The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife eBook
Edward Carpenter
Still, even now, as Mr.
Jerome himself contends, the
term is partly justified by a certain fine feeling
of which it is descriptive and which is indeed very
noticeable in all ranks. Whether in the Army or
Navy, among bluejackets or private soldiers or officers,
the feeling is certainly very much that of a big game—with
its own rules of honour and decency which must be
adhered to, and carried on with extraordinary fortitude,
patience, and good-humour. Whether it arises from
the mechanical nature of the slaughter, or from any
other cause, the fact remains that among our fighting
people to-day—at any rate in the West—there
is very little feeling of hatred towards the
“enemy.” It is difficult, indeed,
to hate a foe whom you do not even see. Chivalry
is not dead, and at the least cessation of the stress
of conflict the tendency to honour opponents, to fraternize
with them, to succour the wounded, and so forth, asserts
itself again. And chivalry demands that what
feelings of this kind we credit to ourselves we should
also credit to the other parties in the game.
We do cordially credit them to our French and Belgian
allies, and if we do not credit them quite so cordially
to the Germans, that is partly at least because
every lapse from chivalrous conduct on the part of
our opponents is immediately fastened upon and made
the most of by our Press. Chivalry is by no means
dead in the Teutonic breast, though the sentiment has
certainly been obscured by some modern German teachings.
While these present war-producing conditions last,
we have to face them candidly and with as much good
sense as we can command (which is for the most part
only little!). We have to face them and make the
best of them—though by no means to encourage
them. Perhaps after all even a war like the present
one—monstrous as it is—does not
denote so great a deviation of the old Earth from
its appointed orbit as we are at first inclined to
think. Under normal conditions the deaths on our
planet (and many of them exceedingly lingering and
painful) continue at the rate of rather more than
one every second—say 90,000 a day.
The worst battles cannot touch such a wholesale slaughter
as this. Life at its normal best is full of agonizings
and endless toil and sufferings; what matters, what
it is really there for, is that we should learn
to conduct it with Dignity, Courage, Goodwill—to
transmute its dross into gold. If war has
to continue yet for a time, there is still plenty of
evidence to show that we can wrest—even
from its horrors and insanities—some things
that are “worth while,” and among others
the priceless jewel of human love and helpfulness.
