The moral damage of war

Front matter

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Contents

WAR CONSIDERED AS AN JMMORALITY

. THE MORAL DAMAGE OF WAR TO THE NATION . THE MORAL DAMAGE OF WAR TO THE CHILD .

. THE MORAL DAMAGE OF WAR TO THE SOLDIER

II The Moral Damage Of War To The Nation

He asked me what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another. I answered they were innumerable, but I should only mention a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their masters in a war in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. . . . Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretend to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrelleth with another for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war is entered upon because the enemy is too strong and sometimes because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have the things which we want ; and we both fight, till they take ours or give us theirs. . . . It is justifiable to enter into war against our nearest ally when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a territory of land that would render our dominions round and complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation where the people are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death and make slaves of the rest in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous way of living. . . . Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance. — SWIFT.

II

THE MORAL DAMAGE OF WAR TO THE , NATION

Since Ruskin delivered himself of that noblest of human pleas for the greatest of human follies, — Tze Crown of Wild Olive, —the pestilent heresy that war is in some way beneficial to the moral nature of man, which had lurked, maggotlike, in the brain, has, like the gay enfranchised butterfly, almost ventured to take a place amongst the recognized and established facts of life. The facts, however, are on the side of the contrary proposition. War is wholly injurious to man’s moral nature, degrading rather than regenerating him, devastating rather than civilizing, and producing more and deeper evils than it proposes to remedy, In attempting to remove a political grievance, it begets moral guilt ; professing to repair injury, it produces vice ; seeking to cure the evils of the state, it causes sin in the soul. The damage it inflicts upon the moral life of a nation is the measure of its offense against the moral laws of God.

As it is impossible for an individual to consent to combat without suffering deterioration throughout the entire range of his inner being, so necessity decrees that the nation which substitutes force for reason, and violence for moral suasion, shall become irrational and immoral to an extent that can be comprehended only by those who have passed through a war period without

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sharing the war passion. Actions universally reprobated, when performed by private persons in times of peace, are transformed into national duties and acts of high patriotism when performed collectively after a declaration of hostilities. The fatal challenge at once turns honest men into knaves, peaceable men into cutthroats, and industrial peoples into hordes of brigands. The first shot annihilates moral sense, not merely in the combatant on the field but in the citizen at home. Conscience is dismissed. The ethical factor is deliberately ruled out. The Ten Commandments are supplanted by the rules of the game. Statesmen, journalists, preachers, suspend their normal functions till the soldier has completed his, and ostentatiously refuse to apply either the principles of statecraft or the precepts of religion to the case until the appeal to the brute has ‘been decided. A declaration of war is the abrogation of morality, —a license to kill, lie, covet, steal, and perform every sin which, up to the moment of the declaration, had been forbidden. The Decalogue is suspended. It is lawful to break all the commandments. Thou shalt not kill ?— but war has no other end than to kill. Thou shalt not steal ?— but the soldier may loot, and his country annex the conquered territory. The Sabbath shall be kept holy ?— but the killing of enemies is not unholy on the holy day, and it becomes holy to march to divine worship to the blare of the trumpet and the skirl of the bagpipe, amid throngs of excited men and women.

Everything goes. Nothing is left ; neither God nor Sabbath, neither ethics nor religion. The military Moloch devours, not our children only, but our moral faculties, our sense of righteousness, our feeling of brotherhood, our religious vows. War is the sum of all villainies, and includes a corruption of moral sense that is the greatest of all its villainies. War kills ; but the murderous spirit it creates is crueler than any particular act of murder. War lies ; but the lying spirit it engenders is baser than any specific falsehood. War steals ; but the pirate spirit it fosters is meaner than any single theft. War lusts ; but the general debauchment of virtue is fouler than any one rape or violation. The glory of war is one thing; let it be put into the scale, and let the gain of war be put in with it. Then into the opposite scale let the moral damage of war be cast. Let the balance be true. Its destructive effect upon the moral character of the nation that wages it is war’s final condemnation. Since all experience goes to show that no consideration of the sufferings involved in war will be powerful enough to dissuade nations from engaging in it, the appeal must now be made from utility to ethics, from the soldier to the citizen, from the body to the soul; and the accent of condemnation must be transferred from the physical destruction of the battlefield to the moral damnation of the home land. It is the’ people who remain at home—the politician and the taxpayer — that truly make the war, employing the soldier merely as their hired tool; and it is amongst them, the applauders of war, that we must look to find its results displayed in their most horrid and disgusting shapes.

