LAND AND [WATER 
June 26, 1915. 
MR. BELLOC'S BOOK ON THE WAR. 
II. 
By THOxMAS SECCOMBE. 
(Professor of English, R.M.C., Sandhurst.) 
THE points left over from my last week's oonaidera- 
tiou of Mr. Belloc's General Sketch of the 
European War were mainly two. First, his 
treatment of the numerical factor, and, secondly, 
his eloquent vision in the form of a peroration, in 
which he treats of the historical continuity of the German 
Dtenac«. Like Napoleon and most other soldiers, he Is 
profoundly persuaded of tJie validity of big battalions. 
Ultimately all Europeans have much the same potential 
moral. " The most remarkable general discovery in the 
war iias been the endurance and steadiness under loss 
of conscript soldiers." It had been said during the long 
peac« that short-service conscripts would not 8t.and up to 
professional or long-service soldiers. To this theory the 
Manchurian and Balkan campaigns gave a sufficient answer 
if men would only have heeded it. The present war leaves 
no doubt on the matter. " The short-service conscript army 
has in this matter done better than anything that was known 
in the past." No; it is left to the priest and the politician 
to repeat the cynical old fable about the volunteer being 
worth ten pressed men. Truly, as Mattliew Arnold said, 
Britain is a country invented for the beatification of cant and 
claptrap — cant about " militarism," claptrap about tha 
" volunteer." A breath of candour about our historic armies 
and the methods used in recruiting them would blow away 
for ever this cynical and enervating twaddle. When a small 
band of genuine volunteers from the City of London, inspired 
by heroic motive, went to the place of embarkation to take 
shipping to defend Antwerp three and a quarter centuries 
ago they were confronted by a crowd of sweepings from the 
gaols, men recruited in Falstaff's fashion. A letter from 
the front asking for more intimated that "our men perish 
like flies, but our need for more is great; see that they may 
be sent with dispatch, for it is urgent, and I pray thee that 
these be not so lousy as the last." It was the same with 
the " volunteers " for Blenheim, who had to be kept in hulks 
to prevent desertion. And what about genuine volunteers 
for our American wars of the eighteenth century, among the 
rank and file ? It would need a microscope to discern them. 
The two most dangerous armies we have ever had, Cromwell's 
and Wellington's, can only be termed volunteer armies by 
courtesy. They were replenished by pressed men, hardly, if 
at all, less than was the navy. "They have given me an 
infamous army, by God," said the victor of Waterloo. By 
" they " apparently he meant the Justices of the Peace and 
the subsidised allies. For if it has not been the compulsion 
of the law that has given us our volunteers, past and present, 
it has assuredly been the compulsion of brute circumstance 
or a confidence trick based upon the most humiliating 
cajolery, such as the assurance tacitly given to the T.F. that 
Saturday afternoon soldiering would be all that God or man 
could conceivably demand of them. On such maxims as 
these, then, the revolting fallacy of which is exposed with 
withering accuracy in " The Green Curve " [" The Limit "], 
is the imposing fabric of our British Pacifism grounded and 
reared. We satirise the unfairness of taxation and the privi- 
leged class under the ancien regime, but what other nation 
in the world has granted the privilege of exemption from the 
supreme tax to all who merely take the tradesmanlike pre- 
caution of protesting against war on principle, but have never 
exhibited even a glimmer of aversion to grasping any conceiv- 
able profit that the chances of war may throw in their way ? 
The God of Blood and Iron is repulsive: agreed. But 
have we not cherished the peace-idol too much in our hearts 
for some time past ? Cant against war and cant against 
soldiering has created an impression among presumin<y 
folk that our feet were oold and that, whatever hap" 
pened, we were not "for war." Yet, as a matter 
of fact, we had already been in a state of war for a 
period considerably anterior to Augtist, 1914. Germany had 
for a long time been bent upon our destruction, and from the 
moment that a state of war is decreed by the predominant 
sense of a nation it cannot end, really, until the will to war 
ceases mutually and by consent. This we ought to have dis- 
cerned, and our Western politicians cannot easily be forgiven 
for the fact that they did their utmost to the last moment to 
keep us blindfolded. Butsomesaid, "Yet a little more sleep," 
yhile others, like the great farceur Pdlissier, were convinced 
that the absence of a tariff wall had cut away the ground from 
an invader. When the Germans penetrated the English Home 
in his delightful travesty they found it richly furnished and 
inhabited by compatriots who damned them for their pains — 
England was theirs already ! Every object in the house was 
promptly turned upside down and discovered to be " made in 
Germany," with the exception of a Bechst^in piano. . . . 
