IT is a subject of speculation among zoologists whether the swamps and forests of Central Africa may still harbour some surviving Dinosaur, or Brontosaur, a gigantic dragon-like monster, half-elephant, half-reptile, a relic of a far bygone age. The thought is thrilling, though the hope is probably doomed to disappointment. What is more certain is that not less marvellous prodigies may be studied, by those naturalists who have the eyes to see them, much nearer home; for though Africa has been truly called a wonderful museum, it cannot compare in that respect with the human mind, a repository that still teems with griffins and gorgons, centaurs and chimÆras, not less real because they are not creatures of flesh and blood. Two thousand years ago it was shown by the Roman poet Lucretius that what mortals had to fear was not such fabled pests as the Nemean lion, the Arcadian boar, or the Cretan bull, but the much more terrible in-dwelling monsters of the mind. In like manner, it was from some hidden mental recesses that there emerged that immemorial savage, the Cave-Man, who, released by the great upheaval of the war, was sighted by many eye-witnesses, on many occasions, during the five-years’ carnival of Hatred.[41]

Some day, perhaps, a true history of the war will be written, and it will then be made plain how such conflict had been rendered all but inevitable by the ambitious schemes and machinations not of one Empire, but of several; by the piling up of huge armaments under the pretence of insuring peace; by the greed of commercialists; and by the spirit of jealousy and suspicion deliberately created by reckless speakers and writers on both sides; further, how, when the crisis arrived, the working-classes in all the nations concerned were bluffed and cajoled into a contest which to their interests was certain in any event to be ruinous. Then, the flame once lit, there followed in this country the clever engineering of enforced military service, rendered possible by the preceding Registration Act (disguised under the pretence of a quite different purpose), and by a number of illusory pledges and promises for the protection of conscientious objectors to warfare. The whole story, faithfully told, will be a long record of violence and trickery masquerading as “patriotism”; but what I am concerned with here is less the war itself than the brutal spirit of hatred and persecution which the war engendered.

As a single instance of Cave-Man’s ferocity, take the ill-treatment of “enemy aliens” by non-combatants, who, themselves running no personal risks, turned their insensate malice against helpless foreigners who had every claim to a generous nation’s protection. “They are an accursed race,” said a typical speaker at one of the meetings held in London. “Intern them all, or rather leave out the n, and inter them all. Let the name ‘German’ be handed down to posterity, and be known to the historian as everything that was bestial, damnable, and abominable.” These would be words of criminal lunacy—nothing less—in the mouth of civilized beings, yet they are merely examples of things said on innumerable occasions in every part of our land. Great masses of Englishmen were, for the time, in a mental state lower than that of remote tribes whom we regard as Bushmen and cannibals.

Perhaps the most curious feature of this orgie of patriotic Hatred was its artificial nature: it was at home, not at the front, that it flourished; and if those who indulged in it had been sane enough to read even the war-news with intelligence, they would there have found ample disproof of their denunciations. Half a dozen lines from one of Mr. Philip Gibbs’s descriptions would have put their ravings to shame. “Some of them [English wounded] were helped down by German prisoners, and it was queer to see one of our men with his arms round the necks of two Germans. German wounded, helped down by our men less hurt than they, walked in the same way, with their arms round the necks of our men; and sometimes an English soldier and a German soldier came along together very slowly, arm in arm, like old cronies.” Not much patriotic Hatred there.

Nor, of course, was it only the wounded, companions in misfortune, who thus forgot their enmity; for the practice of “fraternizing” sprang up to such an extent at the first Christmas of the war, that it was afterwards prohibited. “They gave us cigars and cigarettes and toffee,” wrote an English soldier who took part in this parley with the accursed race, “and they told us that they didn’t want to fight, but they had to. We were with them about an hour, and the officers couldn’t make head or tail of it.” To this a military correspondent adds: “There is more bitterness against the Germans among the French soldiers than among the British, who as a rule show no bitterness at all, but the general spirit of the French army is much less bitter than that of many civilians.” It is an interesting psychological fact that it was the civilians, the do-nothings, who made Hatred into a cult.

And what a beggarly, despicable sort of virulence it was! For a genuine hatred there is at least something to be said; but this spurious manufactured malevolence, invented by yellow journalists, and fostered by Government placards, was a mere poison-gas of words, a thing without substance, yet with power to corrupt and vitiate the minds of all who succumbed to it. Men wrangled, as in Æsop’s fable, not over the ass, but over the shadow of the ass. Theirs was, in Coleridge’s words:

Yet it was difficult not to smile at it. The Niagara of nonsense that the war let loose—the war that was supposed to be “making people think”—was almost as laughable as the war itself was tragic; and satirists[42] there were who, like Juvenal, found it impossible to keep a grave countenance under such provocation. Hereafter, no doubt, smiles and tears will be freely mingled, when posterity realizes, for example, what tragi-comic part was played by “the scrap of paper,” that emblem of national adherence to obligations of honour; by the concern felt among the greater nations for the interests of the smaller; or by the justification of the latest war as “the war to end war.”[43] What a vast amount of material, too, will be available for an illustrated book of humour, when some wag of the future shall collect and reprint the series of official war-posters, including, of course, those printed as advertisements of the war-loans (the melancholy lady, reminded that “Old Age must Come,” and the rest of them), and when it shall be recollected that these amazing absurdities could really influence the public! As if militarism in itself were not comical enough, its eulogists succeeded in making it still more ridiculous by their cartoons. As for the blind credulity which the war-fever inspired, the legend of the Angels of Mons will stand for age-long remembrance.

