The World Decision by Robert Herrick
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Robert Herrick >> The World Decision
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Whatever secret ambitions may be brewing in the chancelleries of
Europe, France has put herself on record against conquest too
emphatically to countenance at the peace conference any predatory
rearrangement of the map of Europe. She has made the great war a
struggle of principle--the principle of national liberty against the
principle of military conquest. It is this great principle which
gives significance to her cause and justifies the awful slaughter and
waste of bleeding Europe. If the pretensions of physical might, no
matter with what excuses, can be thoroughly defeated, proved to be an
impossible theory of life, so that never again in the history of the
world will a nation attempt to take with the sword what does not
belong to it, the bloody sacrifice will have been well worth making.
The issues of the great conflict have been obscured, especially in
America, but to the humblest soldier of France they are as clear as
blazing sunlight. "Never again!" Never the monstrous pretension that
power alone makes right, that the will to eat gives free license to
the eater, however great his appetite or his belief in himself. That
is the cause of all the world, for which the French are willing to
give all that they have. And I know no cause more important to be
settled for the future of the human race.
* * * * *
Are we not interested in the right decision of this cause? A
peaceable people, loving our own way, jealous of interference,
we should assuredly present a lamentable spectacle were we called
upon to defend ourselves against a predatory enemy. Possibly a more
lamentable spectacle of inefficiency combined with corruption than
England has given the world the past year! And at last we are becoming
aware that our policy of selfish isolation does not mean immunity from
attack. We are realizing that those "three thousand miles of cool
sea-water" no longer make an effectual barrier against the ingenuity
of modern men.
But I would not put the matter on the selfish basis of our own
security. It is vastly larger than that. It is, vitally, what
manner of world we wish to have for ourselves and our children.
At the invasion of Belgium, America gave with splendid unanimity
the response: Americans did not want the German world! Since then,
alas, it would seem that the clear moral reaction of our people to
the demonstration of the world struggle has been gradually weakening:
we are becoming confused, permitting insidious reasoners to cloud the
issue, listening to the prompting of the beast in our own bellies,
hesitating, dividing, excusing, evading the great question--"seeing
both sides." As if there were two sides to such a plain issue stripped
of all its fallacies and subterfuges and lies! Do we wish to have
American life take on the moral and intellectual and artistic color
of German ideals? Do we prefer the "old German god" to the culture
and humanities we have inherited from the Latin tradition?... "We,
too, have sinned." In our blood is all the crude materialism of a
triumphant Germany without her discipline and her organization. We,
too, are ready to enter the fierce war of commercial rivalry with
England and Germany. We, too, believe in the good of economic expansion,
though dubious about our own imperialism. Surely no people that ever
lived stood hesitating so dangerously at the crossroads as America at
this hour. Prudence has prevented us as a nation from pronouncing
that moral verdict on the cause which might have had decisive weight
in hastening the world decision. But a selfish timidity cannot prevent
us individually from realizing the immense importance to us of the
decision that is being ground out in the tears and blood of Europe.
And no ideal of diplomatic neutrality can prevent Americans who care
for anything but their own selfish well-being from doing all in their
power to make ours a Latin rather than a Teutonic world.
Every soldier who dies in the trenches of France, who bears a maimed
and disfigured body through life, is giving himself for us, so that
we may live in a world where individual rights and liberties are
respected, where beauty of conduct and beauty of art may endure,
where life means more than the satisfaction of bodily appetites.
III
_Peace_
The real cynics of the war are the pacifists. They see nothing more
serious in the European agony than what can be disposed of easily at
any time in a peace conference--by talk and adjustment. So obsessed
are some of them by the slaughter of men, by the woe and travail of
Europe, that they would turn the immense sacrifice into a grotesque
farce by any sort of compromise--a peace that could be no peace,
merely the armistice for further war. Their eyes are so blinded by
the economic waste of the war and its suffering that they are incapable
of seeing the great underlying principle that must be decided. Americans,
having evaded the responsibility of pronouncing a decisive moral
judgment on the rape of Belgium, the sinking of the Lusitania, and
the extermination of the Armenians, play the buffoon with women's
peace conferences, peace ships, and endless impertinent peace talk.
