# The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense/Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI
WAR AND THE RACE
So much for civilians. Now let us turn our imaginations again upon those ten million soldiers dead in the last war, and the unestimated millions in the next. Let us forget the obvious; let me forget it who have seen war—the gray-green streak down Douaumont Ravine where lay tens of thousands of German dead, the rib-bones sticking everywhere out of Vimy Ridge, the wave of moaning from the three thousand wounded and dying in the Casino Hospital at Boulogne. Let us remember that all men must die, and consider the thing cold-bloodedly from the standpoint of the particular race which draws the sword, and of the whole human species. We shall find, then, that the chief loss of the late war was not the hundreds of billions of dollars of property value destroyed, nor yet the thirty million civilians “who might be living today,” but the ten million soldiers.
From the pacifist literature which preceded our entrance into the European War, three books stand out in memory. Jean Bloch, a Pole, maintained that war could not be; the horrors of modern warfare ​were so great that men would not long face them. Events discredited Bloch; we found unexpected reservoirs of valor in the human spirit. Every week, along the great line, bodies of men performed acts of sacrifice which made Thermopylæ, the Alamo and the Charge of the Light Brigade seem poor and spiritless. Normal Angell, writing from the economic viewpoint, predicted not that war could not be, but that it would not pay; the victor would lose as well as the vanquished. Events so far have tended to vindicate Norman Angell’s view; perhaps the next ten years may vindicate him entirely. The third work, less known than the others, came out of Armageddon unshaken. It is Dr. David Starr Jordan’s “War and the Breed.”
Jordan is an evolutionist, and looks at all society from the viewpoint of the so-called Darwinian theory. The reader may belong to a sect or a scientific creed which rejects evolution. But he need not be a Darwinian to accept Jordan’s argument. He need only believe—I assume every one does—that the characteristics of ancestors are transmitted to their offspring, that strong men and women breed strong descendants, that weak men and women breed weak descendants. And Jordan maintained that a general war, fought by conscript armies under modern conditions, would set back the quality of races for centuries—that it would be a gigantic accomplishment in reverse breeding.
This is how it works: if you are a grower of ​livestock, trying to produce the champion horse or cow, you select from your colts or calves the finest specimens, and breed them; the others you slaughter or sterilize. The average cow new-caught by the barbarians from the wild herds of the European steppes probably gave only a gallon or so of milk a day. We have cows which give their dozen gallons of milk a day; and they have been evolved from the wild steppe-cow by nothing else than this long process of selective breeding. Now if it were an object to do so, breeders could take their herds of big, strong, twelve-gallon Holsteins and breed them back to the scrubby little one-gallon-cow. They need simply to reverse the process—make it impossible for the fine specimens to breed, and produce their calves, generation after generation, from the scrubs.
Modern war—conscription plus increased killing power—does exactly this with the males of the human species, You introduce universal service. Every young man, usually at the age of twenty, is drafted into the standing army for a service of two or three years. Gathered in the barracks, these conscripts are examined. Those not fit for military service, on mental and physical tests, are thrown out—in other words, the deformed, the half-witted or under-brained, the narrow-chested, the abnormally weak-muscled, the tuberculous—the culls of the breed. These culls are free to go their way, to marry if they wish, to become fathers. The rest are generally forbidden to marry until they have performed their ​term of “first line” military service. Scientifically these men are selected as the flower of the nation. The term of first-line service completed, the young man at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three goes into the first reserve. He must take part annually in certain manœuvers; otherwise he is free to work and to marry. At the age of twenty-six, twenty-eight or thereabouts, he is passed on to the second reserve. At about thirty-five, he becomes a “territorial” and remains in that classification until he is about forty-five, when his military duty is supposed to be done.
“Fighting age is athletic age,” say British soldiers. I do not have to tell Americans, a sporting people, that the best days of the average athlete, especially in sports like boxing or football which require intense effort and physical courage, come in the early twenties. Those first-line troops are the best troops.
Moreover, they are under arms when war breaks; they do not have to be gathered together, redrilled and redisciplined. So they go first into battle; lead all the early attacks; form generally the advanced forces all through. The second line, almost equally valuable, almost as much used, consists of men in the first reserve; and so on, until we get down to the territorials, the men between their late thirties and their middle forties. Theoretically, these “old” men are not supposed to get into action at all except when the necessity grows desperate. They ​guard roads and bridges, dig reserve trenches, garrison captured territory, perform the hundred and one varieties of labor which an army requires behind its line.
