Swords and Plowshares/War and Hell
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I
"WAR is hell," because it makes men devils.
You and I, striving for a moment to squeeze or hack the life out of each other, are we not at once transformed into demons?
Hell is ever man's handiwork.
II
BRITISH victory in the Soudan!
The enemy clung obstinately to the trenches, apd were bayonetted in them.
Nothing could have been finer than the behavior of the troops."
Nothing finer indeed!
White Christian soldiers, three thousand miles from home, in the pay of white Christian bond-holders, bayonetting black Mohammedans for defending their native land, and setting the example of bloodshed to brown Mohammedans whom they had already trained to slaughter!
Good God, is it too much to hope that the day may come when every sane man will shrink from running a bayonet into a fellow-creature as he would now shrink from torturing a baby?
We look back with pity, contempt, and detestation on the times of the rack and wheel and fagot—we, who are still in the thick of the Dark Ages ourselves!
A thousandfold better to be a true Mussulman dervish fighting for his home, than one of these Chris-tian hypocrites emphasizing their barbarian butcheries with chaplains and crosses and Te Deums and every kind of shameless lie and blasphemy!
III
HOW they buzzed round the fires at Smithfield,
The black, perverse, froward, reverend clergy (Like June beetles round the hall lamp),
Teaching the Gospel and knowing not the first word of it—
More cruel, revengeful, bloodthirsty than the ignorant mob they instructed—
Blind, malignant, pompous leaders of the blind!
"WAR is hell," because it makes men devils.
You and I, striving for a moment to squeeze or hack the life out of each other, are we not at once transformed into demons?
Hell is ever man's handiwork.
II
BRITISH victory in the Soudan!
The enemy clung obstinately to the trenches, apd were bayonetted in them.
Nothing could have been finer than the behavior of the troops."
Nothing finer indeed!
White Christian soldiers, three thousand miles from home, in the pay of white Christian bond-holders, bayonetting black Mohammedans for defending their native land, and setting the example of bloodshed to brown Mohammedans whom they had already trained to slaughter!
Good God, is it too much to hope that the day may come when every sane man will shrink from running a bayonet into a fellow-creature as he would now shrink from torturing a baby?
We look back with pity, contempt, and detestation on the times of the rack and wheel and fagot—we, who are still in the thick of the Dark Ages ourselves!
A thousandfold better to be a true Mussulman dervish fighting for his home, than one of these Chris-tian hypocrites emphasizing their barbarian butcheries with chaplains and crosses and Te Deums and every kind of shameless lie and blasphemy!
III
HOW they buzzed round the fires at Smithfield,
The black, perverse, froward, reverend clergy (Like June beetles round the hall lamp),
Teaching the Gospel and knowing not the first word of it—
More cruel, revengeful, bloodthirsty than the ignorant mob they instructed—
Blind, malignant, pompous leaders of the blind!
And so to-day round the fires of war—the flash of artillery and glance of bayonets
(But at safe distance, impotent),
Again the dismal brood swarms—hysterical, smirking, grimacing—
Still as oblivious of all their Master taught,
Still going further than the thoughtless populace in their lust and frenzy,
Still impious, blasphemous, sacrilegious, profane—
Gloating like harpies over the nation's sins.
(But at safe distance, impotent),
Again the dismal brood swarms—hysterical, smirking, grimacing—
Still as oblivious of all their Master taught,
Still going further than the thoughtless populace in their lust and frenzy,
Still impious, blasphemous, sacrilegious, profane—
Gloating like harpies over the nation's sins.
IV
JUST a glimpse at the coast of England as we touch at Plymouth on our way up the Channel.
What are those red spots on the shore?
They are the red coats of soldiers breaking out like the blotches of scarlet fever all over the land.
Poor, sick England, what foul disease have you got in your blood?
Silly children may think as they look in the glass that the rash on their faces is pretty.
And so you English are silly children.
And you have inoculated my country too with your distemper.
