# The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense/Chapter 9

CHAPTER IX
“THE TONIC OF NATIONS”
The moral value in peace, war and military preparation can of course be treated with less certainty than the racial and economic values. You cannot measure virtue with a yardstick nor establish by statistics the comparative virtue and vice, honor and dishonor, truth and falsehood in any man or any race. Here one must rely on general observation.
Up to the great struggle in 1914–18, the militarist and the aggressive patriot had somewhat the better of the moral argument. Obviously the man who offered up his life for the welfare or glory or whatsoever of his clan, tribe or nation is doing a fine, high thing. “Greater love than this hath no man.” But modern war is changing even that. Of the ten million killed in battle, the forty million under arms, comparatively few made the supreme sacrifice voluntarily. They were conscripts. They had to go and take the chance of being killed—or die with certainty against a wall. Most of these men had received their one, two or three years of military training. It had involved mental training, ​designed to lash them up, when the moment of action came, to a love of war and a desire for victory. That, and the new experience, seemed to keep them in a state of blithe morale for the first few months. There is a curious, exalted state of mind about the early days of a war. All of us who dodged about the rear, immune from its hardships, nearly immune from its dangers, felt that mood. Never again shall I be so poignantly moved by the beauty of paintings, of old cathedrals, of women, of blossoming fields, as during those early days of the war. It was as though I were constantly and pleasantly a little drunk. Now the men at the front—wallowing in filth and misery, hardening themselves against instant death—felt nevertheless something of the same mood. Then it passed, as intoxication will. Thereafter, they “carried on” because they must. They had been taught it was their duty; most of them believed that; but deep down lay a rebellion against the whole principle of the thing. Boards of morale and of propaganda invented the phrase “the war to end war.” The men of the trenches clutched at that. “It must never happen again”—you hear the phrase to weariness from the British ranks, the French ranks, the Belgian ranks, the Italian ranks. They did not consider themselves as men making an act of sacrifice but rather as men caught in a wheel from which there was no present escape. Germany went to war in a state of exaltation, lashed up through forty years of military ​preparation. But the German ranks must have felt the same; else there would have been no German revolution. Read Philip Gibbs's “Now It Can Be Told” and Henri Barbousse’s “Under Fire”—tolerant observers of high intelligence and of wide experience these two—and learn how little exaltation of self-sacrifice there was in Armageddon.
Much propaganda was spilled during the war to show how, in the same manner, Armageddon profited the higher morals of the civilian population. We heard of the “flapper” who became a heroine; of the frivolous matron who put off her silks and chiffons, put on denim and went to work “in munitions”; of the selfish rich man who gave up servants and automobiles and shooting lodges to help finance the war. This was indeed a moral gain—a temporary one at least. It is good for the souls of the overfed that they fast; it is good for the souls of the idle that they go to work; it is good for the souls of the selfish that they feel the thrill of a generous, common emotion. But how large was this special moral gain? Only as large as the upper class. Every country has its submerged tenth and correspondingly its exalted tenth. The other eight-tenths do not sacrifice comfort or nourishment or leisure—at least not voluntarily. They have no margins of the kind to sacrifice. When the accidents of war drove a family ahead of an invading army to perish of hunger or hardship in the fields, when a whole population lived on reduced rations because of a ​blockade—that was not a voluntary sacrifice. To take seriously the argument that such a war as we have just endured is good because people “know the nobility of self-sacrifice” is to imply that the upper class is the only class which counts.
Unquestionably, there came with the war a movement back to whatever religion the peoples of Armageddon have. But I could never feel, observing Europe during the war, that this was the highest and healthiest form of religion. With their sons in peril of death, their homes in peril of destruction, their nations in peril of extinction, people turned toward whatever God they had—to ask for something. Nor—again I speak from observation—did this special form of religion seem to survive the war.
And there was a strong back-current which censorships, both official and implied, prevented us from describing while the war was on. Whole classes of the European population threw off the ordinary moral restraints imposed by peace. The performances of a certain large and wealthy group were notorious; and once I spoke frankly on this matter to a woman of the class in question. “Oh, it’s eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” she said. “Our people are doing the things they’ve always wanted to do. Their inhibitions are off. They feel that nothing matters any more.”
