The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎572v] (35/239)

4
AUTOCRACY AND WAR.
punishments of Dante’s Inferno, passing through the stages of
courage, of fury, of hopelessness, sinks into the night of crazy
despair.
It seems that in both armies many men are driven beyond the
bounds of sanity by the stress of moral and physical misery.
Great numbers of soldiers and regimental officers go mad as if by
way of protest against the peculiar sanity of a state of war : mostly
amongst the Russians, of course. The Japanese ha\e in then
favour the tonic effect of success; and the innate gentleness of
their character stands them in good stead. But the Japanese
Grand Army has yet another advantage in this nerve-destroying
contest, which for endless, arduous, toil of killing surpasses all
the wars of history. It has a base for its operations; a base of a
nature beyond the concern of the many books w T ritten upon
the so-called art of war, which, considered by itself, purely as an
exercise of human ingenuity, is at best only a thing of well-worn,
simple artifices. The Japanese Army has for its base a reasoned
conviction ; it has behind it the profound belief in the right of a
logical necessity to be appeased at the cost of so much blood and
treasure. And in that belief, whether well or ill founded, that
army stands on the high ground of conscious assent, shouldering
deliberately the burden of a long-tried faithfulness. The other
people (since each people is an army nowadays), torn out from a
miserable quietude resembling death itself, hurled across space,
amazed, without starting point of its own or knowledge of the aim,
can feel nothing but the horror-stricken consciousness of having
mysteriously become the plaything of a black and merciless fate.
The profound, the instructive nature of this war is resumed by
the memorable difference in the spiritual state of the tw r o armies :
the one forlorn and dazed on being driven out from an abyss of
mental darkness into the red light of a conflagration, the other
with the full knowledge of its past and its future, “ finding itself ”
as it were at every step of the trying war before the eyes of an
astonished world. The greatness of the lesson has been dwarfed
for most of us by an often half-unconscious prejudice of race-
difference. The West having managed to lodge its hasty foot on
the neck of the East is prone to forget that it is from the East
that the wonders of patience and wisdom have come to a world of
men who set the value of life in the power to act rather than in
the faculty of meditation. It has been dwarfed by this, and it
has been obscured by a cloud of considerations with whose shaping
wisdom and meditation had little or nothing to do; by the weary
platitudes on the military situation which (apart from geographical
conditions) is the same everlasting situation that has prevailed
since the times of Hannibal and Scipio, and further back yet,