WAS IT LUNACY?

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 230, 28 September 1935, Page 18

WAS IT LUNACY?

THE GREAT WAR.

TOO SOON TO TURN RABBIT.

AUGUST, 1914, RECALLED,

(By AN OLD STAGER.)

LONDON, August 10

In more senses than one the Great War came of ago this week. It is now 21 years since that recondite August the Fourth, 1914, when Germany launched lier legions, and a dazed and dismayed world sprang to hesitant arms. In recalling this truly red letter day of history a curious mental phenomenon may bo observed. Looking back over the lean and dreary stretch of existence since that date, it seems much longer than 21 years ago. Yet, in the still vivid memories of the actual adventure it seems not nearly so long.

Men who were young on August 4, 1014, are now rather more than, middleaged. Men who then were middle-aged are now veterans in the civilian as well as the military sense. Even the youngest 18-year-old recruit of August, 1014, is to-day within a year of forty. Yet Time, tho great healer, has not healed all tho wounds of the Great War. There are still hundreds of thousands of maimed and suffering men, millions of mourners, and a political and economic wreckage that it will take civilisation —even with fairer fortune than at the moment appears likely to bo encountered—perhaps half a century to clean up. It is small wonder, then, that the post-war generation look 3 back on August 4, 10.14, with an ever-increasing demand of cui I bono?

The British people particularly, never a militarist one, is to-day fervently pacifist in its outlook and aspiration. So much so, indeed, that there is a marked tendency on the part of many of us, and especially the younger generation, to pass a wholly mistaken and dismally ignorant verdict on tlie Great War. They regard it, not as an epic of historic heroism, but as a hysterical interlude of sheer lunacy. They see those agonised years from 1914 to 1918 merely as a senseless and even wicked debauch of puerile patriotism and semisenile ambition; as a demented period during which cynical and intriguing elderly statesmen caused muddle-headed humanity to herd like driven sheep to the inhuman slaughter. It is on the broad foundations of this estimate of what happened 21 years ago that the new spirit of internationalism has been built; and to it may be attributed that strange youthful mentality which proudly denies all patriotic fervour.

Apportioning the Blame. Viewed as the Sphinx, blind witness of immortal centuries, might look upon the episodes of a world's unrest, the Great War was undoubtedly part of the larger lunacy. It was a madness by which a moiety of mankind endured horrors of self-inflicted suffering, misery and ruin. As seen from the summit of Mount Everest, by some Martian tourist of the universe quite unacquainted with the intimate details of events on this globe, it must have .p.eeined,,^,3,.unintelligible and chaotic aS to some unseien tific, observer wouldf the inter necine death struggles of "colonies o ants. But that was'not how it appealec to those who found themselves drawi into its deadly, inevitable coils. Oi August 4, 1914, the world was not mas ter of its fate. History presented ii point-blank as a fait accompli. Not th< most brilliantly inspired or conscien tiously devoted statesmanship coulc have undone the tangled skein of ageold European history. To blame th( leadership or the people of 1914 for th< August the Fourth cataclysm would b< as sensible as to censure the villa"! idiot for his ancestry. 0 The situation that confronted us al in 1914 was a slow heritage through th< medieval ages from the Stone Age. Was France to allow the German field-grej hosts to overrun her peaceful provinces •without so much as a gesture of defence? Were we to stand quietly bj rn? lls ° U1 " nei gM>oiir was obliterated; 1 lie German army, the mightiest instrn ment of violent history ever forged, anc the German weltpolitik, whoso ambi tions controlled it, were not debatabl* theories, capable of refutation; thei were grim, hard facts. Perfervid voum pacifists retort that, if France anc Britain had refused to fight, and Ger many had been permitted to run amol as she desired, there could have been n< Great War, ancl conditions of humai existence would have been not mori appreciably uncomfortable than are. Nazi Germany, which is the Ger °/ 3914 reincarnated largely be in oth P °r o 7*™ -° f post " war P'lcifisn ( is tbe most effect™ wer to that jejune assumption. Thi Fu° P ln who „ ar !r Rudest in denouncin. the lunacy of 1914 are precisely thos' 7°. u]d most unendurable th< degradation of the Nazi regime. J-Jiis is not a mere academic ones tion, even after the lapse of twenty one years. Can we permit a deplorabP •distoited and wholly uninformed an< ?" S fl \ aken Pacifism of 1935 to brand n: lunatics, or even as driven sheep, tin . comrades whose graves testify nia Y f ? rei "" n ° lds thef, devoted and patriotic sense of duty Why are those who helped to stem tin reactionary Teutonic avalanche in 191. any more idiotic—or less worthy of din honour—than those gallant ancestor! ~ re P e lled the Armada four centuries earlier, and saved this island fron becoming a vassal of Spain? Becausi those unforgettable recruiting queues that lined up after August the Fourth 1914, did so with gallant enthusiasm and not with blanched faces and haggarc eyes, does any sane soul imagine thej thought a war with Germany was goiiK to be a jolly picnic? And what of those other recruits, middle-aged men wh'< vero at first over military age, win

