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The Silent Division: New Zealanders at the Front, 1914-1919

Appendix

page 317

Appendix

Few serious thinkers to-day would endeavour to justify the World War. It was beyond reasonable doubt the major insanity and the most profoundly immoral act of our time. St James says with extraordinary aptness: "Each man is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed. Then the lust, when it hath conceived, beareth sin: and the sin, when it is fullgrown, bringeth forth death." War springs from the lusts of men, from the insistence of nations at all costs to seek satisfaction for their own desires at the expense of their neighbours. The peoples of old Europe had over a period of some fifty years built up a complex of conflicting desires that could in the long run result only in catastrophe. In 1870 German unity had been attained largely as a result of a victorious war against France and she was afraid of a French war of revenge. She feared the growing friendship of France with Russia. She was jealous of the sea power of Great Britain, and she desired greatly to obtain more colonies so that she might find markets for her growing industries. There were those in Germany, too, who thought imperially, and in the floodtide of their strength dreamed of the conquest of the world for the sake of glory and Deutschland! Deutschland über alles! In France they were afraid of Germany. Patriotic feelings had been outraged by the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War. If it could be hopefully attempted many Frenchmen desired a war of revenge and the extension of French borders towards the Rhine. Great Britain was afraid of the growing sea power of Germany. For a hundred years, and these the years of her great prosperity, she had without challenge been supreme on the page 320seas. This supremacy was looked upon as a God-given right, and it was held as an axiom that a war with any challenging power was a righteous one. The British were jealous also of the commercial expansion of Germany, and afraid that the industrial growth of her rival would squeeze her from potential markets. She had her grasp firmly on the sceptre of the world and would yield to no other. In the east of Europe there was another tangle of fears, hatreds and greed.

All the European countries were determined to enforce their desires even if the act of enforcement should involve the violation or the overthrow of any who stood in the way. They all desired peace providing that they could secure their ends by peaceful means but if not they were all prepared to fight. So the Germans organized a marvellous army because they were expecting to fight on two fronts and at the same time built a strong navy to challenge the supremacy of the seas. The French trained every man to arms, girdled their frontiers with powerful fortifications and made powerful alliances. The British true to the ancient policy that had won so many wars had by far the greatest navy in the world. In 1914 the inevitable happened and Europe broke out into a flame of war. In every country men rallied to the colours with enthusiasm and genuine passion.

Now this rally was not in the least surprising. A spirit of self-centred and selfish nationalism was very strong in Europe. As a result of the process of history each national unit had become self-conscious and unified within itself. The nation—the fatherland—was the largest and most important organization that man knew. It had a visible corporate life. Men felt themselves to be bone of its bone, flesh of its flesh. From infancy they had sung its songs—the "Watch on the Rhine," the "Marseillaise," "Rule Britannia." Their history books were the stories of their countries' wars. German boys read of the campaigns of Frederick the Great. French boys marched with Napoleon through all the capitals of Europe. English boys thrilled at the stories of Drake and Clive page 321and Wolfe and their conception of loyalty took final shape from Nelson's Trafalgar signal. Probably never in history did so many boys grow to manhood in the faith that a man's highest duty and greatest privilege was to die for his country in battle. Among the British this conception was to find expression in very splendid poetry during the war.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.

sings Rupert Brooke as the youth of England rushed to arms.

All that a man might ask, thou hast given me, England.
Yet grant me one thing more,
That now when envious foes would spoil thy splendour,
Unversed in arms, a dreamer such as I
May in thy ranks be not unworthy,
England, for thee to die.

says another. And in the last year Sir Cecil Spring Rice a month before his death wrote:

I vow to thee, my country—all earthly things above—
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love,
The love that asks no questions: the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best,
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price.
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

We who belonged to the British race had grown up at a time when Kitchener and Roberts were the public idols. The occupation of Egypt, the conquest of the Sudan, the smashing of the Boxer Rising, and the Boer War were the great events of our childhood. The righteousness of these conquests had scarcely been discussed. Britain of course was always right. The Mahdi's men had killed Gordon; the Boxers had murdered missionaries; the Boers were said to have treated the Kaffirs very cruelly. There was always a sufficient cause of war. Somehow Britain seemed always to have been right and presumably always would be.

page 322

All of us—Germans, French and British—learned before the war to think of international affairs from the point of view of narrow self-centred nationalism. There was, on a large scale, no other loyalty open to men. Communism was of course fermenting beneath the surface; but even good British and German socialists were after all in the main nationalists first and internationalists second. The majority sections of the Labour parties everywhere supported the war—although with somewhat guilty consciences. Then there was the Christian Church which in theory should have been a united body and truly international and which should have stood for a world brotherhood that would have made a world war impossible. Everywhere however the Churches, hopelessly divided by national barriers, were the obedient servants of patriotism and imperialism. The greatest debacle of the war was without question that of the Christian Church. She was subservient everywhere to the national governments. All over the world Christian ministers closed their New Testaments, preached more paganism and became the recruiting sergeants of the armies.

So a world that had been brought up to believe in war went with songs and cheering down the brimstone tracks that led to the fields of Armageddon; and so, by the way of terror, to the supreme tragedy of the Peace Conference; there to learn, by bitter experience and cruel disillusionment, that the way of war and violence achieves nothing except destruction. As Studdert-Kennedy one of the most famous of the war chaplains wrote at the end of it all—war is waste.