America has caught it and is proud of it.
We pretend that we like to reel along with high temperature and drum-pulse beating loud.
A few years ago man might travel from ocean to ocean without seeing a single epaulet: it was the glory of the land.
But now we are as sick as any of you.
The world is a great hospital of silly, sick nations, boasting of the number of their pestiferous pustules.
V
THERE is "great rejoicing at the nation's capital." So says the morning's paper.
The enemy's fleet has been annihilated.
Mothers are delighted because other mothers have lost sons just like their own;
Wives and daughters smile at the thought of new-made widows and orphans;
Strong men are full of glee because other strong men are either slain or doomed to rot alive in torments;
Small boys are delirious with pride and joy as they fancy themselves thrusting swords into soft flesh, and burning and laying waste such homes as they themselves inhabit;
Another capital is cast down with mourning and humiliation just in proportion as ours is raised up, and that is the very spice of our triumph.
How could we exult without having a fellow man to exult over?
Yesterday it was the thrill of grappling with him and hating him;
To-day we grind our heel into his face and despise him.
This is life—this is patriotism—this is rapture!
But we—what are we, men or devils? and our Christian capital—what is it but an outpost of hell?
VI
WHO are you at Washington who presume to declare me the enemy of anybody or to declare any nation my enemy?
However great you may be, I altogether deny your authority to sow enmity and hatred in my soul.
I refuse to accept your ready-made enemies, and, if I did accept them, I should feel bound to love them, and, loving them, would you have me caress them with bombshells and bayonets?
When I want enemies, I reserve the right to manufacture them for myself.
If I am ever scoundrel enough to wish to kill, I will do my own killing on my own account and not hide myself behind your license.
Before God your commissions and warrants and enlistment rolls, relieving men of conscience and independence and manhood, are not worth the paper they are written on.
Away with all your superstitions of a statecraft worse than priestcraft!
Hypnotize fools and cowards if you will, but for my part, I choose to be a man.
VII
I AM no patriot.
I do not wish my countrymen to overrun the world. I love the date-palm equally with the pine-tree, and each in its place.
I am as true a friend to the banana and orange as to the pear and apple.
I thank the genial breath of climate for making men different.
I am glad to know that, if my people succeed in spreading over the face of the earth, they will gradually differ from each other as they attune themselves to every degree of latitude and longitude.
Humanity is no air to be strummed on one note or upon one instrument.
It is a symphony where every note and instrument has its part, and would be sadly missed.
I do not take the side of the cornet against the violin, for the cornet needs the violin.
I am no patriot.
I love my country too well to be a patriot.
VIII
I SAW them take the blockhouse on the hill by storm.
First advancing slowly in the woods in groups, dodging from tree to tree and firing rapidly, the machine gun grinding out death with its sharp metallic rattle, while the smell of powder fills the air.
Now they rush into the open and up the steep slope.
Some of them fall. One I see plunge backward down the hill with his arms in the air; another stumbles forward up-hill on his face and elbows.
For an instant they waver; then up again they go.
Men spring up from the ground at the top of the hill and run away.
The assailants disappear for a moment in invisible trenches, and then I see them, too, running beyond.
There is a great hurrah; the flag comes down on the blockhouse and another goes up.
They dance about like children, shouting, throwing up their caps, and waving their swords and muskets in a delirium of joy.
I do not blame them. They have never felt such a thrill before. Shall we deprive them of the most ecstatic moment of their lives?
Ecstasy with murder is better perhaps than the dull level of existence without.
It would do them no good to go without murder.
There is no good in going without things.
The good consists in having something better than the things you go without.
Oh, if they only knew that there is a higher ecstacy, a deeper thrill, an inexhaustible courage and contempt of death!
Then how quickly they would let pistol and bayonet drop harmless from their hands!
IX
HAIL to the hero!
