THE CHILD AND THE WAR.
WHEN peace comes there will be many children who have no clear recollection of anything before the war. In after years, when they turn back—as we all turn—to scrutinize their memories, they will see a red dawn, and recognize their earliest selves in the light of a stormy morning. To them, as children, the signs of tempest portended nothing—they rejoiced in the crimson light.
What is the war to a child to-day ? To one to whom it has not meant the loss of his nearest and dearest it is simply a pageant of the imagination. His day-dreams are illumined by it. The "confused noise," "wars rattle," "garments rolled in blood," and " the groans of the dying " he may have heard of in his Bible or his poetry-Look, but they are outside the picture as he conceives it. Unless the screen which so mercifully divides the child's mind from actual facts is suddenly pierced by the realization of death, unless a terrible message makes known to him what it is to miss some one whom he wants above all things and to feel that he will always miss him, war is simply the fulfilment of his fancies. He does not want to get away from the thought of it as his elders do ; he knows nothing of the wild recurrent wish which comes to them to bar it out of their minds. He could not forget it if he did wish. Even if ho lives where he sees no marching, even if his elders restrain their speech before him, it is brought home to him at every mealtime. His food has become a constant symbol of sacrifice. It is a symbol only, for he has so far plenty to eat, but he is always hearing and believing that he must give up something. Perhaps he only dimly remembers when sugar was not scarce—its absence may be but a ceremonial deprivation to him, but he hears deprivation talked of, and is proud to feel himself deprived. At heart all children have something in them of the savage, and even under the most civilized conditions that something shows. The time-honoured game of battle, the game which boys seem born to play, is now more absorbing than over. The make-believe is easier now that the world is peopled with men in uniform, and the delight savours of duty. There is some- thing of ritual in the ancestral game, and primitive man thirsts for ritual, for fighting, and for the semblance at least of sacrifice— but it must be sacrifice on the altar of glory. Of the highest kind of sacrifice—of open-eyed self-immolation—a child, in the nature of things, can know nothing.
The thought of his country's defeat is a thought impossible to a child. Those who are in the right most win. Goodness always succeeds. All his experience tells him this, and the better brought up he is the more is this fallacious certainty bums in upon him. At the root of it lies the fact that only a cruelly ill-used child can make the distinction between right and might. Are not both always upon the side of his parents ? When he does wrong he is rebelling, he knows, against both right and might, and he is always worsted in the cad, even if in the beginning he has seemed to suoceed. In the long last he knows where victory must be, and even if he be "given in to" he knows that the "giving in to " is an act of grace and as much a sign of aright as leas gracious forms of authority. The moral outlook to a child is simply a vision of God against the wicked, those feeble wicked whose day is so short and whose dumbfounding, by one method or another, so sure.
To him, then, the conflict which now touches his life at every turn in one into which he can throw his whole being, his dramatic imagination, his power of self-abnegation, his high spirits, his justice.loring conscience—his all He does not throw it in hope, but in faith, or more truly in knowledge. His vague, false, childish conception of history, his nursery-picture of crusaders and armadas, Royalists and Roundheads, knights and dragons, aeroplanes and big guns, has come to life. These splendid toys, these tin soldiers who slaughter or, in chivalry, spare the amazed and black- hearted enemy, are more real than the people next door. Tlie wicked fly ever before their face, and the child, like Jehovah of the Jews, laughs them to scorn and has them in derision. Of course there are thrilling moments when they seem about to turn, when the daring opponents of might and right seem for an instant to be working their will. He has known such moments himself, and he remembers without resentment or questioning how transient was his joy. A few well-understood reserves are necessary to the dramatic incidents of his little play ; but even the baby herself must not be left in ignorance of their nature. They can come to nothing. As well may she kick the nurse.
But if children are born disciplinarians—and in a sense they are born militarists—they are also logical. The command to love his enemies gives the modern child occasional pause. " What does it mean, that part of ` the reading' in church ? " lie asks. Probably in the First Lesson or the Psalms he may find a city of refuge for his soul, or perhaps, if he confides in his mother, she will explain to him that it is the nursery-maid or his oldest little cousin, not the enemies of his country, for whom the Scripture demands his forbearance. Most probably he will cast aside both ideals as impossible and go on with his dream of war and joy. He has not awakened, he has only turned over. Nevertheless, the thought of "the reading" may recur. The following is a true story. " Could we not have made a plan instead of making war ? " said a little boy of six years old who had been constantly exhorted to resort to maternal arbitration instead of using his fists, and instructor! in the practical side of religion. It was explained to him that "a plan" would never have bean accepted by the enemy, would have been, in this case, impossible. " Would it have been impossible if we had had God in ? " he asked. No doubt the scruple was soon at rest.
We do not think that raids seem to children as part of war. They are undoubtedly frightened by them. It is alarming to be dragged to the cellar at night, and very dull and disagreeable to have to sit there in the day. There lb no glamour about a few bangs or a cloud of gnats—and fearful stories whispered by the maids. The incident helps, perhaps, in the everlasting play when other incidents are for the moment stale. All the same, they do not hope for raids when they go to bed at night or hear their mothers forbidding too long a wander in the daytime. The drama, however, may be to most children worth an occasional fright. It does not wake the boy from the war dream—the only thing that can do that is bad news for himself and his mother. Suppose his father is killed—and suppose that he is also his hero— then the dream disperses. It fades before one of two sensations. A deep sense of revenge may come to him, a knowledge of what the Avenger in man has felt from all time. It is born of the human justice and the animal instinct of retaliation which have met together in his loving yet savage little heart. If he is old enough to feel deep sorrow—that is, to realize, not the horror of death, which is physical, but the sense of missing,in its highest degree, which is of the soul, though not, we hope, eternal—then he will never be a child again, and war, however he comes to regard it, if he lives to be a General, an Archbishop, or a conscientious objector, will always be war. But the experience may take him differently. He may have no sense of revenge. Whether he has or no is largely a temperamental question. The sword in his own heart may reveal to him that sorrow is not a thing confined to himself, or even to those whom he loves, or even those whom he approves. It is the great black cloud of which no skies are clear, which threatens the just and the unjust, and obscures the division which once seemed so clear between them. Sick at heart, he looks back upon his dream, which decomposes, and cannot recompose because he stands now in broad daylight, face to face with the actuaL
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