The end of the war

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Elusive Victory 17

II Pacifists and Patriots 38

Chapter I

In this fourth year of the war all the world longs for peace. The fever has almost run its course. Much hatred remains, much greed for territory and wealth, much reliance on the strength of armies and navies. Yet the world over men are sickened by the eternal bloodshed. The early optimistic enthusiasm has vanished, and there opens up the vista of an endless prolongation of a senseless slaughter. No longer is there hope of an easy victory over dispirited foes. Instead earnest peace-loving men are asking themselves whether this conflict, like the Thirty Years' War, will not long endure and end only in the utter decivilization of Europe and of the world.

Precisely such a situation as we are now facing was presaged in a remarkable anticipation by an English philosopher in the spring of 1914. "Let a European war break out, ' ' wrote Mr. Graham Wallas, "perhaps between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, which so many journalists and politicians in England and Germany contemplate with criminal levity. If the combatants prove to be equally balanced, it may, after the first battles, smoulder on for thirty years. What will be the population of London, or Manchester, or Chemnitz, or Bremen, or Milan, at the end of it ? ' ' *

A thirty years' war, lasting until 1944, still seems to us impossible. Flesh and blood could not stand the intolerable strain ; the war must come to its end earlier. Yet we are as far from a decision as at the beginning. On land the Central Powers are victorious ; at sea the Allies ; and both are straining their resources and wasting their energies at a speed inconceivable four years ago. The war 's contagion has spread, and nations, uninterested in Serbia's fate and other controversies which gave rise to the contest, now marshal their forces, sacrifice their young men and put their whole future to the test. The chances of victory for the one side or the other alter continually, and statesmen and publicists, once possessed of calm judgment, are elated or panicstricken by the news of successive days. Throughout the nations the gambling spirit is rife, and the fate of the world is the stakes.

From the gigantic battling of more than three years there emerges a sense of the elusiveness of the victory sought. In the beginning, when German armies were rapidly invading France, the

i "The Great Society" by Graham Wallas, New York, 1914, p. 12.

Fatherland believed that the present struggle, like those of '66 and 70, was to be ' 'a fresh and merry war," and just before the Marne, and afterwards, France was dismembered in numberless Kneipes throughout the German Empire. Similarly in the optimistic spring of 1915, English and French, relying upon the coming Big Push and the Slavic steamroller, amused themselves by dividing up enemy territories in anticipation of an early decisive victory. Since then, however, much water has flowed under the bridge. Millions of careless boasting boys have been buried deep and other millions are hobbling about on crutches, or, blinded or diseased, are seeking to live out mangled lives until Death comes to this generation and the curtain goes down upon the grotesque tragedy. During all this time amid alarms of defeat there have been exultant shrieks for the victory about to be grasped. The victory has never been grasped. It has always been three months ahead, always needed just one more million deaths, a few billion dollars more. And so, on both sides of that grim fighting line, which has suddenly replaced old political boundaries, men stumble forward, their eyes blinded by the flowing blood, their hearts inspired by an inner ideal, by a primitive, invincible pride and by the persistent hope of a victory that is always to be and never is.

Yet however patriotic, men remain men, and all the obsession of the present cannot deaden the memory of happier days. Even the Junker, steeled in a philosophy of war, has his moments of regret for the time before sons and brothers died daily in unromantic ways on distant battle-fields, when men might meet present enemies on terms of friendship, and the world was not divided against itself by bulwarks of bayonets, ships and lies. To the common run of unmartial people who form a majority of all nations, the war has become odious. The illusion is gone. It is no " merry war" but a desperate, unhonourable conflict, a war of money, deceit, bribery, murder and ruthlessness both against neutrals and enemies. To what does it lead? What will be the gain in the long years of post-bellum reckoning? Sober people begin to see beyond the conflict to the grey years to come. They still hope for victory, but it is a lesser victory than that once envisaged, a victory in which the victors themselves will be overburdened with debt and the care of the victims who achieved the victory. The hope of adequate indemnities has vanished ; the war as a gigantic whole is unprofitable. It does not pay. From a material point of view even a victory will not pay.

Will it pay morally? Will the losses in blood and treasure be made good by permanent gains in ideals ?

Here lies the real issue, and it is the affirmative answer to this question which prolongs the war. So universal is the abhorrence of the ceaseless carnage that nothing but the deepest ideals could reconcile men to the struggle. Millions of us believe, however, that to give over the battle without attaining the war's supreme goal would be to suffer disaster. The war is as odious as ever, cruel, barbaric, vile ; and yet there seems no alternative than a submission to enduring evil. Victory will consist in bringing about a new state of the world in which men will be unharassed and free, and in which great nations and small will live together in peace.

