“A Deadly, Abominable Science”

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 54, 27 November 1926, Page 17

“A Deadly, Abominable Science”

Dr.

F. W. Norwood on War.

“ War is a science, a deadly, abominable, destructive science, but capable of manipulation by the brains of men until it becomes out of all proportion to the human elements involved, until territorial lines or political systems will seem at last to be mere details before the horrible excesses of a machine, of a diabolical invention, which already has grown beyond the power of men to control.” —Dr. F. W. Norwood.

DR. F. W. NORWOOD, of the London City Temple is spending six months on behalf of the League of Nations speaking and preaching in the large cathedrals and churches on behalf of pjace. Dr. Norwood was an Army chaplain during the war, and although he believed in the righteousness of his country's cause his horror of war is intense. At the Church Congress he delivered the first address of his big campaign, and it is a happy augury of Church unity that this enterprise should start at this great conference of churchmen. Dr. Norwood said:— “The moment you say anything that seems to reflect upon your country, that moment there is no word so vile and bitter that men will not fling at you. The real truth is that a man like I am has little to say about other ‘countries but a lot to say about war, and I say that war is an abominable and brutalising thing, and that even British character cannot withstand it. “God knows, I would be the last man in the world to withhold a tribute of admiration from the brave and gallant men of our own country.

“Have I not lived with them, struggled with them, hailed them in the morning, mourned for their death at night? Do I not love my country? At least I risked my life for her, if that was anything. I should be the last man in the world to say a single word that could diminish the glory of the brave and the gallant of our countrymen. But when you sweep up masses of men and put them in khaki and under the flag, by what alchemy do you suppose they become suddenly so saintly that they would never do a vile thing? "Think of the training it gives them. You hang up sandbags which you tell them are the bodies of the foe, and you teach them to run at those bags with bayonets, and you teach them how to give the little twist that is so damaging to the entrails. You teach them how to shoot at moving targets that look like heads, and you talk to them in terms of blood and slaughter, and you make them to suppose that the only thing that is really worth doing is the killing of the enemy. Do you suppose that there is some alchemy about that that makes men become braver and gentler and better?

“My friends, it is because I love man that I hate .war. It is not fair to men. I would see men brought out of the horrid tangle of it. The glamoui has gone. Why, nowadays, under conscription, when the resources of an entire nation are flung into the scale, it is the herd instinct that controls an assembly rather than the individual gallantry of a bygone day. . . .

"The only way from under the catastrophe is the quickening of the mind and the enlarging of the heart, and the moral effort which can fling back into the jungle where it belongs a method that may have been fitted for man when he lived in the jungle, but is absolutely incompatible with his civilisation and his science and his education and his religion.

“Do you think we won the war with kid gloves? Do you think that, whereas the Germans assaulted us with aeroplanes and poison gases, we only retaliated with the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount? We did not. We won the war because we became more destructive than they. Who started it is a trifle. I think they started it; I believe they did. I dislike it with every fibre of my being. “I think, having started it, we had to follow. lam not a fool. If you are in war you have got to win, but I come back to the original statement, and declare again, as, God helping, I will declare a thousand times during the next six months, that this is a process that has no end, that becomes more deadly and more abominable with every passing year, and that every day we live in our own country scientists, chemists, are carefully elaborating the methods of the next war, and those methods deal with chemicals, with gases and with aeroplanes. “I say there is only one alternative, not for Britain only, but for the world. It is cither find a better way than that, or some day the angels will look down on this planet as a burnt-out thing that had a message from the Christ, the holy and the pure, whom they worshipped with their lips but denied with their hearts, until the judgment of God, who is the maker of all the millions of the stars, let this one roll on its blackened way as an object lesson to the spirits he had created of how man must either go to hell or to heaven; and he can only go to heaven by the use of his brain, the cultivation of his conscience, the agreement on laws of justice and the steady attempt to put them into practice. “As for my attitude towards Britain, there is not a day in my life in which my prayer does not go up to God that this great people, that seems to me to be the greatest of the peoples, and that belongs most significantly, most romantically, most providentially, to history, may crown her glorious achievements, not by the mere acquisition of territory, but by the giving of unselfish guidance in the realm of the mind and of the spirit, and in the arena of politics to the driving back into oblivion of the methods of the jungle and the substitution for them of a righteous law.”