CHAPTER IX
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY
Again let us widen our view from closely pressing events. War and militarism are not the result of the actions of rulers of evil intent. It is necessary so to stage the tragedy to-day before the crowds, so that the theatre—stalls and galleries together may hiss the villains, call for the hangman in the final act, and be treated to a tableau with a gibbet in the centre and a crowd of the angelic virtues—the audience themselves—surrounding it to see that vengeance is done, and so be assured that God is in His heaven. That is war seen through the bloodshot eyes of war. That is romance. That is not how military statesmen look at it. That is neither the place nor the emotion they assign to it. To all the greater writers and thinkers on war, war is a mere inevitable incident in political policy, for which much has to be said by way of praise. It is by no means generally regarded as an evil. It is accepted as a good. Its training is advantageous. It licks the loafer into shape, it braces up the slacker, it makes men obedient and fits them for working smoothly in a machine. In other words, it substitutes mechanical discipline for self-discipline, it gives us obedience for initiative. To democracy that is an evil; to autocracy it is a gain, because it removes the problem of training from education and assigns it to drill. But those who find good in war as a rule condemn democracy, and what they approve we naturally disapprove.1 1I do not accept the argument that training in the Army is good. The open air is of course all to the good, and so are the walking and the exercise. But M. Dumont, the Editor of the Libre Parole, has written of France that its military system "has gone a long way towards ruining our peasantry, and to a large extent has already debased them. I deem the universal military service, as it is sometimes termed, one of the saddest sacrifices our country calls on us to bear." Lieutenant Bilse's descriptions of the effect of militarism on young German soldiers in his Life in a Garrison Town are also well known. The men of our Empire, outwardly improved in physique by the training they have had in camp, have other sides to present to us which we shall be in a better position to examine and discuss when peace comes.
Others, again, are quite open in their advocacy of militarism, on the ground that it will keep the working classes in their place and subordinate them to "higher" interests and commands. An utterance which gained some notoriety at the time was that of Colonel Sir Augustus FitzGeorge, son of the late Duke of Cambridge, when he said at the United Service Club on the 26th August, 1915, " Compulsory service is necessary at this time when the people are getting out of hand." But leaving such expressions of casual offensiveness out of account, there can be no doubt but that such opinions as that expressed by Lieutenant-Colonel W. H. Maxwell in the Outlook1 1Quoted by Mr. Bruce Glasier in Conscription, p. 15 (Independent Labour Party, 1d.). are not only prevalent but represent a large body of intelligent and weighty opinion—even if we should call it prejudiced:—
The abuse of personal freedom has reached its climax in this country. Trade Unionism—that shelter for slinking shirkers—is imperilling our existence, and by its action a rot of our national soul has set in. One remedy and one alone can eradicate this state of rot—martial law will cure it.
In a more general way Colonel Ross has expressed the military view. The great weakness of the British Army, he indicates with much truth, is that British militarism has always been subordinate to British liberty. The officer here is of no special account as in Germany—except for dances. And, therefore, if we are to be strong and well protected, our military must be granted increased respect in the country and authority in the State; it must have at its head a military man and not a civilian; representative government must not interfere with its mind or its preparations; military efficiency needs the establishment of autocratic government "in all primary questions, or those relating to war or the struggle for existence, and representative government in all secondary matters on which the comfort of the people depends."1 1Representative Government and War, p. 107. So it must settle the framework of our Constitution. On similar lines we have opinions like that expressed by Professor Ridgway of Cambridge in his Presidential Address to the Classical Association in 1915, th&t a world of democratic States would be" a stagnant pool "in which no higher forms of life could live, and that humanity in a world of peace" would perish from its own physical and moral corruption."
This professorial utterance puts in an academic form an opinion and determination which were not at all uncommon before the war, and which were frightened by the menacing success of the Labour Party. The only way to prevent the capture of the State by the people was to make war. The French agents in Germany reported to Paris, according to the French official paper on the war, that the Prussian Junkers welcomed war because they were getting afraid of death duties, democracy, and Socialism.2 2French Yellow Book, Document No. 5. In war the masses " substitute national passions for social aspirations,' ' because war rouses the most instinctive fears of men. Whatever the immediate cause of a war may be, when it comes it compels some enemy to threaten national existence and honour, and then the complete fabric of democratic gains and aspirations, built upon the foundations of national security, tumbles down to the ground. When the war is over, reaction has a breathing space, for the world in which democracy begins afresh to rebuild its habitations is a new and a strange one. Democratic experience has been buried deep under military emotions. Old opinions have to be revised, old principles have to be applied in new ways, democracy itself has been broken. So time is lost and the work of a generation wiped out. Reaction remains in possession until new democratic movements have been formed, programmes and policies revised, and leaders found. Thus the world drags on its weary way, the motto of reaction each generation being: M Sufficient unto the day is the opportunity thereof." A people requires to be revolutionary to the core to resist the strength which a war gives to reaction. Franchise reform very often follows wars. But then it is safe, because the democracy is in no mind to use its new powers, and being disorganized and having no certain and fixed aim, it cannot employ them to its own advantage.
