THE OPERA-BOX FEELING IN REGARD TO WAR.
IT would be hypocrisy to deny that thousands of men—yes, and women too—feel at this moment as if they were sitting in an opera-box at a great theatre waiting for the curtain to rise on the most exciting of dramas. For the mass of mankind the war will be purely a stage war,—a great and yet terribly exciting pageant which they will watch through their newspapers as they watch the land beyond the foot-lights. The bloodier the battles, the more desperate the attack and the resistance, the longer the agony is prolonged, the more their blood will be stirred and their interest quickened. The Duke of Wellington declared that the people of England liked a big butcher's bill, and he was not far from the truth we expect. This does not mean, of course, that the people of this country now, or at any other time, actually wanted to hear of their friends or their enemies being destroyed. It merely means that they like the excite- ment of war on the great scale, and that therefore a bloodless or comparatively bloodless action seems to them a tame and dull ai'air, and so not worth troubling about. The Duke of Welling- ton, like all good soldiers, was of course delighted if he could drive the French from a position without the loss of a single man and by the exercise of pure strategy. Such a movement would of course appear to him far better than bayonet charges, or artillery mowing men down in swathes, but he knew that the public measured success by, or, at any rate, were only interested in, the great and bloody combats. As we have said, it is the same to-day. Though it would be difficult, nay, impossible, to find any one to acknowledge it openly, the British public is looking forward from the security of the grand tier to a fierce and exciting struggle.
We do not profess to be better than our neighbours, and we do not for a moment suggest that the conductors of this newspaper are superior to the common feeling. But though we do not attempt to disguise the fact that it is very difficult not to be stirred by the thought of the events which we are about to witness, we cannot but recognise that war thus looked at from the opera-box is extremely demoralising,—as demoralising as those Spanish bull-fights to whose influence the world, rightly as we think, attributes so much of the callousness which marks the Spanish character. When a man's own country is involved, and when the wives and sisters, the fathers and the brothers, of the soldiers are watching the combatants, this demoralisation does not take place, or, if it does, it is largely swallowed up in the nobler and stronger emotions called forth. The sense of patriotism and the personal feeling take away the opera-box sense of war. When one's own country is at war one feels, and Is, a partici- pator in the struggle. It is the difference between playing, however humble a part, in a football or cricket match, and merely looking idly on and betting on the result. But in this war, though we should be the last to talk as if the Americans were combatants as to whose fate we were indifferent—they are not foreigners, but our own flesh and blood—the British nation will not be taking any part. They will be mere spectators with a strong feeling for their own relations. But this will not tend towards improving matters. It will only render the excitement more intense. We shall be in the position of the father who watches his grown-up son giving a thrashing to a man with whom he has had a quarrel about the ill-using of a child. The spectacle of the father strolling round with his hands in his pockets watching the fun and cheering all the knock-out blows, is not a very pleasant one to contemplate. The fact is, war waged between one-half of the Anglo-Saxon race and another Power is too much of a war with limited liability to be quite wholesome. The antiseptic of war is the suffering and the self-sacrifice,—"the punishment." The excitement of war without this sobering influence is not good for mankind. We admit that to make such a state- ment as this seems somewhat futile, for we have nothing very definite to suggest as a set-off to the demoralising effects of the great gladiatorial show by sea and land which we are about to witness. We do not suppose for a moment that any one will refuse to read the war telegrams for fear of being demoralised. Of course we shall all read them, and with the greatest possible avidity. There is, however, one thing which People can and should do. They should try to impress upon themselves that they are not witnessing a stage play, but that it is real and deadly earnest.
We must not let our readers suppose from what we have said above that we are to be reckoned among those who hold that war is the worst thing in the world. We are not of that opinion, but hold instead that the effects of war on a nation may be good as well as bad. People sometimes talk as if the alternative to war were an ideal condition where men were perfectly virtuous and perfectly happy. In truth, war very often leaves the morals of a country very much where they were before. No doubt if a country suffers great priva- tions, as Paris suffered during the Siege and the Commune, its moral force, its ethos, is broken up, and its inhabitants become immeasurably worse for the war. War is before all things a wasting, devouring force, and men and women are not made better, but worse, by being ruined and reduced to misery and starvation. The breaking up of homes, and of the relations and " charities " that hold society together and control human action, demoralises mankind above all things. Does any one suppose that the civil populaton of Cuba is the better for having been bunted out of its homes and herded together in the towns to die of famine and disease ? The majority of the survivors are, depend upon it, infinitely worse men now than they were a year ago. But though war may often have such horrible consequences on the population affected, war also sometimes improves men. We do not doubt that the men of the four British regiments now in Egypt are the better, not the worse, for what they have seen of the grim realities of war. The self-restraint, the discipline, the courage to endure which they have been obliged to practise during the cam- paign, and the action in which they were engaged, have, we may be certain, improved them greatly. Such grim work as they have had to do has not brutalised them, but instead has given them a sense of the sternness and reality of life which they would never have got in barracks, in loafing round public-houses,—or indeed in playing draughts in a mechanics' institute. Let our readers think of the officers they know who have been on active service, and compare them with men of their acquaintance, civil or military, who have never been through a campaign, and ask themselves whether they can truth- fully say that the officers who have fought are not as worthy of respect and regard as the men who have never seen a shot fired in anger. What is true of the officers is true of the men. Soldiers are not demoralised by war,—unless, of course, they are commanded by some unscrupulous man who de- liberately encourages his troops to turn themselves into brigands. But in modern warfare such Generals do not come to the top, at any rate in England. War, then, even if it is wasteful of life and treasure, is not demoralising to those who fight, especially when it is fought in a desert, or, as Waterloo was fought, in a friendly country. Bnt, alas ! war is oftenest not fought in a desert, but in the country of one of the combatants ; and then, as we have said above, the moral effects must be of the most terrible kind. It is not the loss of life in war that does the harm, but the misery caused by the breaking up of human society. Yet we could hardly wish to see this evil done away with altogether, and battles fought with such care of the interests of non-combatants that they did not suffer. That would make war too easy, and so too tempting. The horrors of war act as a cheek on the appeal to arms. Bat if war is not so great an evil as people sometimes imagine it, we doubt whether it is ever the good which poets like Wordsworth and Tennyson have imagined it to be. When the poets talk of the " long, long canker of peace," they mean a state of society which is very likely anything but sound, but it is not a state of things which war cures. War, in fact, is an evil,—sometimes a neces- sary evil, often pure evil. That mankind will, however, agree to dispense with its arbitrament we cannot believe,—unless and until some one Power obtains universal empire. Then, as under the Antonines, war may cease for a time and the ground be prepared for an inroad of the barbarians who are always waiting to triumph over the peoples who have forgotten how to defend themselves. Look at the state of China to-day. That is the result of letting half a continent lie lapped for three centuries in a soulless peace. It would be better for China to lose a million of her children than for them to be what they are,—men who will not fight even from patriotism, and have not even the capacity of being interested, in war.
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