Today there has arisen a new attitude toward peace and a larger hope for peace, because of the very conditions which make the present war different from any other in history. In the past wars were limited by the narrow bounds given to political integration, narrow bounds within which all intercourse between the nations took place. And peace was limited by the same conditions. A world peace was impossible in a world divided up into thousands of separate communities unconnected by industrial, social and intellectual bonds. Today the increasingly close integration of the world, which makes wars utterly destructive, makes a world peace conceivable. For the first time there is possibility of a close co-operation among nations, a sense of likeness in aim and destiny. There is a dream of mutual understanding and common concert. There is a propagation of an international faith and of an international allegiance.

This conception, at best merely struggling for expression, distorted and disfigured in the throes of its birth, this faith in a new world society, in a new unity and a new concert, is the one fact which gives this world conflict a rational and moral base. Destroy that base and nothing remains but the maniac clashing of rival peoples, a war which leads to a senseless peace, which again leads to war. Destroy this faith, and the war is but one of an endless chain of wars. In some manner and to some extent all the warring nations, including even those opposed to us, accept this faith. They cling to it despite many facts which should tend to make them sceptical. It is the vindication of this faith which alone makes the war anything more than a mere grotesque tragedy. It is by this vindication alone that a victory can be won.

But is not this real moral victory itself elusive, and do we not clutch at it ignorantly, and with clumsy hands? It is significant that our enemies, against whom we are fighting for the security of this better world, are themselves fighting for security, so that echoes of our ambitions come to us from across enemy frontiers. Can we attain internationalism, democracy and permanent peace by the mere expedient of fighting? In the beginning, it must be admitted, we envisaged the whole problem too simply. Wrapped up in a sense of the perfect justice of our cause, we believed that our enemy must soon discern and acknowledge that he was fighting against the light. Many idealists among the Allies expected that in a few months — in a year at most — they would overturn the Imperial German Government and confer upon the un-hated German people the blessings which they themselves enjoyed. Better still, the Germans, perceiving the abyss towards which their dynasts were leading them, would themselves revolt, and stretch out their hands in friendship to their rescuing enemy. None of all this has happened; on the contrary the Germans have made common cause with their rulers, and believe, quite sincerely, that they, and they alone, are fighting for the right, fighting that we and our Allies may not crush, dismember and humiliate the Fatherland. From the beginning they have opposed to us ideals as firmly held as those that we hold.

All our millions of soldiers, our hundreds of warships, our mountains of explosives, have failed to persuade them that we are fighting their cause. "We are unable to convince them and to their surprise they are unable to convince us.

The difficulty seems to be that we and our Allies are bringing to this problem a blunt war mind and are seeking a somewhat impalpable solution by excessively palpable instruments. We have tried to hammer the enemy into a confession of sin and into a state of grace, not realizing that for this purpose machine guns and asphyxiating gas are no adequate instruments. Though we cannot win this war without arms, we cannot win it by arms alone. The consequence of our exclusive preoccupation with the war tends to obscure the very purposes for which it is fought, with the result that the ideal victory, which we seek, eludes us.

This is true of our enemies and our allies as of ourselves. The simple faith of 1914 is gone. In Germany millions now perceive that they were enrolled in this conflict by a conscription of lies and that the real objects of their exalted rulers were different from those avowed. They begin to doubt the wisdom and justice of invading Belgium, of submarine warfare and the bombarding of peaceful cities ; and a few are wondering whether a German victory might not be a victory over Germany. The chains fastened upon Belgium would clank upon German ankles, for foreign aggression means unfreedom at home. Similarly, though in a lesser degree, the Allied peoples are beginning to dread too complete a victory. What advantage will there be in a mere overpowering of Germany? The German menace will be gone, but new menaces will have been created. Crush Germany to place Italy on the East Adriatic and the seeds are sown for a fresh war between Italy and Serbia and their respective allies, a war potentially as destructive as that under which we now live. Dismember Austria, split up that loose aggregation into a larger Balkans, and what is the permanent gain to England or France I Again, what new wars are to be staged by the Peace Conference in Asia Minor ? Everywhere dangers spring up like armed men from the ground. Everywhere victory promises to create new warring nations, young, unwise, over-confident, over-ambitious, ruthless. Such a victory is no victory. Divide all conquered territories according to the clashing desires of the flushed Allies and you have a state of Europe and of the world, no better than that from which men sought to escape in the insane venture of 1914.

