Where Wars Go to Die

by W. D. Wetherell

  And yet, as soon as you let loose in war the whole of a big nation, you have handed over that high and austere duty to agents who cannot possibly perform it; to masses of very ordinary people, and not only of ordinary people, but of stupid and vulgar and drunken and covetous and dishonest and tricky and cruel and brutal people, who will transform your imagined crusade into a very different reality.

  When the war was flung into the midst of all this seething, heterogeneous mass of men who make up Great Britain or the British Empire, it called out naturally those who in their different ways were most akin to it. It called out both the heroes and the ruffians. But in the main, as the war atmosphere deepened among the civilian population, the men who were interested in justice became unimportant; those who were specially interested in humanity were advised to be discreet in their utterances. It is quite others who came to the front: the men—for such exist in all countries—who believe in Force and love Force; who love to wage bloody battles, or at least to read about them and lash their younger neighbors into them; who rage against the “mere lawyers” who care about right and wrong; despise the pulling sentimentalists who have not deadened their hearts to all feeling of human compassion; loathe the doctrinaire politicians who dare to think about the welfare of future generations instead of joining in the carnival of present passion.

  We knew we should let loose these evil powers, but we believe we can cling to our duty in spite of them. It was part of the price we had to pay, if we wished to save Europe, to save the small nationalities, so save liberty and civilization. And it is by no means all the price. It is only an extra. It comes as an addition to the long bill of dead and wounded, of the mountains of unatoned and inexplicable suffering, the vista of future famine and poverty, and the beggary of nations. And it is not the only extra. There is something that goes wrong in ourselves ….

  This is how it happens. You face the beginning of the war with intense feeling. You feel the casualties, you feel the pain of the wounded, you feel the horror of what your friends have to do, as well as what they have to suffer. You feel also the uplifting emotion of sacrifice for a great cause.

  But you cannot possibly go on feeling like that. War is a matter of endurance, and if you allow yourself to feel continually in this intense way, you will break down. If mere self-protection a man, whether soldier or civilian, grows an envelope of defensive callousness. Instinctively, by a natural process, you avoid feeling the horrors and you cease to climb the heights of emotion. After all, an average man may be sorry for the Czecho-Slovaks; he may even look them up on a map; but he cannot go on grieving about them year in and year out. He may realize in flashes the actual meaning in terms of human misery of one hour of the war which he is not fighting indeed, but ordering and paying for. But he could not live if he did so steadily.

  He proceeds, quite naturally, first to put the enemy’s suffering out of account. He deserves all he gets, anyhow. Then the suffering of the victim nations; he is very sorry, of course, for Belgium, Poland, Serbia, Rumania, the Armenians. But it is no good being sorry. Better to get on with the war! Then the sufferings of his own people, the young men and middle-aged men who have gone out to France or the East. He cannot quite forget these; he must think about them a good deal and the thought is painful. So he transforms them. When they once put on khaki, they became, he imagines, quite different. They were once James Mitchell the clerk, Thomas Brown the railway porter, John Baxter the Wesleyan carpenter. But now they are “Tommies.” And we invent a curious psychology for them, to persuade ourselves somehow that they like the things they do, and do not so very much mind the things they suffer.

  And then, in spite of all this protective callousness, in spite of the pretences we build up in order to make ourselves comfortable, there continues underneath the brazen armour of our contentment a secret horror, a raging irritation—how shall I put it? It is the ceasless, bitter sobbing of all that used once to be recognized as the higher part of our nature, but now is held prisoner, stifled and thrust aside … because the need for the world is for other things.

  When we remember all this it makes us feel lost and heavy-hearted, like men struggling and unable to move in an evil dream … so, it seems, for the time being we must forget it. We modern men are accustomed by the needs of life to this division of feelings. In every war, in every competition almost, there is something of the same difficulty, and we have learned to keep the two sides of our mind apart. We must fight our hardest, indomitably, gallantly, even joyously, forgetting all else while we have to fight. When the fight is over we must remember.

  From Faith, War, and Policy, by Gilbert Murray; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1917.

  The Will to Power

  —Thomas Mann

  When I have held that democracy, that politics itself, is foreign and poisonous to the German character, when I have doubted or argued against Germany’s calling to politics, I have not done so—personally or impersonally—with the laughable purpose of spoiling my nation’s will to reality, of shaking its belief in the justice of its international claims. I myself confess that I am deeply convinced that the German people will never be able to love political democracy simply because they cannot love politics itself, and that the much decried “authoritarian state” is and remains the one that is proper and becoming to the German people, and the one they basically want. A certain amount of courage is required today to express this conviction. Nevertheless, in doing so, I not only intend no derogation of the German nation in the intellectual or moral sense—I mean just the opposite—I also believe that its will to power and worldly greatness (which is less a will than a fate and a world necessity) remains completely uncontested in its legitimacy and its prospects. There are highly “political” nations—nations that are never free of political stimulation and excitement, that still, because of a complete lack of ability in authority and governance, have never accomplished anything on earth and never will. The Poles and the Irish, for example.

