is too subtle for that! A supreme effort, even a supreme agony, may have more real living worth than years of "normal" existence. The youths whose graves now dot so plentifully the pleasant fields of France have drunk deeper than we can fathom of the mystery of life. As for the nation, that greater mother for whose existence they have given their individual lives, there is even less question of the benefit of this war. We Americans are fond of measuring loss and gain in figures: we reckon up the huge war debts, the toll of killed and wounded, and against this heavy account we set down--nothing. It is all dead loss. Yet even to-day, in the crisis of their struggle, there is not a Frenchman who will not admit the immense good that has already come to his people, that will come increasingly out of the bloody sacrifice. The war has united all individuals, swept aside the trivial and the base, revealed the nation to itself. The French have discovered within their souls and shown before the world qualities, unsuspected or forgotten, of chivalry, steadfastness, seriousness, and they have renewed their familiar virtues of bravery and good humor and intelligence. The French soldier, the French citizen, and the French woman are to-day marvelously moulded in the heroic type of their best tradition: in the full sense of the word they are gallant--chivalrous, self-forgetful, devoted. Is there any price too great to pay for such a resurrection of human nobility? The pacifist is fain to babble of the "disciplines of peace." No one denies them. But how can humanity be compelled to embrace these disciplines of peace? The German lesson of thoroughness and social organization and responsibility was as necessary before the war as it is to-day, but neither England nor France, neither Russia nor our own America gave heed to it until the terrible menace of extermination in this war ground the lesson into their unwilling souls. It may be lamentable that humanity should still be held so firmly in the grip of biologic law that it must kill and be killed in order to save itself, but there are things worse than death. Until humanity learns the secret of self-discipline it will create diseases that can be eradicated only with the knife; it is merely blind to assume that the insanity of war can be prevented by any system of parliamenting, or litigation, or paper schemes of international arbitration. Some issues are of a primary importance, unarguable, fundamental. No man--and no nation--is worthy of life who is not ready to lay it down in their settlement. I know that some Americans are still unable to perceive that any such fundamental principle is at stake in Europe to-day. Extraordinary as it seems to me I hear intelligent men refer to the great war as if it were a local quarrel of no real consequence to us. Even the humblest _poilu_ in the trenches, the simplest working-woman in France, know that they are giving themselves not merely in the righteous cause of self-defense, but in the world's cause in defense of its best tradition, its highest ideals. Their cause is big enough to consecrate them. * * * * * Therefore a new, a larger, a more vital life has already begun for invaded and unconquered France! In order to reap the blessings of war, a nation must have an irreproachable cause, and aside from Belgium, France has the clearest record of all the belligerents in this world war. She will gain most from it, not in land or wealth, but in honor and moral strength, in dignity and pride. She is ready to pay the great price for her soul. This is the one supreme inspiration that the French are giving an admiring world--their readiness to give all rather than yield to the evil that threatens them. With the light of such nobility in one's eyes, it is difficult, indeed, to be patient with the cynical clamor of comfortable neutrals for peace at any price. If there is anything of dignity and meaning in human life, it lies in selfless devotion to beliefs, to principles; it is readiness to sacrifice happiness, life, all, in their defense. And that is patriotism in its larger aspect. Our intellectuals discuss coldly the primitive quality of patriotism and its unexpected recrudescence in this world war. They talk of it in the jargon of social science as "group consciousness." Before I felt its fervor in the crisis of Italy's decision, in the sublime endurance of the French, I did not realize what patriotism might mean. It is not merely the instinctive love for the land of birth, loyalty to the known and familiar. Much more than that! The natal soil is but the symbol. Patriotism is human loyalty to the deeper, better part of one's own being, to the loves and the ideals and the beliefs of one's race. It is the love of family, of land, of tongue, of religion, of the woman who bore you and of the woman you get with child, of the God you reverence. It is loyalty to life as it has been poured into you by your forefathers, to those ideals which your race has conceived and given to the world. "_Viva Italia!_" "_Vive la France!_" is a prayer of the deepest, purest sort that the Italian or the Frenchman can breathe. Without these subconscious devotions and loyalties the human animal would be a forlorn complex of mind and sense. Those amorphous beings who, thanks to our modern economic wealth, have become "citizens of the world," who wander physically and intellectually from land to land, who taste of this and that without incorporating any supreme devotion in their blood, our cosmopolites and expatriates and intellectuals, froth of a too comfortable existence, give forth a hollow sound at the savage touch of war. They become pacifists. They can see neither good nor evil: all is a vague blur of "humanity." Patriotism is the supreme loyalty to life of the individual. Wherever this loyalty is instinctive, vivid, there some precious tradition has been bequeathed to a people that still burns in their blood. Latin patriotism is ardent like man's one great love for woman, ennobling the giver as well as the loved one; it is tender like the son's love for the mother, with the sanctity of acknowledgment of the debt of life. Can any vision of "internationalism" take the place of these powerful personal loyalties to racial ideals?... "Mere boys led to the slaughter" is the sentimentality one hears of the marching conscripts of European armies. Better even so than the curse of no supreme allegiance, or devotion, or readiness to sacrifice--than the aimless selfishness in which our American youth are brought up! * * * * * For every boy in Europe knows, as soon as he knows anything, that he owes one certain fixed debt, and that is service to his country, to that larger whole that has given him the best part of his own being. If need be, he owes it his life itself. It is an obligation he must fulfill before all other obligations, at no matter what inconvenience or sacrifice to himself, unquestioningly, immediately. What takes the place for the American youth of this primary obligation? Himself! He is expensively nurtured, schooled, put forward into