The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY
Man alone, among the higher animals, seems characteristically to fight his own kind to the death. Doubtless before there was law or morals the primitive savage often got the woman, the ox or the stone knife which he wanted simply by killing the possessor. With the organization of society, groups and tribes began to do the same thing collectively as a means of acquiring live-stock, wives, slaves or territory; and we had war. In primitive society, if we may judge from our study of existing savages, wars were often comparatively bloodless affairs, settled by a contest between two champions or by a few wounds. Whole groups and tribes may have lived on the pacifist theory, as do today certain African nations which will not keep cattle because cattle bring on raids and peace is with them preferable to property.
When the curtain lifts on recorded history, tribes were collecting into nations, and kingship was firmly fixed in human affairs. By now, war also was a permanent human institution; every throne was propped up by an army. The relation of warfare to this early progress has been traced by H. G. Wells in his “Outline of History.” A people settled down, developed agriculture, town life, a literature, the mechanical arts, the beginnings of scientific knowledge; accumulated wealth and desirable luxuries. In this process, they became to the barbarian point of view “effeminate,” and easy prey for conquest.
Warfare, then and for centuries afterwards, was mostly a matter of individual fighting. That side was the victor which had the greater average of men strong and skilled with the sword or lance, accurate with the bow. The settled peoples, busy with the arts of peace, had not the time for that life-long, intensive, athletic training which made good warriors. The barbarians, therefore, beat them in battle, took their wealth, settled down among them, learned their arts. They in turn became weakened for warfare, and another wave of barbarians repeated the process. Though there were exceptions, such as the long hold of the civilized Roman Empire, this was the general rhythm of ancient wars; even of mediæval wars.
Viewed in this light, we have reason for arguing that warfare was a positive if costly benefit. The world in general was without means of communication; the written word which carried knowledge was unavailable to whole peoples, to all but a few even among the most favored peoples. Travel beyond one’s national boundaries was almost unknown; the barbarians had an invariable custom of killing strangers. Possibly by no other means than warfare could the rudiments of civilization have reached the outer fringe. When the wild Persians overwhelmed them, the peoples of the Mesopotamian Basin had a written language, an understanding of primitive mechanics, a system of star-measurement. Left alone, they might have gone on to advanced mechanics such as the steam engine, to the truth about sidereal space and the world in space. The Persians blew out all that bright promise; yet before they themselves were conquered, they had acquired what their captives had learned. So it went, the world over, except in those three or four rather abnormal centuries during which Rome held sway over the world; and not even Rome was wholly an exception. She conquered Greece; but intellectually she became so absorbed by the Hellenic people that every Roman gentleman must speak perfect Greek or he was no gentleman. The Goths came into Southern Europe unlettered barbarians; in a few centuries, they had in Ravenna the most advanced civilization of their time; and they learned it all from the conquered. The Northmen got their letters, their mathematics, their mechanics from subject peoples. The German Junkers professed that they waged the late war to spread their culture by conquering; the ancient peoples spread their culture by being conquered. He would be indeed a prejudiced pacifist who ignored this aspect of old war, or denied the possibility that in such times war was beneficial.
In those days of primitive nations warfare had no rules, or very few, of mercy or decency. The conquering king and his men, undeterred by scruples, did as they pleased with the conquered. If it served their whim or purpose, they slaughtered a surrendered army, even the women and children, of a whole surrendered tribe. The kingly inscriptions of Egypt and Assyria boast of such deeds as glories of the crown. When the tribe was spared, it was often merely that it might work to pay the victor tribute, or to furnish him with slaves. If there were protesting voices they have left no record. But as early as the great days of Greece, we find a little faint criticism both of war itself and its methods. The thing, certain men thought, was an evil, a calamity. It could not be stopped, probably; but it was an evil nevertheless. There did arise, however, a dim code—rudimentary morals of war. It was no longer quite ethical to kill women and children, to slaughter your prisoners. It was often done; but it required explanation and apology. When, some half-century before Christ, Julius Cæsar put to death the Usepetes and Tenectri, he was denounced in the Roman senate, and Cato even proposed that he be turned over to the Germans.