We, who have forfeited our right to sit at the peace conference, who
are busily making money off the war, having prudently kept our own
skins out of danger, are officiously ready with proposals of peace.
What a peace! The only peace that could be made to-day would be a
dastardly treason to every one of the millions whose blood has watered
Europe, to every woman who has given a son or a father or a husband
to the settlement of the cause. The parochialism of the American
intelligence has never been more humiliatingly displayed than in
the activities of our busy peacemakers.
* * * * *
No sane person believes in war. The sordidness and the horror of war
have never been so fully revealed as during this past year. War has
been stripped of its every romantic feature. Modern war is worse than
hell--it is pure insanity. We do not need peace foundations, peace
conferences, peace ships to demonstrate the awfulness of war. But
crying peace, thinking peace, willing peace will not bring peace
unless conditions that make peace exist. Here in America we use the
word peace too loosely, as if it meant some absolute state of being
which we had achieved through our innate wisdom rather than from the
happy accident of our world position. But peace is an entirely
relative term, as any one who has given heed to the social conditions
we have created should realize. We have enjoyed a certain kind of
peace, the value of which is debatable. And now, alarmed at the
exposed condition of our eastern seaboard, we are agitatedly
preparing to arm to protect ourselves--from what? From Germany? Or is
it from England? And still we recommend an instant peace to Europe!
Awful as are the waste and suffering caused by war, hideous as modern
warfare is, there are worse evils for humanity. To my thinking the
perpetuation of the lawless, materialistic creed of the new Germany
would be infinitely worse for the world than any war could be. When
the German tide broke into Belgium and poured out over northern
France, sweeping all before it, killing, burning, raping, the
pacifists no doubt would have accepted the conqueror as the will of
God and have made peace then!... There are none more eager for peace
than the soldiers in the trenches who are giving their lives to press
back the barbarian flood. But no peace until their "work has been
done, the cause won." I have heard Americans express the fear that
European civilization is in danger of annihilation from the prolonged
conflict. Even that were preferable to submission to the wrong ideal.
But I see, rather, the possibility of a higher civilization through
the settlement of fundamental principles, the reaffirmation of
necessary laws. It is surely with this abiding faith that the
enormous sacrifices are being freely made by the allied nations. "It
is of little importance what happens to us," a Frenchman said to me
in Rheims, whose home had been destroyed that morning, whose son had
already been killed in the trenches. "There will be a better world
for the generations to come because of what we have endured." That is
what the American pacifist cannot seem to understand--the necessity
of present sacrifice for a better future, the cost in blood and agony
of ultimate principles.
* * * * *
This war is leading us all back to the basic commonplaces of
thinking. Is life under any and all conditions worth the having? Our
reason says not. It tells us that the diseased and the weak-minded
should not be permitted to breed, that an anaemic existence under
degenerating influences is not worth calling life. We shudder in our
armchairs at the thought of "cannon food," but why not shudder
equally at the words "factory food," "mine food," and "sweat-shop
food"? We are inclined to sentimentalize over those brave lives that
have been spent by the hundreds of thousands on the battlefields of
France and Poland, but for the most part we live placidly unconscious
of the lives ground out in industrial competition all about us.
Between the two methods of eating up, of maiming, of suppressing
human lives, the battle method may be the more humane--I should
prefer it for myself, for my child. What our pacifists desire is not
so much peace as bloodlessness. We should be honest enough to
recognize that for many human beings,--possibly a majority even in
our prosperous, war-free society,--a violent death may not be by any
means the worst event. And it may be the happiest if the individual
is convinced that the sacrifice of his existence will help others to
realize a better life. That is the hope, the faith of every loyal
soldier who dies for his country, of every soldier's father and
mother who pays with a son for the endurance of those ideals more
precious than life itself.
