New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1920-04-23
The Truth About War

Among the chief pacifst articles
OF faith is the dogma that capitalists
and militarists and jingoes gener-
ally, by a successful conspiracy of
silence and lies, have deceived the
poor deluded public into thinking
that war is fine, pleasant sport.
The censorship of reports of the
horrors of war is pointed to as
proof Of this belief, and Philip
Gibbs has added some fuel to their
argument by his new volume, "Now
1t Can Be Told" in which he pre-
sents the seamy side Of the war as
complement to his contemporary
sketches, which were conventionally
heroic and unrealstic.
This notion Of a conspiracy would
be an amusing commentary upon
the intelligence of our fighting men
and their families, if true. It as
sumes that soldier is such a fool
that he can be conducted through
hell and then argued out of it by a
mixture of silence and eloquence, and
that no family Of a soldier is going
to believe his written and spoken de-
scrlptions as against the descrip-
lions in newspapers and magazines.
Such a conspiracy might work for a
month or six months Or a year. 1t
certainly could not be effective
through five-year war.
Of course, it did not work and it
did not exist in any such sense as
these pacifists assert. The only real
conspiracy Of silence and deception
that existed during the war was that
IN which most normal human beings,
IN the front line trench or behind
IT., played a part. No sensible per-
son wished to dwell on the horrors
of war when he was in the thick of
them-or when those dear to him
were in the thick of them. It is one
of the instructive self-protective
faculties Of every normal person to
avoid doing so. 1t is a safe guess
that nine out Of ten Of the people
who during the war loved to read
of its horrors were pathological
cases. In short, such governmental
concealment of tragedy as took
place in England and America
was hardly more than an official
registration of popular will. Pri
marily, it was the soldiers and their
families, realizing that the war had
to be fought and resolved to make
the best of it, who conspired to dwell
upon the better side of it.
Did Americans carry this con-
splracy too far and would it be bet
ter If we possessed the mind and will
TO face facts more sturdily, with
out relying so much upon this
power Of temporary suppression?
We think so. 1t is interesting to
recall that the nation of high
est intelligence in the war, France,
yielded the books which gave con-
temporaneously the frankest de-
scrIption Of itr-notably the writings
Of Barbusse, who stressed it's hellish-
ness. The poilu always referred to it
as "thc dirty war" There was neither
blinking as to the horror of the
thing in France nor doubt as to it's
necessity nor faltering in seeing it
through. The French mind seems
to have been the only one that re-
manned capable of approaching war
realistically. If our pacifst friends
were urging such realism upon
America their case would be a
strong one. But they are clearly
not. They were so overwhelmed bv
the shock Of war that they never
comprehended it's noble side. They
welcome the new Gibbs book because
IL gives a one-sided statement of the
case.
Such volume Is a needed rec
ord, nevertheless. Already our