Where Wars Go to Die

by W. D. Wetherell

  But whenever the question is one of an army increase, of new cannons, or new battle-ships, we have to appeal to patriotism, because such armaments are per se unproductive, and demand deprivations on our part. Therefore even during peace patriotism has to be stirred up by the threat of possible war. As a rule the glowing spark is just barely kept alive. Were it to flare up too brightly, it might disturb the activities of the diplomats, and governments are almost as proud of them as they are of the deeds of warlike valor.

  When war has once begun, such considerations are superfluous, for war generally puts many deprivations upon a population both in respect to mental and material necessities of life. Consequently, patriotism must be augmented, for only the highest patriotic tension can bring about long-continued and voluntary self-denial in a people. Then, too, the uncertainty and fear with which the possible horrors of war are viewed brings about a closer association of all those who are weak.

  Both these feelings are played upon and artificially stimulated. A closer study of the press shows that the wire-pullers have an empiric understanding of the instincts of the crowd. Probably few people, except perhaps the late P. T. Barnum, would envy them this understanding. The whole performance essentially amounts to this. Either there is exaggeration of things favorable to one’s own country or of those favorable to the opponent. In one case the desire is to stimulate the mass feeling by the feeling of activity; in the other to increase the need for cohesion …

  War is wrong, harmful and needless. Then why do we wage war, we twentieth-century mortals? And why do we even love war?

  War stirs us to the very depths of our being, and is perhaps the last great carouse of which even a degenerate nation can dream. Such simple things as truth and beauty, freedom and progress, evoke merely a tired smile, like that of an old man recalling his youthful follies. Something stronger and more tangible in the way of a stimulant is now needed to arouse the enthusiasm. Such a stimulant for a nation is war. It is a reminder of its youthful days, with their wonderful lightheartedness, their pardonable selfishness, and their boundless capacity for self-sacrifice.

  Even the Americans, who are, after all, quite a recent conglomeration of miscellaneous peoples, are becoming patriots and imperialists …

  Let us assume that the righteous Germans had none but chivalrous motives for taking the field. Now he hears that the enemy sometimes kill and sometimes do violence to defenseless women, old men and children, and sometimes send them on in front in order to protect themselves against German bullets. Next he hears that vessels engaged in the dangerous work of mine-sweeping are manned by defenseless German prisoners; or, as stated in a grand general staff report of May, 1915, that the French, when digging trenches, made German prisoners stand in a row, thus forming a living wall to protect them against German attacks. Next he hears that the Turcos are cutting off Germans’ heads, and carrying them about in their knapsacks as souvenirs; that the Russians are cutting off German children’s hands; that Belgian girls are gouging out soldiers’ eyes; that the English want to starve German women and children to death; that the Serbians are assassins, and the Montenegrins sheep-stealers, the Italians a pack of scoundrels, and the Japanese half-monkeys. In short, he is so overwhelmed by all these mean and baseless statements which he hears that, however kindly may be his nature, he must inevitably be convinced that all mankind except the inhabitants of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the Sultanate of Turkey, and the territories of the Turko-Tatar Bulgarian people is rotten to the core.

  Whoever thinks thus cannot continue to have any respect for human dignity, and the foundations of his own morality are consequently sapped.

  From The Biology of War, by Dr. G. F. Nicolai, translated by Constance and Julian Grande; The Century Co.; New York, 1918.

  Courage There is No Room For

  —Jane Addams

  It gradually became clear to us that whether it is easily recognized or not, there has grown up a generation in Europe, as there has doubtless grown up a generation in America, who have revolted against war. It is a god they know not of, whom they are not willing to serve; because all of their sensibilities and their training upon which their highest ideals depend, revolt against it.

  We met a young man in Switzerland who had been in the trenches for three months and had been wounded there. He did not know that he had developed tuberculosis but he thought he was being cured, and he was speaking his mind before he went back to the trenches. He was, I suppose, what one would call a fine young man, but not an exceptional one. He had been in business with his father and had travelled in South Africa, in France, England, and Holland. He had come to know men as Mensch, that gute Menschen were to be found in every land. And now here he was, at twenty-eight, facing death because he was quite sure when he went back to the trenches that death awaited him. He said that never during that three months and a half had he once shot his gun in a way that could possibly hit another man and nothing in the world could make him kill another man. He could be ordered into the trenches and “to go through the motions,” but the final act was in his own hands and with his own conscience. And he said: “My brother is an officer.” He gave the name and rank of his brother, for he was quite too near the issues of life and death for any shifting and concealing. “He never shoots in a way that will kill. And I know dozens and dozens of young men who do not.”

  We talked with nurses in hospitals, with convalescent soldiers, with mothers of those who had been at home on furlough and had gone back into the trenches, and we learned that there are surprising numbers of young men who will not do any fatal shooting because they think that no one has the right to command them to take human life. From one hospital we heard of five soldiers who had been cured and were ready to be sent back to the trenches, when they committed suicide, not because they were afraid to die but they would not be put into a position where they would have to kill others.

