Armageddon--And After | Page 7

or
indeed thinks that it was in any sense inevitable. Yet if there was one
man more than another whose personal will brought it about, it
was--not Lord Aberdeen who ought to have been responsible--but Lord
Stratford de Redcliffe. "The great Eltchi," as he was called, was our
Ambassador at Constantinople, a man of uncommon strength of will,
which, as is often the case with these powerful natures, not infrequently
degenerated into sheer obstinacy. He had made up his mind that
England was to support Turkey and fight with Russia, and inasmuch as
Louis Napoleon, for the sake of personal glory, had similar opinions,
France as well as England was dragged into a costly and quite useless
war. Napoleon III has already figured among those aspiring monarchs
who wish "to sit in the chair of Europe." It was his personal will once
more which sent the unhappy Maximilian to his death in Mexico, and
his personal jealousy of Prussia which launched him in the fatal
enterprise "à Berlin" in 1870. In the latter case we find another personal
influence, still more sinister--that of the Empress Eugénie, whose
capricious ambition and interference in military matters directly led to
the ruinous disaster of Sedan. The French people, who had to suffer,
discovered it too late. "Quicquid delirant reges plectuntur Achivi." Or
take another more recent instance. Who was responsible for the
Russo-Japanese war? Not Kuropatkin, assuredly, nor yet the Russian
Prime Minister, but certain of the Grand Dukes and probably the Tsar
himself, who were interested in the forests of the Yalu district and had
no mind to lose the money they had invested in a purely financial
operation. The truth is that modern Europe has no room for "prancing
Pro-consuls," and no longer takes stock in autocrats. They are, or ought

to be, superannuated, out of date. To use an expressive colloquialism
they are "a back number." The progress of the world demands the
development of peoples; it has no use for mediæval monarchies like
that of Potsdam. One of the things we ought to banish for ever is the
horrible idea that whole nations can be massacred and civilisation
indefinitely postponed to suit the individual caprice of a bragging and
self-opinionated despot who calls himself God's elect. Now that we
know the ruin he can cause, let us fight shy of the Superman, and the
whole range of ideas which he connotes.
THE MILITARY CASTE
Militarism is another of our maladies. Here we must distinguish with
some care. A military spirit is one thing: militarism is another. It is
probable that no nation is worthy to survive which does not possess a
military spirit, or, in other words, the instinct to defend itself and its
liberties against an aggressor. It is a virtue which is closely interfused
with high moral qualities--self-respect, a proper pride,
self-reliance--and is compatible with real modesty and sobriety of mind.
But militarism has nothing ethical about it. It is not courage, but sheer
pugnacity and quarrelsomeness, and as exemplified in our modern
history it means the dominion of a clique, the reign of a few
self-opinionated officials. That these individuals should possess only a
limited intelligence is almost inevitable. Existing for the purposes of
war, they naturally look at everything from an oblique and perverted
point of view. They regard nations, not as peaceful communities of
citizens, but as material to be worked up into armies. Their assumption
is that war, being an indelible feature in the history of our common
humanity, must be ceaselessly prepared for by the piling up of huge
armaments and weapons of destruction. Their invariable motto is that if
you wish for peace you must prepare for war--"si vis pacem, para
bellum"--a notoriously false apophthegm, because armaments are
provocative, not soothing, and the man who is a swash-buckler invites
attack. It is needless to say that thousands of military men do not
belong to this category: no one dreads war so much as the man who
knows what it means. I am not speaking of individuals, I am speaking
of a particular caste, military officials in the abstract, if you like to put

it so, who, because their business is war, have not the slightest idea
what the pacific social development of a people really means.
Militarism is simply a one-sided, partial point of view, and to enforce
that upon a nation is as though a man with a pronounced squint were to
be accepted as a man of normal vision. We have seen what it involves
in Germany. In a less offensive form, however, it exists in most states,
and its root idea is usually that the civilian as such belongs to a lower
order of humanity, and is not so important to the State as the officer
who discharges vague and