Christianity, when it came at last powerfully into human affairs, carried forward this moral movement. A divine institution applied by imperfect men, it did not strike at the roots of war; nor indeed did it seem clearly to recognize them. It established, however, the principle that an unjust war was wicked; and it did strive to ameliorate the unnecessary horrors and to fix the tradition of chivalrous warfare. The Truce of God, by which it became wicked to fight on certain days of the week, was an attempt in this direction.
The movement collapsed in the great religious or half-religious wars of the sixteenth century, and for a reason quite logical and understandable. Both sides were fighting heresy, a sin and crime—they thought—which did not merely injure men in this life as do most ordinary crimes, but which condemned their souls to an eternity of misery. No punishment was too severe for heresy. Hence such massacres as those of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, and the sack of Antwerp in the Low Countries.
When mankind came out of this madness, the drift toward chivalrous warfare was resumed. The code, by the twentieth century, had become definite; it was a chapter in every general military text book, a course in the education of every professional soldier; finally it was sanctioned almost as international law by the Hague Peace Conference. In principle, war must rest as easily as possible on non-combatants such as women and children; nor might even an armed enemy be killed unnecessarily. In detail, it was agreed that a city might not be besieged until the non-combatants had been given time to get away from the ensuing bombardment and starvation, that the victors holding occupied territory must be responsible for the lives of the inhabitants, that prisoners of wars must not only be spared but adequately fed and housed, that surgeons, nurses and stretcher-bearers must have every reasonable opportunity to rescue and succor the wounded; finally that certain “barbarous” methods of killing, such as explosive bullets and poison gases, might not be used. And the military clan of all nations generally accepted this code as the law and the gospel; they had been bred in the idea of chivalry, and had developed a beautiful and strict conception of professional ethics which implied truth and honor toward their own, and a sense of mercy toward their enemies. With such an attitude toward war, the nations entered the unprecedented struggle of 1914–18.
In the meantime, another current had been running among the European peoples; it is necessary to understand that in order to understand the present situation. In the period since the religious wars, in general during a long period before that, warfare had settled into the hands of professional armies, officered by the aristocracy, recruited in general from the dregs of the population, padded with mercenary soldiers of fortune. These forces were comparatively small, even in time of war.
In 1704, Marlborough won the battle of Blenheim and imposed his will on the Continent of Europe with 50,000 mixed British, Dutch and Austrian troops. France was considered, in this period, the great military power of the world. Just before the Revolution of 1789 her armies had a theoretical war strength of 210,000, or about one in 100 of the population. Nor was the economic burden of warfare very heavy. The weapons were comparatively few and primitive—flint lock muskets for the infantry, sabres and lances for the cavalry, plain smooth-bore cannon for the artillery. Speaking generally, ammunition consisted of four standard commodities—black powder, round lead bullets, flints, and solid cannon balls. The factories which supplied enough of this ammunition for the limited armies of the day represented only a very small part of the nation’s productive forces. And, except in regions swept by the armies, the industries of the nations went on in war much as in peace. Even an unsuccessful war laid on the people only a comparatively light burden of taxation. The losses in men were not so great but that the general increase in races almost instantly filled the gap. At Blenheim, before mentioned, Marlborough lost less than five thousand men both killed and wounded, the defeated French and their Bavarian allies only eleven thousand.
Then came the French Revolution. The new, fanatical French Republic, opposed by an alliance of all the kings of Europe, its frontier invaded, its nobility joined with the enemy, faced the alternative of a struggle with every resource it had or extinction and the gallows. The principle of conscription was decreed for the first time by a great nation. Every man capable of bearing arms must serve or hold himself ready to serve. And national industries also were mobilized, even if crudely. Theoretically, at least, all the iron-workers of France went to work on guns, cannon, pikes and ammunition. In the very streets of Paris stood the forges, hammering out bayonets.
