Tom Kettle

“ The average Englishman—bating the unreal fever-frenzy regarding Ireland—so little planned attack on anyone that events have proved his complete unpreparedness, an unpreparedness common and creditable to all the Allies. Russia wanted no war, Italy wanted none, Serbia, ravaged with disease, wanted none. Yet suddenly there was launched upon us this abomination of desolation.
Who launched it? Who was guilty of this crime above all crimes? The author of it, whether a ruler, a junta, or a whole nation, comes before history stained with an infamy to which no language can reach. ”

“ Nor in praising France do I, or do my fellow-writers, think it necessary to blacken German Catholicism. Simple, misled, unfree units of the Central Powers are dying all over Europe at the bidding of two disastrous Emperors: these plain soldiers, obeying the call of patriotism and deprived of any true vision of things, are dying in good faith, in our good Faith, and dying well. But over all the leaders of German Catholicism lies the red cloud of blood with which the statecraft of their country has enveloped the world. ”

“ WHY IRELAND FOUGHT I.—Prelude
We have lived to see Europe—that Europe which carried the fortunes and the hopes of all mankind—degraded to a foul something which no image can so much as shadow forth. To a detached intelligence it must resemble nothing so much as a sort of malign middle term between a lunatic asylum and a butcher’s stall.
We have seen committed, under our own amazed eyes, the greatest crime against civilisation of which civilisation itself keeps any record. The Blood-and-Ironmongers have entered into possession of the soul of humanity. ”

“ No one who remembers our social miseries will say that that was a house swept and garnished, but it did seem secure against such an invasion of diabolism: that was an illusion, and it has perished. The face of things is changed, and all the streams are flowing up the hills and not down them. If in the old world it was the task of men to build, develop, redeem, integrate, carnage and destruction are now imposed upon us as the first conditions of human society. We are gripped in the ancient bloodiness of that paradox which bids us kill life in order to save life. ”

“ You must leave the people through whom you march only their eyes to weep with.
“In every case the principle which guided our general was that war must be made terrible to the civil population, so that it may sue for peace.”
And so on, and so on. Little Belgium—her gallant soldiers and her laborious peasants alike—has been mashed to a bloody pulp where the heel of the Prussian, shod with iron and with this damnable philosophy, has passed. And all the time the Belgians kept on asking in hope, in despair, “Where are the English? Where are the French?” ”

“ Here, at the opening of this vast and bloody epic, Great Britain is right with the conscience of Europe. It is assumed that she has reconciled Ireland. A reconciled Ireland is ready to march side by side with her to any desperate trial. And suddenly the lawyer, with the Dublin accent, who had been the chief architect of destruction in the whole Empire, and who was thought to have come to reason, proposes for Ireland what I can only call a Prussian programme. England goes to fight for liberty in Europe and for Junkerdom in Ireland. ”

“ In the name of the nation, I fraternally salute the army. Everywhere, Flemings and Walloons, in the cities and in the country, one sole sentiment binds our hearts: Patriotism; one sole vision fills our spirits: our endangered independence; one sole duty imposes itself upon us: a stubborn resistance.
“Under these circumstances two virtues are indispensable: a cool courage, but a strong courage, and a close union of all the Belgian people.
“Both of these virtues have already been demonstrated brilliantly under the eyes of the nation, filled with enthusiasm. ”

“ Men must approve their manhood by handing themselves over soul and body to others, their military superiors. Criticism, and the individual mind, accept engulfment in a world of patterned conduct, salutes, absolutism. All that corruption of the essence of life comes with war as its inseparable shadow, and the rankness of the Prussian offence is not merely to have foregone honour, and broken treaties and sown untimely death throughout the world, but also to have compelled civilisation to debase itself in order to preserve itself. ”

“ You will agree with me, even now, that war, if not Hell, is cousin to it, cousin German. To condemn humanity to pass through that chamber of torture is a decision so grave and terrible that even emperors might well tremble before it. In the lineaments of the obscurest man slain in battle stands written the judgment of the rulers of the earth. Can your Austria face her conscience? ”