It is in them that the savage beast rouses up with a ferocity not less than in the fighters on the field, with a brutality of speech and appetite corresponding to the brutality of the fighter’s deed, but without the redemptive element of danger and the touch of imaginative grandeur which attend him. Without being able to plead any of his excuses these noncombatants exhibit a savagery at least equal to that of the actual combatant, and glory in his bloody work without experiencing any of his dangers or the sobering effect of his responsibilities. It is not difficult to understand that a man who, on the field of strife, confronts the same furies in his foe is able to mask as heroic valor the foul passions which alone make his trade possible, and to excuse the cruelest threats under the plea of necessity ; but what semblance of nobleness or necessity can they wear when vented by those who merely sit at home and pay taxes? If we strip any scene of battle of all the excitements, exigencies, excuses fairly pleaded by those who must eithér kill or be killed, we expose quite naked, if yet unashamed, that love of fight, thirst for revenge, savage joy in an enemy’s wounds and death, infernal lapse into treachery and barbarity which emerge just as inevitably amongst the noncombatants. Even if the foe resemble nothing so much as Emerson’s “embattled farmers,” an imperial poet! will nevertheless yell that

— speech and tongue Lack utterance now for loathing To scourge these dogs, agape with jaws afoam, Down out of life, and will insult their suffering women and children as “dams and cubs.” ‘The poorest being that crawls on

TO THE NATION 4s earth,” says Edmund Burke, in his famous letter on the American War, ‘contending to save itself from injustice, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man. But I cannot conceive any existence under heaven (which in the depths of its wisdom tolerates all sorts of things) that is more truly odious and disgusting than an impotent, helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, bloated with pride and arrogance, calling for battles which he is not to fight, and contending for a violent dominion which he can never exercise.” It is here that the peculiar sin and offense of war stand revealed. The murderous raptures of the non-fighters publish its infamy more than the murderous strokes of the fighters. That which breaks the heart of the peace angel is not so much the corporal undoing of the stricken field as the brutality of the man in the street, the cowardly swagger of the music hall, the prostitution of the pulpit to a heathen deity, the blood lust fostered by theaters, inculcated in schools, preached in churches, propagated by our women, professed by our children, practised by all. It is not the infernal lyddite hurling its baleful vapors to the sky, thence spreading abroad over the fields till vegetation droops and every living thing sickens and dies, but the more infernal exhalations that come reeking up from the hell heart of the home land till the whole atmosphere is thick with hate and murder; it is not the camp, the sentry on his rounds, the bugle note, the marshaling of embattled hosts, but the club, the exchange, the school, the church, the pedagogue pouring hate into the helpless ear of innocent childhood, the pulpiteer preaching hate where he was vowed to preach love, the journalist with his yellow sheet fanning the flame of hate, the politician piling fuel on the fires of -hate, the stockjobber telegraphing hate for the sake of percentages, the mob roaring, rabid, riotous ; it is not the piled corpses of the foughten field, quiet enough at last, and harmless, but the devils of hate and murder, of cruelty and revenge, of falsehood and covetousness, ceaselessly raging, devouring, howling, all in the burning hell of a diseased and demented “‘patriotism’’: these are the repulsive forms in which the war spirit finally clothes himself, to which we point as his unconditional damnation.