Humankind is proverbially disregardful of distant dangers and Europe might be willing to purchase immunity from immediate aggression at the risk of a greater peril fifty years hence. But the menace is far more proximate. In 1912 the Balkan States declared w&r against Turkey upon the basis of a division of conquered territories more carefully considered than that which today binds the Allies; within a year they were at war among themselves. Can the Allies, in the event of their success, surely hold together in the precarious days of victory, while distributing territories newly acquired? Let Germany lay down her arms — is peace then assured? In a division of spoils there is no true harmony. What Italy wants Serbia wants. We can imagine the ironic laughter of the defeated Central Powers if at the final grand inquest the victorious Allies split upon the rock of clashing expansions, and each courted the aid of the German victim. For unless some new principle is evoked, other than that of giving to each what has been promised to each, the division will be made according to the strength of the respective victorious nations, according to the Balance of Power within the Alliance, and in case of conflict the unsuccessful group may appeal to the victim to redress the balance.

It is a discouraging outlook, a vista of ever new dangers, a dread that the world will escape from the consuming fire of this war only to fall into hotter conflagrations. A real victory, a victory of peace, eludes us. And when we inquire why it eludes us we see that we, the Allied nations, carry into the conflict something of that evil principle against which we fight. The war is against German militarism, aggression and imperialism, but the Allied nations are also militaristic, aggressive and imperialistic. Between Germany and Japan there is little to choose in the matter of imperialistic ambition; between the autocratic Eussia that was and the Germany that is there is nothing to choose. The war in its origin was an alignment of aggressive nations against aggressive nations. Moreover, in carrying on the war each combatant group has gained the adhesion of former neutrals by appealing to greed and ambition. The Allies made promises to Italy, Eoumania and Greece, as Germany made promises to Bulgaria. The cement of both alliances has been the very thing which caused the war. The Allies, fighting fire with fire, cannot be depended upon to control their own fire. A war for internationalism has been conducted by expedients opposed to the principle of internationalism.

Small wonder then that the world is disillusioned and war-weary, that the peoples ask themselves if wisdom and justice, moderation and tolerance are not more likely to solve problems than is the clash of brutal armies, let loose by stupid, if astute, diplomats. No wonder that tens of millions are seeking a way out of the banal slaughter to a victory that will not be empty and to a peace that will not be transient.

In this search they are everywhere impeded. They cry " peace, peace," meaning thereby a settlement that is lasting and just, but the echo answers ' ' there is no peace. ' ' Those who desire terms which will make for progress and civilization find their efforts frustrated by two groups, by sincere, dogmatic pacifists, who desire immediate peace on any terms, and by equally sincere bitter-enders, jusqu'a boutistes, who are either imperialists, conscious or unconscious, or mere instinctive haters, loving the war more than the peace that is to be gained. The first group, if successful, would pluck the fruit before it was ripe ; the second would fight on until the fruit was rotten.

To the irreconcilable pacifist the war has brought an endless series of disillusionments. He has an invincible repugnance to warfare, not because he is a coward (on the contrary he is often fanatically brave) but because in him the tribal instinct is weak. He tends to believe in the inherent goodness and reasonableness of men. Often he is a pacifist and a non-resister because he is a Christian; more often he is a rationalist holding fast to reason and distrusting instinct. He is not objective; few extremists are. He is not bound by conclusions drawn from history, for he looks to the future and believes implicitly in the revolutionary conversion of whole peoples. He holds to his dogma that nothing can be gained by war. The nearer the war the less pardonable.

The dogmatic pacifist has seen the ground drift from beneath his feet. In the beginning he hoped that all nations would be reasonable ; they were not. He hoped that non-resistance would evoke nonaggression; it did not. He believed that the sober reason as well as the economic and cultural interests of the world would prevent nations from going to war ; they did not. Even in the midst of the general conflagration he believed that a semi-isolated nation, like the United States, could remain out of the war, could maintain a solitaire peace; he has discovered that it could not. He has seen great peoples, ardently desiring peace, continue to fight as though driven by an invisible maleficent god.

These disillusionments have confused the judgment, if they have not altered the convictions of the pacifist. Though he at first held that we in America should preserve an oasis of peace, and not add to the universal frenzy, he now discovers, when it comes to a question of ending the war, that peace is more than a mere cessation of fighting. It is a thing of difficult terms and conditions; a thing easier broken than made.

