OPTIMIST As a result of the World War?
GRUMBLER Of the European war, up to the decisive victory which in the true World War would be achieved over a spiritually united Europe. The Slav-cum-Latin insurrection, reinforced by auxiliary nationalities, will remain an episode until all of Europe possesses enough German morality, stink bombs, and obligatory conscription for Asia to teach it a lesson. That is what I sometimes fear. But mostly I am an optimist, and one of a very different stripe to you. At such times I confidently hope for a favourable outcome, and see that all this triumphalism is nothing but a criminal loss of time and blood to prolong the delay before the inevitable defeat.
OPTIMIST Be careful!
GRUMBLER I’m only saying it to you, and openly. You won’t repeat it, and the hangman does not understand my style. I would like to speak more clearly. But I let the Prussians go for broke and keep my thoughts to myself.
OPTIMIST But you contradict yourself even in what you keep to yourself.
GRUMBLER But it is no contradiction to fear our victory and hope for our defeat.
OPTIMIST So there is no contradiction either between your praise of German character and your censure?
GRUMBLER No, there is no contradiction between my praise for a civilization which allows public life to function smoothly, replaces muddy streets with asphalt, and provides a thirsty imagination with systematic plans rather than some worthless notion of existential authenticity; and my censure for a culture that has become eclipsed by virtue of this self-same smoothness, efficiency, and know-how. It’s not a contradiction, it’s a tautology. In a generally deplorable world, I feel most comfortable where order reigns and society is sufficiently thinned out to provide me with a cast of supernumeraries who all look alike, and whose physiognomies therefore put no great strain on the memory. But I don’t want that to be the condition of humanity at large; I am far from putting my personal convenience above a nation’s communal desire for happiness, and think it misguided of the nation to allow itself to be lined up like a battalion of bread rolls.
OPTIMIST So can you also please explain the contradiction that you considered the military type as relatively the most decent servant of the state.
GRUMBLER That’s no more a contradiction than the other. Among all the available types of mediocrity, the military type was the most adapted to the chaotic peacetime world. Service is a barrier against unbridled insignificance. Discipline, doing one’s duty for its own sake, earns respect even for banality. Judged by the eye of the moneyed bourgeoisie, it serves as a benchmark. Even the speculator, obliged for once to obey rather than command, comes back in better shape, trimmer and less tedious.
OPTIMIST As I live and breathe, that sounds almost like praise for war.
GRUMBLER No, only for enduring hardship — and only as long as you live and breathe! Death cancels out any gain.
OPTIMIST That’s true. But when the speculators die, that’s all right with you, I imagine.
GRUMBLER The speculators don’t die. And anyway, claiming a glamorous death cancels out the benefits of physical fitness. The heroism of those who have no right to it is the most horrifying prospect of this war. It will serve some day as a backdrop, against which the increased or unaltered baseness of others will stand out more picturesquely and to better effect.
OPTIMIST But people really are dying. Look under the heading “Heroic Death” in the papers every day.
GRUMBLER Certainly, it’s the same section that used to announce who had been awarded the title commercial counsellor. But sadly, a random shell splinter will create a nimbus of reflected glory around the surviving representatives of those commercial interests for which the others died.
OPTIMIST You mean, the representatives who stayed at home.
GRUMBLER Yes, they will be indemnified for the coercion to which the others were subjected, their mandatory death sentence in service of an alien idea called universal conscription.
OPTIMIST The warriors returning home will know how to react to such arrogance.
GRUMBLER The returning warriors will break through into the home front and launch the real war. They will grab for themselves the successes they had been denied, and the impact of war — murder, pillage, rape — will be child’s play compared with the peace that will then break out. May the god of battles protect us from this coming offensive! A terrible agitation, liberated from the trenches and no longer constrained by any system of command, will start wielding weapons and seeking sensual gratifications in every sphere of life, and more death and disease will come into the world than could ever be contrived by the war itself. May heaven protect the children from the sabres that will serve as canes for spanking, and from the grenades brought back for them as toys.
