The historian who reads the whole chronicle of man is saddened even in contemplating a nation’s prosperity. Amidst the cries of joy and triumph and love he seems to hear the cynical laughter of the war-god.
I need not follow the devastation of war through the later history of Europe. The Thirty Years War laid Germany desolate, and postponed its cultural development for more than a century. Spain, Portugal, and Holland, which had won empire by the sword, lost it to the sword. The Ottoman Empire sank into weakness and shame. All this was due, in the first place, to what Count von Moltke calls “the institution of God”: the institution without which “the world would fall into decay and lose itself in materialism.” Even while he spoke Germany was prospering by peace as few nations had ever prospered before. Could there possibly be a more perverse reading of the lesson of history? Could there be a greater mockery conceived than to imagine God smiling on this blood-reeking Europe, or to call this a spiritual triumph over materialism? Is any man, with the present desolation of Europe before him, tempted to place the soldier above the artist, the scientist, or the engineer as an instrument of progress? Let us grant militarism all that it has really achieved. It remains, in the mind of the historian, the greatest curse that mankind has endured since the primitive humans were first gathered into tribes and disputed each other’s “spheres of influence.”