“ To trim is to betray. It will be an ill end of all our “idealistic” movements when their success so transforms the young men of this nation that in this world they shall be content to be neutral, and that nothing will offer them in the next save to be blown about by the winds.
Used with the wisdom which is sown in tears and blood, this tragedy of Europe may be and must be the prologue to the two reconciliations of which all statesmen have dreamed, the reconciliation of Protestant Ulster with Ireland, and the reconciliation of Ireland with Great Britain. ”

“ It is a long-drawn-out Metaphysics of Bullying, nothing less and nothing more.
One has only to think of the soil into which seed like this was dropped in order to understand the harvest of desolation that the swords are now reaping. Think of Prussia, flattered by all the world—even by Matthew Arnold—into regarding herself as the chosen of the Lord. Think of the unearned prosperity brought by the French tribute, of the raw egotism, the coarse insolence bred by it. Think of how the old Germanic racial chauvinism was nourished by the theories of Gobineau as freshened by the appalling Chamberlain. ”

“ If soldiers will not fight on an empty stomach, still less will they fight on an empty soul. A shrug, a sensualism, an epigram, and the “lie of religion” is shattered beyond repair: so far, so good. But with religion there has gone the whole category of the ideal. In a world from which all values have been expelled, except the values of appetite, there remains no principle of sacrifice. The only maxim which it is capable of evolving from its own resources is that of egotism, enlightened by prudence; for that credo men will do many things, but they will not die. ”

“ Millions of men have been marched to this Assize of Blood to be torn with shells and bullets, gutted with bayonets, tortured with vermin, to dig themselves into holes and grovel there in mud and fragments of the flesh of their comrades, to rot with disease, to go mad, and in the most merciful case to die.
Worse, if possible, is the malign transformation of the mind of mankind. Dr. Jekyll has been wholly submerged in Mr. Hyde. Killing has become an hourly commonplace—for the aggressor as the mere practice of his trade, for the assailed as a necessity of defence and victory. ”

“ The world will for the first time understand the nobility, beyond all phrase, of soldiers, and it will understand also the foulness, beyond all phrase, of those who compel them into war. In these days God help the militarists! There will be no need to organise a peace movement; it will organise itself in all democratic countries, spontaneous and irresistible as a prime force of nature. It will still be necessary to arm against those who linger in the blood-mists of autocracy, just as civilised men provide against tigers and murderers and syphilis. ”

“ You have got to move obvious necessaries, such as food and fuel and housing-timber and spare clothes; and human frames—that to marching men are heavier at the end of a long day than anything in the world; and rifles, bayonets and bombs, the ultimate ratio decidendi of all operations; and shells that look like death, and weigh as much as a model bungalow; and frowning Frankensteins of guns that look like the Day of Judgment, and weigh as much as a small foundry; and the wounded who come back with the Cross, steeped in blood, to stand as a fit symbol of their sacrifice. ”

“ You see those who wield its sceptre going about a French provincial town, yawning down deserted boulevards strewn with the debris of autumn, smoking in bare French rooms with green jalousies, always unperturbed, always efficient, always courteous, generally bored. You see them walking arm-in-arm, or in the saddle, knee to knee, with French staff officers, maintaining and deepening the Alliance. Some of them have tunics beribboned with the record of five campaigns; some are raw boys; but, all together, they keep the fight going. They are the Business Organisers of the war. ”

“ There is no plainer transaction in history: the clock has a crystal face that allow us to see all the works. You may, if you will, call up a mist of eloquence and people it with ghosts, the ghosts of wicked things done by English in Ireland and India, Russians in Finland, French in Morocco, Italians in Tripoli, Belgians in the Congo, and Serbians all the way back to Kosovo. ”

“ Truly the scourge of war is more terrible, more Apocalyptic in its horror, than even the most active imagination could have pictured. When the time comes to write down in every country a plain record of it, with its wounds and weariness, and flesh-stabbing, and bone-pulverising, and lunacies, and rats and lice and maggots, and all the crawling festerment of battle-fields, two landmarks in human progress will be reached. ”

