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 among the Russians, of course. The Japanese have in their
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 written 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 a
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 two 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 a 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-conscious 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, since the beginning of historical
record—since prehistoric times, for that matter; by the conventional expressions
of horror at the tale of maiming and killing; by the rumours of peace with
guesses more or less plausible as to its conditions. All this is made legitimate by