Podcast Episode Details
Back to Podcast Episodes
Why do the fighters fight? 1 Corinthians 13
Why do the fighters fight? What is the psychology that sustains the terrible
and wonderful thing called a war?
In nothing is this new history needed so much as in the psychology of
war. Our history is stiff with official documents, public or private,
which tell us nothing of the thing itself. At the worst we only have the
official posters, which could not have been spontaneous precisely
because they were official. At the best we have only the secret
diplomacy, which could not have been popular precisely because it was
secret. Upon one or other of these is based the historical judgment
about the real reasons that sustained the struggle. Governments fight
for colonies or commercial rights; governments fight about harbours or
high tariffs; governments fight for a gold mine or a pearl fishery. It
seems sufficient to answer that governments do not fight at all. Why do
the fighters fight? What is the psychology that sustains the terrible
and wonderful thing called a war? Nobody who knows anything of soldiers
believes the silly notion of the dons, that millions of men can be ruled
by force. If they were all to slack, it would be impossible to punish
all the slackers. And the least little touch of slacking would lose a
whole campaign in half a day. What did men really feel about the
policy? If it be said that they accepted the policy from the politician,
what did they feel about the politician? If the vassals warred blindly
for their prince, what did those blind men see in their prince?
There is something we all know which can only be rendered, in an
appropriate language, as _realpolitik_. As a matter of fact, it is an
almost insanely unreal politik. It is always stubbornly and stupidly
repeating that men fight for material ends, without reflecting for a
moment that the material ends are hardly ever material to the men who
fight. In any case, no man will die for practical politics, just as no
man will die for pay. Nero could not hire a hundred Christians to be
eaten by lions at a shilling an hour; for men will not be martyred for
money. But the vision called up by real politik, or realistic politics,
is beyond example crazy and incredible. Does anybody in the world
believe that a soldier says, ‘My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall
go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of
my government obtaining a warm-water port in the Gulf of Finland.’ Can
anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, ‘If I am gassed I
shall probably die in torments; but it is a comfort to reflect that
should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that
career is now open to me and my countrymen.’ Materialist history is the
most madly incredible of all histories, or even of all romances.
Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the
soul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life
and about death. A man near to death is dealing directly with an
absolute; it is nonsense to say he is concerned only with relative and
remote complications that death in any case will end. If he is sustained
by certain loyalties, they must be loyalties as simple as death. They
are generally two ideas, which are only two sides of one idea. The first
is the love of something said to be threatened, if it be only vaguely
known as home; the second is dislike and defiance of some strange thing
that threatens it. The first is far more philosophical than it sounds,
though we need not discuss it here. A man does not want his national
home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the
good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt
down, because he can hardly count all the
Published on 4 months, 2 weeks ago