Military spirit

“ In our very souls we loathe militarism. Conquest and aggression are foreign to our spirit, and foreign to our thoughts and ambitions. But weakness will by no means assure us immunity from aggression from without. Universal military training up to a reasonable point, and the joint sense of responsibility of every man and every woman in the nation, and the right of the national government to expect and to demand that every man and woman stand ready to respond to the call to service, whatever form it may take—this is our armour. ”

“ Yet the primal command still makes its solemn appeal to the human heart and conscience: “Thou shalt not kill.”
502 It is, unfortunately, only too easy to cultivate the military spirit in almost any nation, and the military spirit, it need hardly be said, is the spirit that seeks quarrels. To the military man war means excitement, emulation, reputation, promotion, subject of course to the possibility of injury or death. ”

“ All the descriptions which we see in ancient history of a soldier's life—descriptions which, in times of peace, appeared like romance—are now realised; military exploits fill every day's newspapers, every day's conversation. A martial spirit is now essential to the liberty and the existence of our own country. ”

“ But, Sir, when the path of early life lay open to your choice,{87} the then warlike state of the world called forth a congenial spirit, and your military ardour led you to encounter the toils and dangers of war in distant climes. ”

“ Our standing armies carry war, so to speak, into the very bosom of peace. Now, a warlike spirit is only honourable in union with the fairest virtues which bloom out from peace, and military discipline, only when allied with the highest feeling of freedom ”

“ The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force. ”

“ We endeavour (and with some success) to ignore the military element; we listen neither to the réveille, nor to the too frequent crack of a rifle; our pursuits are not warlike, and, judging from the sights and sounds that sometimes surround us, we trust they never may be. ”

“ It also has the purpose of creating an effect in the mind of the soldier himself. The art in military life is, indeed, to give the impression of power to all who must be affected by the exhibition of force. ”

“ When our warlike institutions were perishing from the lack of thought, he represented in all its greatness the true type of military thinker. The virile thought of a military thinker alone brings forth successes and maintains victorious nations. ”

“ In this grand response to a most unpalatable order, the very highest discipline is noticeable; it embodies such an act of devotion to duty as reveals that mastery over self which lies at the very root of success in warfare. Such a discipline cannot fail to evoke admiration wherever it is witnessed. It is noticeable among officers and men alike, and tends to weld both in that splendid spirit of comradeship which is so peculiarly a feature of our army at the present time. ”

“ He retained always the infantile gravity which finds pleasure in playing with swords and drums, and the sort of innocence which makes good military men. He esteemed force sincerely. He was a man among men, the flesh of human flesh. ”

“ With a soul kindling intensely at every story of magnanimous virtue, at every deed of self-sacrifice in a righteous cause, his clear Christian judgment saw the mockery of what is called military glory, whether in ancient thunderbolts of war or in the career of modern conquest. ”

“ But when we compare the military type of self-severity with that of the ascetic saint, we find a world-wide difference in all their spiritual concomitants.
“ ‘Live and let live,’ ” writes a clear-headed Austrian officer, “is no device for an army. ”

“ You have marched in the face of a foe of more than double your number—led on by chiefs who have won a national renown under the old flag—intrenched in hills of his own choosing, and strengthened by all the appliances of military art. With no experience but the consciousness [Pg 101] of your own manhood, you have driven him from his strongholds, pursued his inglorious flight, and compelled him to meet you in battle. ”

“ We feel sure that you will do your duty nobly, and return covered with honour and renown. Remember, my men, that obedience to discipline, and patience in enduring hardship, and promptitude in the performance of your military duties are the first steps towards the making of a victorious army. ”

“ From the opening battles of the American Revolution through the turmoil of the Civil War, to World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, to the Persian Gulf and today's operations in the war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, and around the world, the members of our military have built a tradition of honorable and faithful service. ”

“ It is glad of the doubtful amount of intellect in military genius, and knows it to be a good ally in the preservation of power, and in the substitution of noise and show for qualities fearless of inspection. Is it an ascendancy of this kind which the present age requires, or will permit? Do we want a soldier at the head of us, when there is nobody abroad to fight with? ”

“ Arms triumph by physical force and energy: wisdom prevails by the persuasiveness of truth, the gentleness of charity, the beauty of holiness, and the spirit of the Lord. The soldier seeks the aid of science and strategy: wisdom adheres to the simplicity of the gospel, repudiating all art, concealment, disingenuous trickery, such as false colors, masked batteries, treacherous ambuscades, and challenges its enemies with an honest front upon the open field. ”

“ What does each separate human atom feel, when caught in that whirling tornado of passion and of peril? Who shall make visible to us the actual faces in the fighting-line; or make audible the words—stern order, broken prayer, blasphemous jest—spoken amid the tumult? Who shall give us, in a word, an adequate picture of the soldier's life in actual war-time, with its hardships, its excitements, its escapes, its exultation and despair? ”

“ Whence comes this tendency toward war which characterizes above all the good citizen, the populace, who are not called upon personally to participate? The military man is not so easily swayed. Some hope for promotion or pension, but even they are sobered by their sense of duty. It comes from the romance that clothes war and battle, and that has with us ten times more than elsewhere, the power of exciting enthusiasm in the people. ”

“ If two men both take a true view of an operation of war, they will agree, whether they are both soldiers, both civilians, or one a soldier and the other a civilian. It does not matter what you call their view, but, as a soldier who knows his business ought to have true views about it, the proper name for the true view is the military view. ”

