OPTIMIST Such grubby by-products are an unavoidable consequence of great events. After all, it’s possible the world didn’t change overnight on the first of August 1914. Nor am I at all convinced that imagination is one of the human qualities activated in wartime. But if I understand you correctly, you want to deny that modern war leaves any scope whatever for human qualities.
GRUMBLER You do understand me correctly. It leaves them no scope, simply because modern war subsists on the negation of human qualities. There are none.
OPTIMIST What are there, then?
GRUMBLER There are quantities which are mutually self-destructive in equal measure, as they attempt to prove that they are no match for quantities transformed into mechanical energies. In other words, that massed troops can be obliterated by mortars. It was only the lack of imagination remaining after the transformation of mankind into mechanical energy that made this experiment possible and provided the proof.
OPTIMIST If the quantities are diminished in equal measure, one against the other, then where does it all stop?
GRUMBLER When all that remains of two lions is their tails. Or if, exceptionally, it were actually to happen that the greater quantity retains an advantage. I shudder at the thought of having to hope that will be the case. But I shudder even more at the fearful thought that the more principled quantity retains an advantage.
OPTIMIST Which would that be?
GRUMBLER The lesser of the two, of course. The greater might become weaker by virtue of the remnants of humanity it has retained. But the lesser fights with the fanatical belief in a god that has wanted this development.
OPTIMIST A Bismarck is what we need. He would soon put an end to all this.
GRUMBLER That cannot be.
OPTIMIST Why not?
GRUMBLER If the world keeps on totting up its balance sheets by the number of bombs dropped, no Bismarcks can be born.
OPTIMIST How else can we defend ourselves against the Entente’s infernal plot to starve us to death?
GRUMBLER The infernal plot to starve us to death, in a war which revolves around the highest goods of the nation, namely making money and eating, is the infinitely more moral tactic, because it is more fitting than the use of flamethrowers, mines, and gases. The Entente’s tactics reflect the pragmatism of modern warfare. But the Central Powers turn trading areas into battlefields and vice versa — as a result of a culture so confused it builds temples from tallow candles and puts art in the service of commerce. But it is not for industry to employ artists or to produce cripples. The wrong principle for living extends to the wrong principle for killing, so again means and ends diverge. When two consumer cooperatives are tearing each other’s hair out, the more moral one is the one that reestablishes order, not by the consumers themselves but by means of a police force they have hired for that purpose, and if it doesn’t mind losing its customers, or even losing its wares, then it is the more moral. Quite apart from the fact that the blockade is merely a warning to the Central Powers to protect their subjects from it by ending an insane war. If the accountant has not reined in the heroes on horseback, he should do so now, since even they clearly recognize that war is not a tournament, but an attempt to corner the textile market.
OPTIMIST The business of this war is—
GRUMBLER Precisely. The business of this war is business! But the difference is: one side thinks export and says ideal, the other says export, and this honesty alone, separating the two, makes the ideal possible, even if there were no trace of it before.
OPTIMIST You’re not telling me they can be bothered with an ideal!
GRUMBLER Not at all, they merely want to deprive us of ours, and win it back by curing the German race of its uncivilized tendency to flaunt Made in Germany on its manufactured goods. For the Germans, ideals are “value added” to their goods when the others have them shipped in. They don’t believe they can build an underground railway without God and Art. That’s the cancer. In a Berlin stationer’s I spotted a block of toilet paper with quotations from Shakespeare illustrating the purpose of each sheet and the humour of the situation. Shakespeare is, after all, an enemy author. But Goethe and Schiller were called up, too, the block contained the whole of German classical culture. Never before had I had such a strong impression that Germany was the nation of poets and thinkers.
OPTIMIST All right then, so you see a cultural instinct at work in the war the others are waging, and a demand for economic expansion in that of the Germans. But the effect of economic prosperity on the spiritual life of the Germans, would that not be precisely—
GRUMBLER No, it wouldn’t, just the opposite. The total absence of a spiritual life was the prerequisite for these aspirations. Spiritual self-starvation, with its promise of success, would be beyond the range of any imagination, even supposing such a thing were still available.
OPTIMIST But are you not yourself convinced of the necessity of such a war, when you speak of a war of quantities? For it would bring the problem of overpopulation under control for a time, you would have to admit that.
GRUMBLER Radically so. Overpopulation worries would make way for depopulation worries. The legalization of abortion would have been a less painful remedy for that than a world war, and war would have been avoided.
OPTIMIST The prevailing conception of morality would never give its consent!
GRUMBLER Nor did I ever imagine it would, since the prevailing conception of morality only approves of fathers, fortuitously delivered from the random killing, dragging themselves along the pavement as penniless cripples, and mothers giving birth to babies to be torn to pieces by having bombs dropped on them.
OPTIMIST You’re surely not suggesting that such things are deliberate?
GRUMBLER No, worse than that: fortuitous! One can’t help it happening, but it happens with forethought. Regrettable, but still it happens. Fairly extensive experience in this area might have brought it home to those who organize murder from the air, and those entrusted with carrying it out, that when they intend to hit an arms dump they infallibly hit a bedroom, and instead of an armaments factory a school for girls. Repeated experience should have taught them that that is what the success of those raids means when they subsequently boast of having bombed the target.