To the militarist also the war has been disillusionizing. In the beginning he thought of it as a mere conflict of arms and as a chance for valour and distinction in the " imminent deadly breach." There was something mystical, romantic and sentimental in his concepton. War was utterly different from the dead monotony of industrial life, with its gluttonous production of standardized goods, its humdrum collocation of grimy men in grimy factories, its plethoric endless heaping up of commodities. With the outbreak of hostilities all that would be over. To his confusion the war turns out to be nothing but the same industrial process in a different form. He discovers that not armies but factories give the decision. Back of the soldiers stand the same grimy workers. The Brigadier-Generals in their resplendent uniforms are supplanted by manufacturers, merchants, bankers and advertising men, for the war has proved that war is business, and that military efficiency is useless without economic efficiency. Success in war depends upon the identical men and processes as does success in peace. As a consequence the military man of the old type is disappointed.

Yet though pacifists and warriors are alike disillusioned, the war drags on. Men die on the battlefield and women and children and old people die at home. Food becomes scarce, fuel scarcer and the whole industrial machine creaks. The birth-rate falls; the death rate rises. Tuberculosis spreads through vast sections of the populations and venereal diseases make fearful ravages. Everywhere are sick who cannot be tended, and weak who die unnecessarily. The nations, not comprehending each other, vainly strive for a mutual understanding that will relieve them from this excruciating agony. Then failing to reach any end or attain any concord they listen to the counsel of despair, * ' Fight on, you peoples ; cut your throats, lose your lives and with them your doubts and qualms and hesitations. There is peace in death on the battlefield; there is peace in the insensate struggle itself, in which men cease to think, and mechanically shoot at an unseen enemy; as much automata as are the machine guns under their hands.' '

It is as though we were driven by an inner impulse to mass suicide. Whoever seeks a rational escape from the slaughter is exposed to a merciless fire from the rear, to appeals to hatred, revenge, nationalistic gain. Constantly we are told not to look within but outward to the enemy. All the suffering is attributed to the foe and not to the struggle itself. If the loved ones at home starve, the enemy is at fault, not the war. If fathers, husbands, sons die on distant fields, it is the enemy who has killed them, not the war. In each country we forget that war is the opponent and remember only a grinning, contemptuous foe. Those who have something to gain or nothing to lose from the conflict insist on a mere fighting. So also do those who have forsworn thought ' ' for the duration of the war. ' ' They urge the nation to grasp that ever-elusive victory, to gain by just a little more effort the balm that is to salve all wounds, to save itself from the last unutterable calamity of destruction. They demand that the nation fight that " these honoured dead shall not have died in vain." Foolish, vainglorious hope. More millions may die and more and more millions, and yet die in vain. For unless the war is rationalized, spiritualized, saved from gross corrupting elements, unless it is fully harmonized with the new spirit struggling to be born, all who die, die in vain. Until then, those who cry for " peace, peace," even though the military victory be won, must be answered " there is no peace."

Could there be a more striking illustration of our tragic incapacity to rise above a fighting clan spirit to a view of humanity in its world relations? The war lasts because we, like our foes, cannot put ourselves in the enemy's place, cannot view the world from his standpoint, or test our ideals by his needs. We do not concede to him a common humanity or a common rationality, but see in him only the brute and moral idiot. We close our ears to what he has to say, as he closes his ears, and both sides hurl threats across the national boundaries. The loose curses of some unrepresentative Englishman or Frenchman, printed in large type in German papers, shut the mouths and consciences of patriotic Germans, clamouring for a democratic peace. People in Britain or America, who stretch out their hands in the dark to feel the friendly touch of peace-lovers in enemy lands, are struck by a Reventlow or von Tirpitz, and are silenced. In these circumstances there is no peace.

For the peace that is desired, the only peace worthy of the name or worth fighting for, is more than a pact between diplomats coming to the rescue of tired warriors. What is needed is a constructive peace, that will mean the progress of humanity, not a peace of subjugation nor a peace precedent to a new war. To such a true peace all the war irreconcilables of all countries are unitedly opposed. For these Maxses and Barres and Eeventlows, though reviling each other, are true allies. Theirs is a curious unconscious internationalism. Leagued together for war, imperialism and subjection, they are the real censors both of democratic speech and thought.

They keep the flame alive, arousing for ever the war spirit at home and abroad. Against these strutting little men, with their vicarious heroism and their prestige manufactured in enemy lands, the advocates of an honourable peace struggle ineffectually. For these little war-makers* though not intrinsically powerful, represent the vast unreason of the world.

Thus the nations long for a true peace and fight on. Great is the contagion of war, and so near lies the fighting spirit to our primitive instincts, and so easy is the refuge from the task of solving problems to the thoughtless routine of battle, that one nation after another is dragged into the contest. Finally the United States, the last great neutral, was forced into the war.

