Some False Consolations of War

A DARING philosopher will some day reopen the question whether people really grow good through suffering. I do not mean, does one become more unselfish, another less worldly, and others more humble through loss of husband or child or eyesight; but may not such gains to character, even if enduring, be accounted negligible when we consider the cost? So Emerson thought. In his quest for reality, he places grief among the illusions of experience.

He who would attack this problem should be daring, for the mood which must be dissected is one dear to religion, and its tenser memories are sacred to us all. In that twilight world of sensitive values through which the mourner moves, he catches some exquisite overtones of experience, difficult to evaluate. One would rather not disturb such consolations. The preacher harvests abundant homiletical material in this hinterland of life, and our popular hymns attest what people think about grief, disappointment, and failure as a road to the kingdom of heaven.

If men grow good through suffering, the beatitude of mourning must have found in Europe since the beginning of the war a staggering brilliance of illustration; for the energy of the race is now enlisted in the making of sorrow. University professors and preachers are seeing in this anguish a fulcrum for our redemption. Militarists of the most zealous school could scarcely go further in the praise of war as a spiritual tonic than some of these apologists from the seclusion of learning have done of late.

Europe had scarcely uttered its first sob of agony from the war before moral deductions were in print. The millions of tearless mourners, ecstatic in their patriotism, praising the worth of life and the glory of dying, became a great world-sermon. It was the second beatitude flashed across the sky. Preachers took up the cry, and since August a year ago the agony of Europe has been coined into countless sermons. The spiritual by-products of war — its superb courage, its sacrifice, its detachment from all sordid concern — are offered as compensation for this harvest of pain. Thus the martyred spirit of the race has wistfully covered with a veil of beauty the shambles in Poland, Belgium, and France.

From Germany, Russia, France, and, with restraint, from England, has come fervid testimony of a race exalted while it mourns. An Oxford scholar writes, ‘The nations at war are discovering their souls.’ From the University of Moscow comes the word that ‘this is a time when the ideal meaning of national and human life is being revealed with a splendor and an energy seldom witnessed.’ The sanctums of Germany are giving unmeasured praise of this rare hour in history; and humbler folk everywhere are showing spiritual exaltation in a sacrifice without tears and a faith that is crowding the churches. If we accept this witness, we must believe that since the engines of war set about their gruesome task the soul of Europe has been cleansed.

It seems sacrilegious to examine critically these shreds of comfort in which Europe is wrapping her misery. But we who stand aside from the conflict, if we are to defend our pacifist ideals, must be willing to scan closely these spiritual credentials of war. For if these higher loyalties, so precious to national life, which are forged by the hardships of war, are fitted permanently to enrich the future, then it may be that lovers of peace are too niggard in counting the cost of ideals. If the nations at war are really ‘ finding their souls,’ this pearl of great price may be worth what it costs. Pacifists, therefore, may well ask whether this sublime mood of those who are giving their all is a true witness of Europe’s redemption, or is a kind of hysteria which is so often the illusion of grief.

This blessedness of a world in agony — what does it mean? How shall we estimate its moral worth? Do we want it? Is it worth what it costs? And do we yet know how much it will cost? Will this mood make lasting contributions to character, or is there in store for Europe a disillusion such as the mourner knows when, after the first transport of courage is past, he listlessly faces the void?

How familiar to us is that buoyant courage which meets our proffered consolation almost like a rebuff, in the first hours of bereavement in the house of sorrow. We come to bring support. We find the mourner in exalted mood, supplying from the very depths of grief his own cool wells of comfort. We are not disconcerted by this ecstasy of sorrow. We feel the greater pity; for what others praise for courage or blame for insensibility we know to be more pitiable than sobs. This tearless thing is not yet courage. Fortitude has not begun to exact her heavy toll. It is the illusion of grief that it appears to give us strength which we do not possess.

Our tenser emotions are generally accounted untrustworthy. Accurately to appraise our spiritual values we must fall back upon the sustained levels of experience. None of us is really so bad as his worst self or quite so good as his best. Any clergyman, watching sympathetically the growth of character, learns this. He fosters, but not always hopefully, loyalties evoked under stress. They make us feel better men than we really are.

