OPTIMIST Be that as it may, it is a permitted weapon of war, and since mastery of the air has been achieved—
GRUMBLER —man, that scoundrel, seizes the opportunity to make the earth equally unsafe. Read Jean Paul’s account of the ascent of a Montgolfier balloon. No one could write those five pages today, for those making incursions into the upper air have no respect for the heavens above, but as aerial invaders use their safe distance from the earth to launch attacks upon it. Men are incapable of enjoying the fruits of progress without paying the price. They promptly employ the very things that should improve life to destroy it. They struggle with what should make life easier. To ascend in a Montgolfier balloon is an act of reverence, the ascent of an aeroplane is a danger to those left below.
OPTIMIST But surely also for the airman himself who drops the bombs.
GRUMBLER Certainly, but not the danger of being killed by those he is going to kill, and he avoids the lurking machine guns more easily than the defenceless ones below avoid him. He also more easily avoids a fair fight between two equally armed murderers — fair, insofar as the violation of the element in which it takes place permits of such values. But even if it is the “intrepid” aviator who wields it, the aerial bomb signifies armed cowardice, it is as ruthless as the U-boat which signifies the principle of armed guile, the same guile which allows the dwarf to triumph over the armed giant. But the infants killed by the aviator are not armed, and even if they were, they would hardly manage to hit the aviator as surely as he will hit them. Of all the ignominies of war, the most shameful is that the only invention to bring man closer to the stars has served merely to provide confirmation of his baseness, as if he had not sufficient scope for it on earth.
OPTIMIST What of the infants who are being starved to death?
GRUMBLER The governments of the Central Powers are free to spare their infants this fate by weaning their adults off what they were spoon-fed from early childhood. But even supposing the enemy powers-that-be are as guilty of the blockade as our own, the bombing of enemy infants as a reprisal is the sort of thinking that does German ideology proud, the sort of intellectual position in which — by the God of the Germans! — I have no wish to take refuge.
OPTIMIST You’re trying to find fault with the way the Germans wage war, without taking account of the fact that the others are using the same means.
GRUMBLER I freely acknowledge that, and I’ve no intention of making an exception of the French aeroplanes that use much the same heroic villainies in their violation of humanity. However, apart from the fact that we started it, the distinction seems to me to lie, on the one side, in a disposition which participates in the horror, knowingly or absentmindedly forgetful of what it involves, and on the other, a cast of mind which, not content with dropping bombs, accompanies them with jokes and even with “Christmas greetings” specially got up for the inhabitants of Nancy. Here we have once again the pernicious mixing of things made to be used, in this case, bombs, and the inner life, namely jokes, and even the fusion of the joke with the sacred — that mixture which is the greatest abomination of all, the height of debauchery, which a life impoverished by rules and regulations receives as a perk permitting mindless brutality in compensation for all that discipline, drill, and morality. It is the humour of the hangman, the licence of a morality that even takes legal action against love.
OPTIMIST Compensation for discipline? But did you not welcome discipline as a check on disorderly behaviour?
GRUMBLER But not as a lever of power! Rather chaos than order at the expense of humanity! Militarism as a workout and militarism as a state of mind — there is surely a distinction. Militarism is essentially a tool. But it becomes a law unto itself, an irreconcilable enemy of the human spirit, when transformed into the unwitting tool of antagonistic forces — forces hostile to humane values. Its code of honour, allied to the cowardice of technology, has become a farce, its self-imposed duty within a framework of general compulsion has degenerated into a lie. It is nothing but pretence, and it compensates for its slave status by hiding behind its machines to demonstrate its miserable power. The means has become an end in itself, to the extent that in peacetime we can still only think militarily, and war is merely a means to obtain new weapons. A war to the greater glory of the armaments industry. We do not merely want more exports and therefore more guns, we also want more guns for their own sake, and that’s why they have to be fired. Our lives and our thinking are subjected to the interests of heavy industry; it’s a heavy burden. We live under the sign of the gun. And since heavy industry has allied itself with God, we are lost. That is now the human condition.
OPTIMIST But we might also see our position from the perspective of a Nietzschean ideal, and come to a very different view of things.
GRUMBLER Yes, you might well do that, and you would then experience Nietzsche’s astonishment that the “will to power” manifested itself after Sedan not as a triumph of the spirit, but as an increase in the number of factory chimneys. Nietzsche was a thinker who “imagined it would turn out differently.” Namely, the spiritual uplift of the year 1870. That of 1914 he would have scarcely found credible for a moment, nor would he have been any longer astonished by the victory of his own thoughts. Yet perhaps, after all, he would have rejected the conqueror marching off to war with The Will to Power and other edifying intellectual ammunition in his kit bag.
OPTIMIST If war offers no cultural benefit, that holds for all of the belligerent nations. That is, unless you are determined on principle to admit of cultural possibilities only whenever franc-tireurs murder sleeping soldiers.
GRUMBLER Certainly not when our official press bureau exists for the sole purpose of making such allegations. But even in the present state of mankind, it would be unique for aviators who bomb infants to have internationally sanctioned licence to do so, and for franc-tireurs who commit murder to avenge murder not to be allowed to do so because they have no such licence. They are not killing under orders but under a different form of irresistible compulsion, not out of duty but in a frenzy of rage, that is to say, with the only possible motive that halfway excuses the killing; they are unauthorized killers, who cannot identify themselves by the appropriate costume, or by membership of some regional backup squad or reserve unit or special detachment or whatever shameful name they give it. Don’t ask me to judge the moral difference between an aviator who kills a sleeping child and a civilian who kills a sleeping soldier. Decide yourself which is the more courageous choice — taking into account only the danger and not the responsibility — to attack a sleeping soldier or a wide-awake child?
OPTIMIST You may be right on that score, but you’d need a magnifying glass to find signs of humanity on the other side.
GRUMBLER If I were to look for them in our newspapers, indeed I would.
OPTIMIST Just think of the headline “Russians wreak havoc in Galicia.”
GRUMBLER Though I couldn’t make out from that whether the Galician castles were plundered by Polish peasants or Hungarian territorials. What did often appear under that headline, as if they had slipped through the grip of the compulsion to lie, were tales of noble action on the part of the Russians.