Life — October 1, 1914 — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

OCTOBER 1, 1916 “While there is Life there's Hope"* No, 1666 Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY J. A. Mitcurtt, Pres't, A. Mutes, Sec’y and Treas 17 West Thirty-first Street, New York English Offices, Rolls House, Breams Bldgs., London, E. C. HIS is dis- tinctly a foundling war that is going on in he aia ie! Europe. No- body is willing QE to father it. One after another the nations con- cerned have stood up and made formal ‘declaration that it was no war of theirs, but an unwelcome charge left on their doorstep. It will take court proceedings to trace its paternity, but persons who have duly read the papers, white and other kinds, incline ‘strongly to the suspicion that the war is the love-child of the German Gen- eral Staff. Nobody else in Europe seems to have wanted it, not even the Kaiser. The story that the Staff fooled him with a story that the Russians— or was it the French?—had crossed his frontier is just such another tale as that of Bismarck and the Kaiser's grandpa, and sounds so likely that we hope that in due time the German people will take the matter up with their General Staff and get the rights of it. If they conclude that the war was a mistake for them and that the Staff got them into it on false pretenses, to hang so many of the Staff as they can catch would seem not to be out of the way. And perhaps there are professors left alive in Germany with whom some settlement may be in prospect. When one cozsiders what this war is for, the answer hereabouts is that it is to correct certain obsessions that have grown up in the German mind as a consequence of wicked and erron- cous philosophy and teaching. The gospel of force, of assault, of robbery, has been preached openly and effec- tively in Germany for a generation. Nietzsche preached it until his mad- ness became uncontrollable, and Treit- schke, Von Sybel, Von Bernhardi, and heaven knows how many others, They got it into the more or less innocent German head that it belonged to the Germans to dominate the rest of man- kind. To get that idea out of the German head, out utterly and perma- nently, is what this great war is primarily about. Secondarily, it is a war against the whole idea of militarist domination ; a war against brute force; a war to keep the terrible obsession that has brought Germany and all Europe to so dreadful a pass from lodging in the mind of any other people for some time to come. It is not a war of the English to crush German trade; not primarily a war of the French to get back their lost provinces; not a war of the Belgians to conquer Germany ; not a war of Russia to get Constanti- nople; fot a war of anybody for any detail of trade, or revenge, or advan- tage, but a war of all hands to destroy militarism and the gospel of force, and bring peace and equity back into the world, . T is a terrible job to beat the gospel of force and make peace uni- versally popular. This present try at it seems to be going along as well as could be expected. The Nietz- scheans are still extremely efficient. Rheims Cathedral, battered and burned, now attests, along with Louvain, their savage competence in destruction. Cer- tainly the Vandals and the Huns had nothing on the Germans as destroyers of the monuments of beauty and of piety. Beaten back on the Marne, the Kaiser’s troops are making, at this writing, a formidable stand on the Aisne, where there has been a week's fighting, but as yet without decisive military results, The German rush is over, the Allies, having managed, like good shoppers, to avoid or survive it, are at it now, ding-dong, to get the idea of conquest out of the obstinate German head, pre- paratory to introducing there some less dangerous conceptions of the duty and destiny of man. There seems to be going on a vast killing of men in France, not to mention the wholesale operations in that line which we hear of on the other side of Germany. Truly a bad philosophy is a very fatal thing and desperately hard to eradicate. If missionaries could have converted Ger- many to the paths of peace, that would have been the thriftier way, but what could missionaries have done when a large proportion of the Germans are abundantly religious and suppose that they are Christians already, and the rest don’t want to be? SUGGESTIONS of peace have been made to our President, but amount to nothing as yet. Neither sidc is ready for them, The talk is still of a pretty long war in which settlement will be reached by processes of exhaustion. When it comes to that, the feeling of the Allies is that England and France with control of the sea can stand more of it than harbor-bound Germany can; while Russia is inexhaustible, That is dreadful sounding talk, but, of course, it is a hard job to get the poison of a rotten philosophy out of the heads of a strong, obstinate and very numerous people. Some devils come out, as the Scripture says, only by prayer and fasting. We are going to try prayer on a large scale on October 4th, and with fasting there has been much ex- periment in the field already, with comichooks.qom