Fore-armed

“If we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our growing prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.”—George Washington.

The instinct for defense is as old as the world. It grew out of the habit of the strong to prey upon the weak. In the dawn of civilization, the cave man would shoulder his bludgeon and go forth to slay any brother whose stores or woman he coveted. Later, the bold and unthrifty raided the weak and saving. This state of affairs drove the less warlike together for defense and thus in due course evolved the nucleus of national life.

Families banded together and took the necessary measures for safeguarding mutual interests. Such was the basic element of military evolution. True, armies were debauched from their original ends by ambitious princes, but this does not alter the case that the function of a military force is to protect the homes and property of peoples. It is well, in the echo of the battle-guns of Europe, to recall these facts.

The defenseless invite attack. Witness the plight of Belgium. With my own eyes I have seen the penalty of unpreparedness paid in blood and ashes. Whole cities were laid waste because the citizens were incapable of defending them. I witnessed the flight of a nation before the tidal wave of invasion. Man for man and woman for woman these fugitives were the richest race in Europe. Resting on the false promises of neighbors, Belgium made no adequate preparation for defense. Its only sin was weakness. Because the men of Belgium had not been trained in the skill and taught the duty of defense, their motherland lies crushed. The old have died by the roadside, when panic drove thousands before the menace of war unchained. Children sickened and starved. What women suffered may not be written. Who in our country can give thought to these facts without the chill of fear creeping into his heart. Our men are the defenders of our women. The weak, the children of the country, are in their charge. Pass all abstract considerations and fix alone on the safety of the home, the protection of loved ones, and we find ourselves back to first principles. The social state can only be preserved by mutual support in time of attack. Thus the first duty of every citizen is to defend his country.

In that long era when nations depended upon hirelings to do their fighting, the significance of this duty was lost. Selfishness led to shirking the sacrifices demanded by war. Many wars were but the conflict of the policy of princes. Let it be hoped that conflicts willed by the people alone will bring nations to arms in future. But one eternal human law will forever urge man to settle his last battle through trial by blood. That law is the struggle for existence. War today is only the continuation of national policy.

While the American people have shown themselves averse to war, who demands that in order to avoid bloodshed we abandon the Monroe Doctrine or surrender our rights in the markets of the world? No man dare say war will never again visit America.

Study the table of the world’s greatest producing nations. Foremost among all others you will find the United States. Nature has given us enormous riches. The ingenuity of our people has developed and amplified national resources. In twenty years we will have forged so far ahead of the other nations of the earth that our position will be the envy of the world. With wealth will come weakness. Unless a radical change develops in the policy of this country looking towards greater national security, when we reach the zenith of our prosperity we will invite attack from every side.

No better parallel can be found showing the fate in store for the rich but unprepared nation than the extinction of ancient Peru. Before the advent of Columbus, a happy and prosperous people lived in the Andean valleys. Ruins of wonderful cities, once adorned with temples and palaces, testify to the wealth of the Empire of the Incas. Fabulous ornaments of gold and silver beautified these buildings. From the scanty records remaining, we know the ancient Peruvians enjoyed a highly developed social system. They excelled in the arts of peace. Relying on the towering crags that surrounded their valley-land, the Peruvians forswore and condemned all military effort, and devoted themselves assiduously to husbandry. Down the slopes of the valley of Cuzco winds an irrigation system challenging the best of modern times. Here is testimony enough of the prosperity of the subjects of the Incas.

The race lived long in peace, secure in the impregnability of the mountain ramparts. The fable of their riches and their cities spread. The population of the kingdom was estimated from 2,000,000 to 7,000,000. Those 2,000,000, let us say, were conquered by 184 Spanish “gun men.” The Peruvians saw their cities sacked, their women violated, their ruler murdered. The men, women and children were sold into slavery, where they toiled out a miserable existence, delving in mines that had been the source of their own wealth, to satisfy the avarice of the conquerors. Study the story of the conquest of Peru and learn the consequences of unpreparedness. You will find there a parallel for every incentive and every act of modern war. From the history of the Incan kingdom two obvious facts stand out. First, natural resources, wealth, is more a temptation to neighbors than a factor of strength. Second, no nation can avoid war and exist when another nation wishes to force war upon it.