“ Property for every man, and not too much property for any man, had become the watchword of sensible men. Trusts, combines, and private conspiracies of every kind, economic and political, were growing more nervous and by consequence more honest under a growing acuteness of scrutiny. Conservatism, which, for all its faults, had kept the roots of life from being torn up, and Democracy, which, for all its, had been like the sap in the tree forcing itself out into new forms of life, were coming to understand that they were not enemies but allies. ”

“ Our ideal would have fallen in the common mud, the last hope of humanity would have perished, and the war must be indefinitely prolonged. If you have driven an enemy into a corner and hold your bayonet pointed at his breast; if he asks on what terms you will accept his surrender and your answer is that in that case he will be not bayoneted but hanged, you must expect resistance à outrance. It will become an affair not of courage but of mere sanity. Whatever the divagations of their statesmanship, the Allies will, of course, win. ”

“ No statesman has the right to change, behind the backs of the fighting men, the aim and purpose of the war. No government has a mandate to substitute markets for justice.239 The necessary blood must be spent, it will spend itself freely and without question. But the diplomatist who lavishes one life in excess, in order to achieve objects other than that for which peaceful citizens transformed themselves into soldiers, is a criminal against civilisation. There are many, very many, men in the New Army who believe that no war merely for trade can be justifiable or other than an abomination. ”

“ Have we the right to spare? One thing we cannot escape from: the duty to punish. Nobody talks of revenge, or vindictiveness, or cruelty. But since we are fighting for justice, and since the gospel of murder—murder of the body and of the spirit—has been loosed against Europe, we have no choice.
We cannot restore Louvain, but we can give back to Belgium the glory of her own Rubens now exiled in the great gallery of Munich. We cannot call back Rheims out of its smoke of dissolution,137 but we can put Cologne again under the care of civilised France. ”

“ The gleaming symbol of Geneva—that inexplicable lapse of the soldiers of Europe into plain Christian mercy—is already displayed on them. Shops, big and small, are being prepared to serve as depots for the distribution of food in case of need.
It is impossible not to be with Belgium in the struggle. It is impossible any longer to be passive. Germany has thrown down a well-considered challenge108 to all the deepest forces of our civilisation. War is hell, but it is only a hell of suffering, not a hell of dishonour. And through it, over its flaming coals, Justice must walk, were it on bare feet. ”

“ History will write of us that we began nobly, but that our purpose corrupted. The Great War for freedom will not, indeed, have been waged in vain; that is already decided: but it will have but half kept its promises. Blood and iron will have been once more established as the veritable masters of men, and nothing will open before the world save a vista of new wars. ”

“ And, further, Belgium was and till the end of time remains the touchstone of German Kultur. For generations the masters of Prussia had been elaborating a coherent doctrine of domination to be attained through scientific brutality. It is one of the sins of democracy to have thrust that doctrine out of its thoughts, whenever it so much as heard of it, as being too bad to be true, for the foul thing was meant down to its worst word. All the world knows now that although Prussia is not to be believed when she promises fidelity, she is most thoroughly to be believed when she threatens murder ”

“ Such a campaign was inherent in her philosophy of politics, and of war. She stood for the gospel of force; and the sacrament of cruelty. To link with her in any wise a nation like Ireland that has always stood for spiritual freedom is an act of treason and blasphemy against our whole past.
The Allied Powers did not come into the war, and will not come before history, sinless. The past of both Great Britain and France was deeply stained with domination, that is to say, with Prussianism. Much of it was still apparent in some of their politics. But they had begun to cleanse themselves. ”

“ There will be pens, and to spare, to celebrate the heroic defence of the valley of the Meuse, the stubborn withdrawal of an outmatched but unbroken army, the tide of rapine and devastation that marched with the Treaty-Breakers, the driving into exile of a gallant people, the rosary of desolation, Liége, Visé, Louvain, Termonde, Namur,146 Ypres. For my part I should like to recall something of what Belgium was in peace, and what she did give or was in train of giving to the triumphs of civilisation.
One does not need to say anything of her treasury of art ”