The higher one rises in consciousness, the more nearly free and
self-determined life becomes, the greater are the rewards of complete
sacrifice. There are many who have "fallen on the field of honor"
whose lives, if lived out under normal peace conditions, might have
meant much to themselves, possibly to humanity. They have given
themselves freely, without question, for what seems to them of more
importance than life. Wounded, mutilated past all usefulness, dying,
they have not rebelled. Doctors and nurses in the hospitals tell the
story of their endurance without complaint of their bitter fate. Much
as we must feel the awful price which they have felt obliged to pay,
it is not sentimental to say that the finer spirits among them have
lived more fully in the few crowded weeks of their struggle than if
they had been permitted to live out their lives in all the
gratifications of our comfortable civilization. Letters from them
give an extraordinary revelation of priceless qualities gained by
these soldiers through complete renunciation and sacrifice. War, it
must not be denied, is a great developer as well as a destroyer of
life. Nothing else, it would seem, in our present state of evolution
presses the cup of human experience so full of realization and
understanding as battle and death. The men who are paying for their
beliefs with their lives are living more in moments and hours than we
who escape the ordeal can ever live. For life cannot be measured by
time or comfort or enjoyment. It is too subtle for that! A supreme
effort, even a supreme agony, may have more real living worth than
years of "normal" existence. The youths whose graves now dot so
plentifully the pleasant fields of France have drunk deeper than we
can fathom of the mystery of life.
As for the nation, that greater mother for whose existence they have
given their individual lives, there is even less question of the
benefit of this war. We Americans are fond of measuring loss and gain
in figures: we reckon up the huge war debts, the toll of killed and
wounded, and against this heavy account we set down--nothing. It is
all dead loss. Yet even to-day, in the crisis of their struggle,
there is not a Frenchman who will not admit the immense good that has
already come to his people, that will come increasingly out of the
bloody sacrifice. The war has united all individuals, swept aside the
trivial and the base, revealed the nation to itself. The French have
discovered within their souls and shown before the world qualities,
unsuspected or forgotten, of chivalry, steadfastness, seriousness,
and they have renewed their familiar virtues of bravery and good
humor and intelligence. The French soldier, the French citizen, and
the French woman are to-day marvelously moulded in the heroic type
of their best tradition: in the full sense of the word they are
gallant--chivalrous, self-forgetful, devoted. Is there any price
too great to pay for such a resurrection of human nobility?
The pacifist is fain to babble of the "disciplines of peace." No
one denies them. But how can humanity be compelled to embrace these
disciplines of peace? The German lesson of thoroughness and social
organization and responsibility was as necessary before the war as it
is to-day, but neither England nor France, neither Russia nor our own
America gave heed to it until the terrible menace of extermination
in this war ground the lesson into their unwilling souls. It may be
lamentable that humanity should still be held so firmly in the grip
of biologic law that it must kill and be killed in order to save
itself, but there are things worse than death. Until humanity learns
the secret of self-discipline it will create diseases that can be
eradicated only with the knife; it is merely blind to assume that
the insanity of war can be prevented by any system of parliamenting,
or litigation, or paper schemes of international arbitration. Some
issues are of a primary importance, unarguable, fundamental. No
man--and no nation--is worthy of life who is not ready to lay it down
in their settlement. I know that some Americans are still unable to
perceive that any such fundamental principle is at stake in Europe
to-day. Extraordinary as it seems to me I hear intelligent men refer
to the great war as if it were a local quarrel of no real consequence
to us. Even the humblest _poilu_ in the trenches, the simplest
working-woman in France, know that they are giving themselves not
merely in the righteous cause of self-defense, but in the world's
cause in defense of its best tradition, its highest ideals. Their
cause is big enough to consecrate them.
* * * * *
Therefore a new, a larger, a more vital life has already begun for
invaded and unconquered France! In order to reap the blessings of
war, a nation must have an irreproachable cause, and aside from
Belgium, France has the clearest record of all the belligerents in
this world war. She will gain most from it, not in land or wealth,
but in honor and moral strength, in dignity and pride. She is ready
to pay the great price for her soul. This is the one supreme
inspiration that the French are giving an admiring world--their
readiness to give all rather than yield to the evil that threatens
them. With the light of such nobility in one's eyes, it is difficult,
indeed, to be patient with the cynical clamor of comfortable neutrals
for peace at any price. If there is anything of dignity and meaning
in human life, it lies in selfless devotion to beliefs, to
principles; it is readiness to sacrifice happiness, life, all, in
their defense.
