Armageddon--And After | Page 7

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 "�� Berlin" in 1870. In the latter case we find another personal influence, still more sinister--that of the Empress Eug��nie, 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 They are, or ought to be, superannuated, out of date.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 medi?val 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 for the most part useless functions in the War Office.[4] It is a swollen, over-developed militarism that has got us into the present mess, and one of our earliest concerns, when the storm is over, must be to put it into its proper place. Let him who uses the sword perish by the sword.
[4] Thus it was the Military party in Bulgaria which