It is these that lay the last, heaviest, sharpest, bloodiest plait of thorns on the brow of the Prince of Peace. Here is the new ground of the crusade against war, the new basis of the apology for peace. The peace advocate now changes his front. Whereas hitherto it was on the field of battle that the reformer sought his arguments, he now finds them at home, in society and the church; in the degeneracy of those who, without striking, curse; without fighting, hate ; without danger, threaten; without experiencing any of its immediate provocations or undergoing any of its perils, nevertheless delight in every base and brutal passion proper to war. In short, the enemy is not now war, so much as the war spirit.

War inflicts moral damage upon a nation by diffusing the foulest and most malignant passions throughout its entire population. With the first blast of the bugle away goes even the white cloak of religion, and out starts the pagan as unregenerate and unredeemed as if no Christ had ever spoken a beatitude of mercy or given his life to emphasize it. The thing called Christianity stands revealed as a very antichrist, wearing, indeed, the sacred name on its forehead, but bearing in its bosom the heart of Cain. The antichristian quickly descends into the antihuman; and the warrior nation, having discarded religion, proceeds next to throw overboard whatever humanity it may have brought up with it from the pagan ages. The sword that smites the enemy abroad also peels the veneer off the citizen at home, and lays the primeval savage bare. The hired homicide is applauded by the crowd as the finest type of humanity, and the sorning priest hastens to sanctify slaughter as the holiest of human duties. A venal journalism dips its pen in blood, and gorges the populace with gore till the very milk of human kindness runs red. The yellow pressman, eager to float himself to the top of his profession on the red tide, ceases not to invoke the fell monsters of revenge and massacre, till the people, grown familiar with their faces, “first endure, then pity, then embrace.” The capitalistic monger of various jingo journals will chant inspiring ditties to his readers in praise of “the baynit, the ruddy, bloody baynit.” 2 Against all this, no doubt, —a red press, a prostitute pulpit, a debauched populace, —some stand could be made by the apostolic spirit. But the ultimately appalling thing is the lapse of persons in other respects humane and good, who will be found delivering themselves of sentiments that are entirely devilish, and of opinions that would grace the lips only of a thug, so that, if the listener could close his eyes to the soft surroundings of the drawing-room or the saloon carriage, he could easily imagine himself the unhappy auditor of a Zulu war council. Against confessed fiends and undressed devils the peace angel could make some stand; but what strikes him dumb and desperate is the simple unconsciousness of those excellent people who congregate in clubs and churches to the part they are playing and the character they are revealing ; their inability to realize that, for all their unaffected goodness, their gentle accents, and their virtuous ways, they are at heart pitiless homicides. Their real Bible becomes the religious organ which can write, “ Until now blood has been running in tiny rivulets — the British army in the two republics must exterminate the Boer vermin, and soak the soil with their blood, that the grass may grow the quicker.’ Against moral stupidity and callousness like this the Prince of Peace himself wars in vain.

This appalling indifference to human life deepens, by necessity, into a positive inclination towards crimes of violence. If a government, upon word given, may slay men wholesale, why should we be so distressed by accidental deaths, or so averse to taking life in single cases? We may kill whole nations and call it patriotism; but when the corner boy kills the gamin, call it murder and hang him. We carry this indifference to life so far as to come, at length, to regard the slaughter of our own countrymen with unconcern. “Nothing is changed,” says the Pecksniffian journalist, “there are only so many Englishmen the less” ;4 while the patriotic war correspondent ‘cares not if we lose five thousand men killed and wounded in forcing the passage.” > “Right!” echoes the gilded aristocrat. “Some people seem to think that the death of a certain number of soldiers on the field of battle is a deplorable thing,” but he does not believe ‘‘the mass of Englishmen hold that opinion.’’® “More than that,” chimes in the military exploiter, “this nation . . . ought to be satisfied to give them a few lives,” even for target practice at home; ‘if they killed a man every ten years it was a thing that ought to be allowed to occur; . . . it could easily be done by insurance or otherwise, but they ought not to be prevented from learning to shoot, whatever itcost.’’’ There are a great many mouths to feed at home; laborers are competing keenly for the same work, and merchants for the same market. Is it nota capital thing to send the superfluous people at home to destroy the undesirable people abroad? And since, by our persistent neglect, we have turned the surplus laborer into a menace and a danger, what could be better than that, while engaged in killing off our foes, he should himself be killed off? It is a beautiful arrangement of supply and demand! It is quite a providence! Let us be thankful! It is the best of all possible worlds!

