My "Little Bit"

What can be said or thought of it? This wonderful massing of nations—this appalling slaughter of men—this relentless rolling on of a Divine Elemental Force, too vast and powerful and resolute for humanity to resist! It is a War so terrible, yet withal so grand, and so pregnant with infinite issues that we, who are swept by the dust and carnage of its fighting millions—we, who are stunned by the clash and clamour of the frightful weapons of modern science which it uses on land, under sea, and in air, are more or less incredulous and stupefied, and we have been only with difficulty aroused to try and understand its fateful import. It is Destiny in labour; and the pangs and throes of her child-birth will give us a New World! For the Old World is fast crumbling and crushing down upon us like an ancient ruin struck by lightning-flash and thunderbolt; the old vices, lusts, and littlenesses are being torn away from us as a storm-wind tears away the parasite ivies from mouldering walls—and we shall presently see a break in the clouds and light through the darkness. This thing of terror and confusion Was To Be; it Had To Be! It has been coming upon us slowly, but steadily, for years—and if we are honest with ourselves we shall admit that we have felt its approach instinctively in a general sense of insecurity—in a feverish impulse of haste to live lest we should suddenly die!

Something—we know not what—a cloud or a blight—has visibly lowered over the face of European civilisation, and in order to set aside certain strange and perplexing inconsistencies of such conduct among us as might induce us seriously to Think—we have flung ourselves eagerly into a vortex of “sensations” new and old, bad and good, virtuous and vicious, with a kind of furious recklessness, bordering on insanity. Any lapse of morals, any bizarre or weird “craze” in art, any indecency in literature, has been acclaimed and encouraged as “new” and “strong” instead of being condemned for being old and weak as such things truly are—and in many vital matters the nation has been moved by a petulant spirit of selfish, restless irritability, like that of a querulous old man who has neither the grace nor the courage to accept his age with wisdom, sweetness, and dignity. And among various mad things we have done, one stands out pre-eminently as the maddest—and that is the tacit encouragement given by a section of society and the press to a brood of Atheists, who have trailed their poisonous slime along the pathways of peace where the youth of this

have wandered unsuspectingly, gathering the ugly stain on the innocent white of their souls’ garments. Never did a sin of this nature occur in the history of nations without Divine punishment inflicted, not so much to destroy as to purify. The chronicles of every civilisation ever known or heard of bear unswerving testimony to the truth that whenever a nation or a people assumes to itself Divine right, dismissing from its mind and conscience the idea of any higher Supreme Power before Whom it should humiliate itself daily with thanksgiving and prayer, that nation or people has been allowed to follow the lure of its own intellectual pride and self-sufficiency to inevitable disaster.

IDEAL WORTH FIGHTING FOR

This is, and this will be, the case with Germany. For years her people have willingly listened to the teachings of egoists and madmen such as Treitschke and Nietzsche—for years they have scoffed at Christianity, its Founder and its ethics; and they have tempted the Divine Spirit in Man with the devil’s whisper, “All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me!” But that Divine Spirit is stronger than all Germany and its rulers; and “Get thee behind me, Satan!” is the keynote of this great War. The Satan of ambition, greed, and cruelty embodied in the creed of Prussian militarism must be driven “hence”; and it is for this holy Cause that we and our Allies are fighting. We must have a free world!—free in the sense of highest, purest freedom—a world of ideas, thoughts, and deeds built up on the golden law of Christ, “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” As a statesman has so nobly expressed it: “We wish the nations of Europe to be free to live their independent lives, working out their own form of government for themselves, and their own national development, whether they he great nations or small States, in full liberty. This is our ideal.”

An ideal worth fighting for—worth dying for!—this “glorious liberty of the free!” None of us would grudge life or fortune to attain the splendid goal in sight—a radiant vision of the true “Holy City,” where as we are told—“the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it, and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour within it.”

POISONOUS TEACHING

Glory and honour never accompany the creed of selfish Materialism, which is the “Kultur” of Germany. What a miserable man was he who wrote down in cold blood these words: “I condemn Christianity. To me it is the greatest of all possible corruptions. I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one immortal shame and blemish in the human race!” This was Nietzsche—poor, sickly, egoist, Nietzsche! He died mad—yet he was the “guide, philosopher, and friend” of modern Germany! How has his teaching worked? Let the slaughtered thousands of his countrymen on the battlefields reply. And let us take heed that we in our turn be not infected by the poisonous breathings of such insanity! Our nation—our Imperial Britain—has been dangerously far along the road to similar madness—let us hope devoutly that we have been pulled up in time! But—“we have done those things which we ought not to have done”—as, for example, we have thrown the sneer of “Jingoism!” contemptuously in the face of many an honest patriot—and now we are loud in our expressions of wrath and astonishment at the “want of patriotism” displayed by certain tribes of working men who “strike” for more pay, indifferent to the country’s needs! What have these working men been taught for the last twenty years? Why, that Money is the only god, and Self the only master! When we reproach them for unpatriotic conduct, we should reproach ourselves still more for the encouragement and applause we have systematically given to every new or revived doctrine of selfishness and materialism that ever infected the world with its sickly symptoms of decay. Patriotism is a mental and spiritual attitude—as heroism is—as love and faith are. Such things cannot be taught; they are the result of ennobling influences brought to bear on life and its environment. Considering how little our educational system holds of such subtle and delicate training, we have reason to be proud of the splendid response of our men throughout the Empire to the call of “King and Country,” and of the real national “grit” which in every Briton underlies his surface show of levity and indifference.

But have I, as a woman, nothing to say of the war, save in its ethical aspect? Oh, yes! I, as a woman, could say much, in a woman’s way. Of the agony of parting from men dearer to us than life, and seeing them disappear behind a veil of impenetrable silence for weeks or months, their fate or fortune all unknown! I could weep all day and night for the cruel loss of young and gallant lives crushed out and left bleeding and festering on the awful fields of contest—and I long to speak words of consolation and hope to the dear women who wait in strained suspense for news of their husbands, fathers, lovers, and sons! I know all they feel; and the aching throb of their unuttered misery strikes on my own heart with keenest pain! But with all the sorrow and all the suffering, I would not, if I could, hold back one man from taking his share in the noble struggle for the betterment and future peace of the world! One can die but once; and “Greater love hath no man than this—that a man lay down his life for his friends!”