1918

I can see one element in this strange fascination of war which men have not adequately noted. It reduces life to simple terms. The modern man lives in such a complex world that one wonders how his sanity is maintained as well as it is. Every moral venture, every social situation and every practical problem involves a whole series of conflicting loyalties, and a man may never be quite sure that he is right in giving himself to the one as against the other. Shall he be just and sacrifice love? Shall he strive for beauty and do it by gaining the social privileges which destroy his sense of fellowship with the underprivileged? Shall he serve his family and neglect the state? Or be patriotic to the detriment of the great family of mankind? Shall he be diligent at the expense of his health? Or keep healthy at the expense of the great cause in which he is interested? Shall he be truthful and therefore cruel? Or shall he be kind and therefore a little soft? Shall he strive for the amenities of life and make life less robust in the process? Or shall he make courage the ultimate virtue and brush aside the virtues which a stable and therefore soft society has cultivated?

Out of this mesh of conflicting claims, interests, loyalties, ideals, values and communities he is rescued by the psychology of war which gives the state at least a momentary priority over all other communities and which makes courage the supreme virtue. I talked to a young captain at camp last week who told me how happy he was in the army because he had “found himself” in military service. Our further conversation led me to suspect that it was this simplification of life which had really brought him happiness; that and his love of authority.

Unfortunately, all these momentary simplifications of the complexities of life cannot be finally satisfying, because they do violence to life. The imperiled community may for a moment claim a kind of unqualified loyalty which no community or cause has the right or ability to secure in normal times. But judgment returns to sobriety as events become less disjointed and the world is once more revealed in all its confusion of good in evil and evil in good. The imperiled community was threatened because of its vice as much as because of its virtue, and the diabolical foe reassumes the lineaments of our common humanity. Physical courage is proved unequal to the task of ennobling man without the aid of other virtues, and the same men who have been raised to great heights by the self-forgetfulness of war have been sunk into new depths of hatred. There is only momentary peace in an all-consuming passion, except it be a passion for what is indubitably the best. And what is the best?