War and Christ.
The deliberate war made by Prussia in all those areas which she can reach or occupy against the symbols and sacred objects of the Christian faith is a phenomenon in every way worthy of consideration. It is clearly not a matter of accident. The bombardment at Rheims Cathedral, for example, can be proved to have been deliberate. It had no military object; and the subsequent attempts to manufacture a military reason for it only produced a version of the occurrence not only incredible but in flat contradiction to the original admissions of the Germans themselves. But such episodes as those of Rheims and Louvain merely attract the attention of the world because of the celebrity of the outraged shrines. All who are familiar with the facts know that deliberate sacrilege no less than deliberate rape and deliberate murder has everywhere marked the track of the German army.
The offence has been malignant. That does not, of course, mean that it has been irrational; quite the contrary. One fully admits that Prussia, being what she is, has every cause to hate the Cross, and every motive to vent the agonised fury of a lost soul upon things sacred to the God she hates.
The moral suggested by this cartoon of Raemaekers’ must not be confused with the ridiculous and unhistoric pretence that war itself is essentially unchristian. When Mr. Bernard Shaw, if I remember right, drew from the affair of Rheims the astonishing moral that we cannot have at the same time “glorious wars and glorious cathedrals,” he might surely have remembered that the age in which Rheims Cathedral was built, whatever else it was, was not an age of Pacifism. The insult to Jesus Christ is not in the sword (which in His own words He came to bring), but in the profanation of the sword. It is in cruelty, injustice, treachery, unbridled lust, the worship of unrighteous strength—in fact, in all that can be summed up in the single word “Prussia.”
CECIL CHESTERTON
WAR AND CHRIST