Decked out in blue, red, and gilt, as in warpaint—
Rejoicing like a savage in a long head-feather and gold shoulder fringes—
Proud to commit with these adornments all the crimes for which he would be disgraced and punished as a felon without them—
Modestly bearing on his breast a star and ribbon which say, "I am a hero," as plainly as the beggar's placard says "I am blind"—
Followed by a brass band and bass drum, which screw up his courage at a pinch like the war dance and tom-tom of the Central African and red-skin—
Vain of his manliness in the field while indulging in effeminate quarreling over the honors, at the rate of a month's quarreling to a half-hour's fighting—
Admitting that he obeys orders without thinking, and thus proclaiming his complete abdication of conscience and intellect—
Rushing home from the fray to advertise himself in the magazines at a hundred dollars a page—
Hail to the hero!
O shade of Cervantes!
Come back and draw for us another Don Quixote. Prick this bubble of militarism as you pricked that other bubble of knight-errantry. The world yearns for your reappearing.
Come and depict the hero!
X
BUT, you say, there have been good wars. Never, never, never!
As I look back at our "good" war—at the indelible bloody splash upon our history—the four years' revel of hatred the crowded shambles of foiled Secession—
I see that it was all a pitiable error.
That which we fought for, the Union of haters by force, was a wrong, misleading cause the worship of bigness, the measure of greatness by latitude and longitude.
A single town true enough to abhor slaughter as well as slavery would have been better worth dying for than all that tempestuous domain.
From the seed then sown grew up imperialism and militarism and capitalism and a whole forest of stout, deep-rooted ills in whose shadow we lead an unhealthy, stunted life to-day.
The incidental good—the freedom of the slaves, illusive, unsubstantial freedom at best, freedom by law but not from the heart—does it really quite balance the scales?
XI
NAY, violence can only degrade a noble cause.
Behold the French Revolution.
Wave of brotherly love, sweeping over feudal France
(When noblemen embraced coal-heavers and threw away their privilege and rank),
Breath from heaven, inspiring a nation with now life,
What changed you into a frightful tempest, all hell raining and thundering and lightening upon the defenseless earth?
Goddess of freedom and love, how were you transformed into the fiend of bloodshed and hate?
Ah! they did not know, those Titanic lovers, that violence, however employed, drives out all liberty and love in the end.
Violence curdles the love that wields it into hatred, and wherever it strikes, as from the drooping branch of a banyan tree, spring up fresh shoots of hate.
Oh, if they had only known!
And we, when another such wave passes over the land, shall we have learned?
Shall we know the truth better than they?
XII
DOWN with the tiger in each of us!
He has his proper place, no doubt, in the economy of nature, but it is in the depths of our own private bottomless pit.
There he growls and mutters as he chafes behind the bars.
There is only one safe course to pursue: lock him up firmly and securely, and pay no heed to his subterranean roar.
XIII
WHAT do they accomplish who take the sword?
Now and then they cutoff the ear of a servant of the high priest;
Quite as often they lose their own.
While they who say, "Put up thy sword into its place," tho they die, yet succeed sometimes in changing the heart of the world.
XIV
WHAT is true peace but conscious strength? What is war but conscious weakness seeking
What is war but conscious weakness seeking to give proof of its strength?
Peace is a god, not a goddess, a man not a woman—
A brawny, bearded man of might, with nothing but the kindly look in his eyes to distinguish him from the vulgar giant.
He can afford to smile at War, the headstrong boy, rushing, red-faced, blundering, blustering, with impetuous arms, hither and thither.
Peace has outgrown all that, for Peace is a man.
XV
THE old, old dream of empire—
The dream of Alexander and Cæsar, of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan—
The dream of subject peoples carrying out our sovereign will through fear—
The dream of a universe forced to converge upon us—
The dream of pride and loftiness justified by strength of arms—
The dream of our arbitrary "Yea" overcoming all "Nays" whatsoever—
The dream of a cold, stern, hated machine of an empire!