  On the other hand, history has nothing but praise for the organizing and administrative powers of the completely nonpolitical German Nation. When one sees where France has been brought by her politicians, it seems to me that one has the proof in hand that at times things do not work at all with “politics” and this is a sort of proof that things can also work in the end without “politics.” Therefore no misunderstanding should arise when people like me declare the political spirit to be an alien and impossible spirit in Germany ….

  It is the “politicization of the intellect,” the distortion of the concept of intellect into that of reforming enlightenment, of revolutionary humanitarianism, that works like poison and orpiment on me.

  From Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, by Thomas Mann; S. Fisher, Berlin, 1919.

  Wordsworth’s Valley in War-time

  —Mrs. Humphrey Ward

  August 8th, 1915. It is now four days since, in this village of Grasmere, at my feet, we attended one of those anniversary meetings, marking the first completed year of this appalling war, which were being called on that night over the length and breadth of England. Our meeting was held in the village schoolroom; the farmers, tradesmen, innkeeper and summer visitors of Grasmere were present, and we passed the resolution which all England was passing at the same moment, pledging ourselves, separately and collectively, to help the war and continue the war, till the purposes of England were attained, by the liberation of Belgium and northern France, and the chastisement of Germany.

  And I stand to-night on this lovely mountain-side, looking out upon the harvest fields of another August, and soon another evening newspaper sent up from the village below will bring the latest list of our dead and our maimed, for which English mothers and wives have looked in terror, day after day, through this twelve months.

  And yet, but for the brooding care in every English mind, how could one dream of war in this peaceful Grasmere?

  Is it really true that somewhere in this summer world, beyond those furthest dells, and
the Yorkshire moors behind them, beyond the silver sea dashing its waves upon our Eastern coasts, there is still going on the ruin, the agony, the fury, of this hideous struggle into which Germany plunged the world, a year ago? It is past eight o’clock; but the sun which is just dipping behind Silver How is still full on Loughrigg, the beautiful fell which closes in the southern end of the lake. Between me and these illumined shores lies the lake—shadowed and still, broken by its one green island. I can just see the white cups of the water-lilies floating above the mirrored woods and rocks that plunge so deep into the infinity below.

  The square tower of the church rises to my left. The ashes of Wordsworth lie just beyond it—of Wordsworth, and that sister with the “wild eyes,” who is scarcely less sure of immortality than himself, of Mary Wordsworth, too, the “perfect woman, nobly planned,” at whose feet, in her white-haired old age, I myself as a small child of five can remember sitting, nearly sixty years ago. Generally, the tiny house and garden are thronged by Americans in August, who crowd about the charming place like flies about the milk pails in summer.

  But this year there are no Americans, and few visitors. But Grasmere does not distress itself as it would in other years, Wordsworth’s village is thinking too much about the war. Last year, within a few months of the outbreak, seventy young men from the village offered themselves to the army; fifty are serving. Their women left behind have been steadily knitting and sewing since they left. Every man from Grasmere got a Christmas present of two pairs of socks. Day after day, women from the village have gone up to the fells to gather the absorbent sphagnum moss, which they dry and clean, and send to a manufacturing chemist to be prepared for hospital use. One old woman gathered the tufts of wool which the sheep leave behind them on the brambles and fern, washed them, and made them into the little pillows which prop wounded limbs in hospital ….

  One sits and ponders about these things, as the golden light recedes from Loughrigg, and that high crag above Wordsworth’s cottage. Little Grasmere has indeed done all she could, and in this lovely valley, the heart of Wordsworth’s people, the descendants of those dalesmen and daleswomen whom he brought into literature, is one—passionately one—with the heart of the allies. Lately the war has bitten into the life of the village. Of its fifty young sons, many are now in the thick of the Dardenelles struggle; three are prisoners of war, two are said to have gone down in the Royal Edward, one officer has fallen, others are wounded. Grasmere has learned much geography and history this last year; and it has shared in the full in the general deepening and uplifting of the English soul, which the war has brought about. France, that France which Wordsworth loved in his first generous youth, is in all our hearts. And where shall we find nobler words in which to clothe the feeling of England towards a France which has lost Rheims, or a Belgium which has endured Louvain, than those written a hundred years ago in that cottage across the lake?

  Air, earth and skies—

  There’s not a breathing of the common wind

  That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

  Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

  And love, and man’s unconquerable mind!

  To Germany, then, the initial weight of big battalions, the initial successes of a murderous science; to the nations leagued against her, the unconquerable power of those moral faiths which fire our clay, and in the end mould the history of men!

  Along the mountain-side, the evening wind rises. The swell and beat of it among the rocks and fens, as the crags catch it, echo it, and throw it back reverberate, are as the sound of marching feet.

  I hear it in the tread—irresistible, inexorable—of an avenging Humanity. The living and dead are there, and in their hands they bear both Doom and Comforting.

  From The Book of the Homeless, edited by Edith Wharton; Charles Scribner’s Sons; New York, 1916.

  Men Whispered Together

  —H. G. Wells

  Mr. Britling took up the thread of speech again.