  I recall a spirited young man who said: “We are told that we are fighting for civilization but I tell you that war destroys civilization. The highest product of the university, the scholar, the philosopher, the poet, when he is in the trenches, when he spends his days and nights in squalor and brutality and horror, is as low and brutal as the rudest peasant. They say, those newspaper writers, that it is wonderful to see the courage of the men in the trenches, singing, joking, playing cards, while the shells fall around them. Courage there is no room for, just as there is no room for cowardice. One cannot rush to meet the enemy, one cannot even see him. The shells fall here or they fall there. If you are brave, you cannot defy them; if you are a coward, you cannot flee from them; it is all chance.”

  It is such a state of mind which is responsible for the high percentage of insanity among the soldiers. In the trains for the wounded there is often a closed van in which are kept the men who have lost their minds.

  From Women at the Hague, by Jane Addams, Emily G. Balch, Alice Hamilton; Macmillan; New York, 1916.

  This Unspeakably Inhuman Outrage

  —W. E. B. Du Bois

  Most men assume that Africa lies far afield from the center to our burning social problems, and especially from our present problem of World War. Yet in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization, and these words seek to show how in the Dark Continent are hidden the roots, not simply of war to-day, but of the menace of wars to-morrow …

  The present world war is the result of jealousies engendered by the recent rise of armed national associations of labor and capital, whose aim is the exploitation of the wealth of the world mainly outside the European circle of nations. These associations, grown jealous and suspicious at the division of spoils of trade-empire, are fighting to enlarge their respective shares; they look for expansion, not in Europe, but in Asia, and particularly in Africa. “We want no inch of French territory,” said Germany to England, but Germany was unable to give similar assurances as to France in Africa.

  The resultant jealousies
and bitter hatreds tend continually to fester along color lines. We must keep Negroes in their places, or Negroes will take our jobs. All over the world there leaps to articulate speech and ready action that singular assumption that if white men do not throttle colored men, then China, India, and Africa will do to Europe what Europe has done to them …

  Hitherto the peace movement has confined itself chiefly to figures about the cost of war and platitudes on humanity. What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa? How can love of humanity appeal as a motive to nations whose love of luxury is built on the inhuman exploitation of human beings, and who, especially in recent years, have been taught to regard these human beings as inhuman? I appealed to the last meeting of peace societies in St. Louis, saying “Should you not discuss racial prejudice as a prime cause of war?” The secretary was sorry but was unwilling to introduce controversial matters!

  If we want real peace and lasting culture, we must extend the democratic ideals to the yellow, brown, and black peoples. To say this is to evoke on the faces of modern men a look of blank hopelessness. Impossible! we are told, and for so many reasons—scientific, social, and what not—that argument is useless. But let us not conclude too quickly. Suppose we had to choose between this unspeakably inhuman outrage on decency and intelligence and religion which we call the World War and the attempt to treat black men as human, sentient, responsible beings? We have sold them as cattle. We are working them as beasts of burden. We shall not drive war from this world until we treat them as free and equal citizens in a world-democracy of all races and nations.

  Colored people endure the contemptuous treatment meted out by whites to those not “strong” enough to be free. These nations and races, composing as they do a vast majority of humanity, are going to endure this treatment just as long as they must and not a moment longer. Then they are going to fight and the War of the Color Line will outdo in savage inhumanity any war this world has yet seen. For colored folk have much to remember and they will not forget.

  From The Atlantic Monthly; Boston, May 1915.

  A War Made Deliberately by Intellectuals

  —Randolph Bourne

  To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war, it has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the crisis in which America found itself. Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have vied with each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a hundred million more of the world’s people. And the intellectuals are not content with confirming our belligerent gesture. They are now complacently asserting that it was they who effectively willed it, against the hesitation and dim perceptions of the American democratic masses. A war made deliberately by intellectuals! A calm moral verdict, arrived at after a penetrating study of inexorable facts! Sluggish masses, too remote from the world-conflict to be stirred, too lacking in intellect to perceive their danger! An alert intellectual class, saving the people in spite of themselves, biding their time with Fabian strategy until the nation could be moved into war without serious resistance! An intellectual class, gently guiding a nation through sheer force of ideas into what the other nations entered only through predatory craft or popular hysteria or militarist madness! A war free from any taint of self-seeking, a war that will secure the triumph of democracy and internationalize the world! This is the picture which the more self-conscious intellectuals have formed of themselves, and which they are slowly impressing upon a population which is being led no man knows whither by an indubitably intellectualized President. And they are right, in that the war certainly did not spring from either the ideals or the prejudices, from the national ambitions or hysterias, of the American people, however acquiescent the masses prove to be, and however clearly the intellectuals prove their putative intuition.