But there is a more enticing dream:
The dream of wise freedom made contagious—
The dream of gratitude rising from broken fetters—
The dream of coercion laid prostrate once for all—
The dream of nations in love with each other without a thought of a common hatred or danger—
The dream of tyrants stripped of their tyrannies and oppressors despoiled of their prey—
The dream of a warm, throbbing, one-hearted empire of brothers!
And will such a life be insipid when war has ceased forever?
Be not afraid.
Do lovers find life insipid?
Is there no hero-stuff in lovers?
JUST a glimpse at the coast of England as we touch at Plymouth on our way up the Channel.
What are those red spots on the shore?
They are the red coats of soldiers breaking out like the blotches of scarlet fever all over the land.
Poor, sick England, what foul disease have you got in your blood?
Silly children may think as they look in the glass that the rash on their faces is pretty.
And so you English are silly children.
And you have inoculated my country too with your distemper.
America has caught it and is proud of it.
We pretend that we like to reel along with high temperature and drum-pulse beating loud.
A few years ago man might travel from ocean to ocean without seeing a single epaulet: it was the glory of the land.
But now we are as sick as any of you.
The world is a great hospital of silly, sick nations, boasting of the number of their pestiferous pustules.
V
THERE is "great rejoicing at the nation's capital." So says the morning's paper.
The enemy's fleet has been annihilated.
Mothers are delighted because other mothers have lost sons just like their own;
Wives and daughters smile at the thought of new-made widows and orphans;
Strong men are full of glee because other strong men are either slain or doomed to rot alive in torments;
Small boys are delirious with pride and joy as they fancy themselves thrusting swords into soft flesh, and burning and laying waste such homes as they themselves inhabit;
Another capital is cast down with mourning and humiliation just in proportion as ours is raised up, and that is the very spice of our triumph.
How could we exult without having a fellow man to exult over?
Yesterday it was the thrill of grappling with him and hating him;
To-day we grind our heel into his face and despise him.
This is life—this is patriotism—this is rapture!
But we—what are we, men or devils? and our Christian capital—what is it but an outpost of hell?
VI
WHO are you at Washington who presume to declare me the enemy of anybody or to declare any nation my enemy?
However great you may be, I altogether deny your authority to sow enmity and hatred in my soul.
I refuse to accept your ready-made enemies, and, if I did accept them, I should feel bound to love them, and, loving them, would you have me caress them with bombshells and bayonets?
When I want enemies, I reserve the right to manufacture them for myself.
If I am ever scoundrel enough to wish to kill, I will do my own killing on my own account and not hide myself behind your license.
Before God your commissions and warrants and enlistment rolls, relieving men of conscience and independence and manhood, are not worth the paper they are written on.
Away with all your superstitions of a statecraft worse than priestcraft!
Hypnotize fools and cowards if you will, but for my part, I choose to be a man.
VII
I AM no patriot.
I do not wish my countrymen to overrun the world. I love the date-palm equally with the pine-tree, and each in its place.
I am as true a friend to the banana and orange as to the pear and apple.
I thank the genial breath of climate for making men different.
I am glad to know that, if my people succeed in spreading over the face of the earth, they will gradually differ from each other as they attune themselves to every degree of latitude and longitude.
Humanity is no air to be strummed on one note or upon one instrument.
It is a symphony where every note and instrument has its part, and would be sadly missed.
I do not take the side of the cornet against the violin, for the cornet needs the violin.
I am no patriot.
I love my country too well to be a patriot.
VIII
I SAW them take the blockhouse on the hill by storm.
First advancing slowly in the woods in groups, dodging from tree to tree and firing rapidly, the machine gun grinding out death with its sharp metallic rattle, while the smell of powder fills the air.
Now they rush into the open and up the steep slope.
Some of them fall. One I see plunge backward down the hill with his arms in the air; another stumbles forward up-hill on his face and elbows.
For an instant they waver; then up again they go.
