Reflections on War

I

The pacifists who now rant in the open forums and suffragette magazines all seem to ground their case on the thesis that the people of the United States naturally abhor war and shrink from its horrors as an I. W. W. shrinks from soap. The notion, it seems to me, has a flavor of applesauce. It would be far more accurate, though plainly not the whole truth, to say that they delight in war and enjoy its gaudy uproar as a country boy enjoys circus day. Were they unhappy during the late heroic crusade for democracy? Then so is a Methodist unhappy at a revival.

There was, to be sure, a minority of Americans who found war unpleasant, but they never ran to as much as one per cent, of the population, and most of them have learned to enjoy it vastly in retrospect, however much it may have fevered them while it was going on. I allude, obviously, to the young gentlemen who were assisted into the trenches by the draft. The records show, I believe, that fully seventy-five percent, of them tried, by one dodge or another, to avoid service. But that is not saying that they disliked war, once they had got into it. On the contrary, a great many of them enjoyed it immensely, and are among the most ardent warlocks now in practice among us.

To a young man, indeed, war is far more pleasant than unpleasant, especially if he be of simple mind ---which is to say, especially if he be the normal infant of his species. The highly sophisticated youth, accustomed to ease and civilized society, finds it gross and filthy, but certainly those objections to it do not rest heavily upon the mind of a yokel from the cow belt or a youngster from a city slum. As poor men go in this world, soldiers are well fed and well clothed, and have very little work to do. Is the discipline irksome? Then certainly it is not half so irksome as the discipline of the rolling mill, the tannery, the flivver factory or the run-down farm. Is it even as irksome as the discipline of the office? I doubt it.

II

During the war I had occasion to make a journey in Western Pennsylvania, in the coal region. At the bottoms of the naked, frowning hills, alongside the railroad track, ran the straggling villages of the miners. The houses, on a winter day, looking extraordinarily forlorn and forbidding. Most of them stood up from the cinders on absurd stilts, and all of them were without paint. Wretched children played about their doors, waving their hands as the train rushed by. Slatternly women gaped from the windows. Sometimes there was a senile cow in a grassless yard. Every such house, absolutely without exception, flew a service flag. The draft got all the miners boys.

But did it work any oppression upon them? Plainly it did not. It took them out of filth and introduced them to the bracing, highly agreeable feeling of being clean. It made them acquainted with clean food, decently cooked. It converted them into travelers, grandly seeing the world. It taught them the elements of decent manners. In brief, it civilized them --- and if, in the course of that business, it civilized some of them to death, then surely the gain was worth the loss. The dead are remembered as heroes. The living have glorious memories, some of them authentic, and are at least a shade less degraded and miserable than they were.

The effect of war upon such young men, in fact, is mainly excellent, though their employers, when they get back, probably don’t think so. They may be doomed to slavery, but they have at all events got some spirit of revolt in their blood. Some of them, perhaps, unable to return to the brutal routine of their fathers, take to the high road and engage the Polizei; many more go in for bootlegging, or some other such spacious, stimulating science. Moralists deplore the change, but moralists are seldom as wise as they look. Try to imagine a race so broken to the yoke that it no longer produced highwaymen! God help the United States if it ever comes to that.

III

But it is the general population, not the soldiers, that gets the most fun out of war. Who will forget the way the gals of this imperial republic, and especially the fat and faded ones, reacted to the late crusade? I can see them yet, prancing around in their pretty costumes, hobnobbing legally with the handsome conscripts, and keeping their weather eyes upon the even handsomer lieutenants, captains, majors, colonels ---- yes, and generals. The war got many such a gal a husband, and even those who missed husbands at least enjoyed the thrills of an open and hearty chase, with all the usual rules suspended.

The Babbitts of the land got even more out of it than the fair. The years between 1916 and 1920, in fact, were their golden age, and they will never see another such until there is another war. Men of mark were made overnight, and hundreds of thousands of them survive, in all the far-flung towns of the realm, as men of vision. Congress is full of such fiery stay-at-homes today, and some of them are in places higher still. The demand for patriotic speakers in the movie parlors was insatiable, and every novice who got through his four minutes without fainting was practically sure of fame ---- at least, locally.

Moreover, the business paid. A few stimulating yells, to the applause of the commonalty --- and the rest of the day was free for enlightened self-interest. I used to travel a good deal in those days, and so had to listen to the gabble of these idealists in the Pullman smokers. Their air was that of mem who had struck it rich. They talked in large figures and smoked large cigars. They were crusaders shinning up the walls of a new and glittering Jerusalem, and every ten seconds they were showered with gold. Some of them, later on, went to jail, and many more went broke. But the majority hung on to their just and righteous rewards. They constitute the backbone of the right thinking, conservative bloc today, and are unanimously in favor of another war, if necessary, to put down Bolshevism.

IV

It is hard, indeed, to recall a class of Americans to whom the late war was unpleasant. There were, of course, others at home who watched and waited and feared and hoped, and some of them, alas! hoped in vain, but they were fewer than the soldiers and nothing much was heard from them. If they had made any protest, there would have been four minute men to caution them sharply and teach them the high privileges of patriotism. No other class showed any sign of discontent. The jobholders were safe, busy and happy. The honest workingman saw his wages multiply like magic and bought himself a phonograph, a still and a tin lizzie. The banker prepared for a killing in Liberty bonds. The publicist had an audience at last, rounded up to hear him, and forbidden to escape.

It is thus nonsense, and perhaps even libel, to say that the American people detest war. If they detest it, then they are idiots. Life was never so pleasant in America as it was during those three years. There was a gaudy show going on all the time, and parts in it for everyone. Even the pacifists themselves, going grandly to jail, enjoyed themselves immensely. It was not the publicity that delighted and soothed them but the inward thrill. For the first time in a generation they were able to do something dramatic and satisfying to the Holy Cause. No prohibitionist was ever happier, spying through a knothole at his neighbor.

My belief is that the next war will be just as merry. The United States is now so populous and so powerful that no enemy nation, or combination of enemy nations, could hope to tackle it head on. Our next ten or twelve wars will all be fought on foreign soil and in a safe and sanitary manner. No despot’s heel will ever mark these virtuous shores in our time. War, to the soldiers told off to fight it, will be a junket, a picnic, a free foreign excursion --- and to the heroes nominated to keep the home fires burning it will be a thrilling and magnificent show, with the spectators well paid for their applause. I believe that these facts are obvious to most Americans. And so believing, I am convinced that it is a gross slander upon their common sense to argue that they are pacifists at heart. But are they stayed by God’s command, issued through His agents, the rev. clergy? Well, go read again what the rev. clergy had to say in 1917.

H.L. Mencken (The Chicago Sunday Tribune, September 26, 1926)