This credulity begins, like charity, at home. Whenever a war breaks out, there is much talk of the disingenuousness of “enemy” writers; but the sophisms which are really perilous to each country are those of native growth—those which lurk deep in the minds of its own people, ready, when the season summons them, to spring up to what Sydney Smith called “the full bloom of their imbecility.” That egregious maxim, si vis pacem para bellum, “If you wish for peace, prepare for war,” is now somewhat discredited; but it did its “bit” in causing the war, and after a temporary retirement will doubtless be brought forward again when circumstances are more favourable. It is perhaps as silly a saying as any invented by the folly of man. Imagine a ward of lunatics, who, having got their keepers under lock and key by a reversal of position such as that described in one of Poe’s fantastic stories, should proceed to safeguard peace by arming themselves with pokers and legs of tables. For a time this adoption of the para bellum principle might postpone hostilities; but even lunatics would be wasting time and temper in thus standing idly arrayed, and it is certain that sooner or later that madhouse would realize its Armageddon. For opportunity in the long run begets action; and whether you put a poker into a lunatic’s hand, or a sword into a soldier’s, the result will eventually be the same.

Or perhaps we are told that war is “a great natural outburst,” mysterious in its origin, beyond human control: the creed expressed in Wordsworth’s famous assertion that carnage is “God’s daughter.” Could any superstition be grosser? There is nothing mysterious or cataclysmic in the outbreak of modern wars. Antipathies and rivalries of nations there are, as of individuals, and of course if these are cherished they will burst into flame; but it is equally true that if they are wisely discountenanced and repressed they will finally subside. We do not excuse an individual who pleads his jealousy, his passion, his thirst for revenge as a reason for committing an assault, though personal crime is just as much an “outbreak” as war is. There seems to be an idea that when such passions exist it is better for them to “come out.” On the contrary, the only hope for mankind is that such savage survivals should not come out, but that “the ape and tiger” should be steadily repressed until they die.

But “this war was justifiable.” In every nation the belief prevails that, though war in general is to be deprecated, any particular contest in which they may be engaged is righteous, inevitable, one of pure self-defence, in their own words, “forced on us.” Even if this were true, in some instances, in bygone years when international relations were less complex, and when it was possible for two countries to quarrel and “fight it out,” like schoolboys, without inflicting any widespread injury upon others, it is wholly different now; for the calamity caused by a modern war is so great that it hardly matters, to the world at large, who, in schoolboy phrase, “began it.” It takes two to make a quarrel; and the two are jointly responsible for the disaster that their quarrel entails upon mankind.

The more one looks into these fallacies about fighting—and their number is legion—one is compelled to believe that the spirit which chiefly underlies the tendencies to war, apart from the direct incentive of commercial greed, is one of Fear. Hatred is more obvious, but it is fear which is at the bottom of the hatred. This alone can account for the extraordinary shortsightedness with which all freedom, both of speech and of action, is trampled on, when a war is once commenced. In such circumstances, society at once reverts, in its panic alarm for its own safety, to what may be called the Ethics of the Pack. Of all the absurd charges levelled against those objectors to military service who refused to sacrifice their own principles to other persons’ ideas of patriotism, the quaintest was that of “cowardice”; for, with all respect to the very real physical bravery of those who fought, it must be said that the highest courage shown during the war was that of the persons who were denounced and ridiculed as cravens. It was a moment when it required much more boldness to object than to consent; one of those crises to which the famous lines of Marvell are applicable:

The despised “Conchie” was, in truth, the hero and poet of the occasion.

Again, it must be owing to fear, above all other impulses, that when a war is over, the conquerors, instead of offering generous terms—a course which would be at least as much to their own advantage as to that of the vanquished—enforce hard and ruinous conditions which rob them of a permanent peace. This they do from what Leigh Hunt calls

It was this that caused the Germans, fifty years ago, to dictate at Paris those shameful terms which have now been their own undoing; and it was this which caused the French, in their hour of victory, to imitate the worst blunders of their enemies.

We are but a world of savages, or we should see that in international as in personal affairs generosity is much more mighty than vengeance. Some years before the war there appeared in the Daily News an article by its Paris correspondent, the late Mr. J. F. Macdonald, which even at the time was very impressive, and which now, as one looks back over the horrors of the war, has still greater and more melancholy significance. He called it “A Dream.” He pointed out that the sole obstacle to a friendly relationship between France and Germany, and the chief peril to European peace, was the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine.