There was no way out. The struggle was on whether we were in or not, and our participation seemed to promise the end. It was for us, we believed, to resolve the problem, to untie the knot that had resisted Europe's efforts. To this task we brought men, munitions and money, and also a new spirit. We wanted no conquests or indemnities, nothing but an honourable permanent peace. War-weary even before we entered the war, we strove to be disinterested, to fight without hatred and without ambition. We were literally fighting for peace.

Thus America became the chief hope of the world's peace. We were cast for this role not because we were better people than Europeans — we were neither better nor worse — but simply because our safe geographical and economic position not only permitted us to develop ideals of internationalism but also took from us any powerful selfish interest in the conflict. As peace-makers we had an advantage over other great Powers.

We had a corresponding disadvantage. As a nation we were ignorant of those complex historical and political problems of Europe, those intimate repulsions and inherited prejudices out of which wars arise. We knew little about Russia, less about Austria-Hungary, still less about the Balkan situation, and our ignorance concerning the intricate problems of Asia Minor was almost complete. Before the war few Americans had even heard of the Bagdad Railway. Disregarding these problems we believed that peace could be maintained by keeping things as they were and we never asked ourselves whether things could be kept as they were. Ignoring their difficulties and their temptations we felt a contempt for nations which sought to fight out problems, not realizing that in like circumstances we too should have fought. We thought of peace as a self -regulating device, as a thing natural and good and easy, and of any people that broke the peace as a self-confessed malefactor.

Since then we have learned much. We have investigated the rotting foundations upon which peace in the past has been built and we have come to recognize that in some cases the peace-breaker is blessed. We have learned that not every peace will do ; that peace is a highly perishable integument, to be adjusted or fitted, so to speak, to the needs of peoples, to the spread of ideas, ideals, interests, antagonisms ; that it must grow with the growth of the nations it holds together. It is not a glass case, rigid and fragile, but a living container, a web, of the nature of the things it holds, growing, changing, alive — and mortal. It is a condition, good, bad, improving, degenerating. It is a part of the enveloping atmosphere of the nations, and the nations may grow up healthy in its atmosphere or they may stifle and die.

We have also learned that no nation, nor all nations together, can proclaim "Let there be Peace' ' and there will be peace. For that peace which the world desires is an organic and vulnerable thing, which must grow out of the ideals and passions of men, which must be better or worse, which must die day by day and be renewed day by day, as our skin dies and is renewed. We have only begun to learn the vast toxicology of peace ; the virulent, recondite poisons that destroy it, poisons not placed there by wicked men but, like fatigue germs, generated by the international body itself. We find the enemy of peace to be not Germany alone but also those distractingly difficult questions, which Peace must confront and answer or be herself destroyed. Our own pat replies of three years ago, as we now realize, were no answers, but mere evasions. We have studied and learned though we are still ignorant. So is the rest of the world. The blind lead the blind ; the ignorant teach the ignorant; the passionate preach to the passionate the virtues of peace.

Disheartening? Surely. Yet so the world has always been governed and the race survived. Today if our difficulties are intricate we have at least a broader basis, in a new world created under our feet, upon which to build for the future. More men and more women than ever before are striving not for any peace but for one that is true and permanent and just. The task of attaining such a peace is paralyzingly difficult, but we hope and believe that it is not impossible.

But to attain it requires a larger spirit than to fight a war. It requires broader sympathies, a clearer vision, a greater faith and a nobler charity. The problem is no less than the planning of the world, the provision of a place in the sun for all the nations (including our enemies), the evening of the path over which all peoples in their daily arduous lives must pass. The peace to be attained must be a peace that lays the foundations upon which a world society may be built. Such a peace does not come automatically, nor is it attained by fighting, which can achieve only the removal of some of the obstacles. The end of the war does not of itself bring peace, just as the battle won does not bring the victory; all that war assures us is a partial cleaning of the slate upon which a new message may be written. What that message will be depends upon what spirit animates the peoples who are to do the writing. It is in something of this mood and with the sense that she is a nation chosen by circumstances to lead, that America must approach the problem of world peace. The task comes to us more immediately than ever before. Plunged into the World War to sink or rise with the other nations, we may either fight on to the elusive victory that is defeat, or may strive by intelligence and a true spirit to attain to that moral victory without which this war is an unmeaning curse.

Chapter II Pacifists And Patkiots

Supebficially there could have been no more startling volte face than that of America in April, 1917. We had just re-elected Mr. Wilson, who had "kept us out of war ' ' ; immediately afterwards, and under his leadership, we entered the war.