“Even if there were no other causes of war, the great historic and romantic tradition would suffice to kindle it. No generation likes to die without seeing this famous thing—war—with its own eyes. Every generation must have its war, and so the latest date for ‘the next war’ is fixed by the life of the generation now being born.”
–ISRAEL ZANGWILL
Oh, the splendours of war! Oh, the glamour, the banners, the tramp of marching men, the flashing bayonets, those erect heads, those flushed cheeks, those eyes burning with the fire of a great resolve, the comradeship, the irresponsible gaiety, the clinging grip of friendly hands … the goodbyes … the first glimpse of the sea, the embarkation, the voyage, the mere fascination of shipboard, the immensity of sea and sky, the sudden glistening of cliffs in the sun—land!—a harbour bristling with life, long marches across a countryside filled with the singing of birds never heard before, the fever of nearing the front, reaching it, being thrown into the breach—saviours of one’s country, of the world’s liberty—and then, the pals, the spirit of men under fire, the good nature, the humour, the heroisms, the surging of youthful blood, the grim hardening of fibre when the circle of defeat closes in, the ennobling belief that perhaps this battle, this tiny phase of a battle, this scrap of a wrecked trench, held at all costs, may mean the stemming of a vast tide; that these few men standing about you—and you!—always you with them, bleeding and faint and with the harps of eternity in your ears, you with them till the last shot, till the last glimmer of forlorn hope!—you and these men may be saving the day!—an everlasting day, perhaps, that may live in history forever and forever! … oh, that ever present sense of making history, that glow of individual fealty to a common cause, a glorious cause, always—as long as wars last—an invincible cause! … and, oh, when it comes, when it comes, after dragging months of weariness, the quick scent of victory … the throbbing breath of it in the very air, the sky lit with gorgeous fires, the never to be forgotten sight of the scampering foe, the advance, the advance! … oh, the intoxication of it … Victory! … oh, the red headlines at home!
And, at last, after how long, the homecoming … oh, the yearning for home, the breathless eternity of those last few miles, few minutes, seconds … that sudden lump in your throat … and then, cheers, cheers, crowds, turmoil, jostling, kisses, tears, gripped hands … one’s own folks breaking through the crush to clasp you, to burst into quiet sobbing over you and your empty sleeve … your soul’s mate smiling bravely into your eyes … that baby you’ve never seen … oh, youth, youth, back from the wars!
Would you have peace? Then all this must be cut from the living hearts of men. Work for steadiest of hands, and finest of scalpels.
But, you say, war is not like that anymore. Your picture is false. War is a deadly, deadening thing this time, that sends men back exhausted, dulled, horror-stricken. You haven’t painted half the picture.
True. There is much more. There are the horrors, and worse than the horrors, the misery, the dreariness, the waiting, the mud, the stench, the vermin, the discipline, the standing for hours up to your knees in water, hunger, days and nights without sleep, the mistakes, the injustices, the impatience, the weariness, the homesickness … I know, I know.
But that isn’t what lasts. What lasts is the big persisting fact that you were there, that you were in it, that you struck a blow, that you killed a man in hot blood for a glorious cause … for liberty! … eternal echo of a magic word!
The thing that lasts, that spreads, takes root, lives, that passes down the ages in the proud hearts that have learned it on the knees of the veterans— what lasts is the glamour, however obscured by the mud of interminable trenches, however stultified by the immensity of operations that makes the merest pawn of a man … the glamour persists, the bright things, the poignant, the piquant things … the splendour, the splendour!
They have sent us glimpses of it in their letters home. They bring it back with them. And with every anniversary of those great days, with every slightest shock of circumstance there is struck from the deeply inscribed stone of their memory a glow of sparks … warm recollections of the days of the great adventure, the great crusade.
The generation now being born will grow up with all that, with the spectacle ever before their eyes of a world sacrificing its millions to crush forever a frantic wrong; the spectacle of a race immolating itself for posterity’s sake, meeting death gloriously with a vision of a world made secure, made sane, free of future hazards, impregnable against fresh assaults from unhatched hordes of marauders and vandals whose spawn even now, perhaps, old Time has hidden in his flowing sleeve.
This spectacle and this vision you must remove from the memories of men. Otherwise it will flame like a firebrand, leaping from heart to heart, from generation to generation, engendering an impatience with injustice and tyranny and producing a race whose pride in their purged world will make them swift to fling wide the doors of the temple of Janus at the slightest defiance of the principles for which their fathers died.
The task is there. And those who would now thrust a resolute hand into the future to erase from Destiny’s scroll the date of the next war, must first accomplish it. War’s splendour-germ must be rooted out of the souls of men. Bury your bugles deep. Muffle your drums forever. Hide away your banners, your medals, your scars. Batter into the earth your monuments and your triumphal arches. Revile the memory of your great captains. Burn your songs of victory.
For that is the bitter price of perpetual peace!