The book ends with a Michelet-flight of historical synthesis 
recalling the fine work, unrivalled, so far as I know, that Mr. 
Belloc has done in books like his " Marie Antoinette," " The 
Girondin," and " The Eye- Witness." This war compels him 
to conjure up the returning again of those conflicting spirits 
—spirits like those in " The Dynasts " — which had bee a 
seen over the multitudes in the dust of the Rhone Valley when 
Marius came up from Italy and met the chaos in the North — 
the clash between the ancient European civilisation and the 
quickly growing, quickly dissolving outer mass which con- 
tinually learns its lesson from civilised men and yet can never 
perfectly learn that lesson. They had come this time in over- 
whelming numerical superiority, in a flood, in a sweep that 
has no parallel in the monstrous things of history. . . . 
" And all along the belt of that march the things that 
were the sacrament of civilisation had gone. Rheims was 
possessed, the village churches of the ' Island of France ' and 
of Artois were ruins or desolations. The peasantry already 
knew the destruction of something more than such materij 
things, the end of a certain social pact which war in Christen- 
dom had spared. They had been massacred in droves, with no 
purpose save that of terror; they had been netted in drovei, 
the little children and the women with the men, into captivity. 
The track of the invasion was a wound struck not, as other 
invasions have been, at some territory or some dynasty; it 
was a wound right home to the heart of whatever is the West, 
or whatever has made our letters and our buildings and our 
humour between them. Tliere was a death and an ending iu 
it which promised no kind of reconstruction, and the fools 
who had wasted words for now fifty years upon some imagined 
excellence in the tilings exterior to the tradition of Europe 
were dumb and appalled at the sight of barbarism in action — 
in its last action after the divisions of Europe had permitted 
its meaningless triumph for so long. Were Paris entered, 
whether immediately or after that approaching envelopment 
of the armies, it would be for destruction, and all that is not 
replaceable in man's work would be lost to our children at 
the hands of men who cannot make." 
There was something in them always — these Germans— 
of the back forest, averse to the life of the walled city. In 
their moods there was often sometliing pathetic as of Calibans 
who aspired to lick the hands of Culture, or in sentimental 
mood warbled bird notes and sought to catch and tame the 
pretty grey squirrel of the pine woods. Their genius was in 
the back rather than the brain, but their diligence and their 
laboriousness was limitless, and they thought by intellect 
alone to solve the intimate riddle of the universe. Dis- 
cipline, the Drill Sergeant, and tlie Science, which they 
adapted rather than created, became their gods. The neutrals, 
who knew them not, were dazed by the prosperity of this cult 
of success and forgot to ask, when they propounded their Will 
to Power doctrine. The Will to Power to wliatf And their idol 
befitted them well : Bismarck, the grand carnivore, the worst 
of the century after Napoleon. The man without scruple, to 
whom all means were good in the national lawsuit, who bent 
the cornars of the cards v/hen luck did not serve him 
(" Blessed be the hand that falsified the Ems telegram "), 
vindictive, cruel, insensible, jealous, already ready to invoke 
the Frederick tradition. "Trust me to find a casus belli 
within twenty-four hours. The sycophants of the study will 
always justify a fait accompli. Whatever is, is might." lb 
is with the psychology of a people bred in this faith, wantonly 
arrogant and aggressively rude by nature, that the Spirit of 
the West in Europe is remorselessly at war. 
After a vivid survey of the horrors of invasion by this 
exulting horde last September, the author is in a position to 
give to his Dixerat just a Swiftian touch of the terrible, with 
an added vagueness all liis own. " That is the vision that 
should remain with those who desire to understand the future 
the war must breed, and that is the white heat of energy 
which will explain very terrible things, still masked by the 
future, and undreamt of here."- 
Tho.m.^s Seccombk. 
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