There followed the twenty years of the Napoleonic wars, wherein conscription was applied in fact if not always in name. From that time, through fifty years of comparative peace, the thing grew as a principle of statecraft. It did not become settled and universal, however, until after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Prussia, ambitious leader of the German states, herself led by men with ruthless genius, had applied the principle of conscription, had planned and studied the possibilities of modern warfare as they had never been studied before. The German army was ready “to the last buckle” when it burst on France, swept up the brave but ill-organized army of MacMahon, took Metz and Paris, and in six months brought about a peace which tore from France two provinces, nearly her whole supply of iron ore, a discriminating tariff agreement, and the unprecedented indemnity of a billion dollars. Germany had shown the way to the militarists.
Now we must go back again and trace for a moment a third current, running into that cesspool which overflowed in 1914.
The era of kingship, as a focus for human loyalty, had passed into the era of Powers. And these Powers grew as predatory as the Roman Empire, though less frankly and obviously so. The age of machinery, of intensive manufacture, had arrived. Europe produced only a part of the raw materials which she needed for her furnaces, her forges or her looms. That country would prosper best, it was felt, which held the tightest grip on the sources of raw material. Every European nation was turning out more manufactured goods than it could use at home; all needed foreign trade; and “trade follows the flag.” Finally, as national wealth was multiplied through the fruitful processes of machinery, Europe began to pile up surplus capital. Investment in new, undeveloped lands was much more profitable to capital than domestic investment under tight conditions.
Out beyond the fringes of European civilization lay barbaric and semi-civilized peoples owning raw materials, ready to buy European manufactured goods, promising still other benefits to the nation which could possess them either as conquerors or “protectors.” It was easy for a European statesman, who wanted a fruitful barbarian country, to find the pretext. A native king, we will say, was encouraged to get hopelessly into debt with a European government or banking firm. An “incident” occurred. There were Europeans who made a trade of bringing on such incidents. National honor was offended; also, there was the debt. The army of the European power involved—sometimes bloodlessly, sometimes after a brief campaign—assumed the responsibilities of the native king. The debt was paid in time; but the European control remained. I describe here, and only as an example, one method among many.
When any given power so extended its “influence,” it tried to make that influence exclusive. It must have all the raw materials and all the markets which it cared to take. It must have all the rights to invest capital. When the European nation, for fear of its rivals, could not take over any undeveloped nation outright, it tried to bring it at least within its “sphere of influence”—a kind of half-control leading in time to full conquest. The critics of this system call it “financial imperialism.” For European diplomacy, backed by enormous armies, by great national banking houses, by munitions manufacturers, had become almost frankly commercial.
Diplomacy kept the long peace which this policy always endangered by a system borrowed from the eighteenth century and much improved in the nineteenth. “The Balance of Power” it used to be called; now it was termed “the Concert of the Powers.” Nations, led by the great powers, allied themselves in such manner as to keep the opposing sets of interests at about equal strength. If you expect to make a successful aggressive war, you must have a superiority of forces. Two nations about even in military resources are not likely to fight. The risk of failure is too great. And so with two alliances. But all this time, another current was running strongly among European nations. Each alliance was struggling to build up stronger potential power than the other. This helped when, as happened every four or five years, there rose a visible conflict of interests. The stronger you were in a military way, the stronger would be the situation of your diplomats. Every year, the European “race of armaments” grew more intense.