  “The psychology of all this recent insubordination and violence is—curious. Exasperating too … I don’t quite grasp it … It’s the same thing whether you look at the suffrage business or the labour people or at this Irish muddle. People may be too safe. You see we live at the end of a series of secure generations in which none of the great things of life have changed materially. We’ve grown up with no sense of danger—that is to say, with no sense of responsibility. None of us, none of us—for though I talk my actions belie me—really believe that life can change very fundamentally any more forever. All this,”—Mr. Britling waved his arm comprehensively—“looks as though it was bound to go on steadily forever. It seems incredible that the system can be smashed … We shall go on—until there is a spark right into the magazine. We have lost any belief we ever had that fundamental things happen. We are everlasting children in an everlasting nursery … If the world were like a whispering gallery, what whispers might we not hear now—from India, from Africa, from Germany, warnings from the past, intimations of the future … We shouldn’t heed them.”

  And indeed at the very moment when Mr. Britling was saying these words, in Sarajevo in Bosnia, where the hour was somewhat later, men whispered together, and one held nervously to a black parcel that had been given him and nodded as they repeated his instructions, a black parcel with certain unstable chemicals and a curious arrangement of detonators therein, a black parcel destined ultimately to shatter nearly every landmark of Mr. Britling’s cosmogony ….

  One writes “Germany.” That is how one writes of nations, as though they had single brains and single purposes. But indeed while Mr. Britling lay awake and thought of his son and Lady Frensham and his smashed automobile and of God and evil and a thousand perplexities, a multitude of other brains must also have been busy, lying also in beds or sitting in studies or watching in guard-rooms or chatting belatedly in cafes or smoking-rooms or pacing the bridges of battleships or walking along in city or country, upon this huge possibility the crime of Sarajevo had just opened, and of the state of the world in relation to such possibilities. Few women, one guesses, heeded what was happening, and of the men, the men whose decision to launch that implacable threat turned the destinies of the world to war, there is no reason to believe that a single one of them had anything approaching the imaginative power needed to understand fully what it was they were doing. We have looked for an hour or so into the seething pot of Mr. Britling’s brain and marked its multiple strands, its inconsistencies, its irrational transitions. It was but a specimen. Nearly every brain of the select few that counted in this cardinal determination of the world’s destinies, had its streak of personal motive, its absurd and petty impulses and deflections. One man decided to say this because if he said that he would contradict something he had said and printed four or five days ago; another took a certain line because so he saw his best opportunity of putting a rival into a perplexity … It would be strange if one could reach out now and recover the states of mind of two such beings as the German Kaiser and his eldest son as Europe stumbled toward her fate through the long days and warm close nights of that July. Here was the occasion for which so much of their lives had been but the large pretentious preparation, coming right into their hands to use or forgo, here was the opportunity that would put them into the very forefront of history forever; this journalist emperor with the paralysed arm; this common-fibred, sly, lascivious son. It is impossible that they did not dream of glory over all the world. And being what they were they must have imagined spectators, and the young man, who was after all a young man of particularly poor quality, imagined no doubt certain women onlookers, certain humiliated and astonished friends, and thought of the clothes he would wear and the gestures he would make. The nickname his English cousins had given this heir to all the glories was the “White Rabbit.” He was the backbone of the war party at court. And presently he stole bric-a-brac. This will help posterity to the proper value of things in 1914 …

  Readers of histories and
memoirs as most of this class of men are, they must have composed little eulogistic descriptions of the part themselves were to play in the opening drama, imagined pleasing vindications and interesting documents. Some of them perhaps saw difficulties, but few foresaw failure. For all this set of brains the thing came as a choice to take or reject; they could make war or prevent it. And they chose war.

  Thus—a vivid fact as yet only in a few hundred skulls—the vast catastrophe of the Great War gathered behind the idle, dispersed and confused spectacle of an indifferent world, very much as the storms and rains of late September gathered behind the glow and lassitudes of August, and with scarcely more of set human intention.

  From Mr. Britling Sees It Through, by H. G. Wells; Macmillan, NY, 1917.

  Scientific Barbarism

  —Havelock Ellis

  Germany, with its ancient genius for warfare, has in the present war taken the decisive step of placing warfare definitely on the basis on scientific barbarism. To do this is, in a sense, we must remember, not a step backwards, but a step forward. It involved the recognition of the fact that war is not a game to be played for its own sake, by a professional caste, in accordance with fixed rules which it would be dishonourable to break, but a method, carried out by the whole organised manhood of the nation, of effectively attaining an end desired by the state, in accordance with the famous statement of Clausewitz that war is State policy continued by a different method. Humane sentiments and civilised traditions, under the moulding hand of Prussian leaders of Kultur, have been slowly but firmly subordinated to a political realism which, in the military sphere, means a masterly efficiency in the aim of crushing the foe by overwhelming force combined with panic-striking “frightfulness.” In this conception, that only is moral which served these ends. The horror which this “frightfulness” may be expected to arouse is from the German point of view a tribute of homage.