At best, whatever moral force was loosed by the Great War seems to me an impermanent thing. It did not survive the Armistice. It became no part of ​the moral heritage of mankind. Lord Roberts described war as “the tonic of races.” He confused substance with shadow, I think. It is a stimulant, not a tonic. Most of us know the difference. Iron is a tonic; alcohol a stimulant. Iron strengthens the system; alcohol seems to give temporary strength. Iron is a permanent gain; the reaction makes alcohol a permanent loss. It is related that the Oriental alchemist who first discovered alcohol thought he had the elixir of life—and drank himself to death. The militarist mind, still primitive in its workings, still believing that things are so because they seem to be so, makes the same mistake. Regarded in the most favorable light, the state of war is a stimulant, not a tonic.
At the beginning of the late war, we heard from German, French, British and American militarists that nations grew soft through peace. China they set up as the awful example—notwithstanding the fact that war is the only practical activity for which China of the past two hundred years has shown any aptitude. Her Tai-Ping rebellion spilled more blood than any other military struggle of the nineteenth century. But do nations grow soft through peace? The late war seemed to prove quite the contrary.
During the forty-four years between 1870–1914, the Western nations of the European continent, while armed for war, had preserved peace by the concert of the powers. There were small colonial ​expeditions, it is true; but those involved comparatively few men, only a little strain on the national resources. Britain’s expedition against the Boers was only a second-rate war. Europe never knew a period of peace so long and so profound. When the Germans marched on France, not one in ten thousand French or German soldiers had ever experienced the buzz of a bullet past his ear. From these people grown soft through peace we might have expected cowardice, timidity—whole armies breaking at the first fire. We got unexampled heroism. It was written in the old books on infantry tactics when a body of troops lost ten per cent or at most fifteen, they became an uncertain quantity—even though you had been able to replace the losses, it was time to take them out if you could. In the Battle of the Somme, the Allied Armies regularly kept divisions in the line until the replacements numbered fifty per cent—sometimes more. Whole companies, whole regiments fought so often to the traditional “last handful” that the newspapers scarcely troubled to record such performances—they had grown too common. Study, if you want concrete proof, the record of the famous French Twentieth Corps, recruited from Paris—city men, and therefore most affected by the soft influence of peace.
Militarists have answered that universal military training accounts for this unexpected hardness. Frenchmen, Germans and Italians had been ​educated for war, taught to think from their infancy in terms of war; and we are dealing with a state of mind. Then what about the British? The island of Britain had protected herself by navies, not armies. Her small army was composed of volunteers. The average Englishman, Scotchman, Irishman or Welshman did not know the trigger of a rifle from the muzzle. He had never thought of war as a possibility of his life. When Britain took to the draft, she gathered in the last of these young men, ran them through four or five months of intensive training, sent them to the line. Generally such troops, as one might expect, were inferior to the veterans in military technique. They were little if any inferior in “hardness.” I saw a British draft-division once literally staggering back to the rest-station. It was a time of special stress, when relief divisions were hard to find. These men had been kept in the line until nearly seventy per cent of their original strength was gone and replaced. Yet they had held firm to the end. I have shown how modern warfare under the conscription system chooses the best, takes their activity from the existing generation, their strong blood from the next generation. That is your true softening process. Nations do not grow hard through wars and preparation for wars. This is another thing which is not so, but only seems so. Armageddon affords proof that the reverse is true.
CHAPTER X
THE DISCIPLINE OF PEACE
All this leads up to the question of the moral factor in general military preparation—whether peace-time conscription or universal military training. Is it useful only as a means of national defence, or has it a real value for the general purposes of society? The militarists say that it has. Too begin with, if inculcates obedience, and the instinct of discipline. It spreads the habits of civilization among the masses. It takes boys with round shoulders, shuffling gait, uncleanly ways, lawless manners, and makes them straight, upstanding, clean, orderly, obedient men. During the war, they showed us photographs of these awful examples, before and after taking.
Now it is true that tens of thousands of our young men, perhaps hundreds of thousands, were so transformed by army training. But we must consider averages, not exceptions. Millions of others—certainly the great majority—came from a good, sound American environment. All of them in their childhood, most of them in their youth, had practised athletic sport in some form. They presented