– PEACEFUL LIFE –
but thinking and hoping and praying (so unheroic are the ordinary people who die in war) that the casualties would be, not to themselves but to their companions. They took the risk of death willingly, as young fools take it daily on motorbicycles, as men take it in aeroplanes, or in search of a Pole, or after big game, or among the mountains; but the absolute certainty of death is something far removed from this. A man is indeed a hero if, longing for life, he accepts death of his own will. How many heroes do we commemorate each year? How many of the ‘immortal dead’ have deliberately died for their country?
Neither in its origins nor in its conduct is war heroic. Splendidly heroic deeds are done in war, but not by those responsible for its conduct, and not exclusively and inevitably by the dead. Of the ten million men who were killed in the last war, more than nine million had to fight whether they wanted to or not, and of these nine million some eight million did nothing heroic whatever before they were killed. They are no more ‘immortal’ than a linen-draper who is run over by a lorry; their deaths were no more ‘pleasant’ and ‘fitting’ than the death of a stock-broker in his bath.
But of course one can’t just say to a million mothers: ‘I want your sons,’ and then six months later; ‘Sorry, they’re all dead.’ If war is to be made tolerable, the romantic tradition must be handed on. ‘Madam, I took away your son, but I give you back the memory
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