We have been hitherto inclined to minimize the influence of such military and reactionary opinions as the above, just as we minimized the dangers of a war. But they have been very widespread and have been found in high and influential places. Intellectually as well as practically militarism is antagonistic to the liberty for which democracy stands; it has to limit that liberty in its own self-interest, and it is used by other interests to the same purpose.1 1The story of the persecution of Mr. Bertrand Russell can be placed alongside the most obnoxious suppressions of civil liberty in Germany, and not suffer by the comparison. There will be a chapter in the history of this war on civil liberty, and it will read just as the similar chapter in the history of the Napoleonic wars reads.
The opinion of the soldier one understands and respects. The soldier desires the efficiency of his profession. Popular assumptions that national defence rests ultimately on force compelthe soldier to study the organization of force, and he is driven to the Prussian conclusion. He naturally detests politics and politicians because their methods and psychology are poles asunder from 1 his. He sees that the officer must be put on a pedestal, that military uniform should be a sacred garb. He wants no humanitarian humbug. The Clausewitz formula, "War is an act of violence which in its application knows no bounds," is honest. It has been formally accepted by the soldier of every nationality. His work is to kill, frighten, and destroy. His authority is not that of the State or the nation, but the War Council, which he demands should be composed of military men. International law is a mere fiction "hardly worth mentioning." Treaties are only valid so long as convenient. 1 1"Directly circumstances change—and they change constantly—the most solemn treaties are torn up, as Russia tore up the Treaty of Paris, or as Austria tore up the Treaty of Berlin. All history is full of torn-up treaties. And as it has been, so it will be. The European waste-paper basket is the place where all treaties eventually find their way" (Major Stewart Murray, The Reality of War, p. 110). Might is to him right at any rate, they are so mixed up that they cannot be distinguished. In the military mind, as Colonel Ross has said: "Might has taken the place of right, and should the destruction of homes and farms not prove sufficient, whole towns must be destroyed and the inhabitants must hang"; or as Lord Wolseley, dealing with another aspect of military moral psychology, has written in his Soldier's Pocketbook, that though public opinion condemns falsehood, detests the word "spy" and believes in honesty, "the man who acts upon that opinion in war had better sheathe his sword for ever." Similar expressions could be quoted through pages upon pages. They all prove that the professional military psychology in every country is precisely the same. There is no distinction in spirit between Prussian militarism and any other militarism. Openly by practice in Prussia, theoretically in Great Britain up to now, but now rapidly becoming practical, militarism challenges democracy, demands an independent existence in the democratic State, and claims a morality and a rationality all of its own. Juarès never wrote a truer sentence than this true not merely as a description of what had happened, but true as a warning of what must always happen in the nature of things: "Who is most menaced to-day by the military action of the generals, by the always glorified action of military repression? Who? The People."
Nor must we treat too lightly or too sentimentally the rationality of all this. These people believe that wars cannot be avoided. Wars are not brought about by Kaisers, but by nature. War, says Major Stewart Murray in his interesting and (granting his assumptions) profoundly true commentary on Clausewitz,1 1The Reality of War, p. 68. "is based on the essential fundamental characteristics of human nature, which do not alter." We can arbitrate on non-essentials, but we cannot arbitrate on honour. Here is the dilemma. Honour compels us to make war; we make it successfully, and our military victory forces the other side, which of course cannot accept a defeat on a point of honour, to devise how to make another appeal to the sword. That is the reductio ad absurdum of war as an incident, as well as a determining factor, in national policy. That reductio ad absurdum is, however, accepted by the militarists as "the inherent weakness of human nature"; but a weakness which is seen, exposed, and can be provided against is not "inherent."
Let us honestly face the logic of facts, however. We base national security upon an army, and national security is psychologically an over-mastering demand of civic human nature. So long as the fear of national insecurity is in people's minds, liberty and everything else must be limited by military efficiency, the soldier acquires a privileged place in the State, and the moral and intellectual requirements of his profession are accepted as a necessity. Thus arises the doctrine of "military necessity," which means that the military mind is allowed to create standards of moral action and political policy which accord with its own problem of how to make Might and Force triumphant. The evolution in the military ascendancy in States, extraordinary as its results are, is to be explained by the simplest and most obvious psychological processes. "I am an absolute necessity," argues the soldier, "and you must therefore allow me to create the political conditions under which I can do my work efficiently. If you do not do that, your blood be upon your own heads."
We can go on encouraging this idea by harbouring false views of international relations, by trusting our security to organized force instead of to
7 organized rationality, and by obscuring the facts and applying adjectives like "Prussian" to a spirit which is universal; but the penalty we shall have to pay is that which is now being; meted out to, Germany.
How literally true it is that the people who trust to force will perish by force!