The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
THE DISCIPLINE OF PEACE
All this leads up to the question of the moral factor in general military preparation—whether peace-time conscription or universal military training. Is it useful only as a means of national defence, or has it a real value for the general purposes of society? The militarists say that it has. Too begin with, if inculcates obedience, and the instinct of discipline. It spreads the habits of civilization among the masses. It takes boys with round shoulders, shuffling gait, uncleanly ways, lawless manners, and makes them straight, upstanding, clean, orderly, obedient men. During the war, they showed us photographs of these awful examples, before and after taking.
Now it is true that tens of thousands of our young men, perhaps hundreds of thousands, were so transformed by army training. But we must consider averages, not exceptions. Millions of others—certainly the great majority—came from a good, sound American environment. All of them in their childhood, most of them in their youth, had practised athletic sport in some form. They presented themselves to the drill-sergeant with fine, well-developed bodies. They knew how to keep themselves clean. They had been under the tight discipline of the modern world from the moment they opened a first reader—in school, in factory, in business. And after they left school, it was a kind of voluntary discipline making, it seems to me, for higher aims in character than any kind of involuntary discipline.
In the modern world as contrasted with the ancient we all live under strict discipline, partly self-imposed. Every morning, the reader gets up and goes at a set hour to his office or shop. No bugle wakes him; no sergeant barks out the order to fall in and go to work. If he grows weary of getting up at six or seven, he has only to quit his job. He will not be shot or jailed or publicly disgraced for that, as he would if he deserted from the army. To quit the job might hurt his career, might work privation on his family—that is all. Every morning after breakfast I sit down and write. Today, there is a dog-show in town. I want very much to go. I am not going, because I have too much work to do. So I hold myself to writing—voluntarily. Now both the reader and I are doing a thing, it seems to me, better for our mortal fibre than as though the bugle blew us out of bed and the sergeant, backed by the whole force of the United States government, ordered us to work. It is self-discipline, self-control, as contrasted with external discipline, external control. The modern world requires always more and more of this kind of discipline. That is one reason for the unexpected hardness and valor of all European and American troops in the late war—forty years of the discipline of peace.
The Germans showed the way to the perfect “psychological preparation.” Its main object, though not its sole one, is perfectly to overcome the natural fear of death. The Italian peasants of the ancient Roman army, it is said, fought so valiantly partly because the men feared their officers more than they did the enemy. We have found another and more scientific way—the power of habit. Take a man and accustom him to obedience, instant and unquestioned, in every act of his life. To obey becomes in time a fixed habit, almost an obsession. The moment arrives when he must obey the whistle or the officer’s command, and advance to probable death. Personal pride, fear of the disgraceful consequences in refusal, love of country, even sense of adventure, urge him forward of course; just as the natural shrinking from pain and death hold him back. But the governing factor in the perfect soldier is the ingrained habit of instant, unquestioning obedience. He goes because his very nervous reflexes tell him that he must.
I cannot find that in the old days of chivalrous warfare conscious hate played much part in the training of a soldier. The ideal—imperfectly felt and realized, but still an ideal—was the generous, adventurous warrior who hated his enemy perhaps, but who spared him, too. “Brave as a lion, gentle as a woman,” The Germans showed that there was a more useful method. “The best soldier is a bit of a brute,” they said. In our military schools, we have always forbidden hazing. The German military schools encouraged it, in forms more gross than any of our youth imagined. That was done to cultivate the required touch of brutality. In the close race for victory of the last war, we all had to follow. Uninstructed civilians, visiting the American, French and British training-camps, wondered at the time given to bayonet practice. They knew that the bayonet was rarely used in action. Why so much stress upon it? Any sergeant could explain that. It was a means of cultivating hate, of making your soldier a bit of a brute. That dummy at which you were thrusting—the instructor encouraged you to imagine him a German, to curse him, to work up a savage delight in mutilating him. It was a part of the higher psychology of modern war.