A dream, indeed, and of a kind which at present flits through the ivory gate; but a true dream in the sense that it conveyed a great psychological fact, and of the sort which will yet have to be fulfilled, if ever the world is to become a fit place for civilized beings—not to mention “heroes”—to dwell in.

But let us return to realities and to the Cave-Man. However irrational the Hatred which surged up in so many hearts, it nevertheless had power to trample every humane principle under foot. That gorilla-like visage which looked out at us from numbers of human faces meant that our humanitarian cause, if not killed or mortally injured by the war-spirit, was at least, in military parlance, “interned.” What we were advocating was a more sympathetic conduct of life with regard to both our human and our non-human fellow-beings, and what we mainly relied on, and aimed at developing by the aid of reason, was the compassionate instinct which cannot view any suffering unmoved. We had advanced to a point where some sort of reprobation, however inadequate, was beginning to be felt for certain barbarous practices; and though we could not claim to have done more than curb the ferocious spirit of cruelty that had come down to us from the past, it was at least some satisfaction that limits were beginning to be imposed on it. What result, then, was inevitable, when, in a considerable area of the world, all such ethical restrictions were suddenly and completely withdrawn, and mankind was exhorted to take a deep draught of aboriginal savagery?

Terrible as are the wrongs that countless human beings have to suffer, when great military despotisms are adjusting by the sword their “balance of power,” and exhibiting their entire lack of balance of mind, still more terrible are the cruelties inflicted on the innocent non-human races whose fate it is to be involved in the internecine battles of men. In a message addressed to the German people, the Kaiser was reported to have said: “We shall resist to the last breath of man and of horse.” As if the horse could enjoy the comforts of “patriotism,” and were not ruthlessly sacrificed, like a mere machine, for a quarrel in which he had neither lot nor part! More suffering is caused to animals in a day of war than in a year of peace; and so long as wars last it is idle to suppose that a humane treatment of animals can be secured. Do the opponents of blood-sports, of butchery, of vivisection, wonder at the obstinate continuance of those evils? Let them consider what goes on (blessed by bishops) in warfare, and they need not wonder any more.

“Do men gather figs from thistles?” It seemed as if some of our sages expected men to do so, if one might judge from the anticipations of a regenerated Europe that was to arise after the close of the war! Already we see the vanity of such prophesyings—of making a sanguinary struggle the foundation of idealistic hopes. Not all the wisdom of all the prophets can alter the fact that like breeds like, that savage methods perpetuate savage methods, that evil cannot be suppressed by evil, nor one kind of militarism extinguished by another kind of militarism. Hell, we say, is paved with good intentions; but those who assumed that the converse was true, and that the pathway of their good intentions could be paved with hell, have been woefully disillusioned by the event.

There is a too easy and sanguine expectation of “good coming out of evil.” People talked as if Armageddon would naturally be followed by the millennium. But history shows that modern wars leave periods of exhaustion and repression. “Reconstruction” is a phrase now much in vogue, but reconstruction is not progress. If two neighbouring families, or several families, quarrel and pull down each others’ houses, there will certainly have to be “reconstruction”; but it will be a long time before they are even as well off as they were before. So it is with nations. The question is: Does war quicken men’s sympathies or deaden them? To some extent, both, according to the difference in their temperaments; but it is to be feared that those who are quickened by experience of war to hatred of war are but a small minority, compared with those who are rendered more callous.

One great obstacle to the discontinuance of bloodshed is the incorrigible sentimentality with which war has always been regarded by mankind. “Who was it,” exclaimed the poet Tibullus, “that first invented the dreadful sword? How savage, how truly steel-hearted was he!” But surely the reproach is less deserved by the early barbarian who had the ingenuity to discover an improved method of destruction than by the so-called civilized persons who, for the sake of lucre, prolong such inventions long after the date when they should have been abandoned. “War is hell,” men say, and continue to accept it as inevitable. But if war is hell, who but men themselves are the fiends that people it?

In like manner the outbreak of war is often called “a relapse into barbarism,” but rather it is a proof that we have never emerged from barbarism at all; and the knowledge of that fact is the only rational solace that can be found, when we see the chief nations of Europe flying at each other’s throats. For if this were a civilized age, the prospect would be without hope; but seeing that we are not civilized—that as yet we have only distant glimpses of civilization—we can still have faith in the future. For the present, looking at the hideous lessons of the war, we must admit that the growth of a humaner sentiment has been indefinitely retarded. We cannot advance at the same time on the path of militarism and of humaneness: we shall have to make up our minds, when the fit of savagery has spent itself, which of the two diverging paths we are to follow. And the moral of the war for social reformers will perhaps be this: that it is not sufficient to condemn the barbarities of warfare alone, as our pacifists have too often done. The civilized spirit can only be developed by a consistent protest against all forms of cruelty and oppression; it is only by cultivating a whole-minded reverence for the rights of all our fellow-beings that we shall rid ourselves of that inheritance of selfish callousness of which the militarist and imperialist mania is a part.[44]

Is it not time that we sent the Cave-Man back to his den—henceforth to be his sepulchre—and buried for ever that infernal spirit of Hatred which he brought with him from the pit?