The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
“DEFENSIVE PREPARATION”
What should be our American attitude toward military preparation? The average hard-headed, practical American will perhaps say that if war has grown so deadly, it is all the more reason why we should prepare to defend ourselves. Without defence, we stand in peril of general extinction; with defence, we may avert war at least for a time, may soften the blow when it comes. Let us prepare then, says the American citizen, not for conquest, or “fulfilment of national aspirations” but for defence.
Yes, provided only that we can, in this age of confusions and complexities, keep our military preparations defensive. And that is extremely difficult. Indeed, when you come to thorough defensive preparation, a hundred per cent efficient, it becomes perhaps impossible. The term “defence” needs defining; it has hitherto been used as a most effective hypocrisy of militarism. Keeping our coasts and borders against an invading enemy is pure defence; no one disputes that. But in the modern world a nation is not confined to its own political borders. The American mining engineer developing a lode 
There comes a point in any thorough military preparation when the spirit of defence runs subtly into the spirit of offence. Again, Germany is the typical case. She was, her emperors, kings and generals said, “ringed with foes.” That, in the beginning, was not an entirely insincere presentation of the case. On one side lay France, smarting with the injustice of 1870; on another lay the barbaric Russia of the Czars, with double Germany’s manpower and an eye on Germany's developed wealth. On her seacoast lay the strong British Navy. “What is Germany?” asked question 1 in the public school catechism on geography, “It is your Fatherland, entirely surrounded by enemies.” Militarism was hammered into the German people in the form of defence, defence, always defence. And let me repeat; in the beginning the men who urged this were not all insincere.
Germany went into the game of financial imperialism with the rest. The world was spotted with “spheres of influence,” where German capital harvested fields of trade or raw materials for the factories of Berlin, Leipsic, Düsseldorf. These interests must be protected; other capital must be kept out. The German army began to pass from a defensive force to an implied offensive force. In such crises as the transfer of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Germans won because the Kaiser rattled his sword and the others yielded for fear he might turn loose his perfect army.
There came, too, a mental change. “He who forges the sword will want to wield it.” Here is one of the ways in which a national mind works like an individual mind. You have found, we will say, that you play an extraordinary game of lawn tennis. You will not long be satisfied with scrub games. You will want, if you are a normal man, to enter tournaments, to prove your accomplishment and superiority before the world. You discover that you write good poetry or fiction. How long will you be contented with sugared sonnets among your private friends? Sooner or later you will want to publish it and let the world see how clever you are. And so when you have the perfect army or navy, perfectly knit into the structure of the state, you will find some impulse which you may not at the time analyze, urging you toward its proof in action.
Germany did. There was never such a glittering display of military power as in the old summer manœvres before the war. Doubtless any German who saw that great charge of massed cavalry by which they always ended, felt somewhere in him a glow as he thought of what Germany might do in real battle. The cloud gathered. With Germany—as even most Germans now admit—lay the decision for peace or war; and she chose war. It is absurd to blame the Kaiser alone; almost equally absurd to blame his counsellors alone. They were carried along, all of them, by a flood which had been rolling up in Germany for forty years.
Yet even then, they maintained the fiction to their people—and half to themselves—that they were fighting a defensive war against the “ring of foes.” The average German soldier whom I saw in Belgium during 1914 believed this devoutly. Barbarous Russia and envious England had attacked the Fatherland. He fought in her defence. France must be crushed because she had foolishly joined these major enemies. Poor France! Now, if they survive, these same Germans are calling France the source of all their woes, the true enemy. For the current is running in another direction, and the strategy of propaganda has changed. But this is a digression. Germany illustrates, among other things, the danger in the perfect defensive preparation and the difficulty of drawing the line between defence and offence.
Some may note that I have not touched upon the question of national honor. The individual in society sometimes meets a situation outside the law so intolerable that he is less than a man if he does not take the law into his own hands; and so it is with nations. The circumstance which drew us into the Great War was an unusually clean-cut example of an unpardonable affront. Germany had announced cold-bloodedly, flatly, that American vessels could no longer sail the most frequented seas of the world; if they did, the hulls would be destroyed, the crews killed without warning. The occasions of war are not commonly so simple as this. “National honor” is more often the excuse for economic and political interests, or the mere focus of trouble arising from a conflict of such interests. The occasion of the Great War, the spark which set the mine, was the assassination of an Austrian prince in Serbia. Behind that lay thirty or forty years of intrigue leading up to a “situation.” Austria wanted to make Serbia a vassal economically, and in the end politically. Germany wanted to extend a “line of influence” through the Balkans in order to build an all-German Berlin-to-Bagdad railway. The Entente nations wanted to prevent all this. Had no such situation lain behind the assassination at Sarajevo, the matter would have been settled with an apology, punishment of the criminals and perhaps indemnity.
Let us imagine another case. Mr. Colby, then our Secretary of State, visited South America in 1920. Suppose that in Rio de Janeiro some fanatic or band of fanatics had murdered him. Would that have led to war between the United States and Brazil? Almost certainly no. But suppose that Brazil and the United States had long been engaged in an economic and political struggle to control by their capital the resources of Ecuador, Colombia and Central America. Suppose them both prepared to the last belt-buckle. Would it then have led to war? Almost certainly yes. And most Americans would say—as did the Austrians in 1914—that we were drawing the sword to avenge national honor and wipe out an intolerable insult.
Building up armies, navies, and munitions industries solely through the fear of national insult, solely to protect honor, seems a little like carrying a loaded pistol night and day lest perhaps someone insult you intolerably, beyond recourse of law.
Yet the fact remains: few Americans of spirit will want, in this era of the world, to strip us of all our defences. That goes beyond the reasonable pacifism which has hitherto been the general American attitude toward war. It becomes the non-resistance of the dreamer, Tolstoi. Apart from its danger, completely laying down our own arms would be no good, except by example. We must reach further back than that into the structure of things; try, with all the others, to repair this world-machine. At present, it is like some great, complex engine which has broken a vital part. It tends to beat itself to pieces with its own power.