The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife eBook
Edward Carpenter
Is it this that explains the curious fact that Wars—notwithstanding
all their bitterness and brutishness—do
not infrequently lead to strange amalgamations and
generations? The spreading of the seeds of Greek
culture over the then known world by Alexander’s
conquests, or the fertilizing of Europe with the germs
of republican and revolutionary ideas by the armies
of Napoleon, or the immense reaction on the mediaeval
Christian nations caused by the Crusades, are commonplaces
of history; and who—to come to quite modern
times—could have foreseen that the Boer
War would end in the present positive alliance between
the Dutch and English in South Africa, or that the
Russo-Japanese conflict would so profoundly modify
the ideas and outlook of the two peoples concerned?
In making these remarks I do not for a moment say
that the gains resulting from War are worth the suffering
caused by it, or that the gains are not worth
the suffering. The whole subject is too vast and
obscure for one to venture to dogmatize on it.
I only say that if we are to find any order and law
(as we must inevitably try to do) in these
convulsions of peoples, these tempests of human history,
it is probably in the direction that I have indicated.
Of course we need not leave out of sight the ordinary
theory and explanation, that wars are simply a part
of the general struggle for existence—culminating
explosions of hatred and mutual destruction between
peoples who are competing with each other for the means
of subsistence. That there is something in this
view one can hardly deny; and it is one which I have
already touched upon. Still, I cannot help thinking
that there is something even deeper—something
that connects War with the amatory instinct; and that
this probably is to be found in the direction of a
physiological impact and fusion between the two (or
more) peoples concerned, which fertilizes and regenerates
them, and is perhaps as necessary in the life of Nations
as the fusion of cells is in the life of Protozoa,
or the phenomena of sex in the evolution of Man.
And while the Nations fight, the little mortals who
represent them have only the faintest idea of what
is really going on, of what the warfare means.
They feel the sweep of immense passions; ecstasies
and horrors convulse and dislocate their minds; but
they do not, cannot, understand. And the dear
creatures in the trenches and the firing-lines give
their lives—equally beautiful, equally
justified, on both sides: fascinated, rapt, beyond
and beside themselves, as foes hating each other with
a deadly hatred; seized with hideous, furious, nerve-racking
passions; performing heroic, magnificent deeds, suffering
untold, indescribable wounds and pains, and lying
finally side by side (as not unfrequently happens)
on the deserted battlefield, reconciled and redeemed
and clasping hands of amity even in death.
