Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

“Then don’t!” said Mr. Wilson.

“—but I will say this. You and your crowd have had two years—two long and terrible years—in which to prove that the thing we are getting ready for is a myth. You’ve had more than eighteen months since the blitz to convince us Hitler isn’t coming. You have money and brains, orators and a free press. You have congressmen and senators and leaders. You have radio time and you can print books. You’ve done all of it. And, day by day, more and more Americans have come over to our way of thinking—because, by God, you can’t make a case for your side! Not a convincing case! You can’t offer a guarantee that Germany won’t attack America someday. You can’t offer a guarantee that America can lick a Germany that may have licked everybody else on earth. All you’ve got to offer is your scorn, your negative hopes, and your fear of what preparedness and aid will cost.

None of those is worth a concrete damn! And as long as your crowd can’t prove—prove absolutely and beyond cavil—that we Americans are safe going along as we were, you might as well not try to talk. Because as long as there is a threat, a possibility, a chance, that the Huns are damn’ well after us—or will be—every man, woman, and child in America would be a sap if he was not exerting his utmost effort to whip them. Right?”

“There’s another position,” Mr. Wilson said hotly. “The position that Germany will exhaust herself before she gets to America.”

“Sure. And can you prove that she will? Mr. Wilson, what you can prove is that the Germans are bending every effort to make us Americans think they will be exhausted.

They want us to believe that the Russian campaign destroyed divisions, and hordes of tanks, and whatnot. It did, no doubt. But it also has left them with a couple of hundred or more divisions of the best-trained big-country invasion troops in history! The Germans wouldn’t like us to dwell on that angle! Our own army has a number of strategists who claim you can’t defend America—once an enemy has established bases inside the nation, and good supply lines. And if the German troops who trained in Russia landed here, they might blitz from Atlanta to Seattle!”

“But the general staff—” said one of the women.

Mr. Corinth looked at her.

“Unfortunately, the brass heads in the army and the navy think the way Wilson does. With their wishes. It’s natural. We brought them up in a ‘tradition.’ We thought that officers should have imagination beaten out of them; we sacrificed it for discipline, automatonism, excellence in as-is operation. Being patriotic, and being the victims of an ironclad environment, they—for the most part—can do nothing original to win our wars.

They don’t understand how the wars will be fought—only how they were fought. So that they must use up their energies wishing that the Germans were coming in ’43 just as they came in ’14 because that is the only way they learned to use their energies. That’s why an American admiral can strut smugly about on the deck of a battleship that has inadequate anti-air defenses. That’s why a general can conduct war games, and keep ‘score,’ without taking the possibility of air power into consideration at all. He does what he can do because he is a patriot—and he doesn’t do what he can’t do. That’s impossible.”

“But our boys have the spirit to whip anybody. We’re training ’em right now,” retorted Mr. Wilson.

“We may get enough new officers in time,” Mr. Corinth replied. “But whenever I hear an army man saying, ‘Give me the boys, and give the boys Springfield rifles, and I’ll show the old Boche what for!’ I get sick at the pit of my stomach. Because that poor devil will someday possibly be facing Boche —who are destroying himself and his men and the terrain and towns around them, from a point beyond Springfield range. Or from behind armor plate a Springfield and a Garand and a .37 millimeter gun can’t pierce! I get quite sore at veterans and old soldiers and the reminiscing legionnaires, sometimes. All they have is the right spirit. What they lack is the basic realization that, in twenty-odd years, one military machine—the German—has figured out how to make the World War lessons meaningless.

“Last fall, Mr. Wilson, the British were almost ready to quit. If the air blitz had gone on another ten days they probably would have quit. The government even had appointed the officials to treat with the Germans after the surrender. Whole towns, whole cities, counties, were so shell-shocked that they were unmanageable. Millions of people were stunned, numb, out of their heads. The end was at hand. The British knew it. And then—the Germans gave up the effort. That’s twice they’ve quit too soon. The third time—they may not quit. It’s all different, and it would be better for us if we didn’t have so many old soldiers around the land—good men—who are trying to get us ready to fight the war of 1914.

“The military wiseacres will tell you that there’s a defense discovered for every new weapon of offense. And so there is! I used to be more or less lulled by that theory.

Then I skimmed through the history of war to investigate it. And the sad truth is, that most of the great new steps forward in new weapons for offensive war—or new ways of using old weapons—have been immediately followed by the disastrous defeat of nations and whole continents! You can follow the story, from the phalanx and the catapult, through the Swiss bowmen and the use of gunpowder, right down to the tank and the bomber! There’s always a time lag before defense catches up with offense. It may be that an adequate defense will someday be invented against air bombing—as the old truism says it must be—but history leads me to suspect that the invention may very well come after the whole damned world has been subjugated, and the defense will be useful only in wars that lie centuries away from us now.”

Mr. Corinth stopped. Jimmie, who had been watching the faces, saw anxiety on many—anxiety that changed slowly to a hard, resentful determination. It was if a bigotry froze on the people, froze in stolid rejection of anything so adamantine as the old man’s words implied. They sat on the porch, uniting their wills anew to ward off bombs and torpedoes, rape and blood.

One woman, however, who had listened with a sorrowful expression, now said, “If you’re right, Willie, what’s to become of us all? I’ve always thought that war was shameful and sinful and a waste. I’ve believed that you should turn the other cheek. I’m a pacifist—a real one, I trust.”

“I know you are, Mollie,” Mr. Corinth replied. “And if everyone were like you, there wouldn’t be war. But—everyone isn’t. War is still a collective expression of individual irresponsibility, as I’ve said, and of individual greed and avarice. Comes out of a natural instinct. War is nature, Mollie. It’s only man—in the last few thousand years—who has begun to see that he can someday evolve his nature up to a high enough plane to quit making war. All the carnivorous animals kill the little, weaker ones for food. They kill each other when pressures get unbearable. And even the grasseaters kill grass, which no doubt feels it has a right to live also. The instinct of self-preservation embraces the will to preserve yourself in an environment most advantageous to you. As a human being, whatever you may happen to think of as an advantage—money, power, a bigger nation, raw materials, anything—can consequently become a motive for going to war. Living is a struggle; that is the very meaning of the word. It’s a struggle for individuals, and consequently a struggle for groups.