Now, grief shares with some other tense emotions this illusion. It seems to reveal our purest and most generous selves. From the grave of our hopes and loves spring often that same calm and detachment which we are familiar with in religious conversion. For peace of mind is not so much a question, perhaps, of what men believe, as it is of the things for which they have ceased to care. When one loses all either by chance, as in sorrow, or by choice, as in conversion when the penitent ‘throws his all at the feet of Christ,’there is a sweet abatement of striving. Thus the avalanche of grief as it breaks over the soul carries with it many a nagging worry. It simplifies life by the elimination of fretful interests. India with her siren call of self-abnegation has taught the world what peace may be found in ‘not caring.’

Now this, I suspect, is the mood of Europe at this hour. It is tasting the freedom which the irresponsibility of a great sacrifice always brings to conventional morals. Civilization in days of peace compels us to be calculating and provident. Its margin for lavish enthusiasms is narrow. War, on the other hand, hurls us at once into a land of romance where we cast to the four winds all our worldly caution and timid measurements. The luxury of throwing all away and ‘ not caring ’ is rare to mortals accustomed to the plodding steps of peace. It is the long-dreamed-of pilgrimage of the soul. The first days of self-renunciation offer, despite the agony, certain peculiar compensations. They are costly but none the less soothing. So, it may truly be said that Europe is to-day unworldly and simple at heart. War has for the moment restored to unity the nation’s divided self. In so far it has seemed to experience redemption.

But when I say that this is the mood of Europe at this hour, I do not, of course, include in my reckoning the men and boys who are now in the trenches, or the million dead. I feel restrained from satisfaction over spiritual blessings earned by the anguish of war, when I read a passage like the following from a recently published letter from Munich: ‘ A French official told me that the horror on the trains for removing the wounded was so great — the suffering, the screams, the contortions of the mangled and the dying — that they were absolutely compelled to change the train guards every few days, as nerves could not continue to stand the scenes and they went insane if not removed.' And again: ‘A German officer home on a week’s furlough, telling me something of the trench warfare at Arras (justly called the hell of Arras) said that for a very long time back no wounded could be picked up between the hostile trenches. They had to be left to die, some in hours, some in days. The result is that the wounded writhe and scream until they die, lying on the fields between the trenches amid heaped-up carcasses of whites, negroes, Hindoos, and animals, bloated to many times their normal size and amid a stench which is an indescribable horror.’

If such be the price of a nation’s ‘ finding its soul,’ is it not a pitiable confession that our cowardice and shame should require such bitter atonement? In the presence of Europe’s agony, the writhing of Armenia, the gathering fury in the Balkans, is it quite the time to talk about our spiritual gains.

And may we not be making too generous concessions to the militarist’s cause when we accept as real this quick redemption of Europe? Despite these glowing by-products of war, I see in it all only a tragedy pathetic beyond words or tears. The romance of its lavish sacrifice does not restrain my loathing and my shame. There is for me little consolation in Russia’s abstinence from vodka when I see her peaceful peasants drunk with blood. I cannot rejoice over the decrease of crime in her villages when I read of the devastation wrought in Belgium and Poland. I refuse to find one scrap of comfort in Europe’s return to God as the nations sob their litanies in the crowded churches. This mighty wave of patriotism has cleansed the fountains of life, it is true. It has purified like fire. Despite the strife of tongues, the house has been cleansed of many an unlovely and sordid desire. But does any one suppose that this will last ? That Russia is permanently temperate? That Germany and France will be henceforth devout? England unworldly? Have these high moments in the heat of war distilled for us essences so rare and beautiful?

If we turn to the past for our measurement of these emotions evoked by conflict, we shall find scant comfort for the militarist. The Thirty Years’ War left Europe spiritually and materially bankrupt. It checked for generations the progress of civilization. It is impossible to say what spiritual riches were sunk in that grave. We should be indulging bold inference were we to affirm that the Seven Years’ War and the Napoleonic wars were processes of redemption. Certainly our own Civil War was fought for a lofty principle. Here, if anywhere, war should have been the means through which the soul of a nation might find itself. But were the decades between Appomattox and the beginning of our century years for us of romance, high patriotism, and religious faith? For an evaluation of that lean period of our national life, we have only to recall what men like Godkin, Norton, and Lowell thought about it. Why did not the sober discipline of war beget in America a fine-souled progeny ? The afterglow of our war was not a season of disinterested patriotism. Virtues conceived in war have frequently proved sterile. Only fifty years have passed since sacrifice and suffering brought to America a means of national redemption. But were we at the outbreak of the present war less materialistic than Europe? If war discovers to a nation its soul, surely there is much to be said in behalf of such rigorous discipline. But there have been many wars in Europe during the past one hundred years. Must nations find their souls so often? Is it sordid to ask whether a redemption so fleeting is worth what it costs?