Men spring up from the ground at the top of the hill and run away.
The assailants disappear for a moment in invisible trenches, and then I see them, too, running beyond.
There is a great hurrah; the flag comes down on the blockhouse and another goes up.
They dance about like children, shouting, throwing up their caps, and waving their swords and muskets in a delirium of joy.
I do not blame them. They have never felt such a thrill before. Shall we deprive them of the most ecstatic moment of their lives?
Ecstasy with murder is better perhaps than the dull level of existence without.
It would do them no good to go without murder.
There is no good in going without things.
The good consists in having something better than the things you go without.
Oh, if they only knew that there is a higher ecstacy, a deeper thrill, an inexhaustible courage and contempt of death!
Then how quickly they would let pistol and bayonet drop harmless from their hands!
IX
HAIL to the hero!
Decked out in blue, red, and gilt, as in warpaint—
Rejoicing like a savage in a long head-feather and gold shoulder fringes—
Proud to commit with these adornments all the crimes for which he would be disgraced and punished as a felon without them—
Modestly bearing on his breast a star and ribbon which say, "I am a hero," as plainly as the beggar's placard says "I am blind"—
Followed by a brass band and bass drum, which screw up his courage at a pinch like the war dance and tom-tom of the Central African and red-skin—
Vain of his manliness in the field while indulging in effeminate quarreling over the honors, at the rate of a month's quarreling to a half-hour's fighting—
Admitting that he obeys orders without thinking, and thus proclaiming his complete abdication of conscience and intellect—
Rushing home from the fray to advertise himself in the magazines at a hundred dollars a page—
Hail to the hero!
O shade of Cervantes!
Come back and draw for us another Don Quixote. Prick this bubble of militarism as you pricked that other bubble of knight-errantry. The world yearns for your reappearing.
Come and depict the hero!
X
BUT, you say, there have been good wars. Never, never, never!
As I look back at our "good" war—at the indelible bloody splash upon our history—the four years' revel of hatred the crowded shambles of foiled Secession—
I see that it was all a pitiable error.
That which we fought for, the Union of haters by force, was a wrong, misleading cause the worship of bigness, the measure of greatness by latitude and longitude.
A single town true enough to abhor slaughter as well as slavery would have been better worth dying for than all that tempestuous domain.
From the seed then sown grew up imperialism and militarism and capitalism and a whole forest of stout, deep-rooted ills in whose shadow we lead an unhealthy, stunted life to-day.
The incidental good—the freedom of the slaves, illusive, unsubstantial freedom at best, freedom by law but not from the heart—does it really quite balance the scales?
XI
NAY, violence can only degrade a noble cause.
Behold the French Revolution.
Wave of brotherly love, sweeping over feudal France
(When noblemen embraced coal-heavers and threw away their privilege and rank),
Breath from heaven, inspiring a nation with now life,
What changed you into a frightful tempest, all hell raining and thundering and lightening upon the defenseless earth?
Goddess of freedom and love, how were you transformed into the fiend of bloodshed and hate?
Ah! they did not know, those Titanic lovers, that violence, however employed, drives out all liberty and love in the end.
Violence curdles the love that wields it into hatred, and wherever it strikes, as from the drooping branch of a banyan tree, spring up fresh shoots of hate.
Oh, if they had only known!
And we, when another such wave passes over the land, shall we have learned?
Shall we know the truth better than they?
XII
DOWN with the tiger in each of us!
He has his proper place, no doubt, in the economy of nature, but it is in the depths of our own private bottomless pit.
There he growls and mutters as he chafes behind the bars.
There is only one safe course to pursue: lock him up firmly and securely, and pay no heed to his subterranean roar.
XIII
WHAT do they accomplish who take the sword?
Now and then they cutoff the ear of a servant of the high priest;
Quite as often they lose their own.
While they who say, "Put up thy sword into its place," tho they die, yet succeed sometimes in changing the heart of the world.