And that is patriotism in its larger aspect. Our intellectuals
discuss coldly the primitive quality of patriotism and its unexpected
recrudescence in this world war. They talk of it in the jargon of
social science as "group consciousness." Before I felt its fervor
in the crisis of Italy's decision, in the sublime endurance of the
French, I did not realize what patriotism might mean. It is not
merely the instinctive love for the land of birth, loyalty to the
known and familiar. Much more than that! The natal soil is but the
symbol. Patriotism is human loyalty to the deeper, better part of
one's own being, to the loves and the ideals and the beliefs of one's
race. It is the love of family, of land, of tongue, of religion, of
the woman who bore you and of the woman you get with child, of the
God you reverence. It is loyalty to life as it has been poured into
you by your forefathers, to those ideals which your race has conceived
and given to the world. "_Viva Italia!_" "_Vive la France!_" is a
prayer of the deepest, purest sort that the Italian or the Frenchman
can breathe. Without these subconscious devotions and loyalties the
human animal would be a forlorn complex of mind and sense. Those
amorphous beings who, thanks to our modern economic wealth, have become
"citizens of the world," who wander physically and intellectually from
land to land, who taste of this and that without incorporating any
supreme devotion in their blood, our cosmopolites and expatriates and
intellectuals, froth of a too comfortable existence, give forth a
hollow sound at the savage touch of war. They become pacifists. They
can see neither good nor evil: all is a vague blur of "humanity."
Patriotism is the supreme loyalty to life of the individual. Wherever
this loyalty is instinctive, vivid, there some precious tradition has
been bequeathed to a people that still burns in their blood. Latin
patriotism is ardent like man's one great love for woman, ennobling
the giver as well as the loved one; it is tender like the son's love
for the mother, with the sanctity of acknowledgment of the debt of
life. Can any vision of "internationalism" take the place of these
powerful personal loyalties to racial ideals?... "Mere boys led to
the slaughter" is the sentimentality one hears of the marching
conscripts of European armies. Better even so than the curse of no
supreme allegiance, or devotion, or readiness to sacrifice--than the
aimless selfishness in which our American youth are brought up!
* * * * *
For every boy in Europe knows, as soon as he knows anything, that he
owes one certain fixed debt, and that is service to his country, to
that larger whole that has given him the best part of his own being.
If need be, he owes it his life itself. It is an obligation he must
fulfill before all other obligations, at no matter what inconvenience
or sacrifice to himself, unquestioningly, immediately.
What takes the place for the American youth of this primary
obligation? Himself! He is expensively nurtured, schooled, put
forward into life--for what? To help himself as best he can at the
general table of society. He can never forget himself, subordinate
his personal ambition to any transcendent loyalty. He becomes from
his cradle the egotist.
To-day under the shadow of world war we are taking thought of
national protection, projecting schemes of defense including the
enrollment of citizens who may be called upon to fight for their
country. It is less important to teach our youth the military lessons
of self-protection than it is to teach them the greater lesson of
self-forgetfulness, of devotion to a national ideal--so that they may
be ready to give their lives for that national ideal as the youth of
Europe have given their lives to settle this world cause. Not a few
hundreds of thousands of national guards, then, in order to secure
ourselves from invasion are what we need, but that every man or woman
born into the nation or adopting it as home should be made to feel
the obligation of national service. It matters less what form that
service should take, whether purely military or partly military and
partly social. It is the service, the sense of obligation that counts
for the individual and for the nation. The responsibility of service
teaches the importance of ideas, the necessity of sacrifice. And he
who is ready to sacrifice himself, to forget himself and become
absorbed in the life that surrounds him, of which he is but an
infinitesimal unit, to which he owes the best in him, has already
achieved a larger peace than the pacifist dreams of.