There was propaganda, too—and here I must condense a theme for a whole book. This was one of the human forces existing before the great war, which the war reduced to its scientific terms; made tremendously usable. It was, really, our contribution. The American science of advertising had shown by what means an idea may best be implanted in the greatest number of people. With all the press under control, the European Boards of Morale and Bureaus of Propaganda proceeded with conscious purpose to put into every people a mob-instinct of hatred for the enemy, man, woman and child, Since everyone who has a pair of working hands is useful to the purposes of a modern war, the hate-propaganda was aimed at the civilians as well as the soldiers. But “keeping up morale” in the army was the main object. Generating hate in the civilian population made toward that end. If the soldier on leave heard from his women, his father and his uncles that the enemy were all a set of ruffians, a race which had nothing in common with the human race, it made him a better hater when he returned to the line. Half-truth was the best tool of this propaganda; but, war being the negation of all ordinary morality, the propagandists did not gag at lies. For a familiar example, there is the story about the Germans cutting off children’s hands in Belgium. It was not true. I repeat that I was in Belgium during the first month of the war; that there were German atrocities, some of which I witnessed—atrocities committed by order, for the strategic purposes of the General Staff—but that no case of the kind I mention was ever fully proved. Nevertheless it was a popular war-rumor in the beginning; it had all the qualities which make a story “go.” It was taken up by the propagandists, spread as a means of lashing up hate by men who knew better; so firmly fixed in the public mind that I myself have but lately been called “pro-German” for denying it. In fairness, I may add that they lied more grossly in Germany, especially when the case grew desperate. There, cutting off women’s breasts was the favorite nightmare tale.
This hate-propaganda failed a little of its main purposes. The soldier swallowed it less avidly than the civilian population. If you wanted a tolerant view of the enemy, you were most likely to get it from a soldier sitting in a dugout under fire, his gas-mask at the alert. If you wanted to hear that the enemy was a creature not quite human, but a species of gorilla which should be exterminated to the last baby, you must go to some comfortable home in Paris or London—or equally I suppose in Berlin. Indeed, whole elements in the European armies quietly closed their minds to this form of propaganda. British officers of the old school, for example, tried to maintain the tradition of the warrior chivalrous even in his thoughts. It was a conventionality of most British headquarters messes not to speak ill of the enemy. If the civilian visitor introduced the “hate-stuff” into the conversation, he was answered by polite denials or by frigid silence.
All this must be changed in the next war. You must focus your hatred where it is most useful and needed—in the soldiers at the front. And we are studying to change it. The propagandists and boards of morale are working and experimenting like the chemists—coolly reviewing the methods and mistakes of the last war, finding new methods without mistakes.
Has the involuntary discipline of armies much to do with the voluntary discipline of peace? The aftermath of the late war goes to prove that the relation is a little remote. I know hundreds of young men—British, French, Belgian, Italian, American—whom the war seemed to have spoiled at least temporarily for civilian pursuits. Accustomed to be disciplined by others, they seemed to have lost the habit of disciplining themselves. They found it difficult, almost impossible, to make themselves go to work at regular hours, stick to any one job or any practical object very long at a time. This psychological aftermath of the war we all know, I think. You might lay it all to the actual war—its stresses and excitements, its alternate tense action and idleness—were it not that we find the same state of mind in young Americans who were mobilized in the draft, had their year and a half of army training, and never got abroad. It was hard to “settle down”; which means that it was hard to change from imposed discipline to self-discipline, from the regularity of army life to the fast, irregular competition of civilian life.
The world over, we found that the hate-propaganda, the conscious effort to make the soldier “a bit of a brute” had long effects. Everywhere were “crime waves”—highway robbery, burglary, sudden murders of passion. Ours was perhaps the lightest of all. The police records of Berlin in 1919 read like annals of the old days of Jack Sheppard. The Belgian police were forced, for the first time since Barons ruled in Flanders, to fight organized gangs of bandits. England boasted in old years a low murder rate; and her courts had a swift and certain way of hanging for murder without regard to wealth or social rank. “The unwritten law” did not exist for British juries. Just after the war, England experienced a series of “murders of passion,” by ex-soldiers and ex-officers; and British juries acquitted the murderers as lightly as once did Latin judges. How much of this mentality back of these crime-waves sprang from actual experience at the Front and how much from the education in brutality of the new military training, no one of course can say. Doubtless both influences bore on this crime wave.
Here in America and abroad, there are plans afoot for knitting army training a little more closely into civilian life. Experts on physical culture have testified that drill and setting-up exercises, as hitherto practiced by armies, give an imperfect and one-sided physical development. It is proposed to revise army physical training on modern lines. It is proposed, further, to teach the men, while they are in the ranks, the elements at least of useful civilian trades. These are compromises, at best designed to reduce the ultimate cost of armies to society, at worst sops to public opinion. The chief end of military training is to teach men to fight. They must be drilled, first in order to inculcate the instinct of perfect obedience and second so that large bodies of troops may be moved without confusion. They must learn to use weapons, from the trench-grenade and the rifle to the aeroplane and the tank. Most of this training, from the point of view of ordinary, peace-time industry, is wasted. One of the chief economic losses in military training is the time and energy it takes from the most teachable years of best young men. It will be “war by machinery” in future; and those told off for the higher functions of war—such as tanks, aeroplanes and gas—will get, it is true, a certain training in mechanics and chemistry. But in just as much as these devices differ from the devices of peace, in just so much will the training be wasted, socially and economically.