THE MYTH OF A DEMON ENEMY

ONE of the peculiarly depressing aspects of modern

war is the degradation of the non-combatant mind. The civilian population goes blind with intolerance and mad with hate. In war we credit any impossible virtue in ourselves and any degree of wickedness in our foe. We swallow with eager gullibility every tale, plausible or grotesque, of his cruelty, his bestiality, his mendacity, his stupidity. The enemy becomes the scapegoat of the universe, and we load him with every conceivable attribute of evil until he looms in our eyes a monster of inhuman fiendishness. We picture him as the potential destroyer of everything worthy of liberty, of art, of democracy, even of civilization itself. We do our narrow-minded best to belittle his achievements in science, literature and government. We are the good white knight, but he is the seven-headed dragon that God and justice has called us to destroy.

"War," said an ancient philosopher, "makes men mild." But this is true only of those who do the actual fighting. In the trenches, we know, the German is respected, and even regarded with a half-bantering affection. The soldier speaks generously of his foe, whose bravery and suffering he sees and appreciates.

The soldier, moreover, understands the nature of warfare, and does not cite the harshness of military operations which he himself, in whatever army, must practice of necessity—as a proof of the enemy's personal depravity. The civilian does precisely that. Out of hearing of the guns the humility and reasonableness which this game of life and death imposes have no counterpart. The millions of non-combatants, pricked daily by poisoned pens, join in an orgy of vilification, brandish lies about the enemy, chant their hymns of hate, and curse when they pretend to pray. It is even probable that a non-militarist democracy runs into this moral vitiation more easily than a military autocracy. For where great armies must be raised by volunteering, abuse of the adversary is elevated to a public duty. The spirit of the people must be aroused, it is said; we must be worked up and kept up to the fighting pitch, or rather to the recruiting pitch, by fair means or foul. The press takes on an inflammatory and scurrilous tone. A premium is put upon Billingsgate. To speak a fair and kindly word for the enemy is considered traitorous, and to degrade the nation into a mob is looked upon as a patriotic service.

Of course the better men and women of every nation will resist this popular delirium. It is one of the proofs of England's greatness that there has been a constant stream of protests in her papers and journals against the slander-mongers. The cheap journalist and the penny-a-liner mixes his ink with gall, but the cultivated Englishman speaks with moderation.

It ought to be possible for a democracy to make war with dignity. Battles cannot be won by insults, and mud is not even an effective weapon of defense; but it is easy to befoul our own hands and minds. A high moral tone is a nation's first duty to itself, and it can be won only by a vigilant self-control. Neither a just cause nor victory will in itself prevent a spiritual rout.

There are certain obvious and human facts about Germany that we should keep in mind, both now and hereafter. Germany is not a Force, a Power, a Historical Tendency, or a Beast, but only a number of Germans, speaking a different language, but fundamentally like any other collection of men, women and children. They are now, and have been in the past, a great people, who command our respect in peace for their industrial and intellectual exertions, and in war for their valor and their power. Furthermore, they are convinced, like each of the other nations at war, that they are right in this conflict. In that cause they pour out their blood like water; and they are suffering as few peoples have suffered. Germany, within her rims of flame, is a nation in bandages and black; by day her land rings with the clangor of arms and shouts of defiance, but at night God hears there but one sound, the sobbing of women. Agony and death mean the same thing to a Teuton as to any other mortal, and heartbreak is just as hard to bear.

Deeper and more lasting than any struggles of race, or pride, or national advantage are the human verities. Unless we hold to these we shall lose our soul, though

we win a world. The true note of sane sympathy and understanding has been struck by an English writer not widely known in this country, A. CluttonBrock, who contributes to the literary supplement of the London Times. Permit me to quote one or two of his admirable paragraphs:

"We know that we are not what the Germans think us, whatever our sins may be. We know that England is not an abstraction, cold and greedy and treacherous, but a country of people whose virtues we love. and whose vices we extenuate because they are our

But Germany-she seems to us now to speak with one voice as if she were an abstraction, and that voice says always the same venomous things against the abstract England of her evil dream. But she is not an abstraction any more than England is. She, too, is a country of men and women who love their own virtues and extenuate their own faults; and they also hear of the evil things which England says of them, and think that England is pouring out a hatred long nursed and attempting a destruction long planned. What an ugly word 'Germany' sounds to us now; yet to them it is a music which sets them marching, and they will suffer and die for it, as we for England. Every man has dignity who is ready to die for a cause, whether it be good or bad, for men will not die for causes that do not seem right to them; and the Germans, we know, are ready to die in herds and droves, as we put it, for Germany. And yet each German to himself remains a single human being, with his indi