The Yahoo and the Angry Ape
Contemplating this picture of a state of mankind so recent that
no denial of its truth is possible, one understands Shakespeare
comparing Man to an angry ape, Swift describing him as a Yahoo
rebuked by the superior virtue of the horse, and Wellington
declaring that the British can behave themselves neither in
victory nor defeat. Yet none of the three had seen war as we have
seen it. Shakespeare blamed great men, saying that "Could great
men thunder as Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet; for
every pelting petty officer would use his heaven for thunder:
nothing but thunder." What would Shakespeare have said if he had
seen something far more destructive than thunder in the hand of
every village laborer, and found on the Messines Ridge the
craters of the nineteen volcanoes that were let loose there at
the touch of a finger that might have been a child's finger
without the result being a whit less ruinous? Shakespeare may
have seen a Stratford cottage struck by one of Jove's
thunderbolts, and have helped to extinguish the lighted thatch
and clear away the bits of the broken chimney. What would he have
said if he had seen Ypres as it is now, or returned to Stratford,
as French peasants are returning to their homes to-day, to find
the old familiar signpost inscribed "To Stratford, 1 mile," and
at the end of the mile nothing but some holes in the ground and a
fragment of a broken churn here and there? Would not the
spectacle of the angry ape endowed with powers of destruction
that Jove never pretended to, have beggared even his command of
words?
And yet, what is there to say except that war puts a strain on
human nature that breaks down the better half of it, and makes
the worse half a diabolical virtue? Better, for us if it broke it
down altogether, for then the warlike way out of our difficulties
would be barred to us, and we should take greater care not to get
into them.
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