The Crown of Wild Olive
certain "natural enemies" of the French, there are
successively selected, during the French war, say thirty
able-bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled
and nursed them; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow,
fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so
that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the
weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois.
Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are
selected; all dressed in red; and shipped away, at the
public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the
south of Spain; and fed there till wanted.
'And now to that same spot in the south of Spain are thirty
similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like
manner wending; till at length, after infinite effort, the
two parties come into actual juxtaposition; and Thirty
stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand.
'Straightway the word "Fire!" is given, and they blow the
souls out of one another, and in place of sixty brisk useful
craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcases, which it must
bury, and anon shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel?
Busy as the devil is, not the smallest! They lived far
enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a
universe, there was even, unconsciously, by commerce, some
mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their
governors had fallen out; and instead of shooting one
another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads
shoot.' (Sartor Resartus.)
Positively, then, gentlemen, the game of battle must not, and shall not,
ultimately be played this way. But should it be played any way? Should
it, if not by your servants, be practised by yourselves? I think, yes.
Both history and human instinct seem alike to say, yes. All healthy men
like fighting, and like the sense of danger; all brave women like to
hear of their fighting, and of their facing danger. This is a fixed
instinct in the fine race of them; and I cannot help fancying that fair
fight is the best play for them, and that a tournament was a better game
than a steeple-chase. The time may perhaps come in France as well as
here, for universal hurdle-races and cricketing: but I do not think
universal 'crickets' will bring out the best qualities of the nobles of
either country. I use, in such question, the test which I have adopted,
of the connection of war with other arts; and I reflect how, as a
sculptor, I should feel, if I were asked to design a monument for a dead
knight, in Westminster abbey, with a carving of a bat at one end, and a
ball at the other. It may be the remains in me only of savage Gothic
prejudice; but I had rather carve it with a shield at one end, and a
sword at the other. And this, observe, with no reference whatever to any
story of duty done, or cause defended. Assume the knight merely to have
ridden out occasionally to fight his neighbour for exercise; assume him
even a soldier of fortune, and to have gained his bread, and filled his
purse, at the sword's point. Still, I feel as if it were, somehow,
grander and worthier in him to have made his bread by sword play than
any other play; had rather he had made it by thrusting than by
batting;--much more, than by betting. Much rather that he should ride
war horses, than back race horses; and--I say it sternly and
deliberately--much rather would I have him slay his neighbour, than
cheat him.
But remember, so far as this may be true, the game of war is only that
in which the _full personal power of the human creature_ is brought out
in management of its weapons. And this for three reasons:--
First, the great justification of this game is that it truly, when well
played, determines _who is the best man_;--who is the highest bred, the
most self-denying, the most fearless, the coolest of nerve, the swiftest
of eye and hand. You cannot test these qualities wholly, unless there is
a clear possibility of the struggle's ending in death. It is only in the
fronting of that condition that the full trial of the man, soul and
body, comes out. You may go to your game of wickets, or of hurdles, or
of cards, and any knavery that is in you may stay unchallenged all the
while. But if the play may be ended at any moment by a lance-thrust, a
man will probably make up his accounts a little before he enters it.
Whatever is rotten and evil in him will weaken his hand more in holding
a sword hilt, than in balancing a billiard cue; and on the whole, the
habit of living lightly hearted, in daily presence of death, always has
had, and must have, a tendency both to the making and testing of honest
men. But for the final testing, observe, you must make the issue of
battle strictly dependent on fineness of frame, and firmness of hand.
You must not make it the question, which of the combatants has the
longest gun, or which has got behind the biggest tree, or which has the
wind in his face, or which has gunpowder made by the best chemist, or
iron smelted with the best coal, or the angriest mob at his back. Decide
your battle, whether of nations, or individuals, on _those_ terms;--and
you have only multiplied confusion, and added slaughter to iniquity. But
decide your battle by pure trial which has the strongest arm, and
steadiest heart,--and you have gone far to decide a great many matters
besides, and to decide them rightly.
