A Counsel of Peace

by Hall Caine

A Counsel of Peace

During the day which is now drawing to a close we have been treading in memory on holy ground—the memory of what happened five years ago. To each of us as we look back the gospel of the war must be according to the way we saw and felt it. Permit me, as briefly as possible, to say how I saw the war, and what doctrine I draw from it.

I spent a part of the winter of 1910 in the higher Alps, at a little hotel at the foot of a glacier and in the midst of the deep snows, a few yards from the small chalet in which Nietzsche lived out his last tragic days. One afternoon I saw in the glistening sunshine three or four sleighs ploughing their way through the deep snow ruts to the half-buried gate of our house. The sleighs contained a number of the rulers and royalties of what we then called the Central Empires. They had sleighed over from a neighboring winter resort of fashionable people, and were to go back after tea. A slight acquaintance with one of the group led to my being asked to join the party, and, going downstairs, I found them in the timbered hall before a crackling wood fire, sitting like ordinary country folk about a big pine tea table. Among other whose names afterwards became known throughout the world was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir-presumptive to the throne of Austria, a rather stolid and uninspiring person, who was understood to be hostile to England and a close friend of the German Kaiser. They seemed to be a united company; they laughed and chatted, and called each other by their Christian names. The talk was generally about winter sports, but sometimes it touched upon serious subjects. War was threatened somewhere, and it was mentioned that at that moment of peace Austria had 800,000 men under arms. The impression left on me was that to certain of the company war, if it came, would be a great gamble, a great game, in which the greatest virtue would be to be strong. I remember that amid the clatter of the cups and saucers I thought of voiceless millions whose lives lay so lightly in the hands of the little group of men and women then taking tea in the little snow covered house in the Swiss mountains.

In the early autumn of 1914 1 went home to my native island busy with my work and without much time for reading newspapers. On a bright Sunday morning at the beginning of August I drove into a neighbouring fishing town and came upon numbers of our fishermen dressed in the blue uniform of the British Naval Reserve shouting adieux: to their families and flying off in the direction of the railway station. War had broken out mobilisation, had begun during the night and they were hastening to join their ships. It was like a thunderclap out of a clear sky. Hardly anybody knew what had happened. But the Archduke Ferdinand had been assassinated in Serbia the Austrian Emperor had decided that the crime was a menace to his Royal house; the German Emperor for his own reasons had agreed with him, and together they had willed it that the murder of that one Austrian gentleman. must be avenged even if all Europe had to be deluged in blood. We of the Western nations had thought it all a plot—a monstrous plot against liberty and justice which must be stopped, or civilisation would be lost. Within three days three-quarters or Europe were at war.

November 11, 1918.

Four years later the war came to an end. Ten millions had fallen. As many more had been maimed blinded, and broken in nerve and brain. Kings and Kaisers had been hurled from their thrones. Not one of the group of rulers I had seen in the Swiss mountains remained. History is the story of war, and war is the story of the cruelty and barbarity with which the children of men behave towards each other; but this had been a war of indescribable horrors. Not a war of armies against armies, as war was of old but of nation against nation, and of guns and bombs against, open towns and innocent women and children. The air had been invaded by powers more deadly than the lightning and the sea by forces more fatal than the storm. At length Justice had called America over the ocean to help the Allies: together they had conquered and the enemy were supplicating for peace. And then came Armistice Day. How well we remember it! Some of us had not slept the night before. Through the darkness there was the hush and silence as of a great cathedral over land and sea. The world was on tip toe waiting for the word that meant either peace or war to extermination. When it came in the morning and was flashed in a moment to the ends of the earth it was like a flash from the unrisen sun. What a storm of emotion! What frantic relief and joy! We can hear them still—the church bells, the guns the sirens. We can see them even yet—the processions in the parks, and the strangers shaking hands and even kissing in the streets. To us the Allied nation it was a day of rejoicing, of thanksgiving, and, as we believed of divine and unfailing promise. There would be no more war. The shadow of the sword which had been hanging over ourselves should never darken the sleep of our children. Tyranny had fallen despotism was dead; the world was free.

And now we have reached the fifth anniversary of Armistice Day unable to go to that long cemetery of wooded crosses, which stretches from the Alps to the sea, we have gathered, all over the country, about the symbols of the burial places of our dead, for prayer and consolation. In doing that we have done well. Somewhere and somehow, in the mysterious ways of Providence, our sacrifices will have their reward. But has our hope of a better world been fulfilled? What do we see? Europe is in chaos. One of its empires, the one that began the war, has been almost wiped off the map. Another is at this moment struggling with anarchy. A third has been swept by famine and disease. Our own country may have laid down its arms, but it is now fighting a deadlier enemy than Germany—poverty and want. A million and a quarter of our people are unemployed and living on the charity of the State; nearly 4,000,000 are badly housed, or not housed at all. We try to reconcile ourselves to our condition by thinking how much worse it might have been if we had been beaten in the war, but what is it to be the victors if our victory is as dust and ashes? War itself is not dead. There are now a million and a half more men under arms than ever before in times of peace.

Mankind's Supreme Interest.

What then? Where lies the remedy both for friend and foe, for conquered and conqueror? In Parliaments, in Cabinets, in chancelleries, in conferences? No—for these are at best only the representatives of ourselves; but in our own souls and on our knees before the Lord of Hosts. At God's feet there is neither hatred nor jealousy. There is only mercy and forgiveness. God's law is love, and He has no other law. If this is a day of thanksgiving, is it not a day of repentance also? What, then, is the gospel of war The gospel of war is that war has failed as a judge of human conduct; that it is not (as Edmund Burke said) the last appeal court of Providence; that the conscience of humanity repudiates it; that there is no safety under the soldiers' sword: that the supreme interest of mankind his this hour of the world's peril is peace, and that the further militarisation of the world must cease. There will be people enough to tell us that we cannot oppose sentiment to machine guns; and that it will be time enough to disarm when other nations are disarming. What foolishness! History shows that on the battlefield itself moral strength compared with physical force has always been as four to one, and the faith that holds humanity together is that justice always triumphs over violence. Empires founded on force pass away; the one thing solid and enduring is the human soul. What it wills to do can always be done.

Statesmen tell us that if the world is to be saved, the remedy for its ills must be applied now; that it is perishing and cannot wait. Well, the remedy is here—in the human soul, the individual soul, your soul, mine, the mightiest thing in the world. Let there be no more vengeance and no more race hatred. On this fifth anniversary of Armistice Day, let us resolve on peace, and peace will come. Is it not that for which the millions of our dead fought and died? The ruling classes may have fought for power, for territory, for a little earth, but the common soldiers fought for peace. And if they are with us to-night, in the darkness over land and sea, they are speaking that word into our hearts now, as the message of hope that will lighten the burden of the troubled world.

A final word a personal one. My unseen friends, in offering this counsel of peace, I have remembered in all humility that it has not fallen to me to suffer the bereavements for which so many of you are still watering your pillows with your tears. But I am an old man now: I have fulfilled the allotted span of man's life, and nearly all else that life has to give and take I have gone through. And with the pity of the present condition of the world heavy upon me its hatreds and jealousies and their cruel consequences—and with fear for its future, not for me, but for those who must live after me, including my own, perhaps it may be permitted to my years to say that of all the words yet spoke to the soul of man, the tenderest, the wisest and the noblest were these: "Little children, love one another."