“ Of the morale of that army there can be no higher evidence than the voices that came from the poor fellows in our ranks—the letters with which they filled the newspapers of the day, detailing with spirit, simplicity, and pathos their humble experiences in the great events of the war. ”

“ Yet let us hasten to add that, without bodily soundness and strength to resist privation, hardship and fatigue, an army is naught. And here we strike the peculiarity which makes war the true touch-stone of nations. It is the supreme test of their merits and demerits both moral and physical. By a community's art, literature, science and philosophy you may take the measure of its intellectual attainments ”

“ Nevertheless, there is one thing which must not be forgotten. Though there is no military knowledge among them, though they are not trained soldiers, they are extremely clever with their war-machines. Nothing can stand against them! ”

“ But so few of our faculties are of a truly military turn, and these wax indolent and unwary from disuse like troops during long times of peace. We all come to recognize sooner or later, of course, the unfailing little band of them that form our standby, our battle-smoked campaigners, our Old Guard, that dies, neversurrenders. ”

“ As the war attracts more and more of public attention, and is seen to create high reputations and great fortunes in a short space of time, the choicest spirits of the nation enter the military profession. ”

“ Some day one of our soldiers now fighting—some young man with a gift of words—will write for all time the story of all this: the beauty and the ugliness and the agony of it, the colour and the smell and the movement of it, with intimate and passionate remembrance. It is a memorable battle-picture in modern history, and in the mass of hundreds of thousands of men, obedient to the high command, which uses them as parts of the great war machine, is the individual with his own separate experience and initiative, with his sense of humour and his suffering, and his courage and his fear. ”

“ We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man’s creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare. ”

“ And beyond some rare exceptions, of which I am one, man may be defined as an animal with a musket. Give him a fine uniform with the hope of fighting, and he will be happy. Also, we make the military calling the noblest, which is true, in a sense, for it is the oldest calling, and the earliest of mankind made war. The military calling, moreover, has this appropriateness to human nature, that it never thinks, and clearly we are not made for thought. ”

“ To shorten the War—by strengthening the morale of the allied peoples and their armies, by alleviating their sufferings in the period which must elapse until the American army can become fully effective abroad. ”

“ Even in peace soldiers learn betimes to suffer warfare by toil and discomforts, by marching in arms, running over the drill-ground, working at trench-making, constructing the tortoise, till the sweat runs again. In the sweat of the brow all things are done, lest body and mind should shrink at changes from shade to sunshine, and from sunshine to frost, from the dress of ease to the coat of mail, from stillness to shouting, from quiet to the din of war. In like manner do ye, O blessed ones, account whatever is hard in this your lot as discipline of the powers of your mind and body. ”

“ There is about it a confidence that the vital effects of war are simple and easy to define and a cheerful contempt for the considerable biological difficulties of the subject that remind one of the bracing military atmosphere, in which a word of command is the supreme fact, rather than that of the laboratory, {127} where facts are the masters of all. ”

“ We read of campaigns that his mind has traced out, of battles which his plans have won; and we forget, in our admiration of his skill and power, those by whom the heroic deeds were done, the victory gained. Generals, says one author, “often calculate upon men as though they were blocks of wood, or movable machines.” Yet every one of these nameless soldiers has feelings as acutely alive to suffering and to honor as those who look upon them thus. ”

“ He is to be pitied; surrounded by such scenes, and trying with all his might to understand strategy, naval warfare, big guns, the movements of troops, military maps, reconnaissances, occupations, interior and exterior lines, and all the technical details of the art of slaying. He runs from one house to another, armed with plans, papers, reports, recommendations, sometimes good humoured, never angry, occasionally dejected, and always a little fussy. ”

“ God of infinite love and goodness, will the great army with the ranks of sin, and greed, and lust, prosper and thrive and live, while this young soldier, this infant of purest soul and lion heart, lies all unheeded, dying, the victim of cruelty and selfish forgetfulness? ”

“ In arms that military type arose which lives upon the virtues proper to arms and detests the vices arms may breed. Above all, an intense and living appetite for truth, a perception of reality, invigorated these generations. ”

“ In many qualities we are different—a distinct type; but in nothing are we more like the British than in our attitude toward the soldier and toward war. The character of any army reflects the character of its people. An army is the fist; but the muscle, the strength, of the physical organism behind the blow in the long run belong to the people. What they have prepared for in peace they receive in war, which decides whether they have been living in the paradise of a fool or of a wise man. ”

“ Since he drilled a schoolboy army
⁠In a truly martial style.
But now he's a man, a soldier,
⁠And we lend him a listening ear;
For his heart is a heart all loyal,
⁠Unscourged by the curse of fear. ”

“ Regulars who were sure of themselves—having learned more of war in six months than in all their service—gladdened at the prospect of the fulfillment of their dream of a great army, which was equal to any in the world. ”

“ Of heaven’s bright army glitters in Thy praise.
A million torches lighted by Thy hand
Wander unwearied through the blue abyss—
They own Thy power, accomplish Thy command,
All gay with life, all eloquent with bliss. ”

“ In this grand army, gentlemen, we are now enlisted; and are combatting under the same banners with those excellent men of the earth. Then let self-gratulation gladden our every heart, and swell each high-toned nerve. With such worthies by our sides, with such a CAUSE before our eyes, let us move on with joy to the battle and charge like the honored champions of God and of human rights. ”

“ Only some great vision of Duty seen along the track of the eternally right will kindle the heart of a people; the faith that goes with that vision will alone sustain courage. Without it, armies and battle-ships are but a temporary and flimsy defence, the pretext of a self-confidence, while the heart is clouded with despair. ”