When all the statistics of the war are compiled and classified, their graphic chart will look like a pyramid. They will show that the losses bore by far the heaviest on the ages between twenty and twenty-five; they shaded off until in the ages between forty and forty-nine they became almost negligible.
Here is reverse breeding on a wholesale, intensive scale. The young, unmarried men go first to be killed; are most numerously killed through the whole war, They are the select stock of their generation; and practically, not one has fathered a child. Their blood is wholly lost to the race. Next come the men in their middle twenties. Some of them have married since they left the first line, and some have not. It is doubtful if they average more than one child apiece when their turn comes to die. So it goes on, class by class; smaller losses and more children, until we come to the Territorials of forty-five. In that category, the losses of life are proportionately very small, and if we study vital statistics, we find that men of this age have had about all the children they are going to have. But all this time ​the culls of whatever age, the men exempted because they are below standard, are living out their lives and fathering children.
In our own draft, we proceeded on the European plan, calling to arms the men between twenty-one and thirty, and generally exempting the married. That age was set largely to get the men of best fighting age—“athletic age.” But we were moved by another consideration, which showed itself in the exemption of married men. We wished to minimize human grief and human hardship. If an unmarried boy of twenty is killed there are only his immediate blood-family to mourn him. A married man of thirty-five has in addition a wife and children. Moreover, if he goes to the war in the ranks, he must leave his wife and children virtually to shift for themselves. Great Britain recognized the same principles when, in her advance to universal conscription, she took the young before the old, the unmarried before the married.
Humane and beautiful as well as expedient, all this; yet from the racial point of view, unscientific even to immorality. Better, far better, would it be to begin at the other end of the scale, mobilizing for first-line troops the men between seventy and sixty, for the second-line those between sixty and fifty, for Territorials those between fifty and forty-five. With these old men the race, as such, has little concern. They have mostly fathered their children, done their duty to the strain.
​Nature does not care in the least what becomes of the plant after it has produced its seed and the new crop is growing. If, allowing war, we were conducting it scientifically for the best interests of the race, the slogan of conscription would be not “single men first” but “grandfathers first.” Of course, this is ridiculous. But it seems to me that whenever we carry out any aspect of modern war to its logical conclusion, we arrive at the ridiculous.
The older wars of modern times were not conducted by conscription, as we know it now. The rank and file, as far as we can read the records, consisted very largely of the dregs of the population who had been forced into the army by press gangs. There was a sprinkling, however, of young, vigorous youths who went to war for the adventure; there were organized bodies of soldiers of fortune who hired out as mercenaries, and who must needs be sound physically. Occasionally, too, we find a body of sturdy peasantry like the English yeomen who followed the lords of the land to war. There was, however, no selective conscription, no careful medical examination to reject the culls of the blood and send the best to slaughter, usually no rule of “single men first.” Even at that, the breeding-stock killed in the old wars was probably superior to the average level of the race and species. Jordan believes that he can trace a kind of rhythm in the history of “dominant nations.” The war-like race, continuously engaged in battle, reaches a point where ​it begins to go decadent, to find its force sapped. Spain, lord of the world up to the seventeenth century, holding her power by means of the famous Spanish infantry, "the wall which repaired its own breaches," suddenly faded away until by the nineteenth century she was the football of Europe. But the off-hand recruiting systems of those old days could not possibly hit the breed as hard as our modern method of scientific conscription. Just as technically-improved war has worked toward greater and greater property-destruction, so has it worked toward greater and greater race-destruction.
The thirty million civilians deprived of life by Armageddon probably struck about the average level of the breed. Those who died of starvation or exhaustion in the great treks before the advancing hordes of the late war were below that average. These flights were primitive struggles for existence, wherein the weakest died first. Without quite the same certainty, we may say that those who died of malnutrition and the epidemics directly engendered by war were somewhat below average. That—to be perfectly cold-blooded—was a gain to the race. But the unborn—for the most part they never came into this world because their ​potential fathers were away in the trenches or dead. Those fathers were the flower of Europe, physically and mentally; meantime, the weaklings, rejected by the recruiting offices, remained at home, breeding their vitiated blood into the strain. That was a loss to the race. Probably these items just about balance one another, and we get in the civilian losses an average of the mental and physical strength of the European breed.
