We keep the peace in private life by asking for the facts of the provocation and the proper object of punishment. We do not go into the dull details; we do inquire into the origins; we do emphatically inquire who it was that hit first.
Given this, it is indeed true that behind these facts are the truths—truths of a terrible, of a spiritual sort. In mere fact the Germanic power has been wrong about Servia, wrong about Russia, wrong about Belgium, wrong about England, wrong about Italy. But there was a reason for its being wrong everywhere, and that root reason, which has moved half the world against it, is nothing less than the locating, after more than a hundred years of recriminations and wrong explanations, of the modern European evil—the finding of the fountain from which poison has flowed upon all the nations of the earth ….
The Prussian begins all his culture by that act which is the destruction of all creative thought and constructive action. He breaks that mirror in the mind in which a man can see the face of his friend or foe. The truth is that they are breaking up the whole house of the human intellect that they may abscond in any direction. There is an ominous and almost monstrous parallel between the position of their overrated philosophers and of their underrated soldiers. For what their professors call roads of progress are really routes of escape.
From Current History; the Euopean War; The New York Times Company, New York, 1915.
The Moral Energy of Nations
—Henri Bergson
The issue of the war is not doubtful: Germany will succumb. Material force and moral force, all that sustains her, will end by failing her because she lives on provisions garnered once for all, because she wastes them and will not know how to renew them.
Everything has been said about her material resources. She has money, but her credit is sinking, and it is not apparent where she can borrow. She needs nitrates for her explosives, oil for her motors, bread for her sixty-five millions of inhabitants. For all this she has made provision, but the day will come when her granaries will be empty and her reservoirs dry. How will she fill them? War as she practices it consumes a frightful number of her men, and here, too, all revitalization is impossible; no aid will come from without, since an enterprise launched to impose German domination, German “culture,” German products, does not and never will interest those who are not Germans.
But it is not merely a question of material force, of visible force. What of the moral force that cannot be seen and that is more important than the other, since without it nothing avails?
The moral energy of nations, like that of individuals, can only be sustained by some ideal superior to themselves, stronger than they are, to which they can cling with a strong grip when they feel their courage vacillate. Where lies the ideal of contemporary Germany? The time has passed when her philosophers proclaimed the inviolability of justice, the eminent dignity of the individual, the obligation laid upon nations to respect one another. Germany militarized by Prussia has thrust far from her those noble ideas which came to her for the most part from the France of the eighteenth century and the Revolution.
The Germany of the present worships brute force. And as she believes herself strongest she is entirely absorbed in adoration of herself. Her energy has its origins in this pride. Her moral force is only the confidence by which her material force inspires her. That is to say, that here also she lives on her reserves, that she has no means of revitalization. Long before England was blockading her coasts she had blockaded herself morally by isolating herself from all ideals capable of revivifying her.
Therefore she will see her strength and her courage worn out. But the energy of our French soldiers is linked to something which cannot be worn out, to an ideal of justice and liberty. Time has no hold on us. To a force nourished only by its own brutality we oppose one that seeks outside of itself, above itself, a principle of life and renewal. While the former is little by little exhausted, the latter is constantly revived. The former already is tottering, the latter remains unshaken. Be without fear; the one will be destroyed by the other.
From Current History; the European War; The New York Times Company, New York, 1915.
I Do Not Hold My Tongue Easily
—George Bernard Shaw
The time has now come to pluck up courage and begin to talk and write soberly about the war. At first the mere horror of it stunned the more thoughtful of us; and even now only those who are not in actual contact with or bereaved relation to its heartbreaking wreckage can think sanely about it, or endure to hear others discuss it cooly. As to the thoughtless, well, not for a moment dare I suggest that for the first few weeks they were all scared out of their wits. But they certainly were—shall I say a little upset? They felt in that solemn hour that England was lost if only one single traitor in their midst let slip the truth about anything in the universe. It was a perilous time for me. I do not hold my tongue easily; and my inborn dramatic faculty and professional habit as a playwright prevent me from taking a one-sided view even when the most probably result of taking a many-sided one is prompt lynching.
Having thus frankly confessed my bias, which you can allow for as a rifleman allows for the wind, I give my views for what they are worth. They will be of some use; because, however blinded I may be by prejudice or perversity, my prejudices in this matter are not those which blind the British patriot, and therefore I am fairly sure to see some things that have not yet struck him.