Expressed in less abstract terms, this was the general state of Europe during the forty or fifty years which followed the Franco-Prussian war:
On the Continent, military conscription had become universal. If Great Britain did not follow, it was because she, an island kingdom, was checking armies with an unprecedented navy. On the Continent, every young man must serve his two or three years with the colors, learning to be a modern soldier. Retired to the Reserve, he must at intervals drop his work and drill again, in order “to keep his sword bright.” The financial burden of arming this soldier grew even greater. As I shall presently show, weapons of warfare never until recently improved so fast as industrial tools; but they did improve almost too rapidly for the finances of the nations. The Germans decided that a repeating rifle could be used with advantage in infantry tactics; the French must scrap from five to ten million single-shot rifles and replace them by repeaters. When the British proved that a battleship of unprecedented size entirely armed with big guns could thrash any small battleship armed with guns of mixed calibres, all existing battleships were headed toward the junk-yard, and the rival nations must build dreadnoughts. When France worked out a field-gun unprecedented for accuracy and rapidity of fire, thousands of German field-guns must go to the melting-pot or to museums, to be replaced by imitations of the French “soixante-quinze.” And the expense of these improvements increased almost in arithmetical ratio. A repeating rifle, with its complicated mechanism, cost much more than a smooth bore. “First-line” ships for modern navies cost in the seventies one or two million dollars; a crack dreadnought costs now a matter of forty or fifty million dollars. The burden of taxation weighed heavier and ever heavier on the common man and woman of Europe. There were signs just before the Great War that the race of armament was slowing up. Nations seemed to hesitate about adopting obvious but costly improvements. The true cause back of this, doubtless, was that taxation was reaching the “point of saturation”—for peace times at least. Agitation against military service began to make itself heard. It took two years from the 
OBSOLETE ARMAMENT
The U. S. S. Indiana, before and after it became a target for the 14-inch rifles of the superdreadnought Oklahoma.
The Indiana cost $5,800,000 when built. The latest dreadnoughts cost at least $40,000,000.
But the nations in general could not let go, even had their statesmen desired to renounce “Financial Imperialism” and its buttress of great standing armies. If for no other reason, because Germany sat in the centre of Europe, unconverted to any theories which involved military disarmament; and England sat behind her sea walls, afraid of any theories which involved naval disarmament. But Germany was setting the pace. She had learned the “lesson” of the Franco-Prussian war—a “nation in arms,” an army methodically, scientifically prepared from its boots to its plan of campaign, eternally ready for that sudden stroke which catches the enemy unprepared. Scientific military preparation had laid the foundations for the prosperity and greatness of modern Germany. More scientific preparation—more prosperity and greatness! That German genius for organization, scarcely suspected before 1870, sprang into full blaze. And the army was organized into every German institution. The state schools educated the children to make them not only good citizens and efficient workers, but also good soldiers. With a skill and thoroughness which was the marvel of its time, Germany wove the army into the fabric of civilian life. Her state railways were laid down not only for commercial needs but also with a view to moving great bodies of troops toward any critical point on the frontiers. Her great steel works, making and exporting the tools and machinery of civilian life, could be changed over with a minimum of trouble into factories for munitions of war. She specialized, indeed, on munition making—furnished the rifles and cannon for the little wars of the far countries.
The “psychological preparation” imposed by the rulers of Germany was just as thorough. A state-controlled pulpit, a state-controlled press, state-controlled teachers and university professors, hammered or insinuated into the German people exaggerated, conceited patriotism and the thought of war—the “Religion of Valor.” With the national talent for intellectual speculation, the Germans of the governing class worked out a philosophy which sounds quaint to practical-minded Americans, but upon which men lived and died. The state was a thing with a soul. It was the duty of the subject, his highest end, to advance the glory and interest of the state, no matter if that glory made every subject poorer and less happy. We, of course, look upon the state as a means of getting together and promoting the happiness and security of its members. If it does not generally have that result, it is nothing. When it comes to promoting the interests of the state—this philosophy held—all ordinary rules of morals are off. Acts like theft, murder, unchastity, cruelty, calling for severe punishment when performed against other citizens of the state, became holy when performed for the state.