In the ten million soldiers lies the dead loss. Take France, who suffered most heavily of all. She had nearly a million and three-quarters men killed in action, died of wounds and “missing in action.” But that does not tell the whole story. Of her young soldiers between nineteen and thirty-one years of age, about sixty per cent died in the war. While statistics are not yet compiled on this special point, it is doubtful if this glorious young company left nearly so much as an average of one child apiece. In the absolute, Germany lost more heavily, in the relative less heavily; she counts two million killed or missing in action or dead of wounds. And if we should hand over the human race to a breeder, to improve by the same methods he uses to improve a breed of horses, these are precisely the million and a half or two millions whom he would have chosen from the men of France and Germany for his purpose.
This reduction of the strength in the European breed through the selective conscription system, plus ​war by machinery, is one of those situations which one can prophesy in advance with mathematical accuracy. The vital statistics of the young and adolescent in the years between 1918 and 1938, compared with those between 1894 and 1914, are going to prove the point in cold figures.
So far, wars in general have struck at the strength of the male strain alone. However much the women have been massacred, there has been no scientific selection in the choice of victims. The strength of woman has been left to war-depleted nations to renew their blood. But in the next war we shall probably do away with that archaic check on the purpose of the great god Mars. Women, as I have already shown, have proved their value for indirect military purposes, and so put themselves within the circle of destruction. Already, the general staffs of Europe are saying that the recruiting of women in the late war was irregular, hit-and-miss, wasteful. In a struggle between national resources as well as national armies, it would be far more efficient and economical to mobilize them all and select the war-workers by scientific methods, according to national convenience and necessity. All of which is true and logical. And if women are put under conscription for munitions work, for ambulance and truck driving, for the thousand and one varieties of light labor which they can perform in the rear areas of an army zone, we must proceed by the same methods which we use in selective conscription of the male ​element. We shall, first of all, spare the mothers, the women who have already given their strain to the breed. They are needed in their homes for the vital business of rearing children. We shall take the young unmarried women, and choose from them by scientific test the strongest and most brilliant, rejecting the weakest and most stupid. That process was begun in the late war. The best managed munitions works gave no woman a job until medical and psychological tests proved that she had the body and brains for the work. Just as with the men, we shall send the culls back to civilian life, free to pour their inferior blood into the veins of the new generation.
In the fate war, a few thousands of these superior women, chosen from among the volunteers for munitions workers and for transport drivers in the army zone, died through air raids and long-distance artillery fire. These losses were not great enough to have much effect on the breed. But they pointed the way we are going. In the next war, with its overwhelming air raids, its gases blotting out life over square miles, its bacilli, possibly its rays, munitions works and the services of the rear will be special objects of attack. There, as at the front, we shall kill by wholesale not by retail, and we shall kill our selected female breeding stack. So to the anti-social effects of the next war we must add one never accomplished before in human history: the sapping of the feminine strength in the human race, as war—even before that great reversal of selective ​breeding which was Armageddon—seems usually to have sapped the masculine strength.
The extreme militarist declares that the highest civic duty of man is the advancement of the power and glory of his race or nation; nothing else really counts. He is confounded out of his own mouth. In the long story of races, what doth it profit a nation if during two or three generations she rules a world-circling empire as Spain did in the seventeenth century, and then sinks back exhausted and impotent as Spain did in the nineteenth? Does that make for the power and glory of the race? Yet biologic law seems to ordain that the sharp sword of the warlike nation cuts both ways; and when we intensify nature with modern science, the matter gets beyond seeming. In the idea that by war he advances the power and the ultimate glory of his race, the militarist is again mistaking appearances for reality.
* ↑ Forty-five years was the usual limit of military service; though for a few months during 1918, the British stretched conscription to fifty. But many French and German Territorials who entered the war aged forty-five, were kept in the army until the end; and were therefore forty-nine in the year of the armistice.
* ↑ Jordan's militaristic opponents asked once for facts to support his theory. This caused Dr. Vernon Kellogg to investigate the old French records. He found that in the generation following the Napoleonic wars, the standard of height and weight for French recruits had greatly to be lowered by the military authorities. More significantly, be found the percentage of men rejected for physical unfitness greatly increased.