And first, I do not see this war as one which has welded Governments and peoples into complete and sympathetic solidarity against the common enemy. I see the people of England united in a fierce detestation and defiance of the views and acts of Prussian Junkerism. (What is a Junker? Is it a German officer of twenty-three, with offensive manners, and a habit of cutting down innocent civilians with his sabre? Something like this—but he is by no means peculiar to Prussia; we may claim to produce the article in a perfection that may well make German despair; our governing classes are overwhelmingly Junker.) And I see the German people stirred to the depths of a similar antipathy to English Junkerism, and anger at the apparent treachery and duplicity of the attack made on them by us in their extremest peril from France and Russia. I see both nations duped, but alas! not quite unwillingly duped, by their Junkers and Militarists into wreaking on one another the wrath they should have spent in destroying Junkerism and Militarism in their own country. And I see the Junkers and Militarists of England and Germany jumping at the chance they have longed for in vain for many years of smashing one another and establishing their own oligarchy as the dominant military power in the world.
No doubt the heroic remedy for this tragic misunderstanding is that both armies should shoot their officers and go home to gather in their harvests in the villages and make a revolution in the towns; and though this is not at present a practical solution, it must be frankly mentioned, because it or something like it is always a possibility in a defeated conscript army if its commanders push it beyond human endurance when its eyes are opening to the fact that in murdering its neighbors it is biting off its nose to vex its face, beside riveting the intolerable yoke of Militarism more tightly than ever around its own neck.
But there is no chance—or, as our Junkers would put it, no danger—of our soldiers yielding to such an ecstasy of common sense. They have enlisted voluntarily; they are not defeated nor likely to be; their communications are intact and their meals reasonably punctual; they are as pugnacious as their officers; and in fighting Prussia they are fighting a more deliberately, conscious, tyrannical, personally insolent, and dangerous Militarism than their own. Still, even for a voluntary professional army, that possibility exists.
I mention all this, not to make myself disagreeable, but because military persons are now talking of this war as likely to become a permanent institution like the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s ….
What has made Germany formidable in this war? Obviously her overwhelmingly superior numbers. That was how she rushed us back almost to the gates of
Paris. The organization, the readiness, the sixteen-inch howitzer helped; but it was the multitudinous kanonnenfutter that nearly snowed us under. The British soldier at Cambrai and Le Cateau killed and killed until his rifle was too hot to hold and his hand was paralyzed with slayer’s cramp; but still they came and came.
Well, there is no obscurity about that problem. The Germans who took but an instant to kill had taken the travail of a woman for three-quarters of a year to breed, and eighteen years to ripen for the slaughter. All we have to do is to kill, say, 75 per cent. of all the women in Germany under 60. Then we may leave Germany her fleet and her money, and say “Much good may they do you.” Why not, if you are really going in to be what you call a Nietzschean Superman? War is not an affair of sentiment. It is not more cowardly to kill a woman than it is to kill a wounded man. And there is only one reason why it is a greater crime to kill a woman than a man, and why women have to be spared and protected when men are exposed and sacrificed. That reason is that the destruction of the women is the destruction of the community. Men are comparatively of no account; kill 90 per cent. of the German men, and the remaining 10 per cent. can repeople her. But kill the women, and Delenda est Carthago. Now this is exactly what our militarists want to happen to Germany. Therefore the objection to killing women becomes in this case the reason for doing it …
Supermen! Nonsense! O, my brother journalists, if you revile the Prussians, call them sheep led by snobs, call them beggars on horseback, call them sausage eaters, depict them in the good old English fashion in spectacles and comforter, seedy overcoat buttoned over paunchy figure, playing the contrabass tuba in a street band; but do not flatter them with the heroic title of Superman, and hold up as magnificent villainies worthy of Milton’s Lucifer these common crimes of violence and lust that any drunken blackguard can commit when the police are away, and that no mere multiplication can justify. As to Nietzsche, with his Polish hatred of Prussia, when did he ever tell the Germans to allow themselves to be driven like sheep to the slaughter in millions by mischievous dolts who, being for the most part incapable of reading ten sentences of a philosophic treatise without falling asleep, allow journalists as illiterate as themselves to persuade them that he got his great reputation by writing a cheap gospel for bullies? ….
