The second type recorded by our observers was less contemptible, but almost as backward. These were the persons who, though often strong in a kind of social sense, innocently accepted war and the martial code. Their vision was limited to the hero ideal. They saw the war in the good old way as a supreme opportunity of personal courage and devotion. It came, they said, to purge men of the selfishness bred of industrialism and of the softness bred of security. These guiltless champions of the war might personally behave toward it either with cowardice or heroism; but they never questioned it. With complete sincerity they faced it as a god-sent ordeal. For them it was indeed a religious test, an opportunity to enter into communion with some obscurely conceived heroic deity. To speak against it was sacrilege; but a sacrilege so gross and fantastic that it should be regarded as a sign rather of idiocy than of wickedness. Consequently, though they condemned pacifism whole-heartedly, there was no vindictiveness in their condemnation. Again and again our observers, experimenting in these simple minds, have tried to introduce some doubt, some apprehension that there might be another side to the matter. But such doubts as could be introduced appeared to the subject himself as merely an intellectual exercise, not as a live issue. Such images of brutality and disgust as were introduced were accepted simply as tests of fortitude.
Curiously it was among these archaic souls, these happy warriors, that we sometimes came upon a pellucid kind of religious experience. Fortunate innocents, they were exempt from the guilt and torture which wrecked so many of their fellows. For them the issue was a clear issue between self-regard and loyalty to all that they most cherished. And those who had the strength to bear themselves throughout according to their code had the reward of a very sweet and well-deserved beatitude. We attended many a death-agony that was thus redeemed, especially in the earliest phase of the war. Many an old regular thus found his rest. Many a very young subaltern, whose photograph on the parental mantelpiece truthfully commemorated a bright immaculate boy-soldier, found in his last moment that peace which passed his simple understanding. But many more, to whom death came less suddenly or more brutally, could not attain that bliss. Hundreds, thousands of these luckless beings, betrayed by their god, we have watched slipping down into the gulf of death, clutching, screaming, bewildered and indignant, or utterly dehumanized by pain.
More common than the ‘happy warriors’ was a third type, namely those who, having passed in spirit beyond this knightly innocence, still tried to retain it. These, when the war began, were first shocked and tom asunder by conflicting motives, by loyalty to the old idea of War and by the obscure stirrings of something new which they dared not clearly face. For, in spite of all their regrets and compassion, they very deeply lusted for war. And because this new thing that disturbed them ran counter to this lust and to the familiar code, they strove to ignore it. Or they persuaded themselves that though war was an evil, this war was a necessary evil. They elaborated all manner of arguments to convince themselves that their country’s cause was the cause of humanity, or that the War, though tragic, would result in a great moral purgation. They eagerly accepted every slander against the enemy, for it was very urgent for these distraught spirits to believe that the enemy peoples were almost sub-human. Only so could they feel confident that the War was right, and indulge their martial zeal with a clear conscience. The pacifists they condemned even more bitterly than the enemy, for in tormenting the pacifists they seemed to be crushing the snake in their own hearts.
The fourth type, though not actually a majority in all lands, had the greatest influence, because in most of the other types the sentiment of this fourth type was present in some considerable degree. These were at the outset little stirred by patriotism, and for them war had but a slight romantic appeal. They thought only of individual lives and happiness, and nearest their hearts were the lives and happiness of their fellow-countrymen. Under the influence of the lying propaganda with which the spirit of each nation was poisoned by its government, they sincerely believed that the enemy government was in the wrong, and was carrying out a base policy by brutal measures. But they preserved their sanity so far as to believe that the enemy peoples were on the whole not very different from themselves. As individuals the enemy were ‘just ordinary decent folk’ who, through some lack of resolution, had been led into a false policy. Consequently (so it was said) the ‘group spirit’ of these swarms of harmless enemy individuals was unhealthy. In the mass they were a danger to civilization, and so at all costs they must be beaten.
Such was the attitude of most men and many women in both the opposed groups of peoples. They lacked faith in human nature. And through their lack of faith in it they betrayed it. They might so easily have risen up in their millions in all lands to say, ‘This war must stop; we will not fight.’ Yet of course, though in a sense so easy, such a refusal was also utterly impossible to them. Because they were without any perception of man’s true end, because they accepted the world as it stood and human nature as it seemed, they inevitably missed the great opportunity, and condemned their species to decline. Pitiable beings, they brought upon their own heads, and upon the future, deluges of pain, grief, despair, all through lack of vision, or of courage. They manned a thousand trenches, endured a thousand days and nights of ennui or horror, displayed what in your kind is called superb devotion. All this they did, and all for nothing. They thrust bayonets into one another’s entrails, they suffered nightmares of terror, disgust and frantic remorse. They were haunted by bloody and filthy memories, and by prospects of desolation. Those of them who were parents gave up their sons, those who were women gave up their men, and all for nothing; or for a hope that was as impossible, as meaningless, as self-contradictory, as a round square, for the mad hope that war should end war. They believed that from their agony there must spring anew, fair world. But in fact through their lack of faith in one another the whole future of their species was overclouded.
The fifth type that we discovered was actually opposed to the war. There were many kinds of pacifists. A few were those naive beings who, loyal to the Christian faith both in the spirit and the letter, simply accepted the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’, and thought no further. But the main body of effective pacifists, even of those who gave as their motive ‘religious scruples’, were of a very different water. One and all, though they knew it not were ruled by that imperious, but still unformulated impulse which I have already noted in the case of Paul, the impulse of loyalty to the dawning spirit of man. But since the real spring of their conduct Was still so obscure, they had to rationalize it in various manners. Many supposed themselves to be moved simply by the Christian faith. But indeed in these, so our observers discovered, it was not Christianity that had bred pacifism, but pacifism that had given Christianity a new significance. Strong in the intuitive loyalty to the great adventure of the Terrestrial mind, they interpreted that intuition as loyalty to the Christian God. They strove, so they said, to love their fellows as Jesus had bidden them, but also they strove to love Jesus himself even more. And for them Jesus, though they knew it not, was the divine spirit embodied in their groping species.