Why War Must Survive
BY LORD DUNSANY.
WE have no record that when Newton discovered the law of gravity he incurred any hostility from angry folk saying : Now we shall have everything falling on our heads, apples and everything else. So I hope my theory will cause no annoyance either. The proof of the theory I leave to some mathematician with an interest in history, feeling that it can easily be proved by someone familiar with figures. My theory is briefly an application of a commonplace of hydraulics to human bloodshed. It stands to reason that if children making a dam across a trickling gutter wish still to hold back the water they must soon build their dam right across the road ; nor can this hold it back for long ; and, if the flow of that trickle is by any means still to be stopped, a dam must be built eventually across the whole valley. It will then be a long time before any water goes that way. Yet the effort to hold it back must fail ultimately, and, when the dam does break, this is obvious, that the number of drops of water that will go by must be exactly the number of drops that would have gone by in any case, from the time that the trickle was first stopped.
I believe some mathematician can easily prove by stati- stics that the same law must apply exactly tohuman blood- shed. For when you have small communities quietly raiding each other every other year there obviously cannot be that security and co-operation that can allow the growth of the organization that makes large armies possible. But prohibit a hamlet from raiding a Hundred, and you get an order- liness that results in the growth of heptarchies. Join up your heptarchies into kingdoms, and you still have wars ; and, though people prayed against them, nobody seemed to suppose they were going to stop for ever. It is not till great empires are formed, imposing peace over wide areas of the earth, that the delusion is fostered that peace may now be everlasting. Had warfare between Prussia, Bavaria and Austria broken out again in every generation, the quiet growth of .the force that made the World War would have been impossible. Great wars, then, are made alone by peace ; and little wars are as bad as great wars, because there are far more of them, and because, as my mathematician will one day prove, the little and the great kill exactly as many. There are two things to consider about this : why is it so ? And how could it be prevented ? A large number of the best minds in the world is presumably dealing with the second point, so that we may leave that point now, except to say that they seem to be fastening too much hope upon disarmament.
All disarmament can do is to stop certain large firms of war-manufacturers from having an interest in war ; which probably does not go for very much. Disarmament cannot prevent men from fighting, even if you took away the deadliest of all ingredients for battle, the railway train. The most destructive weapon of warfare is not the big Bertha, but the flint axe. Great guns tend to keep armies apart, killing perhaps a quarter of them, but where men fought with flint axes they must have at once met hand to hand, and more than half must have been killed, including the whole of one side. But while others are discussing how to stop war, let us consider why it is that for so long as we have been upon this planet this weed, or flower, whichever it be, has hitherto grown alongside of us. Well, whatever ailments individuals may die of, there are but three exits from this world for peoples ; War, Famine and Plague. Without these exits the world 'would be overcrowded, and anyone who can realize that space on a raft is limited must be able, with a greater imaginative effort, to realize that so is the space on a planet. But to say that without these exits the world would be overcrowded is unnecessary, for they themselves make overcrowding impossible. The growth of people beyond a certain limit must necessarily lead to starvation, or to devastation by whatever fevers haunt insanitary areas, or by the determination of a strong man not to let his people starve, whatever may happen to others ; and this means war ; or by the same strong man leading his people away from crowded dirty spaces, elsewhere ; and this means invasion. I believe that Nature is benevolent, and chooses the best of these bad exits for us.
I do not know that I can define Nature, but I mean those impulses in the deeps of our minds, dimmer than reason and yet more powerful, that sway us in the end, and the similar forces in beasts and in blades of grass. These in the end lead us to take the wiser course. War at the present moment is not the wiser course, the world for the present having had sufficient of it. You may see this by the attitude of all nations, when one by one their legations were shelled by the Japanese =or Chinese. The attitude of every ambassador over that was : " These gunners are all young men ; they don't mean any harm by it." But in times when there is a need for war it is sufficient cause. for it for an ambassador to slip on a piece of orange-peel.; .and, though imputing no assault to anyone, his countrymen will say in such times as those : " But what right had the dirty foreigners to leave the orange-peel lying about ? " That is quite sufficient to cause war when war is needed, though shelling legations will not do so when it is not. For war comes from tides in human affairs, and depends little on human precautions. Shall we stop it by keeping the birth-rate down to the level of the death-rate, thus preventing its logical cause ? I think not, for that is only to invite invasion. War has been hitherto the method whereby the blood of peoples was blended, always with a strong tincture of adventure, and whereby races were made. It has been the method whereby those races held their own so long as they were worthy to hold it, and whereby they were overthrown before they cumbered the earth and lowered the average human standard. I like it less than Newton liked being hit on the head by an apple, but I recognize it as one of the conditions under which we live on the planet. To those who, hoping for peace, are yet prepared to face facts I
would point out the sinister circumstances that the first syllable of Avon is practically the same as the second syllable of Punjab, and that that syllable means river. It is worth more than a moment's thought to consider who brought that word ab or av, meaning river, from India to Warwickshire, and how he got there. Nor was he probably by any means floated upon the first of such tides, that swept out of the highlands of Asia riding after the sun. Yet let us hope that the court of King Canute now sitting by the shores of Geneva will stop these tides for ever.
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