Waste of muscle, waste of brain,
Waste of patience, waste of pain,
Waste of manhood, waste of wealth,
Waste of beauty, waste of health,
Waste of blood, and waste of tears,
Waste of youth's most precious years,
Waste of ways the saints have trod,
Waste of glory, waste of God.

page 323

The condemnation of war lies not in the sacrifice of life, but in the fact that the sacrifice is wasted as far as the attaining of any good end is concerned. Sacrifice is the essential of all development toward higher levels of life. It is the way of the Cross. But to be availing, sacrifice must be directed into profitable channels. There can be a waste of the capacity for sacrifice just as there can be a waste of patience or wealth. The primary aim of a combatant is not to offer himself as a sacrifice but to destroy his opponent with the minimum of loss to himself. The paradox of war is that great communities endeavouring to enforce their desires against others in the most selfish manner, are, for the attainment of their ends, compelled to challenge their own peoples to most heroic acts of self-giving. The glory of war lies in the fact that masses of ordinary men are prepared to devote themselves to bloody wounds and frightful deaths for the sake of loyalties, which however mistaken, are nevertheless the highest that they know. To go to war is an evil thing, because war is destructive of brotherhood. But there is one thing even worse and that is to remain at peace for the sake of gain. A school acquaintance of the writer's remarked at the beginning of the war that he was not going to be shot at for five shillings a day. The remark was utterly ignoble, and if it had fairly reflected the mind of our people it would have stamped us as what our old Teutonic forefathers called "nithing" —the utterly contemptible.

The writer of this book how holds the Christian Pacifist position, and in the event of another war would not take up arms and fight. He believes that the great task of all men of goodwill is to abolish war and build a peaceful world. It is a mistake however as some writers of war books would seem to suggest that man can be frightened from war by accounts of the suffering of men in battle, by the description of incidental horrors, or by a totalling of the losses in life and material. In so far as any of these are introduced into this book it is with no such page 324morbid purpose but to make a background for the display of valour. There is a side to human nature and that one of the finest that demands to be matched with circumstance. The impulse that sends men on heroic voyages of discovery, on great missionary enterprises, on quests and crusades of all sorts is one of the most precious of human characteristics—it is also one of the strongest. Some hard striving that demands the sacrifice of body, mind and soul to the achievement of a great purpose is a necessity of our existence. When this instinct ceases to stir the life of a people then that people commences rapidly to be of no account. To abolish war we have got to direct the crusading spirit from negative and bloody strivings among ourselves to great and constructive ends. Are there great purposes to which we of New Zealand can devote the energies of our nationhood?

For about a hundred years we had been slowly laying, the foundations of a national character of strongly marked individuality. The incidence of the war completed and intensified the process. We emerged from the conflict a nation, and a proud one at that, with traditions of courtesy, patience, endurance, steadfastness and valour. And now conscious of our nationality with strong life stirring in our veins and a world of change before us, what are the great ends that challenge us to achievements ?

The first is the making, in fact, of "a land fit for heroes to live in." We have copied far too slavishly the worn out institutions of the Europe of the Industrial Revolution and in a country that is full of food and natural wealth of all sorts we have allowed our people to suffer to a shocking extent. Thousands of men who fought in the ranks of the N.Z.E.F. have been on relief work. Our educational system has been so gravely interfered with that it will take a generation to recover. And all this because we have not dared to break the enchanted ring of ancient custom! Within our own borders at least we can make a land of plenty in which no one will page 325lack an abundance of food, in which no child shall go without higher education because its parents are poor, and in which no man is put on to humiliating relief work while there are great constructive tasks to be done which should and could absorb the whole of our creative effort. In New Zealand we are less dependent upon the economic tides of world capitalism than are the overcrowded, highly specialized industrial countries. We could, if we would, break free and with faith in ourselves we could change the present and lay the foundations of a marvellous future.

Our second great end should be to make our proper contribution to international life. We are a small people and yet at the end of the war we had a reputation out of all proportion to our size. We have now direct representation at the League of Nations and of course at all Imperial conferences. But what have we done with these opportunities? Slavishly followed the old men of Europe who have continued to dodder along the brimstone tracks that lead to destruction!

Surely a young and virile people can do better than this? Our general standard of education is high—our human quality is perhaps not surpassed anywhere. We have the capacity for thought, we are able to take initiative and then to perform with a steadfastness of purpose mat can with patient perseverance win through a storm of difficulties. Why is it that for thirty years since the great tide of liberalism ran out that we have done no great and notable thing toward making a better country and a better world? Various reasons can be given—years of material prosperity, the terrible upheaval of the war, the difficulties of the post-war years. But now surely the time has come for another burst of national self-expression mat will lift us to higher things.

For fifteen years the men of the N.Z.E.F. have been getting married and settling down and fighting hard to get on their feet and that last wasn't easy after the four tremendous years of packed experience. During all this page 326time the old men have held the stage. But now they are going or every day appear more ineffective. The time has come for the men who dug the trenches and put out the wire, and passed the great barrages, to run New Zealand. In the years of terror men learned brotherhood. In the years ahead of us can we practise it in the making of a better country?

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