life--for what? To help himself as best he can at the general table of society. He can never forget himself, subordinate his personal ambition to any transcendent loyalty. He becomes from his cradle the egotist. To-day under the shadow of world war we are taking thought of national protection, projecting schemes of defense including the enrollment of citizens who may be called upon to fight for their country. It is less important to teach our youth the military lessons of self-protection than it is to teach them the greater lesson of self-forgetfulness, of devotion to a national ideal--so that they may be ready to give their lives for that national ideal as the youth of Europe have given their lives to settle this world cause. Not a few hundreds of thousands of national guards, then, in order to secure ourselves from invasion are what we need, but that every man or woman born into the nation or adopting it as home should be made to feel the obligation of national service. It matters less what form that service should take, whether purely military or partly military and partly social. It is the service, the sense of obligation that counts for the individual and for the nation. The responsibility of service teaches the importance of ideas, the necessity of sacrifice. And he who is ready to sacrifice himself, to forget himself and become absorbed in the life that surrounds him, of which he is but an infinitesimal unit, to which he owes the best in him, has already achieved a larger peace than the pacifist dreams of. * * * * * Consider what happened to the youth of France a little more than a year ago. Suddenly with no preparation or warning they were called to defend their country from invasion. It was no longer possible to argue the rights of that diplomatic tangle into which European statesmen had muddled. Whatever the ultimate truth, the ultimate right of the controversy, the state--that larger self which was their home, their mesh of loves and interests and beliefs--demanded their service. The youth of France had been brought up with the knowledge that any day such a sacrifice might be required, with the consciousness deeply rooted in their beings that one of the necessary conditions of their living was to give their all at the call of the state. They conceived of no honorable alternative: it was as inevitable to pay this obligation as it is for decently minded citizens to pay their legal debts. They hurried to their mobilization posts, donned uniforms and equipment, and were shipped away in regiments to the front. Most of them did not worry about the possibility of death, but acted like all healthy human beings, ignoring what they could not affect, caught up in the novelty and the requirements of the new life. Yet deep in the consciousness of the most careless must have lain some thought that he might never return, that the cross-marked grave on the hillside, the pit, or the hospital might be waiting for him. This consciousness that he can no longer dispose of himself, at least for the finer spirit, must act as a great release. Having accepted his fate, and therefore willed it as the only possible choice for him, he becomes another person, a largely selfless person, a strangely older, calmer being capable of thinking and acting clearly, nobly. Once the great personal decision made, the resolve to forego life and happiness and personal achievement, a clogging burden of selfish considerations drop from within. So one can read the experience of those two young officers preserved in Henry Bordeaux's "Two Heroes." They were free as never before to do what lay before them,--their officers' duty,--simply, directly. Many things that they had previously valued seemed to have lost color, to have become trivial. They thought solely of acquitting themselves with, honor in what it was their fate to do. They were ready to obey because before death they were humble. They had begun to glimpse the blind mystery that is life, in which every one must needs act his part without questioning, with faith in its ultimate meaning, with the will to trust its end. They were brave because they were simple and single-hearted, selfless. They were strong because they disdained to be weak, having renounced all. If it were to be their fate to die unnoted, they were content with the satisfaction of having done what was expected of them. And if they died in glory, they were unaware of their honor, believing that they had done no more than any of their fellows would have done in the same opportunity. Thus, having laid down their lives for the cause that commanded their faith and loyalty, they found their real lives--larger, more beautiful, stronger.... Not once, but many thousands of times, has this miracle happened! Their graves are strewn, singly and in groups, over every field of eastern France. They paid the debt, did their part little or great, unknown or glorified by men. Literally they have given their blood for the soil of their fathers' land. * * * * * We know that they have given much more than their blood to that soil. Just as at the call to arms, the selfish, the mean, the vicious qualities of these lives dropped from them in the freedom of sacrifice accepted, and in place of egotistic preoccupations rose once more to the surface of their natures the ancient virtues of their race, so in their going they left for the others who lived, who were to be born, a tremendous legacy of honor and noble responsibility. By watering the soil with their blood they have made it infinitely more precious for every human being that treads upon it. They have helped to make mere life more significant for those who remain to mourn them. It can never again be quite the same commonplace affair, so lightly, cheaply spent, as it had been before. They have not left behind them joy, but faith. And that is why the faces of the earnest living who are able to realize this sacrifice of youth have a grave sternness in them which touches even the most careless stranger. Something of the glory created by the dead and the wounded radiates out even to us in a distant, peaceful land.... But why, we ask, all this sacrifice, this cruel, agonizing sacrifice of war? That is a mystery too deep for any to fathom. It is better not to probe too insistently, to accept it as the man in Rheims,--"It must be better for the others afterward because of what we have endured." That is the expression of faith in life which is the better part of any religion. For what we suffer now, for what we give now of our most precious, it will be repaid to those who are to come. Life will be freer, grander, more significant: it will be a better world. Nobody who has seen or felt the heavy tragedy of this world war could endure its horror if he were not sustained by that faith. But with that faith the losses seem not too vast. One by one the world's great decisions must be made, in suffering, in blood and tears. Peace comes not through evasion or compromise, either for the individual or for the state. [THE END] _ |
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