Of the grandeur and elevation which Rome imparted to war and to man's nature it is superfluous to speak. As in statesmanship, so in war, he who would greatly praise another describes his excellence as Roman, and thinks that all is said. The silver eagle which Caius Marius gave as an ensign to the legions is for once in history the fit emblem of the race that bore it to victory and world-dominion. History by fate or chance added a touch of the supernatural to the action of Marius. The silver eagle announced the empire of the Caesars; the substitution of the _Labarum_ by Constantine heralded its decline. With the emblem of humiliation and peace, the might of Rome sinks, yet throughout the centuries that follow, returns of galvanic life, recollections of its ancient valour--as in Stilicho, Belisarius, Heraclius, and Zimisces[4]--bear far into the Middle Age the dread name of the Roman legion, though the circuit of the eagle's flight, once wide as the ambient air, is then narrowed to a league or two on either side of the Bosphorus.
To push the survey further would but add to the instances, without deepening the impression, of the measureless power of the ideal element in war, alike in the history of the great races of the past and of the present. Even the wars which seem most arbitrary and, to the judgment of their contemporaries, purposeless, acquire, upon a deeper scrutiny and in after ages, a profound enough significance. Behind the immediate occasion, trivial or capricious, sordid or grandiose, the destiny of the race, like the Nemesis of Greek Tragedy, advancing relentlessly, pursuing its own far-off and lofty ends, constantly reveals itself.
War, therefore, I would define as a phase in the life-effort of the State towards completer self-realization, a phase of the eternal nisus, the perpetual omnipresent strife of all being towards self-fulfilment. Destruction is not its aim, but the intensification of the life, whether of the conquering or of the conquered State. War is thus a manifestation of the world-spirit in the form the most sublime and awful that can enthrall the contemplation of man. It is an action radiating from the same source as the heroisms, the essential agonies, +agôníai+, conflicts, of all life. "In this theatre of a world," as Calderon avers, "all are actors, _todos son representantes_." There too the State enacts its tragedy. Nation, city, or empire, it too is a _representante_. Though the stage is of more imposing dimensions, the Force of which each wears the mask is one with the Force which sets the stars their path and guides the soul of man to its appointed goal. A war then is in the development of the consciousness of the State analogous to those moments in the individual career when, in Hamlet's phrase, his fate "crying out," death is preferable to a disregard of the Summoner. The state, the nation, or the empire hazards death, is content to resign existence itself, if so be it fulfil but its destiny, and swerve not from its being's law. Not to be envied is that man who, in the solemn prayer of two embattled hosts, can discern but an organized hypocrisy, a mockery, an insult to God! God is the God of all the earth, but dark are the ways, obscure and tangled the forest-paths, in which He makes His children walk. A mockery? That cry for guidance in the dread ordeal, that prayer by the hosts, which is but the formulated utterance of the still, the unwhispered prayer in the heart of each man on the tented field--"Through death to life, even through death to life, as my country fares on its great path through the thickening shadows to the greater light, to the higher freedom!"--is this a mockery? Yet such is the prayer of armies. War so considered ceases to be an action continually to be deplored, regretted, or forgiven, ceases to be the offspring of human weakness or human crime, and the sentence of the Greek orator recovers its living and consoling power--"Of the dead who have fallen in battle the wide earth itself is the sepulchre; their tomb is not the grave in which they are laid, but the undying memory of the generations that come after them. They perish, snatched in a moment, in the height of achievement, not from their fear, but from their renown. Fortunate! And you who have lost them, you, who as mortal have been born subject unto disaster, how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so glorious a shape!"