Out To Win by Coningsby Dawson

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Night is the troublesome time. The children hide under their beds with
terror. The nurses have to go the rounds continually. If the children
would only cry, they would give warning. But instead, they creep
silently out from between the sheets and crouch against the floor like
dumb animals. Dumb animals! That is what they are when first they
are brought in. Their most primitive instincts for the beginnings of
cleanliness seem to have vanished. They have been fished out of caves,
ruined dug-outs, broken houses. They are as full of skin-diseases as
the beggar who sat outside Dives' gate, only they have had no dogs to
lick their sores. They have lived on offal so long that they have the
faces of the extremely aged. And their hatred! Directly you utter the
word "Boche," all the little night-gowned figures sit up in their cots
and curse. When they have done cursing, of their own accord, they sing
the Marseillaise.

Surely if God listens to prayers of vengeance, He will answer the
husky petitions of these victims of Hun cruelty! The quiet, just,
deep-seated venom of these babies will work the Hun more harm than
many batteries. Their fathers come back from the trenches to see them.
On leaving, they turn to the American nurses, "We shall fight better
now," they say, "because we know that you are taking care of them."

When those words are spoken, the American Red Cross knows that it is
achieving its object and is winning its war of compassion. The whole
drive of all its effort is to win the war in the shortest possible
space of time. It is in Europe to save children for the future, to
re-kindle hope in broken lives, to mitigate the toll of unavoidable
suffering, but first and foremost to help men to fight better.

IV

THE LAST WAR

_The last war!_ I heard the phrase for the first time on the evening
after Great Britain had declared war. I was in Quebec en route for
England, wondering whether my ship was to be allowed to sail. There
had been great excitement all day, bands playing the Marseillaise,
Frenchmen marching arm-in-arm singing, orators, gesticulating and
haranguing from balconies, street-corners and the base of statues.

Now that the blue August night was falling and every one was released
from work, the excitement was redoubled. Quebec was finding in war
an opportunity for carnival. Throughout all the pyramided city the
Tri-colour and the Union Jack were waving. At the foot of the Heights,
the broad basin of the St. Lawrence was a-drift in the dusk with
fluttering pennons. They looked like homing birds, settling in
dovecotes of the masts and rigging.

As night deepened, Chinese lanterns were lighted and carried on poles
through the narrow streets. Troops of merry-makers followed them,
blowing horns, dragging bells, tin-cans, anything that would make a
noise and express high spirits. They linked arms with girls as they
marched and were lost, laughing in the dusk. If a French reservist
could be found who was sailing in the first ship bound for the
slaughter, he became the hero of the hour and was lifted shoulder high
at the head of the procession. War was a brave game at which to play.
This was to be a short war and a merry one. Down with the Germans! Up
with France! Hurrah for the entente cordiale!

Beneath the coronet of stars on the Heights of Abraham the spirit of
Wolfe kept watch and brooded. It was under these circumstances, that I
heard the phrase for the first time--_the last war_.

The street was blocked with a gaping crowd. All the faces were raised
to an open window, two storeys up, from which the frame had been taken
out. Inside the building one could hear the pounding of machinery,
for it was here that the most important paper of Quebec was printed.
Across a huge white sheet a man on a hanging platform painted the
latest European cables. A cluster of electric lights illuminated him
strongly; but he was not the centre of the crowd's attention. In the
window stood another man. Like myself he was waiting for his ship
to sail, but not to England--to France. He was a returning French
reservist. Across the many miles of ocean the hand of duty had
stretched and touched him; he was ecstatically glad that he was
wanted. In those first days this ecstasy of gladness was a little hard
to understand. Thank God we all share it instinctively now. He was
speaking excitedly, addressing the crowd. They cheered him; they were
in a mood to cheer anybody. His face was thin with earnestness; he
was a spirit-man. He waved aside their applause with impatience. He
was trying to inspire them with his own intensity. In the intervals
between the shouting, I caught some of his words, "I am setting out
to fight the last war--the war of humanity which will bring universal
peace and friendship to the world."

