Does War Settle Anything?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 20, 10 November 1939, Page 12

Does War Settle Anything?

HE most frequently heard complaint T of that very small minority who hesitate to throw their full weight into the war effort is that war settles nothing. What they really mean is that it does not settle everything. It in fact settles far too much. It would be a little difficult to persuade the Poles to-day that war settles nothing; or the Abyssinians; or the Nankingese. If there is any hope left in those people it is that what has been taken from them by the swords of their enemies will some day be restored by the swords of their friends. Without that hope their miseries would crush them utterly. And by some day they mean some day soon; before hope and everything that they now value are dead. What may happen later than that they can’t afford to think about. It would be interesting, too, to know what Napoleon would have answered if someone had told him on St. Helena that Waterloo settled nothing. For him at any rate it settled everything. So did the Armada for Philip of Spain, and Bannockburn for Edward of England. A good deal was settled by war at Carthage. A good deal more at Nineveh. It is certainly true, as pacifists say, that peace has never been tried. It may even be true that, if it could be tried, its cost, in tears and blood, would be less over a hundred years than the cost of resisting tyranny. No one knows. If any nation has ever believed in peace sufficiently to put it to the test, it has not survived the test long enough to give us the story. And what we can’t know we are not prepared to take on trust. We do know what war means, and shrink from it if we are not lunatics. We know that it will mean something worse as time goes on. But to say that it settles nothing because humanity and civilisation survive it and perhaps turn to it again, is to say that Tarawera settled nothing fifty years ago because the grass will some day return to its feet.