XIV
WHAT is true peace but conscious strength? What is war but conscious weakness seeking
What is war but conscious weakness seeking to give proof of its strength?
Peace is a god, not a goddess, a man not a woman—
A brawny, bearded man of might, with nothing but the kindly look in his eyes to distinguish him from the vulgar giant.
He can afford to smile at War, the headstrong boy, rushing, red-faced, blundering, blustering, with impetuous arms, hither and thither.
Peace has outgrown all that, for Peace is a man.
XV
THE old, old dream of empire—
The dream of Alexander and Cæsar, of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan—
The dream of subject peoples carrying out our sovereign will through fear—
The dream of a universe forced to converge upon us—
The dream of pride and loftiness justified by strength of arms—
The dream of our arbitrary "Yea" overcoming all "Nays" whatsoever—
The dream of a cold, stern, hated machine of an empire!
But there is a more enticing dream:
The dream of wise freedom made contagious—
The dream of gratitude rising from broken fetters—
The dream of coercion laid prostrate once for all—
The dream of nations in love with each other without a thought of a common hatred or danger—
The dream of tyrants stripped of their tyrannies and oppressors despoiled of their prey—
The dream of a warm, throbbing, one-hearted empire of brothers!
And will such a life be insipid when war has ceased forever?
Be not afraid.
Do lovers find life insipid?
Is there no hero-stuff in lovers?
XVI
I AM a great inventor, did you but know it.
I have new weapons and explosives and devices to substitute for your obsolete tactics and tools.
Mine are the battle-ships of righteousness and integrity—
The armor-plates of a quiet conscience and self-respect—
The impregnable conning-tower of divine manhood—
The Long Toms of persuasion—
The machine guns of influence and example—
The dum-dum bullets of pity and remorse—
The impervious cordon of sympathy—
The concentration camps of brotherhood—
The submarine craft of forgiveness—
The torpedo-boat-destroyer of love—
And behind them all the dynamite of truth!
I do not patent my inventions.
Take them. They are free to all the world.
XVII
I AM a soldier too, and I have the battle of battles on my hands.
You little warriors who, while fighting each other, are yet at heart agreed, and see the same false life with the same distorted eyes,
I have to make war upon all of you combined, and upon the infernal War Spirit which inspires you in the bargain.
I set my courage against your courage.
It is fine not to flinch under fire.
It is also fine to tell an unwelcome truth to a mob and to call you the mad lot of murderers that you are.
It is war between us to the knife, and I will not tell you how well I love you until you are shamed into unconditional surrender.
Then I will show you my commission, and you will see that it is signed by a Commander-in-Chief who may wait long for victory, but never waits in vain.
I AM a great inventor, did you but know it.
I have new weapons and explosives and devices to substitute for your obsolete tactics and tools.
Mine are the battle-ships of righteousness and integrity—
The armor-plates of a quiet conscience and self-respect—
The impregnable conning-tower of divine manhood—
The Long Toms of persuasion—
The machine guns of influence and example—
The dum-dum bullets of pity and remorse—
The impervious cordon of sympathy—
The concentration camps of brotherhood—
The submarine craft of forgiveness—
The torpedo-boat-destroyer of love—
And behind them all the dynamite of truth!
I do not patent my inventions.
Take them. They are free to all the world.
XVII
I AM a soldier too, and I have the battle of battles on my hands.
You little warriors who, while fighting each other, are yet at heart agreed, and see the same false life with the same distorted eyes,
I have to make war upon all of you combined, and upon the infernal War Spirit which inspires you in the bargain.
I set my courage against your courage.
It is fine not to flinch under fire.
It is also fine to tell an unwelcome truth to a mob and to call you the mad lot of murderers that you are.
It is war between us to the knife, and I will not tell you how well I love you until you are shamed into unconditional surrender.
Then I will show you my commission, and you will see that it is signed by a Commander-in-Chief who may wait long for victory, but never waits in vain.