A sailor behind me spat. He was drunk and feeling the need of
sympathy. He began to explain to me the reason. He was a fireman on
one of the steamers in the basin and a reservist in the British Navy.
He had received his orders that day to report back in England for
duty; he knew that he was going to be torpedoed on his voyage across
the Atlantic. How did he know? He had had a vision. Sailors always had
visions before they were drowned. It was to combat this vision that he
had got drunk.

I shook him off irritably. One didn't require the superstitions of an
alcoholic imagination to emphasize the new terror which had overtaken
the world. There was enough of fear in the air already. All this
spurious gaiety--what was it? Nothing but the chatter of lonely
children who were afraid to listen to the silence--afraid lest they
might hear the creaking footstep of death upon the stairs. And these
candles, lighting up the fringes of the night--they were nothing but a
vain pretence that the darkness had not gathered.

But this spirit-man framed in the window, he was genuine and
different. Yesterday we should have passed him in the street
unnoticed; to-day the mantle of prophecy clothed him. Within two
months he might be dead--horribly dead with a bayonet through him.
That thought was in the minds of all who watched him; it gave him an
added authority. Yet he was not thinking of himself, of wounds,
of death; he was not even thinking of France. He was thinking of
humanity: "I am setting out to fight the last war--the war of humanity
which will bring universal peace and friendship to the world."

Since the war started, how often have we heard that phrase--_the last
war!_ It became the battle-cry of all recruiting-men, who would have
fought under no other circumstances, joined up now so that this might
be the final carnage. Nations left their desks and went into battle
voluntarily, long before self-interest forced them, simply because
organised murder so disgusted them that they were determined by weight
of numbers to make this exhibition of brutality the last.

Before Europe burst into flames in 1914, we believed that the last
war had been already fought. The most vivid endorsement of this belief
came out of Germany in a book which, to my mind, up to that time was
the strongest peace-argument in modern literature. It was so strong
that the Kaiser's Government had the author arrested and every copy
that could be found destroyed. Nevertheless, over a million were
secretly printed and circulated in Germany, and it was translated into
every major European language. The book I refer to was known under its
American title as, _The Human Slaughter-House_. It told very simply
how men who had played the army game of sticking dummies, found
themselves called upon to stick their brother-men; how they obeyed at
first, then sickened at sight of their own handiwork, until finally
the rank and file on both sides flung down their arms, banded
themselves together and refused to carry out the orders of their
generals. There was no declaration of peace; in that moment national
boundaries were abolished.

In 1912 this sounded probable. I remember the American press-comments.
They all agreed that national prejudices had been broken down to such
an extent by socialism and friendly intercourse, that never again
would statesmen be able to launch attacks of nations against nations.
Governments might declare war; the peoples whom they governed would
merely overthrow them. The world had become too common-sense to commit
murder on so vast a scale.

Had it? The world in general might have: but Germany had not. The
argument of _The Human Slaughter-House_ proposed by a German in
protest against what he foresaw was surely coming, turned out to be a
bad guess. It made no allowance for what happens when a mad dog starts
running through the world. One may be tender-hearted. One may not like
killing dogs. One may even be an anti-vivisectionist; but when a dog
is mad, the only humanitarian thing to do is to kill it. If you don't,
the women and children pay the penalty.

We have had our illustration in Russia of what occurs when one side
flings away its arms, practising the idealistic reasonings which this
book propounds: the more brutal side conquers. While the Blonde Beast
runs abroad spreading rabies, the only idealist who counts is the
idealist who carries a rifle on his shoulder--the only gospel to which
the world listens is the gospel which saviours are dying for.

The last war! It took us all by surprise. We had believed so utterly
in peace; now we had to prove our faith by being prepared to die for
it. If we did not die, this war would not be the last; it would be
only the preface to the next. To paraphrase the words of Mr. Wells,
"We had been prepared to take life in a certain way and life had taken
us, as it takes every generation, in an entirely different way. We had
been prepared to be altruistic pacifists, and ..."