OPTIMIST It’s certainly dangerous for children to play with grenades.
GRUMBLER And the adults who do such things do not even shrink from praying with grenades! I’ve seen a cross constructed from one.
OPTIMIST Those are merely by-products. There was a time when you didn’t despise war so completely.
GRUMBLER There was a time when you didn’t misunderstand me so completely. War was once a tournament for the few, and every instance was compelling. Now, it’s a mechanized lottery for everyone, and you are still an optimist.
OPTIMIST But it is impossible for the development of weapons to lag behind the technical achievements of modern times.
GRUMBLER True, but the imagination in modern times has lagged behind man’s technical achievements.
OPTIMIST So, one wages war with imagination, then?
GRUMBLER No, for if one still had imagination, one would no longer wage war.
OPTIMIST Why not?
GRUMBLER Because then the suggestive power of a phraseology which lingers on after an ideal has become obsolete would not have enough scope to befuddle men’s brains; because men could themselves imagine the most unimaginable horrors, and would know in advance how short a step it is from the colourful slogans and all the flag-waving enthusiasm to the field-grey misery; because the prospect of dying from dysentery for their country, or having their feet frozen off, would no longer have any emotional appeal; because they would march off in the sure knowledge that they would catch lice for their country. For they would know that man invented the machine only to be overpowered by it, and they would not trump the madness of having invented it with the even greater madness of allowing themselves to be killed by it. Moreover, they would realize they must defend themselves against an enemy of whom they see no more than columns of rising smoke, and sense that acting as agents for an armaments factory offers inadequate protection against the products of the enemy’s armaments factories. So if men had imagination, they would know it is a crime to expose their lives to chance, a sin to debase death to mere chance, that it is madness to build armoured warships and at the same time torpedo boats to outwit them, to build mortars and at the same time trenches to take cover in, where you’re only done for if you stick your head out too soon, so that foxholes offer the only escape from weapons and peace can then only be found under the earth. If, instead of newspapers, men had imagination, technology would not be a means of making life more difficult, and science would not aim to destroy it altogether.
Alas, heroic death hovers in a cloud of gas, and we experience only the choked wording of a communiqué! The bodies of 40,000 Russians twitching on the barbed wire were simply a special bulletin, read aloud in the interval by a soubrette to the dregs of humanity, so that the librettist who turned the slogan “I Gave Gold for Iron” into a shameful operetta might receive a curtain call. The numbers involved, so huge as to be unimaginable, mean that only one’s own experiences and perhaps those of one’s immediate neighbours retain any emotional force — things one can see, grasp, touch directly. Is it not noticeable how everyone dodges the collective whole, where for want of a hero everyone is a hero, and takes refuge in his own little world? Things open up more than ever before, yet there was never less community spirit than now. As never before, the format of the world is that of a gigantic triviality. Reality does not extend beyond the communiqué from the front, which breathlessly strains to reproduce its distinctive gasping and panting. The report of the action is, at one and the same time, a report of the action as imagined, the reporter having interposed himself and rendered the action unimaginable. And such is the sinister effect of his mediation that I would indict each and every one of those wretched figures, who plague us now with that interminable violation of the human ear, their inescapable cry of “Ex-tra-aa edi-shun!”, as responsible for instigating this global catastrophe. Isn’t the messenger equally guilty? The printed word has enabled a humanity with its shrunken soul to commit atrocities it can no longer imagine, and the terrible curse of mass circulation means that the word, propagating itself, brings forth yet more evil. All that happens, happens only for those who describe it, and for those who do not experience it. A spy being led to the gallows must take that long, final walk to provide some diversion for the cinema audience, and has to stare into the camera lens yet again before the viewers are satisfied with his expression. Don’t let me pursue this train of thought as far as the gallows of mankind — and yet I must, for I am its spy and endure its death throes. My heartrending experience is horror at the vacuum which this unprecedented plethora of events presupposes in people’s souls, before the crimes are recorded on camera!