So far from fostering chivalry and the generous sentiments, as has been claimed, war appears to destroy them completely, and to substitute for them those qualities which characterize the bully and the braggart. Before the cruel face of the war god magnanimity dies. If there is anything in the past history of a nation that leans to the side of the magnanimous, it will be denounced as a weakness and a blunder, and politicians will weary themselves in taking precautions that the people shall never again suffer from a flow of generosity to the heart. They become a nation of churls. Take, for an example, their attitude towards the leader of the hostile people. He may, in the estimate of an unprejudiced world, be as magnanimous as his assailants are mean, may have spared the lives of those who plotted against his country, and tried every possible way of honorable peace, but it will avail him nothing. He may resemble one of the antique heroes, but the nation that fights him will not see it. Impartial judgment may put him beside the greatest patriots of the past, but his greatness cannot save him from the ridicule and contempt of those who war against him, whose audiences will receive his name with howls, whose processions will burn him in effigy, and whose poltroon press will seize on every personal defect or eccentricity, exaggerating, distorting, denouncing, till it succeeds in turning the vulgar laugh against him, or inflaming the popular mind with resentment. Politicians at play, unbending themselves amid the jocularities of a garden party, will take pop-shots at his effigy with the Morris tube.

The last thing he must expect is magnanimity. Or, for another instance, see the manner in which a victorious nation regards the sufferings of its foe. So far from compelling admiration or begetting compassion the. sufferings of the brave appear to fire the victor with a-fiendish pleasure. He owns to “feeling a rare satisiaction, a warm glow at the heart, when he sees the smoke of their homesteads ascending to heaven ; they are but human vermin; a beast of a rebel is getting his deserts.’’® No matter how numerous his losses, how deep his anguish, how passionate his protest, how pathetic his appeal, the uppermost, almost the sole sentiment in the breast of the conquering people will be that expressed in the phrase, “Serves him right.” With joy they read that “farm-burning goes merrily on, and our course through the country is marked as in prehistoric ages by pillars of smoke by day and fire by night. ... I do not gather that any special reason or cause is alleged against the farms burnt; .. . to save trouble we burn the lot without enquiry; . . . only the women are left.’ Their savagery deepens to the solemnity of a pagan sacrifice as they learn that the enemy ‘have now to watch a slow, implacable, methodical devastation of their country, tract by tract. Day by day they fight, and one by one they fall. Comrades and friends drop at each other’s side; sons drop by fathers’, brothers by brothers’. The smoke rises in the valley, and the home is blotted out. It is a torture long and slow, the agony and bloody sweat.” 1!

What happiness in the picture of the conquering army coming down “burning farms and taking all the cattle, . . . leaving women and children homeless, to die of hunger” #— hunger to escape which “the women have to till the ground, whilst the boys and girls are sometimes inspanned eight or ten together, to draw a small plough, in order to get some mealies sown.” ® It is a cordial to the patriot heart to know that “at least thirty thousand houses on the farms have been burnt, or destroyed. . . . Our dwellings with the furniture have been burnt or demolished, our orchards cut down, all agricultural implements broken, mills destroyed, every living animal taken away or killed— nothing, alas! remains. The land is a desert !” * No punishment will appear too great for the crime of resisting the dictate of whatever minister may happen to be the mouthpiece of their pride. If he cannot be entirely proud of sending to make war on women and children the biggest army that ever crossed the sea, the citizen of a country that can do no wrong—when he reads of girls driven to escape hunger by the solitary road of prostitution,» of women taken from their burnt homes twelve hours after giving birth to twin children, placed in wagons and carried off by troops, to die with their children a few hours later,!® of deaths of women and children so numerous that there is no more wood for coffins [“ The graves were three and a half feet deep only; we saw little children engaged in filling them in”’],” or that thirteen thousand children have thus miserably perished ¥% will sullenly ejaculate, ‘‘ Let their men give in, then or piously opine, with a most Christian dean,” that the conduct of the war “is an overflowing stream which we may hope will water the hearts of [the enemy].”