And the other reasons for this mode of decision of cause, are the
diminution both of the material destructiveness, or cost, and of the
physical distress of war. For you must not think that in speaking to you
in this (as you may imagine), fantastic praise of battle, I have
overlooked the conditions weighing against me. I pray all of you, who
have not read, to read with the most earnest attention, Mr. Helps's two
essays on War and Government, in the first volume of the last series of
'Friends in Council.' Everything that can be urged against war is there
simply, exhaustively, and most graphically stated. And all, there urged,
is true. But the two great counts of evil alleged against war by that
most thoughtful writer, hold only against modern war. If you have to
take away masses of men from all industrial employment,--to feed them by
the labour of others,--to move them and provide them with destructive
machines, varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost; if you
have to ravage the country which you attack,--to destroy for a score of
future years, its roads, its woods, its cities, and its harbours;--and
if, finally, having brought masses of men, counted by hundreds of
thousands, face to face, you tear those masses to pieces with jagged
shot, and leave the fragments of living creatures countlessly beyond all
help of surgery, to starve and parch, through days of torture, down into
clots of clay--what book of accounts shall record the cost of your
work;--What book of judgment sentence the guilt of it?
That, I say, is _modern_ war,--scientific war,--chemical and mechanic
war, worse even than the savage's poisoned arrow. And yet you will tell
me, perhaps, that any other war than this is impossible now. It may be
so; the progress of science cannot, perhaps, be otherwise registered
than by new facilities of destruction; and the brotherly love of our
enlarging Christianity be only proved by multiplication of murder. Yet
hear, for a moment, what war was, in Pagan and ignorant days;--what war
might yet be, if we could extinguish our science in darkness, and join
the heathen's practice to the Christian's theory. I read you this from a
book which probably most of you know well, and all ought to
know--Muller's 'Dorians;'--but I have put the points I wish you to
remember in closer connection than in his text.
'The chief characteristic of the warriors of Sparta was great composure
and subdued strength; the violence [Greek: lyssa] of Aristodemus and
Isadas being considered as deserving rather of blame than praise; and
these qualities in general distinguished the Greeks from the northern
Barbarians, whose boldness always consisted in noise and tumult. For the
same reason the Spartans _sacrificed to the Muses_ before an action;
these goddesses being expected to produce regularity and order in
battle; as they _sacrificed on the same occasion in Crete to the god of
love_, as the confirmer of mutual esteem and shame. Every man put on a
crown, when the band of flute-players gave the signal for attack; all
the shields of the line glittered with their high polish, and mingled
their splendour with the dark red of the purple mantles, which were
meant both to adorn the combatant, and to conceal the blood of the
wounded; to fall well and decorously being an incentive the more to the
most heroic valour. The conduct of the Spartans in battle denotes a high
and noble disposition, which rejected all the extremes of brutal rage.
The pursuit of the enemy ceased when the victory was completed; and
after the signal for retreat had been given, all hostilities ceased. The
spoiling of arms, at least during the battle, was also interdicted; and
the consecration of the spoils of slain enemies to the gods, as, in
general, all rejoicings for victory, were considered as ill-omened.
Such was the war of the greatest soldiers who prayed to heathen gods.
What Christian war is, preached by Christian ministers, let any one tell
you, who saw the sacred crowning, and heard the sacred flute-playing,
and was inspired and sanctified by the divinely-measured and musical
language, of any North American regiment preparing for its charge. And
what is the relative cost of life in pagan and Christian wars, let this
one fact tell you:--the Spartans won the decisive battle of Corinth with
the loss of eight men; the victors at indecisive Gettysburg confess to
the loss of 30,000.
II. I pass now to our second order of war, the commonest among men, that
undertaken in desire of dominion. And let me ask you to think for a few
moments what the real meaning of this desire of dominion is--first in
the minds of kings--then in that of nations.
Now, mind you this first,--that I speak either about kings, or masses of
men, with a fixed conviction that human nature is a noble and beautiful
thing; not a foul nor a base thing. All the sin of men I esteem as their
disease, not their nature; as a folly which may be prevented, not a
necessity which must be accepted. And my wonder, even when things are at
their worst, is always at the height which this human nature can attain.
Thinking it high, I find it always a higher thing than I thought it;
while those who think it low, find it, and will find it, always lower
than they thought it: the fact being, that it is infinite, and capable
of infinite height and infinite fall; but the nature of it--and here is
the faith which I would have you hold with me--the _nature_ of it is in
the nobleness, not in the catastrophe.
Take the faith in its utmost terms. When the captain of the 'London'
shook hands with his mate, saying 'God speed you! I will go down with my
passengers,' _that_ I believe to be 'human nature.' He does not do it
from any religious motive--from any hope of reward, or any fear of
punishment; he does it because he is a man. But when a mother, living
among the fair fields of merry England, gives her two-year-old child to
be suffocated under a mattress in her inner room, while the said mother
waits and talks outside; _that_ I believe to be _not_ human nature. You
have the two extremes there, shortly. And you, men, and mothers, who are
here face to face with me to-night, I call upon you to say which of
these is human, and which inhuman--which 'natural' and which