There are those who point to the wonderful natural and artificial resources of the United States and deduce from these great strength. In war our wealth would simply be a spur to the enemy. To put the discussion in colloquial analogy, who would win in a fight between Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan and “Jack” Johnson?

Because we are a peace-loving people it does not follow we shall remain immune from attack. Let us labor for our ideals, but do not let our most ardent impulses for world betterment blind us to the basic facts of human nature. God has been good to the people of the United States. No other nation enjoys the fruits of the earth and of industry in so great a measure as we do. It is easy for us to advocate universal peace and the arbitration of all disputes, because we have everything to gain from peace and everything to lose by war. To put the matter bluntly, universal peace and unlimited arbitration implies we can shirk our manifest responsibilities.

We are confident in the forensic skill of our advocates. But is it possible for any rational being to reconcile the existence of The Hague Peace Palace, with its thousands of volumes of words on the abolition of war, and the settlement of all disputes according to the decisions of a few ideal personages with God-like attributes, with the furious whirlwind of battle sweeping Europe today? The print was hardly dry on the type recording the polished rhetoric of peace before the armies of the belligerents were marching to mutual slaughter. Peace is the vapor of words, war the substance of deeds. Differentiate the fact of war, and the strong probability of the continuation of war by such nations as find the method suiting their self-interests, from the abstract discussions of a millennium when all national contests will be settled by a set of incorruptible and infallible judges. While man remains finite in his wisdom and judgment, blood conflict will continue.

We may not wish war, but what shall we do if an aggressive adversary attacks us? Hostilities may develop from the flimsiest foundations. Our political attitude, our wealth, our geographic position invite attack. It is highly rational to consider aggression possible. What should we do if New York and Washington were captured? Surrender the occupied territory and live in sweet peace with our conquerors (who doubtless would rest content with the easily acquired provinces and cities), purchase an evacuation (which would assure immunity for the future, perhaps), or fight? Is there an American citizen worthy of the name who would hesitate in his choice?

I remember what I reverently think of as my first glimpse into the soul of soldiers fighting, as our fathers fought at Lexington and Brandywine. I had left the German lines in Belgium, passed the last patrol of Uhlans at Middlekerke, crossed the few kilometers separating the opposed forces, until at Westende I stopped my motor beside the foremost Belgian picket. He was a boy in his twenties. Fresh from the sight of the masterful mechanism of the German war organization, this sentry looked like a child in the path of the Juggernaut. After showing my papers I offered to carry him into his lines at Nieuport.

“The Germans are not more than five kilometers away, you know; they are coming.”

His eye flashed scorn at my suggestion.

“My place is here. Let them come.”

Outside Nieuport an outpost was dug in along the road. The blue barrel of a machine gun shining out of the trench-top looked like the rigid body of a snake stretched along the macadam. A bearded sergeant took my papers. While he studied them I found myself under the eyes of a war-worn group. What a story those eyes told! They held an unearthly light. It seemed as if they were looking beyond me and the sand dunes, the sea even, into another world. Trench-soiled, uncouth, bearded with the tangled growth of hard campaigning, the eyes of those soldiers seemed to shed a radiance about them. If the eye is the window of the soul, I saw into the spirit of these men. Enshrined there was an ideal—the sacrifice of self for country.

When the sergeant gravely returned my papers I raised my hand sharply to my hat rim, the group as a man returned my salute. I drove on with the old Roman words of death defiance uppermost in mind: Morituri salutamus.

Horrors, or atrocities, as they are designated in war, are almost always confined to the operations of invading armies. So it is a country such as the United States, where traditions and geographic position place us on the defensive, that must suffer most should an enemy strike. It is unthinkable that our nation will ever engage in an armed adventure of aggrandizement. Those who rant against adequate measures for protection insult the majority of the American people by crying out that making our citizens into competent defenders of their homes, property and families means sowing the seed of world conquest. If this were true, it were better we disarm and perish than continue to enjoy the liberty for which our forefathers suffered and died. We are not worthy of the liberty secured to us by the blood spilled from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, from Bull Run to Appomattox, if we are not to be trusted with the weapon necessary for our self-preservation.