War was the highest manifestation of the state, the supreme act which gave it glory, the opportunity for the subject to prove his devotion. War was good in itself. It was, first of all, natural. All biological life was a struggle. The weak went down, the strong survived; by this process the species evolved and improved. So, the weaker races go down before the stronger, for the improvement of the human breed[1]. Of course, your own race was the strongest, the most worthy of survival. Races grew soft in peace, strong in war. The talk about doing away with warfare was “immoral, unnatural, degrading.”
Such, briefly, were the ideas upon which Germany was being fed. We all know that, I suppose. Most of us have heard of Bernhardi and his book “Germany and the Next War”—the extreme expression of this view. What we do not perhaps appreciate is that such opinions were not peculiar to Germany. In the Great War, in the settlement after the Great War, Europe was divided not only by a horizontal line between Entente Allies and Germanic Allies, but by a vertical line between the aristocratic element and the democratic element. The set of ideas which I have quoted above were distinctly aristocratic in their aims and origins; by an aristocracy in secure control they were disseminated. But the other European aristocracies held exactly the same view—not so logically worked out perhaps, not so frankly expressed, but the same at the bottom. Lord Roberts, the venerable and respected British general, issued a kind of manifesto at the beginning of the war. Less brutal and feverish in expression, it is in thought the same thing as the mouthings of the German Junkers. “War is necessary for the souls of people,” he said in effect; “it is the tonic of races.” You heard the same sentiments from the French General Staff. The difference was only this: whereas in the Entente countries the democratic idea kept a balance with the aristocratic as in Great Britain and Italy, or maintained the ascendence as in France, the aristocratic element held in Germany the control over government, over most material activities, over most sources of public opinion. Germany, said the aristocrats of the neutral European nations, had made aristocracy scientific, brought it up to date, showed how it could he fastened on to a modern state. That was why these neutral aristocracies were one and all pro-German.
There were German dissenters, of course. There were in fact many of them, as the Social Democratic vote showed in 1913, the Revolution in 1918. But their dissent was as yet ineffective. Probably the majority of Germans believed in this Religion of Valor which they had learned with their Christian prayers. Certainly the majority believed that the intensive, perpetual preparation for instant war was a necessity to a nation “ringed with enemies.” The preparation went on, ever and ever more burdensome and complex. So did the propaganda, the “mental preparation.” By 1914, the Germans published and read more books on war than all the other nations of the world put together. “The man who builds the ship will want to sail it,” say the nautical experts. And the man who forges the sword will want to wield it. By 1914, the mine was laid and ready. With their “financial imperialism,” their “concert of the powers,” their race for dominating armament, all the European nations were responsible for that. The assassination of an Austrian prince, a mere police court case, lit the fuse. Accident alone was responsible for that. The fuse might have been trampled out; but the Kaiser and his counsellors held back, held others back. Germany was responsible for that—Germany and an aristocratic, militarist system, “prepared to the last buckle.” On the day of mobilization, the French conscripts went to their appointed places sober or pale or weeping according to their individual characters, The first young British volunteers marched to the recruiting offices with a solemn consecration in their faces, as men who go to take a sacrament. The Germans rushed to arms shouting and singing. During the early days of the Belgian invasion a German Junker officer, who seemed well informed upon events within the enemy lines, spoke to me with tears of pride in his eyes concerning this contrast.
“Ah, Germany was beautiful—beautiful!” he said.
- ↑ I shall treat later on of other articles of this faith but this one might as well be nailed here and now. Admitting what is popularly called the Darwinian theory of the origin of species through survival of the fittest, evolutionists still doubt whether man did not free himself from the law of evolution at the moment when he fashioned the first tool, built the first fire. From that time, he became not the creature of his environment, but its master. But even if the man-species still lives, grows and improves by the law of evolution, the struggle for existence is, in the natural, animal state, between individual and individual, not between tribe and tribe, horde and horde. This is like many other militarist arguments; it is neither true nor scientific; it only seems so.