Yet the Catholic Church, certain of its faith, and all other churches claiming that they teach the gospel of Christ, have been challenged to explain their attitude during the war and the relation of their teaching to the world-tragedy, the Great Crime, which has happened. It will not be easy for them to do so. They will have to explain how it is that German bishops, priests, pastors, and flocks, undoubtedly sincere in their professions of faith, deeply pious, as our soldiers saw in Cologne, and fervent in their devotion to the sacraments on their side of the fighting-line, as the Irish Catholics on our side, were able to reconcile this piety with their war of aggression. The faith of the Austrian Catholics must be explained in relation to their crimes, if they were criminal, as we say they were, in leading the way to this war by their ultimatum to Serbia. If Christianity has no restraining influence upon the brutal instincts of those who profess and follow its faith, then surely it is time the world abandoned so ineffective a creed and turned to other laws likely to have more influence on human relationships. That, brutally, is the argument of the thinking world against the clergy of all nations who all claimed to be acting according to the justice of God and the spirit of Christ. It is a powerful argument, for the simple mind, rejecting casuistry, cuts straight to the appalling contrast between Christian profession and Christian practice, and says: “Here, in this war, there was no conflict between one faith and another, but a murderous death-struggle between many nations holding the same faith, preaching the same gospel, and claiming the same God as their protector. Let us seek some better truth than that hypocrisy! Let us, if need be, in honesty, get back to the savage worship of national gods, the Juju of the tribe.”
My own belief is that the war was no proof against the Christian faith, but rather is a revelation that we are as desperately in need of the spirit of Christ as at any time in the history of mankind. But I think the clergy of all nations, apart from a heroic and saintly few, subordinated their faith, which is a gospel of charity, to national limitations. They were patriots before they were priests, and their patriotism was sometimes as limited, as narrow, as fierce, and as bloodthirsty as that of the people who looked to them for truth and light. They were often fiercer, narrower, and more desirous of vengeance than the soldiers who fought, because it is now a known truth that the soldiers, German and Austrian, French and Italian and British, were sick of the unending slaughter long before the ending of the war, and would have made a peace more fair than that which now prevails if it had been put to the common vote in the trenches; whereas the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of Cologne, and the clergy who spoke from many pulpits in many nations, under the Cross of Christ, still stoked up the fires of hate and urged the armies to go on fighting “in the cause of justice,” “for the defense of the Fatherland,” “for Christian righteousness,” to the bitter end. Those words are painful to write, but as I am writing this book for truth’s sake, at all cost, I let them stand. …
VI
The entire aspect of the war was changed by the Russian Revolution, followed by the collapse of the Russian armies and the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, when for the first time the world heard the strange word “Bolshevism,” and knew not what it meant.
The Russian armies had fought bravely in the first years of the war, with an Oriental disregard of death. Under generals in German pay, betrayed by a widespread net of anarchy and corruption so villainous that arms and armaments sent out from England had to be bribed on their way from one official to another, and never reached the front, so foul in callousness of human life that soldiers were put into the fighting-line without rifle or ammunition, these Russian peasants flung themselves not once, but many times, against the finest troops of Germany, with no more than naked bayonets against powerful artillery and the scythe of machine-gun fire, and died like sheep in the slaughterhouses of Chicago. Is it a wonder that at the last they revolted against this immolation, turned round upon their tyrants, and said: “You are the enemy. It is you that we will destroy”?
By this new revelation they forgot their hatred of Germans. They said: “You are our brothers; we have no hatred against you. We do not want to kill you. Why should you kill us? We are all of us the slaves of bloodthirsty castes, who use our flesh for their ambitions. Do not shoot us, brothers, but join hands against the common tyranny which enslaves our peoples.” They went forward with outstretched hands, and were shot down like rabbits by some Germans, and by others were not shot, because German soldiers gaped, wide-eyed, at this new gospel, as it seemed, and said: “They speak words of truth. Why should we kill one another?”
The German war lords ordered a forward movement, threatened their own men with death if they fraternized with Russians, and dictated their terms of peace on the old lines of military conquest. But as Ludendorff has confessed, and as we now know from other evidence, many German soldiers were “infected” with Bolshevism and lost their fighting spirit.
Russia was already in anarchy. Constitutional government had been replaced
