My Year of the Great War — A Reader’s Guide

in which we should have had to deal with her single-handed.”

I would rather catch the drift of a nation’s purpose from the talk of statesmen in the lobby or in the club than from their official pronouncements. Von Bethmann-Hollweg had said in public what was universally accepted in private. He had let the cat out of the bag. England’s desire to preserve the neutrality of Belgium was not altogether ethical. If Belgium’s coast had been on the Adriatic rather than on the British Channel, her wrongs would not have had the support of British arms.

Great moral causes were at stake in the Great War; but they are inextricably mixed with cool, national self-interest and racial hatreds, which are also dictated by self-interest, though not always by the interests of the human race. One who sees the struggle of Europe as a spectator, with no hatred in his heart except of war itself, finds prejudice and efficiency, folly and merciless logic, running in company. He would return to the simplest principles, human principles, to avoid confusion in his own mind. Not of Europe, he studies Europe; he wonders at Europe.

On a map of the world twice the size of a foolscap page, the little finger’s end will cover the area of the struggle. Europe is a very small section of the earth’s surface, indeed. Yet at the thought of a great European war, all the other peoples drew their breath aghast. When the catastrophe came, all were affected in their most intimate relations, in their income, and in their intellectual life. Rare was the mortal who did not find himself taking sides in what would have seemed to an astronomer on Mars as a local terrestrial upheaval.

From Europe have gone forth the waves of vigour and enterprise which have had the greatest influence on the rest of the world, in much the same way that they went forth from Rome over the then known world. The war in this respect was like the great Roman civil war. The dominating power of our civilisation was at war with itself. Draw a circle around England, Scandinavia, the Germanic countries, and France, and you have the hub from which the spokes radiate to the immense wheel-rim. It is a region which cannot feed its mouths from its own soil, though it could amply a little more than a century ago in the Napoleonic struggle. In a sense, then, it is a physical parasite on the rest of the world; a parasite which, however, has given its intellectual energy in return for food for its body.

This war had for its object the delivery of no people from bondage, except the Belgians after the war had begun; it had no religious purpose such as the Crusades; it was not the uprising of democracy like the French Revolution. Those who charged the machine guns and the wives and mothers who urged them on were unconscious of the real force disguised by their patriotic fervour. Ask a man to die for money and he refuses. Ask him to die in order that he may have more butter on his bread and he refuses. This is putting the cause of war too bluntly. It is insulting to courage and to self-sacrifice, assessing them as something set on a counter for sale. For nations do not know why they fight, as a rule. Processes of evolution and chains of events arouse their patriotic ardour and their martial instinct till the climax comes in blows.

The cause of the European war is economic; and, by the same token, Europe kept the peace for forty years for economic reasons. She was busy skimming the cream of the resources of other countries. Hers was the capital, the skill, the energy, the _morale_, the culture, for exploiting the others. All modern invention originated with her or with the offspring of her races beyond seas. Steamers brought her raw material, which she sent back in manufactures; they took forth, in place of the buccaneers of former days seeking gold, her financiers, engineers, salesmen, and teachers, who returned with tribute or sent back the interest on the capital they had applied to enterprise. She looked down on the rest of the world with something of the Roman patrician feeling of superiority to outsiders.