enlisted just as gallantly ill 1915°cir 1910, when the cpic of the Sonime holocaust was being enacted?

The Case For Freedom. Nobody is more genuinely pacifist, "■ore wholeheartedly opposed to fiiilithnl" 1 i a , nc !. w ? r ' tllan lho survivors of those khaki battalions of twenty-one jeais ago. They have every possible common sense reason to bo sincere in look' Th VS a i Kl intclli * cnt in their outlook. They know how hideous is the naked .mage of Mars, viewed close up how revolting the tilth and the lice; how prostrating the endless fatigues, the broken sleep, the bitter exposure to cold and damp, and the deadly, exasperating military regime. But when they'behold to-day how things are tending'in some European countries, and most notably ii Germany, few of them, I, think, will b< so craven as to declare that the ordea was not worth while. Not those, at any rate, who have reac an authentic account of what happens ir the Nazi concentration camps. Freedon

is riot, <ns some of our superior feministminded young men of the post-war epoch seem to fancy, a mere glittering, hollow word. Throughout the ages: there have been men who deemed everything well lost, so long as Freedom was well won. When this country ceases to breed men who inherit that sea-girt tradition, our history will be nearing its inglorious and sordid end.

A favourite sneer, nowadays, is concentrated on the apparent futility of those who fought "the war to end war.""; Who are these omniscient '"highbrow's" who venture to assume that those who sacrificed themselves on the altar of authentic pacifism in 1014 did not in any reality achieve their purpose? It niay not be any more possible even in a ferro-concrete age to build Home in a day than it was in the marbled past. Only a cocksure post-war egoist—second cousin, surely, to the village idiot — would expect to undo in a couple of decades the inherited historical tradition of two thousand years. Great were the horrors and tragic the losses of the evolutionary war-to-end-war; but it has already shaken the world out of some of its ingrained complaccncy. There is a League of Nations; and, though it may not function so omnipotently as impetuous youth ordains or dreams, who shall say what its ultimate potentiality may be?

Ono fact is incontrovertible. Never before in the piteous history of this too well-blooded world has a genuine urge of pacifism been so hopefully widespread amongst many different peoples. Oiljy an international minority of reactionary States, anachronistic cavemen, tlirow-baeks to the ruthless epochs, now impede the wheels of progressive disarmament. August the Fourth, 1914, may yet prove a mighty fulcrum in human salvation. History may yet, in spite of everything, date the Peace Millennium from that red reveille. But; in any ease the fervent blue-eyed pacifists of to-day owe an immortal debt to the men of 1014, who did not shirk the realistic cold-drawn facts of August the Fourth. Better, my son, to have donned a steel helmet in the Great War than to have lived to take degrading orders from a Nazi camp overseer. While there are still tigers roaming the jungle, it is too soon for the lion to turn rabbit.