  Those intellectuals who have felt themselves totally out of sympathy with this drag toward war will seek some explanation for this joyful leadership. They will want to understand this willingness of the American intellect to open the sluices and flood us with the sewage of war spirit …

  The war sentiment, begun so gradually but so perseveringly by the preparedness advocates who came from the ranks of big business, caught hold of one after the other of the intellectual groups. With the aid of Theodore Roosevelt, the murmurs became a monotonous chant, and finally a chorus so mighty that to be out of it was at first to be disreputable and finally almost obscene. And slowly a strident chant was worked up against Germany which compared very creditably with the German fulminations against the greedy power of England. The nerve of war-feeling centered, of course, in the richer and older classes of the Atlantic seaboard, and was keenest where there were French or English business and particularly social connections. The sentiment then spread over the country as a class-phenomenon, touching everywhere those upper-class elements in each section who identified themselves with this Eastern ruling group. It must never be forgotten than in every community it was the least liberal and least democratic elements among whom the preparedness and later the war sentiment was found. The farmers were apathetic, the small business men and workingmen are still apathetic towards the war. The intellectuals, in other words, have identified themselves with the least democratic forces in American life. They have assumed the leadership for the war of those very classes whom the American democracy has been immemorially fighting. Only in a world where irony was dead could an intellectual class enter war at the head of such illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world-liberalism and world-democracy. No one is left to point out the undemocratic nature of this war-liberalism. In a time of faith, skepticism is the most intolerable of all insults ….

  We go to war to save the world from subjugation! But the German intellectuals went to war to save their culture from barbarization! And the French went to war to save their beautiful France! And the English to save international honor! And Russia, most altruistic and self-sacrificing of all, to save a small State from destruction! Whence is our miraculous intuition of our moral spotlessness? Whence our confidence that history will not unravel huge economic and imperialist forces upon which our rationalizations float like bubbles? Are not our intellectuals fatuous when they tell us that our war of all wars is stainless and thrillingly achieving for good? …

  Minor novelists and minor poets are still coming back from driving ambulances in France to write books that nag us into an appreciation of the “real meaning.” No one can object to the generous emotions of service in a great cause or to the horror and pity at colossal devastation and agony. But too many of these prophets are men who have lived rather briskly among the cruelties and thinness of American civilization and have shown no obvious horror and pity at the exploitations and the arid quality of the life lived here around us. Their moral sense has been deeply stirred by what they saw in France and Belgium, but it was a moral sense relatively unpracticed by deep concern and reflection over the inadequacies of American democracy. Few of them had used their vision to create literature impelling us toward a more radiant American future. And that is why, in spite of their vivid stirrings, they seem so unconvincing. Their idealism is too new and bright to affect us, for it comes from men who never cared very particularly about great creative American ideals. So these writers come to us less like ardent youth, pouring its energy into the great causes, than like youthful mouthpieces of their strident and belligerent elders …

  It is foolish to hope. Since the 30th of July, 1914, nothing has happened in the area of war-policy and war-technique except for the complete and unmitigated worst. We are tired of continued disillusionment, and of the betrayal of generous anticipations. One keeps healthy in wartime not by a series of religious and political consolations that something good is coming out of it all
, but by a vigorous assertion of values in which war has no part.

  From Untimely Papers, by Randolph Bourne; B. W. Huebsch; New York, 1919.

  Women Who Dared

  —Emily G. Balch

  When I sailed on the Noordam in April 1915 with the forty-two other American delegates to the International Congress of Women at The Hague, it looked doubtful to me, as it did to many others, how valuable the meeting could be made. I felt, however, that even a shadow of chance to serve the cause of peace could not to-day be refused. Never have I been so thankful for any decision. As I look at it now, the undertaking repaid all that it cost us a hundred-fold.

  In this world upheaval the links that bind the peoples have been strained and snapped on every side. Of all the international gatherings that help to draw the nations together, since the fatal days of July, 1914, practically none have been convened. Science, medicine, reform, labor, religion—not one of these causes has yet been able to gather its followers from across the dividing frontiers.

  Our whole experience has been an interesting one. Sunny weather and a boat steadied by a heavy load of grain made it possible for the American delegates to study and deliberate together during the voyage. We were stopped one evening under the menace of a little machine gun trained full upon us by a boat alongside while two German stowaways were taken off and searched and carried away. If the proceeding had been staged for dramatic purpose, it could not have been more effective. One prisoner, with a rope about him to prevent his escaping or falling overboard, shouted Hoch der Kaiser, Deutschland uber Alles, before he stepped upon the swaying ladder over the ship’s side; both prisoners in the boat below us, with hands held up above their heads, were searched in front of that ever-pointing little cannon, then the sailors carried blankets and cups of hot coffee to them in the hold. All this, lighted by the ship’s lanterns, was just below us as we hung over the ship’s side.