Blind Courage
George Santayana reprimanded politicians and military men who thought war was good for the country’s soul.
1905
King Edward VII 1901-1910
King’s Liverpool Regiment practising near Blaireville, Wailly, 16th April 1916.
Ministry of Information, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
The King’s Liverpool Regiment, 55th Division, practising an attack near Blaireville, Wailly, on April 16th, 1916. Santayana was not willing to let his sincere admiration for the common soldier’s courage and sacrifice interfere with his duty to tell warmongering politicians that they were sending men to die in causes stirred up for their own thrill and glory. Such reckless bravado, far from making the country great, had a devastating effect on for generations to come. Nine years later, the German Empire unleashed the Great War of 1914-18, in which 880,000 British military personnel died, some 6% of the adult male population. In Germany the number was 2,737,000.
Introduction
Writing in 1905, American essayist George Santayana was full of admiration for the common soldier, and for the ordinary citizen who stands up to a bully. But to bellicose politicians and generals, and to anyone who romanticised war, he had some stern words to say.
Abridged.
There are panegyrists* of war who say that without a periodical bleeding a race decays and loses its manhood.* Experience is directly opposed to this shameless assertion. It is war that wastes a nation’s wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.* [...]
Blind courage is an animal virtue indispensable in a world full of dangers and evils where a certain insensibility and dash are requisite to skirt the precipice without vertigo. Such animal courage seems therefore beautiful rather than desperate or cruel, and being the lowest and most instinctive of virtues it is the one most widely and sincerely admired. In the form of steadiness under risks rationally taken, and perseverance so long as there is a chance of success, courage is a true virtue; but it ceases to be one when the love of danger, a useful passion when danger is unavoidable, begins to lead men into evils which it was unnecessary to face. Bravado, provocativeness, and a gambler’s instinct, with a love of hitting hard for the sake of exercise, is a temper which ought already to be counted among the vices rather than the virtues of man. To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
Abridged.
* A panegyric is a speech of praise, especially one that is excessive and lacking in balance. A panegyrist is someone who delivers such a speech.
* Santayana may have been thinking of the letter from Helmuth von Moltke (1800-1891) to Johann Kaspar Bluntschli (1808-1881) in 1880, in which he wrote: “Eternal peace, however, is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream, for war is part of God's scheme of the world. In war the noblest virtues of man develop courage and renunciation, the sense of duty and abnegation, and all at the risk of his life. Without war the world would be swallowed up in the morass of materialism.”
* In this same essay, Santayana reminded us that in the everyday ‘struggle with nature’ it is the fittest that survive, ‘while in war it is often the best that perish’.