And here we are, in this year of 1918, engaged upon the bloodiest war
of all time, harnessing the muscle and brain-power of the universe
to one end--that we may contrive new and yet more deadly methods
of butchering our fellow men. The men whom we kill, we do not hate
individually. The men whom we kill, we do not see when they are dead.
We scald them with liquid fire; we stifle them with gas; we drop
volcanoes on them from the clouds; we pull firing-levers three, ten,
even fifteen miles away and hurl them into eternity unconfessed. And
this we do with pity in our hearts, both for them and for ourselves.
And why? Because they have given us no choice. They have promised,
unless we defend ourselves, to snatch our souls from us and fashion
them afresh into souls which shall bear the stamp of their own image.
Of their souls we have seen samples; they date back to the dark
ages--the souls of Cain, Judas and Caesar Borgia were not unlike them.
Of what such souls are capable they have given us examples in Belgium,
captured France and in the living dead whom they return by way of
Evian. We would rather forego our bodies than so exchange our souls.
A Germanised world is like a glimpse of madness; the very thought
strikes terror to the heart. Yet it is to Germanise the world that
Germany is waging war to-day--that she may confer upon us the benefits
of her own proved swinishness. There is nothing left for us but to
fight for our souls like men.

The last war! We believed that at first, but as the years dragged
on the certainty became an optimism, the optimism a dream which we
well-nigh knew to be impossible. We have always known that we would
beat Germany--we have never doubted that. But could we beat her so
thoroughly that she would never dare to reperpetrate this horror?
Could we prove to her that war is not and never was a paying way of
conducting business? Men began to smile when we spoke of this war as
the last. "There have always been wars," they said; "this one is not
the last--there will be others."

If it is not to be the last, we have cheated ourselves. We have
cheated the men who have died for us. Our chief ideal in fighting is
taken away. Many a lad who moulders in a stagnant trench, laid down
his life for this sole purpose, that no children of the future ages
should have to pass through his Gethsemane. He consciously gave
himself up as a scapegoat, that the security of human sanity should
be safeguarded against a recurrence of this enormity. The spirit-man,
framed in the dusky window above the applauding crowds in Quebec,
was typical of all these men who have made the supreme sacrifice. His
words utter the purpose that was in all their hearts, "I am setting
out to fight the last war--the war of humanity which will bring
universal peace and freedom to the world."

That promise was becoming a lie; it is capable of fulfilment now. The
dream became possible in April, 1917, when America took up her cross
of martyrdom. Great Britain, France and the United States, the
three great promise-keeping nations, are standing side by side. They
together, if they will when the war is ended, can build an impregnable
wall for peace about the world. The plunderer who knew that it was not
Great Britain, nor France, nor America, but all three of them united
as Allies that he had to face, no matter how tempted he was to prove
that armed force meant big business, would be persuaded to expand
his commerce by more legitimate methods. Whether this dream is to
be accomplished will be decided not upon any battlefield but in the
hearts of the civilians of all three countries--particularly in
those of America and Great Britain. The soldiers who have fought and
suffered together, can never be anything but friends.

My purpose in writing this account of America in France has been to
give grounds for understanding and appreciation; it has been to prove
that the highest reward that either America or Great Britain can gain
as a result of its heroism is an Anglo-American alliance, which will
fortify the world against all such future terrors. There never ought
to have been anything but alliance between my two great countries.
They speak the same tongue, share a common heritage and pursue the
same loyalties. Had we not blundered in our destinies, there would
never have been occasion for anything but generosity.

The opportunity for generosity has come again. Any man or woman
who, whether by design or carelessness, attempts to mar this growing
friendship is perpetrating a crime against humanity as grave as that
of the first armed Hun who stepped across the Belgian threshold. It
were better for them that mill-stones were hung about their necks and
they were cast into the sea, than ...

God is giving us our chance. The magnanimities of the Anglo-Saxon
races are rising to greet one another. If those magnanimities are
welcomed and made permanent, our soldier-idealists will not have died
in vain. Then we shall fulfil for them their promise, "We are setting
out to fight the last war."

THE END

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