We appeared to be upon the verge of a great religious revival when the war broke out. The first decade of the new century was rich in promise of a new idealism. What will become of this hope no one can now say. Already the deep religious sense of humility and awe, which during the first months of the war brought encouragement to the churches, is waning. Church attendance in Germany is again declining, and the high emotional tension in which we live is numbing our sympathies: we are growing less responsive to tales of suffering. How different from our grief over the Titanic was the concern with which America received the news of the Lusitania and the Eastland! This is not the spiritual climate in which to carry forward social reform with its careful husbanding of human life and its sensitiveness to waste.

Some pretty severe things have been said of late regarding the materialism of that business man’s Europe, with its snug comforts and lean emotions, from which the war delivered us. But, after all, was it so poor a thing when we compare it with what is going on in Europe to-day?

I dare to think that Germany, France, and even Belgium were more spiritually sane, were more fruitful types of Christianity before the war, when their people were immersed ‘ in the discordant and piecemeal torrent of daily life,’ than they are to-day in their fervid ecstasy of sacrifice. Europe must some day return to the monotonous chores of peace, the tax worries, and the unsung sacrifice. Is there any evidence that we shall do the thing more beautifully for having passed a few years in an orgy of destruction?

There is a vast sustaining fellowship in sorrow now while drums are beating and the armies march by, but we must not forget that Europe has thus far only promised the sacrifice. She has not yet completed payment. The reckoning is coming when men and women with their souls bled white must set about the task of rebuilding the waste, while the finest spirits are lying in their graves.

But even were we certain that nations at war discover their souls, we might be permitted to doubt whether the end would justify the means. Surely there is a more decent, humane way for humanity to grow good than by the immolation of five million boys. The leaven of the Gospels was fitted to expand in other soil than blood and tears.

I have seen men grow holy as they stood by the casket of a child. But dare we suggest such sacrifice that parents may save their souls? Beatitudes may be too dearly bought. I have sometimes wondered whether we mortals were not too officiously eager in springing to God’s defense whenever an earthquake, the horrors of war, or the premature death of our loved ones makes life a bitter thing. There are some experiences so terrible that even the extenuating fact of spiritual discipline seems to insult our courage, and to rob our grief of its patient dignity. Brave men smitten in their love may grow finer; but one would never be so base as to weigh together in the balance the spiritual gain and the human sacrifice it cost. I must believe that life affords to the soul, as it does to the body, cheerful ways of growing strong. While the modest loyalties of our daily life require such moral vigor, the Iron Cross of courage can be sufficiently earned on the battlefields of peace.

So, one modest service which we can render the cause of peace is the attempt to have a right judgment of some of the spiritual by-products of war. It were best not to appear too grateful for minor blessings gained from accumulations of misery. For, unawares, we may seem to lend approval to Treitschke’s teaching that ’the disappearance of war would turn the earth into a great temple of selfishness.’ Christianity cannot afford to concede so much. Germany’s school of blood and iron has said few finer words about war than some of our preachers and professors have unwittingly done in their quick gratitude for recent signs of ‘spiritual unity’ in Germany, France, and Russia. An undiscriminating patriotism, feeding upon the emotions, is a big asset to any general staff. It stiffens the moral fibre for the battlefield and it inhibits critical judgment at home. But we who view the matter at a distance are responsible to more permanent interests than the mere equipping of a nation’s energies for battle.

I have no theory for the prevention of wars. War is certainly not always a sin. There have been many chivalrous and necessary wars. I have scant sympathy with pacifists who blind their eyes to facts. But we should do well to leave war in the unpretentious category where General Sherman placed it. While we are weaving a halo for the thing we call ‘sacrifice,’ there is danger of forgetting the bestiality of the actual business of slaughter. Those who have set about the beneficent task of preventing a plague do not sentimentally divert their energies into by-paths of appreciation of the nobler aspects of plagues. They may be mindful of the devotion of physicians and the fortitude of those who suffer, but they continue to call the loathsome thing ‘the plague.’ We overdo our gracious desire to be hopeful when we place these scourges among the saving forces needful to keep life unselfish and clean. Human nature is not so grossly mean as to require these constant purgings of fire. So it all comes back to the question of the salutariness of tears.