The ruthlessness of the reader of battles probably often exceeds that of the fighter of them; nor can the story of brave heads low on the ground or loving hearts broken in the home shake his fell purpose. The heart that beats behind the newspaper is not less hard than that which animates the sword ; and as, folded in the soft security of his easy-chair, the lounger cons the daily tale of blood, he gloats over defeat, delights

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in wounds, glories in deaths, applauds revenge, and condones cruelty with as few ‘compunctious visitings of nature” as any soldier of them all. The thought of the writhing wounded or the staring dead brings forth no prayer for mercy or for pity; the record of farms trampled into mire, steadings burnt to the ground, cities sacked, brave men hunted like partridges upon the mountain, swells the breast and sends lumps of exultation up into the throat, till the readers rush out into the night to relieve themselves with wild shouts of revelry. « And, to set forth,” says Swift, “the valor of my own dear countrymen, I assured him that, had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship; and beheld the dead bodies come down in pieces from the clouds to the great diversion of the spectators.” It is thus that war hardens the heart of him that consents to it, and robs him of sorrow for the slain, reverence for the weak, generosity for the defeated, chivalry for the brave. War is not so horrible in that it drains the dearest veins of the foe, but in that it drains our own hearts of the yet more precious elements of pity, mercy, generosity, which are the lifeblood of the soul.”

This descent into the dastard touches bottom with that wholesale slandering of the foe which appears to be the inevitable concomitant of war, and of which Mr. Herbert Spencer has given instances, as well as an explanation, in his chapter on the “ Bias of Patriotism.” But instances crowd upon the attention in time of national collision. A celebrated imperialistic poet 24 — to take but one — confesses that he attended a magiclantern entertainment given to Indians at a time when

India was supposed to be menaced by Russia, and that when any beast more uncouth and terrifying than usual ambled across the screen, it was, on his suggestion, solemnly introduced as a true and authentic likeness of those diabolical Russians and accompanied by the most horrible stories that could be concocted. The joke is bad, but the morals are worse, — and it is a mild instance of how “patriotism” keeps the Ninth Commandment. Heathendom expressly declared that no enemy was to have the truth spoken of or to him, which was perfectly consistent ; and since war cancels the Decalogue and abrogates Christianity, a certain kind of consistency can be pleaded also by Christendom. The hostilities ’ which break every tie of humanity annul also every law of charity. The justification to kill involves also the liberty to lie. Every war may be said to involve two campaigns, ——a campaign of slaughter abroad and a campaign of calumny at home, the second of which is not less cruel than the first, and much more disgusting. As the fighters breathe out threatenings and slaughter, so the writers vomit rivers of lies like serpents’ slime ; the first shoot bullets, the second fling mud; those take life, these destroy reputation. Such are the two complementary forces without which no long-sustained contest would be possible. The broom that blackens the foe is the indispensable auxiliary of the bayonet that stabs him; the journalistic ink slinger is as necessary as the scout; the platform libeler as important as the sentry; the parliamentary mud lark as essential as the general on the field; the pulpit bearer of false witness not less needful than the chaplain of the regiment ;

