The Militant Pacifist

Opotiki News, Volume II, Issue 274, 22 December 1939, Page 5 (Supplement)

The Militant Pacifist

(ANY were the men who, M having taken part in the World War of 1914-18, returned to I their homes firmly resolved to labour for the rest of their lives to avoid the recurrence of another such horror. I was one of them. I still am. I want to be, and I shall be, to the last breath I draw.

I served in the army as physician and surgeon. I saw, throughout the war, only one face: tortured by pain, bleeding, wretched, dramatic. It is possible that at times the combatants, as they say, experienced joy or enthusiasm. I knew nothing of that. I saw only wounds, bandages, blood, pus, and operatingtheatres where, after a night of labour, the dawn saw the wastebins filled with the pale, ghastly debris of human bodies. Overwhelmed with horror, in this charnel-house I used to tend old men, women and children. I have seen beautiful little bodies, innocent and truly angelic, dreadfully mutilated by the bursting of an idiot bomb. It was a relatively rare thing during the World War, but will be a more frequent sight in the catastrophe to come. When the war was over I undertook, despairingly, the study of pacifism in all its aspects. Carefully and profoundly, I weighed every theory, every conclusion. I probed Tolstois doctrine of passive resistance to evil. Possibly, in certain cases, these doctrines are still applicable; in the event, for instance, of a conflict, a misunderstanding between two human groups animated by related civilisations and truly parallel philosophies. And then the European drama took the tragic and terribly dangerous turn that we see to-day. I began again an examination of the problem, and have modified my position.

Absolute pacifism is always justifiable in a few well-defined cases. If my brother, in a transport of anger, to strike me, I might not have perhaps the sublime courage to offer him the other cheek, but 1 should make a great effort not to strike him back. But if, while walking along the road, I should meet a madly enraged animal, the case is quite different. In allowing him to him to bite and infect me fatally, I serve no cause whatsoever, but only his unjustifiable rage. France to-day is confronted by two nations led by ambitious men, sick men who desire, in their delirious hallucination of power, to reduce the entire world to slavery. In submitting to such a yoke, one is doing a disservice to the cause of peace, for each victory in the undeclared war (we know it, now), is a pretext for new crimes, new demands. Does that mean I have come to welcome the idea of war? Absurd deduction. I have to-do y, as I had twenty years ago and yesterday and shall always have, a profound horror of disorder, of massacre. War, if it ever copies, will be the acme of such disorder,, I have only one"thought: to avoid war. But all reasonable mei| today agree in their conclusion that we shall not avoid a carnage by refusing, to resist. For almost two years I haye been writing,anticleson this burn-* -- 'iiiMhiif*'' ""-ii idMMkn i* T

consists not only in arm loving nations, but in these armaments, in these defences, in po continually to the agg tions that their enterpi future encounter i 1 obstacles..! True pacifism, I tl change its- nature and r events. I jam not a p; by philosophy, exper taste, but]for many pe sons as ; well. I have enough to bear arms, my home an old inva who canpot be movec usually in a large city get of enemy bombers nerable on all sides. t ever happens, will b< the complete defeat o: life’s thinking, not onl tion of my life’s work strike at everything ii I love. And that is 1 “Let the pacifists resif arm to resist. All e hour, is sophistry, false strategy, tragic —Georges Duhamel the French Academy the “Mercure de Frai