The confusion of thought on the question of defense has arisen from our conception that the regular army is solely responsible for the safety of the nation. Vaguely our citizens, who are so occupied with other interests they cannot give the subject the thought it merits, understand that in event of a war of the dimensions of the struggle of 1861-65, the regular soldiers would be reinforced by volunteers. But the question of reserve, in fact, the whole problem of protection, is pushed out of mind because it is considered a remote contingency that this nation will again be faced with no alternative but war. In the end it is assumed that the seas protect us.

After what has passed in Europe during the last year and a half no man can honestly believe our regularly enlisted force, numbering not more than 90,000 combatants, scattered over our lands from Alaska to Florida, in Hawaii and the Philippines is competent to fend an attack resolutely directed against this country. Since the Civil War the United States army has been little more than a super-police force. The comparison of the standing army of this country with the forces of the powers that may move against us leads to absurd results. Should an enemy elect to land on Long Island and move on New York, as Lord Howe did in 1776, granting that it were possible to mobilize the whole regular army to meet the invasion, it would be brushed aside more easily than were the Continental forces of Washington. With the present supply of ammunition the American army could not make as stubborn a stand as did the Belgians at Liège.

The whole theory of the small regular army in this country is based on the assumption of the availability of every fit male for military service. This theory comes to us from colonial days. In former times, considering the conditions that obtained, it may have been justifiable. But today the practice of war has changed. Improvisation is no longer possible. We live in the era of the “nation in arms.” And the nations approaching the United States in population and material wealth drill and arm all suitable citizens. Granting the possibility of war, to continue in the present state of defenselessness is a stupid crime.

On the theory that our army cannot be trusted, and therefore must be kept down to lowest strength, is it not doubly incumbent on the citizens of the country to adopt some system of self-preparation? In case of emergency the flower of the nation would rush to the colors. Yes, without officers, without arms. The men who might attempt to bulwark our shores against invasion would, to borrow a current phrase, serve as cannon fodder.

The trouble with most of the well-intentioned citizens of this country who argue against defense-training is that they have never actually seen what happens when untrained and under-munitioned troops meet highly organized opponents. The result is massacre. The braver the untrained force, the more vicious the massacre. Men will continue to lay down their lives for their homes and liberties, but is it not the right of all to demand that the sacrifice be not in vain? Under the conditions of modern life, the average man cannot train and equip himself, and even if he could, this is far from being the sum total of preparation for defense. An army is one of the most complex and highly organized businesses of the times. Today the casual reader of the daily papers must be aware of this fact. Thus we are brought back to the problem of defense. As we are a self-governing people, so are we a self-defending people. It is right that we continue with a reasonably small standing army. But this implies the liability of every fit male citizen of military age to be trained and ready to supplement the work of our small army when the national life and liberties are endangered. The degree of training and readiness must insure the repelling of an enemy before material damage has been inflicted on the lives and property of the people.

It argues a limited insight into the qualities of Americans to think that they would not respond with their total mental and material resources if the land should be invaded. Such is not the contention. In plain words, when our citizen body of military age is instructed in tactics and when the nation has a sufficient supply of war material to arm and equip these citizen soldiers, we shall avoid death, suffering and the horrors of war, perhaps war itself. Should war come, the protection we can offer our women and children will be in the ratio of our preparation.

Nations, like men, have their part to play in the march of civilization. No nation can shirk this part and keep its own honor. The United States boasts the only purely altruistic act credited to a conquering sovereignty. It fought a war on sentiment, occupied territory, and when the war and the evils that follow war were remedied, withdrew wholly from that territory. The United States set a new standard. Having done this, it must maintain its place among the ranking powers of the world and bring the pressure of its influence for good on all international questions.

Today the American republic provides no adequate protection for the lives of its citizens or their property in case of war.

We have seen the fate of nations unprepared.

We are rich beyond all other countries. The total wealth of the United States is $187,000,000,000; greater than Germany and Great Britain combined.

Our greatest wealth is concentrated in cities on or near our coast line. With bitter shame we remember how easily our capital was once captured.

At this moment two-thirds of the world is ablaze with battle. What will be resolved from this stupendous conflict no one can prophesy. Is it not time for the people of the United States to put their house in order?