Why do the fighters fight? 1 Corinthians 13
Why do the fighters fight? 1 Corinthians 13  
Podcast: Spirit Force
Published On: Wed Apr 23 2025
Description: Why do the fighters fight? What is the psychology that sustains the terribleand wonderful thing called a war?In nothing is this new history needed so much as in the psychology ofwar. Our history is stiff with official documents, public or private,which tell us nothing of the thing itself. At the worst we only have theofficial posters, which could not have been spontaneous preciselybecause they were official. At the best we have only the secretdiplomacy, which could not have been popular precisely because it wassecret. Upon one or other of these is based the historical judgmentabout the real reasons that sustained the struggle. Governments fightfor colonies or commercial rights; governments fight about harbours orhigh tariffs; governments fight for a gold mine or a pearl fishery. Itseems sufficient to answer that governments do not fight at all. Why dothe fighters fight? What is the psychology that sustains the terribleand wonderful thing called a war? Nobody who knows anything of soldiersbelieves the silly notion of the dons, that millions of men can be ruledby force. If they were all to slack, it would be impossible to punishall the slackers. And the least little touch of slacking would lose awhole campaign in half a day. What did men really feel about thepolicy? If it be said that they accepted the policy from the politician,what did they feel about the politician? If the vassals warred blindlyfor their prince, what did those blind men see in their prince?There is something we all know which can only be rendered, in anappropriate language, as _realpolitik_. As a matter of fact, it is analmost insanely unreal politik. It is always stubbornly and stupidlyrepeating that men fight for material ends, without reflecting for amoment that the material ends are hardly ever material to the men whofight. In any case, no man will die for practical politics, just as noman will die for pay. Nero could not hire a hundred Christians to beeaten by lions at a shilling an hour; for men will not be martyred formoney. But the vision called up by real politik, or realistic politics,is beyond example crazy and incredible. Does anybody in the worldbelieve that a soldier says, ‘My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shallgo on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages ofmy government obtaining a warm-water port in the Gulf of Finland.’ Cananybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, ‘If I am gassed Ishall probably die in torments; but it is a comfort to reflect thatshould I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, thatcareer is now open to me and my countrymen.’ Materialist history is themost madly incredible of all histories, or even of all romances.Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in thesoul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about lifeand about death. A man near to death is dealing directly with anabsolute; it is nonsense to say he is concerned only with relative andremote complications that death in any case will end. If he is sustainedby certain loyalties, they must be loyalties as simple as death. Theyare generally two ideas, which are only two sides of one idea. The firstis the love of something said to be threatened, if it be only vaguelyknown as home; the second is dislike and defiance of some strange thingthat threatens it. The first is far more philosophical than it sounds,though we need not discuss it here. A man does not want his nationalhome destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all thegood things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burntdown, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss.Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but isreally a house. But the negative side of it is quite as noble as well asquite as strong. Men fight hardest when they feel that the foe is atonce an old enemy and an eternal stranger, that his atmosphere is alienand antagonistic; as the French feel about the Prussian or the EasternChristians about the Turk. If we say it is a difference of religion,people will drift into dreary bickerings about sects and dogmas. We willpity them and say it is a difference about death and daylight; adifference that does really come like a dark shadow between our eyes andthe day. Men can think of this difference even at the point of death;for it is a difference about the meaning of life.Men are moved in these things by something far higher and holier thanpolicy: by hatred. When men hung on in the darkest days of the GreatWar, suffering either in their bodies or in their souls for those theyloved, they were long past caring about details of diplomatic objects asmotives for their refusal to surrender. Of myself and those I knew bestI can answer for the vision that made surrender impossible. It was thevision of the German Emperor’s face as he rode into Paris. This is notthe sentiment which some of my idealistic friends describe as Love. I amquite content to call it hatred; the hatred of hell and all its works,and to agree that as they do not believe in hell they need not believein hatred. But in the face of this prevalent prejudice, this longintroduction has been unfortunately necessary, to ensure anunderstanding of what is meant by a religious war. There is a religiouswar when two worlds meet; that is, when two visions of the world meet;or in more modern language, when two moral atmospheres meet. What is theone man’s breath is the other man’s poison; and it is vain to talk ofgiving a pestilence a place in the sun. And this is what we mustunderstand, even at the expense of digression, if we would see whatreally happened in the Mediterranean; when right athwart the rising ofthe Republic on the Tiber, a thing overtopping and disdaining it, darkwith all the riddles of Asia and trailing all the tribes anddependencies of imperialism, came Carthage riding on the sea.The ancient religion of Italy was on the whole that mixture which wehave considered under the head of mythology; save that where the Greekshad a natural turn for the mythology, the Latins seem to have had a realturn for religion. Both multiplied gods, yet they sometimes seem to havemultiplied them for almost opposite reasons. It would seem sometimes asif the Greek polytheism branched and blossomed upwards like the boughsof a tree, while the Italian polytheism ramified downward like theroots. Perhaps it would be truer to say that the former branches liftedthemselves lightly, bearing flowers; while the latter hung down, beingheavy with fruit. I mean that the Latins seem to multiply gods to bringthem nearer to men, while the Greek gods rose and radiated outwards intothe morning sky. What strikes us in the Italian cults is their local andespecially their domestic character. We gain the impression ofdivinities swarming about the house like flies; of deities clusteringand clinging like bats about the pillars or building like birds underthe eaves. We have a vision of a god of roofs and a god of gateposts, ofa god of doors and even a god of drains. It has been suggested that allmythology was a sort of fairy-tale; but this was a particular sort offairy-tale which may truly be called a fireside tale, or a nursery-tale;because it was a tale of the interior of the home; like those which makechairs and tables talk like elves. The old household gods of the Italianpeasants seem to have been great, clumsy, wooden images, morefeatureless than the figure-head which Quilp battered with the poker.This religion of the home was very homely. Of course there were otherless human elements in the tangle of Italian mythology. There were Greekdeities superimposed on the Roman; there were here and there uglierthings underneath, experiments in the cruel kind of paganism, like theArician rite of the priest slaying the slayer. But these things werealways potential in paganism; they are certainly not the peculiarcharacter of Latin paganism. The peculiarity of that may be roughlycovered by saying that if mythology personified the forces of nature,this mythology personified nature as transformed by the forces of man.It was the god of the corn and not of the grass, of the cattle and notthe wild things of the forest; in short, the cult was literally aculture; as when we speak of it as agriculture.With this there was a paradox which is still for many the puzzle orriddle of the Latins. With religion running through every domesticdetail like a climbing plant, there went what seems to many the veryopposite spirit: the spirit of revolt. Imperialists and reactionariesoften invoke Rome as the very model of order and obedience; but Rome wasthe very reverse. The real history of ancient Rome is much more like thehistory of modern Paris. It might be called in modern language a citybuilt out of barricades. It is said that the gate of Janus was neverclosed because there was an eternal war without; it is almost as truethat there was an eternal revolution within. From the first Plebeianriots to the last Servile Wars, the state that imposed peace on theworld was never really at peace. The rulers were themselves rebels.There is a real relation between this religion in private and thisrevolution in public life. Stories none the less heroic for beinghackneyed remind us that the Republic was founded on a tyrannicide thatavenged an insult to a wife; that the Tribunes of the people werere-established after another which avenged an insult to a daughter. Thetruth is that only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have astandard or a status by which to criticise the state. They alone canappeal to something more holy than the gods of the city; the gods of thehearth. That is why men are mystified in seeing that the same nationsthat are thought rigid in domesticity are also thought restless inpolitics; for in