* * * * *
Consider what happened to the youth of France a little more than
a year ago. Suddenly with no preparation or warning they were called
to defend their country from invasion. It was no longer possible to
argue the rights of that diplomatic tangle into which European
statesmen had muddled. Whatever the ultimate truth, the ultimate
right of the controversy, the state--that larger self which was their
home, their mesh of loves and interests and beliefs--demanded their
service. The youth of France had been brought up with the knowledge
that any day such a sacrifice might be required, with the
consciousness deeply rooted in their beings that one of the necessary
conditions of their living was to give their all at the call of the
state. They conceived of no honorable alternative: it was as
inevitable to pay this obligation as it is for decently minded
citizens to pay their legal debts. They hurried to their mobilization
posts, donned uniforms and equipment, and were shipped away in
regiments to the front. Most of them did not worry about the
possibility of death, but acted like all healthy human beings,
ignoring what they could not affect, caught up in the novelty and the
requirements of the new life. Yet deep in the consciousness of the
most careless must have lain some thought that he might never return,
that the cross-marked grave on the hillside, the pit, or the hospital
might be waiting for him.
This consciousness that he can no longer dispose of himself, at
least for the finer spirit, must act as a great release. Having
accepted his fate, and therefore willed it as the only possible
choice for him, he becomes another person, a largely selfless person,
a strangely older, calmer being capable of thinking and acting
clearly, nobly. Once the great personal decision made, the resolve
to forego life and happiness and personal achievement, a clogging
burden of selfish considerations drop from within. So one can read
the experience of those two young officers preserved in Henry
Bordeaux's "Two Heroes." They were free as never before to do what
lay before them,--their officers' duty,--simply, directly. Many things
that they had previously valued seemed to have lost color, to have
become trivial. They thought solely of acquitting themselves with,
honor in what it was their fate to do. They were ready to obey
because before death they were humble. They had begun to glimpse
the blind mystery that is life, in which every one must needs act
his part without questioning, with faith in its ultimate meaning,
with the will to trust its end. They were brave because they were
simple and single-hearted, selfless. They were strong because they
disdained to be weak, having renounced all. If it were to be their
fate to die unnoted, they were content with the satisfaction of having
done what was expected of them. And if they died in glory, they were
unaware of their honor, believing that they had done no more than
any of their fellows would have done in the same opportunity.
Thus, having laid down their lives for the cause that commanded
their faith and loyalty, they found their real lives--larger, more
beautiful, stronger.... Not once, but many thousands of times, has
this miracle happened! Their graves are strewn, singly and in groups,
over every field of eastern France. They paid the debt, did their
part little or great, unknown or glorified by men. Literally they
have given their blood for the soil of their fathers' land.
* * * * *
We know that they have given much more than their blood to that soil.
Just as at the call to arms, the selfish, the mean, the vicious
qualities of these lives dropped from them in the freedom of
sacrifice accepted, and in place of egotistic preoccupations rose
once more to the surface of their natures the ancient virtues of
their race, so in their going they left for the others who lived, who
were to be born, a tremendous legacy of honor and noble
responsibility. By watering the soil with their blood they have made
it infinitely more precious for every human being that treads upon
it. They have helped to make mere life more significant for those who
remain to mourn them. It can never again be quite the same
commonplace affair, so lightly, cheaply spent, as it had been before.
They have not left behind them joy, but faith. And that is why the
faces of the earnest living who are able to realize this sacrifice of
youth have a grave sternness in them which touches even the most
careless stranger. Something of the glory created by the dead and the
wounded radiates out even to us in a distant, peaceful land....
But why, we ask, all this sacrifice, this cruel, agonizing sacrifice
of war? That is a mystery too deep for any to fathom. It is better
not to probe too insistently, to accept it as the man in Rheims,--"It
must be better for the others afterward because of what we have
endured." That is the expression of faith in life which is the better
part of any religion. For what we suffer now, for what we give now of
our most precious, it will be repaid to those who are to come. Life
will be freer, grander, more significant: it will be a better world.
Nobody who has seen or felt the heavy tragedy of this world war could
endure its horror if he were not sustained by that faith. But with
that faith the losses seem not too vast. One by one the world's great
decisions must be made, in suffering, in blood and tears. Peace comes
not through evasion or compromise, either for the individual or for
the state.
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