allowed to respect one another’s achievements and civilization; Englishmen
traveled safely in France while France was at war with England; and the
French and Frederick the Great continued to admire each other while they
fought each other in the Seven Years’ War. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries war was a contest of aristocracies rather than of
peoples. In the twentieth century the improvement of communication,
transport, weapons, and means of indoctrination made war a struggle of
peoples, involving civilians as well as combatants, and winning victory
through the wholesale destruction of property and life. One war can now
destroy the labor of centuries in building cities, creating art, and developing
habits of civilization. In apologetic consolation war now promotes science
and technology, whose deadly inventions, if they are not forgotten in
universal destitution and barbarism, may later enlarge the material
achievements of peace.
In every century the generals and the rulers (with rare exceptions like
Ashoka and Augustus) have smiled at the philosophers’ timid dislike of
war. In the military interpretation of history war is the final arbiter, and is
accepted as natural and necessary by all but cowards and simpletons. What
but the victory of Charles Martel [Charles Martel (688?-741)] at Tours
(732) kept France and Spain from becoming Mohammedan? What would
have happened to our classic heritage if it had not been protected by arms
against Mongol and Tatar invasions? We laugh at generals who die in bed
(forgetting that they are more valuable alive than dead), but we build
statues to them when they turn back a Hitler or a Genghis Khan. It is pitiful
(says the general) that so many young men die in battle, but more of them
die in automobile accidents than in war, and many of them riot and rot for
lack of discipline; they need an outlet for their combativeness, their
adventurousness, their weariness with prosaic routine; if they must die
sooner or later why not let them die for their country in the anesthesia of
battle and the aura of glory? Even a philosopher, if he knows history, will
admit that a long peace may fatally weaken the martial muscles of a nation.