for without all these secondary and auxiliary forces at home the ‘primary forces of destruction abroad would never be able to complete the task of putting a nation to death. The home auxiliaries in press and pulpit, in club and school, in congress and parliament, supply the motive power, the driving force of hate, the stimulus of revenge, the incentive of pride; the forces in the field are the mere executive of their passions. But it is certain that no army would be permitted to put a nation to physical death unless the home auxiliaries had first condemned it to moral death. A nation’s character must be destroyed before it is possible to destroy its citizens, for no people would consent to kill those whom it had not first pronounced unfit to live. The origin of a war has to be justified to the people who wage it, and their spirit kept up to fighting pitch through all the months or years of its continuance; and there is no better way of doing both than to represent the enemy as savages, monsters, vermin (“like to the unclean race of monkeys,” as an eminent Russian representative of Greek Christianity recently described the Japanese), to exterminate whom is to perform a duty to humanity. And to achieve this is not so difficult as might appear to the unprejudiced mind. It is necessary only to ignore the testimonies of men high in the offices of peace and war,—such testimonies as this: “I have lived among many nations and in many countries, and I may with all truth say this, —I know no people richer in public and in private virtues” ;™ or this: ‘‘ The deepest impression has been made on me by these conversations, and by the manly bearing and the straightforward, outspoken way in which we were met”’;”’ or this : ‘‘So they were not cruel, these enemies!

This was a great surprise to me, for I had read much of the literature of this land of lies’; or this: “‘ They area deeply religious people.” % It is necessary merely to accuse the foe, however noble, of every crime which might be supposed to unfit a creature for existence, — such as arson, murder, rape, assassination; to get the papers to retail those manufactured atrocities often enough — and especially whenever the public mind appears to be softening; to get the pulpits to dilate on those imaginary crimes with a fine moral heat; to get ignorant dignitaries of the church to misrepresent the enemy as having ‘‘a coarser sense of the dignity of man,” * or that “their religion is a strange Calvinistic superstition that has taught them that lying and trickery should form the basis of character’’; 27 and the result of these home maneuvers will certainly be to keep the temper of the home land so like a hell that the executive army abroad will have no choice but to do its work like a devil. The general in command may protest against it, paying the tribute of truth to the enemy as ‘“‘a brave and high-spirited people,” and saying, “I hate this atrocity-manufacturing and its effects on the men, tending to make them either cowards or butchers” ;78 but there are at home a number of excellent and godly people whose sentiments require some kind of salve or opiate before they will consent to prolong a war of extermination to which, on other grounds, they are not averse; and these Miinchausen tales give them the very pretext the thing they call conscience craves.

Those who have faced the enemy on the field may write indignantly of the attempt to paint an opposing general as brutal and dishonorable. “ Those who, like myself, have fought against him, and frequently met men who have been prisoners under him, look, I believe, with shame and indignation on the attempts made to blacken the character of a man who throughout the war has held a reputation with our troops in the field of being not only a gallant soldier but a humane and honorable gentleman;”™” but the “patriot” scandal monger will keep his sordid way. There is nothing new about the method. It is as old as hypocrisy. ‘There used to be tales told long ago,”’ writes Mr. H. Fielding in that exquisite flower of travel literature, Zhe Soul of a People, “of King Thibaw, how he was a drunkard, and had orgies in the palace. We know now that there was not a word of truth in those reports. . . . Howthereports ever arose I could never ascertain — certainly not from Burman sources. . . . told me that we English had invented them, . . . not one word of truth in the English reports that the king drank, . .. a nation of total abstainers.’”’ The complaint lodged by Benjamin Franklin in the name of the American colonists still goes to the root of the matter; the object is still to render the enemy odious and contemptible, so as to prevent all concern for him in the friends of liberty: “so much and so long persecuted with vehement and malicious abuse, . . . rendering us odious as well as contemptible, to prevent all concern for us in the friends of liberty here, when the project of oppressing us further and depriving us of our rights by various violent measures should be carried into execution.”