Prussia’s ruler, with the kid gloves he called mailed fists and the high class tailoring he called shining armor, 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 naive 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 parade ground. It is frightful to think of the powers which Europe, in its own snobbery, left in the hands of this Peter Pan. His victory over British and French democracy would be a victory for Militarism over civilization; it would literally shut the gates of mercy on mankind. 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.” …
The one danger before us that nothing can avert but a general raising of the human character through the deliberate cultivation and endowment of democratic virtue without consideration of property and class, is the danger created by inventing weapons capable of destroying civilization faster than we produce men who can be trusted to use them wisely. At present we are handling them like children. Now children are very pretty, very lovable, very affectionate creatures (sometimes); and a child can make nitroglycerine or chloride of nitrogen as well as a man if it is taught to do so. We have sense enough not to teach it; but we do teach the grown-up children. We actually accompany that dangerous technical training with solemn moral lessons in which the most destructive use of these forces at the command of kings and capitalists is inculcated as heroism, patriotism, glory and all the rest of it. It is all very well to fire cannons at the Kaiser for doing this; but we do it ourselves. It is therefore undeniably possible that a diabolical rhythm may be set up in which civilization will rise periodically to the point at which explosives powerful enough to destroy it are discovered, and will then be shattered and thrown back to a fresh start with a few starving and ruined survivors …
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 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.
From Current History; the European War; The New York Times Company; New York, 1915.
Mere Wordmonger to Shame
—Christabel Pankhurst
His reputation for perversity and contrariety is full maintained by George Bernard Shaw in the ineptly-named “Common Sense About the War.” At home in Britain we all know that it is Mr. Shaw’s habit to oppose where he might be expected to support, and vice versa. He sees himself as the critic of everything and everybody—the one and only man who knows what to do and how to do it.
Mr. Shaw charges his compatriots with intellectual laziness, but they are not so lazy as to leave him to do their thinking for them. That he sometimes—and oftener in the past than now—says illuminating things is true, but firm reliance cannot be placed on his freakish mental processes, exemplified in his writings about the war. He has played with effect the part of jester to the British public, but when, as now, his jests are empty of the kernel of good sense, the matter gets beyond a joke.
The truth is that in face of this great and tragic reality of war the men of mere words, the literary theorists, are in danger of missing their way. Certainly women of deeds are more likely to see things aright than are men of words, and it is as a woman of deeds that I, a suffragette, make answer to my irresponsible compatriot, Mr. Bernard Shaw. And yet not a compatriot, for Mr. Shaw disclaims those feelings of loyalty and enthusiasm for the national cause that fills the mass of us who live under the British flag!
The suffragettes, who have fought and suffered for their cause as no living man reformer in the British Isles has fought and suffered for his, have during the present crisis subordinated their claim to the urgent claims of national honor and safety. So Mr. Shaw, whose campaigning is done generally in the armchair, and never in any place more dangerous than the rostrum, ought surely to refrain from his frivolous, inconsistent, destructive and unprofitable criticism of our country.
As for the question of lynching, Mr. Shaw is, the American public may be assured, in no danger whatsoever of being lynched. He is in far more danger of having the Iron Cross conferred upon him by the Kaiser. The only retribution that will come upon this man, who exploits the freedom of speech and pen that England gives him, is that his words will lose now and henceforth the weight they used to have. Oh, the conceit of the man, who in this dark hour, when the English are dying on the battlefield, writes of “taking the conceits out of England” by a stroke of his inconsequential pen! …
The spirit of nat
ional freedom, which is as precious to humanity as is the spirit of individual freedom, cannot be driven out by words any more than it can be driven out by blows. The most unlettered Belgian soldier, fighting for a truth that is at the very heart and depth of all things true, puts the mere wordmonger to shame. We fight for the all-sufficient reason of self-defense.
From Current History; the European War; The New York Times Company, New York, 1915.
The God of Force
—John Galsworthy
I believe in peace with all my heart. I believe that war is outrage—a black stain on the humanity and fame of man. I hate militarism and the god of force. I would go to any length to avoid war for material interests, war that involved no principles, distrusting profoundly the common meaning of the phrase “national honor.”
But I believe there is a national honor charged with the future happiness of man, that loyalty is due from those living to those that will come after; that civilization can only wax and flourish in a world where faith is kept; that for nations, as for individuals, there are laws of duty, whose violation harms the whole human race; in sum, that stars of conduct shine for peoples, as for private men.
And so I hold that without tarnishing true honor, endangering civilization present and to come, and ruining all hope of future tranquility, my country could not have refused to take up arms for the defense of Belgium’s outraged neutrality, solemnly guaranteed by herself and France …
I do not believe that jealous, frightened jingoism has ever been more than the dirty fringe of England’s peace-loving temper, and I profess my sacred faith that my country has gone to war not from fear, not from hope of aggrandizement, but because she must—for honor, for democracy, and for the future of mankind.
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