By the growth and expansion of Science (God forgive the word!) which will inevitably make each future war more devilish and inhuman than the last;By the cry of the black and coloured peoples of the Earth who have for long enough already said how hard and cruel the faces of the white men seemed to them, and who now think how black their souls are;By the hardness of heart, the insensitiveness of a certain kind, which during a century or more now has been bred by the institutions of Commercialism;By the habitual betrayal, through long periods of 'prosperity' and `peace,' of men by their fellows -- of the weak by the powerful, of the generous by the mean, of the simple and thoughtless by the crafty and selfish;By the huge dividends declared by Armament Firms; by the international agreements of these firms with one another, even to cozen their own respective Governments;By the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of innocent folk trampled underfoot in the ditch of competition, the mad, race in which the devil takes the hindmost;By the treacherous internal warfare of the ordinary industrial life of every country, the secret betrayal and murder of bodies and souls for profit -- at last written out in letters of blood and fire across the continents, for all to behold --This must not be again !
Let the Allies by all means accuse Germany of world-ambition and world-plunder, and let the German people accuse their Prussian lords but let every nation also search its own heart and accuse itself.
For have not the lords of every nation set before themselves the same goal, the goal of world-ambition and glory and 'empire' and plunder? And have not the mass-peoples of every nation stood meanly by and acclaimed the fraud, nor spoken out against it, silently consenting to these things in the prospect of some advantage also to themselves?
Have not all the nations without exception acted meanly and dastardly towards the out lying black races, and even towards those more civilized peoples whom they thought weaker than themselves -- and now in the stress of war are they not finding that their own rights and liberties are being slowly filched from them?
Yes, that is, the end of Glory and of Greed.
But the day of glory is departed. The newspapers, it is true, still keep up the phrase. They talk of a battalion "covering itself with glory." But the men themselves do not talk so. They know too well what it all means. They see no glory in covering themselves with the blood of their brothers of the opposing trenches; with whom a few moments before they were joining in songs and jokes.
They only say: Now that we have begun, we will see it through -- but it must not be Again.
Never I think in all the history of the world has there been a thing so great in its way as the present British Army and Navy. This enormous force, raised -- except for a small remnant -- by Voluntary enlistment from all classes of the nation, and inspired more by a general and protective sense towards the Motherland than by anything else, has fulfilled what it considered to be its duty and its honour with a devotion and a heroism unsurpassed. It were impossible to stay and recount its many wonderful deeds.
A young officer said to me one day -- "Horrible as the whole thing is, yet it almost seems worth while, when you think of the splendid things done -- and done too in such a simple matter-of-fact way: when you think of all the love and devotion poured out, and the lives our men have given one for the sake of another."Great indeed is the spirit of such an army, great its magnanimity, its simplicity of mind, its unself-consciousness, its single concentration on its purpose.
Yet perhaps the most surprising thing about our men is that they have done all this with so little hatred in their hearts for the enemy.
Whatever the Germans may have felt, and whatever the French, the Britishers have just done their fighting in their own nonchalant way "because they had to" -- with scarcely a shadow of malice or revenge -- rather with that respect for a doughty opponent which always distinguishes the true fighter.
Think of that quaint story (Between The Lines, by Boyd Cable, pp 188 ff)of the German Burschen in their trenches, singing with pious enthusiasm the Song of Hate (probably commanded and compelled, poor devils, to sing it)and our men for days secretly listening, learning the words, practicing the tune on their muffled, mouth-organs; till having got it all complete they one morning, burst it forth in full chorus on the astonished Teutons, nor failed at the end to blaze out "Gott strafe England" at the top of, their voices as if they really meant it -- and then subsided into a roar of laughter. They simply would not take the German "Hate" seriously.
Well, what can an enemy do with such an army? It would seem indeed to be invincible.
The other surprising thing about this Army is (but it is also in part true of the Russians and others) that the members of it not only bear so little malice in their heart of hearts against the enemy, but that all the time they (or nine-tenths of them) are giving their life-blood, for a Country which in hardly any available or adequate sense can really be said to belong to them.
Not one man of ours in ten, probably not one in a hundred, has any direct rights or interest in his native soil; and the Motherland has too often (at any rate in the past) turned out a stepmother who disowned him later when crippled in her service.
He is told that he is fighting for his country, but he finds that his real privilege is to die at the foot of a Trespass-board on some rich man's estate, singing bravely to the last that "Britons never, never shall be slaves!" He is told that he is defending his hearth and his home, and to prove that that is so, he is sent out on a far campaign to further some dubious scheme -- in Mesopotamia! I think we cannot refuse to say that the good temper and they single-heartedness and the single mindedness of the British soldier are beyond all praise.
