56 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
stun ; where you positively felt the agony of the biting shells as they tore their way into the flesh, the crunching of the bones under the wheels of the artillery, the shrieks and yells of stricken men and terrified horses, the glare of relentless hate in the eyes of those who stabbed at wounded men on the ground — wounded men who, writhing in the pangs of death, had spent their last gasp of ebbing strength in a treacherous shot into the back of the foe. There it all was, a scene of fierce madness, in which men seemed to have drunk of some hell-broth and become frenzied with the cruelty of fiends. Ah ! to think that that should be the last sight of mother-earth which the memories of dying men should bear away with them into the far world beyond death ! To think of the sdnh, flung hot from this savage roar or rage straight into the eternal silence, straight before the awful judgment throne of God ! And then outside, as you passed into the pleasant Cologne gardens, there sat in crowds the soldiers of Germany — the very men who had maddened in that horrible fray — quietly taking their ease in the sun, sub- dued and gentle ; men with friendly faces and kindly eyes, strolling under the trees, and watching the merry children dance and play, surrendered to the sweet homeliness of household peace. And, as you looked at them, it seemed absolutely impossible to put the two contrasted scenes together. There was nothing in these men to suggest that it was conceivable that they actually could have ever been hotly engaged in deeds so barbarous and so bloody ; that within them somewhere lay latent the fires that could blaze out in such frenzied violence, in the lust of slaughter, in the reckless ferocity of killing and being killed.^
II.
The Moral Value of War.
Such is war itself, as a visible fact. And all the concen- trated skilfulness of science has but intensified this, its horrid aspect of hate and cruelty and hideousness. As our nerves grow ever more sensitive, and our instruments of slaughter ever more heartless and excruciating and far-reaching and wholesale, the
^ Canon Scott Holland.
ISAIAH 57
horror ever grows in intensity and in range. And then, as we recognise this, there breaks in upon us the contrast which so sur- prised Plato. Somehow, who can deny it ? — out of this debasing and intolerable carnage there rises before us a moral character which startles us by its beauty — the character of the perfect soldier. Whence has it sprung ? What strange efficacy is there in this dark soil to breed such fair flowers ? We can discern a reason, perhaps, for this steadiness of will, this trained and firm nerve, this disciplined obedience ; but how has there been added to them this nobility of reserve, this delicacy of honour, this courteous deference, this quiet gentleness ? Even in its rougher forms, we cannot but realise the value of the character built up under the training of the barracks. We see the rawest material, which defies all other methods of education, taken up by this dis- ciplinary system and endowed with the instincts of confederated honour, and with the brotherly heart that comes from responsi- bilities shared in common. This in the very roughest. And, in its finer examples, it touches the very heights of the spiritual life ; it becomes typical of all that is most serene, and high- strung, and controlled, and tender ; it can pass up to the very glories of Christian saintliness. We in England know that type well, for we have had it portrayed for us in its most captivating and exquisite reality by the pen of Thackeray, in the pathetic figure of Colonel Newcome. And we have its entire secret fault- lessly disclosed to us in the immortal lines of our highest master- poet, " On the Character of the Happy Warrior," He —
Who, if he be called upon to face
Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
Great issues, good or bad for human kind,
Is happy as a Lover, and attired
With sudden brightness like a Man inspired,
And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw ;
Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth
For ever, and to noble deeds give birth.
Or he must go to dust without his fame,
And leave a dead unprofitable name —
Finds comfort in himself and in his cause;
58 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
This is the happy Warrior — this is He That every Man in arms should wish to be.
If we turn to the poetic literature in which all nations have expressed their first consciousness of the ideal element in life, we find that exaltation of heroism in battle forms one of its two most prominent themes. Poetry always seeks for its object in something that has an ideal meaning, something that shows an elevation of man's spirit above his merely physical existence ; still it seeks this, not by breaking away from that existence, but rather by casting a new light upon it. If it tends to liberate man's soul from the contracted cares and fears of his natural life, it is not by setting the higher against the lower, the spirit against the flesh, but rather by lifting the latter, so far as may be, to the level of the former. Poetry seeks to turn the common bread of life into sacramental food, and its water into wine. Hence it attaches itself most often to those first and simplest manifestations of man's social and individual nature in which he shows that he is something higher than an animal ; it attaches itself to the love which is the natural root of all the affections of the family, and the first expression of that capacity of living for others, of which the highest Christian charity is but the purified and extended manifestation ; and it attaches itself in like manner to the valour of the soldier, which, as it rises above mere animal rage and deliberately faces and overcomes the fear of death — especially if it does so not merely in defence of the honour of the individual, but of some wider interest of family or nation — seems to give evidence of a nature that is above time and change. Hence it is that the simple tale of love and battle has such undying interest for us, and seems to encircle it with a halo of imagination and romance which is seldom associated with higher and less equivocal manifestations of man's moral nature. It is as if the earliest throb of the higher life in us had in its spontaneity a kind of attractiveness which is want- ing to its later, more deliberate and self-conscious manifestations. IF Let me in illustration take one slight incident which I find quoted from the account of Sir Charles Napier's war against the robber tribes of Northern Scinde : " A detacliraent of troops were marching along a valley, the cliffs overhanging which were crested by the enemy. A sergeant with eleven men chanced to