will not decide, the outcome of the war, for the final senseless mustering of heroism and patience, the final hideous triumph of dynamite and machines over human life and the human spirit!
In view of this situation it is our duty, the one sacred duty of every man of good will on earth, not to sheathe ourselves in indifference and let things take their course, but to do our utmost to prevent this final catastrophe.
Yes, you say, but what can we do? If we were statesmen and ministers, we would do our bit, but, as it is, we have no power!
This is the easy reaction to all responsibility – until it becomes too pressing. If we turn to the politicians and leaders, they too shake their heads and invoke their helplessness. We cannot sit back and put the blame on them.
To blame are the inertia and cowardice of each one of us, our obstinacy and reluctance to think. In response to the excellent Mergari, Sonnino refused to say ‘anything that might give aid and comfort to the enemy’; the Wolff dispatch I have just mentioned declares that Germany has ‘not the slightest reason’ to make another move on behalf of peace. But every day we ourselves give evidence of the same attitude. We accept things as they come, we rejoice in victories, we deplore the losses in our own camp, we tacitly accept war as an instrument of politics.
Alas, every nation and every family, every single individual in all Europe and far beyond it, has more than enough ‘reason’ to give his utmost on behalf of the peace for which we all yearn. Only a vanishing minority of men truly want the war to go on – and beyond a doubt they deserve our contempt and sincerest hatred. No one else, only a very few morbid fanatics or unscrupulous criminals are in favour of this war, and yet – inconceivable as it seems – it goes on and on, with both sides arming indefatigably for the allegedly final holocaust in the West!
This is possible only because we are all too lazy, too easy-going, too cowardly. It is possible only because somewhere in our secret hearts we approve or tolerate the war, because we throw all the resources of our minds and souls to the winds and let the misguided machines roll on! That is what the political leaders do, and what the armies do, but we ourselves, the onlookers, are no better. We all know that we can stop the war if we want to in earnest. We know that whenever men have felt an action to be truly necessary they have performed it against all resistance. We have looked on with admiration and beating hearts as the Russians laid down their arms and manifested their will to make peace. There is no people on earth that has not been profoundly moved in its heart and conscience by this marvellous drama. But at the same moment we reject the obligations such feelings imply. Every politician in the world is all in favour of revolution, reason, and the laying down of arms – but only in the enemy camp, not in his own! If we are in earnest, we can stop the war. Once again the Russians have exemplified the ancient and holy doctrine that the weak can be mightiest. Why does no one follow them? Why do parliaments and cabinets everywhere content themselves with the same dreary drivel, the same day-to-day trivialities, why do they nowhere rise up to champion a great idea, the only idea that matters today? Why do they favour the self-determination of nations only when they themselves hope to profit? Why are people still taken in by the false idealism of official phrasemongers? It has been said that every nation has the rulers it wants and deserves. Maybe so. We Europeans at all events have the bloodiest and most ruthless of all rulers: war. Is that what we want and deserve?
No, we don’t want it. We all want the opposite. Apart from a small number of profiteers, no one wants this shameful and dismal state of affairs. What then can we do? We can bestir ourselves! We can take every opportunity to manifest our readiness for peace. We can desist from such useless provocations as the above-mentioned Wolff dispatch, and stop talking like Sonnino. At the present juncture a slight humiliation, a concession, a humane impulse can do us no harm! How, when we have befouled ourselves so thoroughly with blood, can we worry about petty national vanities?
Now is the time to oust those statesmen who conceive foreign policy in terms of self-seeking national programmes, who ignore the cry of mankind! Why wait until their stupidity has shed the blood of more millions?
All of us – great and small, belligerents and neutrals – we must not close our ears to the dire warning of this hour, the threat of such unthinkable horrors. Peace is at hand! As a thought, a desire, a suggestion, as a power working in silence, it is everywhere, in every heart. If each one of us opens his heart to it, if each one of us firmly resolves to serve the cause of peace, to communicate his thoughts and intimations of peace – if every man of good will decides to devote himself exclusively for a little while to clearing away the obstacles, the barriers to peace, then we shall have peace.
If that is done we shall all have helped to bring it about, we shall all feel worthy of the great tasks it will impose – whereas hitherto we have all been possessed by a feeling of shared guilt.
If the War Goes On Another Five Years
Early in 1918
In the autumn of 1925, the Official Journal, the one newspaper still published (weekly) in the Kingdom of Saxony, carried the following short article with the somewhat recondite headline:
A NEW KASPAR HAUSER
Near Ronneburg in Vogtland a puzzling and troubling discovery was recently made. Only the future can show whether it should be regarded as a mere curiosity or as a matter of more far-reaching interest.
In the course of the ‘elimination of citizens demonstrably unfit for public service’, a programme which in our district has been organised with exemplary efficiency and, allowing for inevitable hardships, humanely executed, the Ronneburg regional authorities have reported one of those all-too-frequent cases in which a private individual, despite his demonstrated inability to be of any further use whatsoever to the state and common weal, appreciably oversteps his allotted existence time, in the present instance by several months, it appears. A year before, the old-age control board had classified this private individual, one Philipp Gassner residing in a secluded country house outside one of the villages, as unemployable and, as usual in such cases, reminded him of his civic duty by progressive reduction of his rations. When his deadline expired, his demise had not been reported, nor had an appointment been made in his name with the regional chloroform centre. Thereupon the regional authorities sent Sergeant Kille to Gassner’s place of residence to convey a formal notification of his civic duty and inform him of the penalty for noncompliance.
Although this notification was communicated in the accepted forms and accompanied by the usual offer of free service, Gassner, a man of almost seventy, was thrown into a state of extraordinary agitation and obstinately refused to comply with the law. In vain the sergeant rebuked him for his unpatriotic attitude and tried to make him see how disheartening it was that an old man, grown grey in civic honours, should decline to make the sacrifice which all our hopeful young men were prepared to make at the front. When the sergeant pronounced him under arrest, Gassner went so far as to resist. The sergeant, who had already been struck by the physical strength of this man who had been put on diminishing rations, proceeded to search the house. And now comes the incredible part of the story: a young male was discovered in a second-floor room overlooking the garden. The old man had been hiding him for years!
This young man, aged twenty-six and brimming with health, turned out to be Alois Gassner, the house owner’s son. How the sly old man was able to elude the conscription authority and keep his son hidden for years remains to be clarified; the most likely hypothesis would seem to be a criminal falsification of the records. Much is explained, no doubt, by the secluded location of the house, by the father’s ample means, and by the existence of a carefully cultivated kitchen garden which provided them both with more than sufficient food.
What interests us here is not so much the unusual case of grave fraud and draft evasion, as a psychological anomaly which has come to
