George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

The Sufferings of the Sane
The mental distress of living amid the obscene din of all
these carmagnoles and corobberies was not the only burden
that lay on sane people during the war. There was also the
emotional strain, complicated by the offended economic
sense, produced by the casualty lists. The stupid, the selfish,
the narrow-minded, the callous and unimaginative were
spared a great deal. “Blood and destruction shall be so in use
that mothers shall but smile when they behold their infantes
quartered by the hands of war,” was a Shakespearean proph-
ecy that very nearly came true; for when nearly every house
had a slaughtered son to mourn, we should all have gone
quite out of our senses if we had taken our own and our
friend’s bereavements at their peace value. It became neces-
sary to give them a false value; to proclaim the young life
worthily and gloriously sacrificed to redeem the liberty of
mankind, instead of to expiate the heedlessness and folly of
their fathers, and expiate it in vain. We had even to assume
that the parents and not the children had made the sacrifice,
until at last the comic papers were driven to satirize fat old
men, sitting comfortably in club chairs, and boasting of the

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GB Shaw
sons they had “given” to their country.
No one grudged these anodynes to acute personal grief;
but they only embittered those who knew that the young
men were having their teeth set on edge because their par-
ents had eaten sour political grapes. Then think of the young
men themselves! Many of them had no illusions about the
policy that led to the war: they went clear-sighted to a horri-
bly repugnant duty. Men essentially gentle and essentially
wise, with really valuable work in hand, laid it down volun-
tarily and spent months forming fours in the barrack yard,
and stabbing sacks of straw in the public eye, so that they
might go out to kill and maim men as gentle as themselves.
These men, who were perhaps, as a class, our most efficient
soldiers (Frederick Keeling, for example), were not duped
for a moment by the hypocritical melodrama that consoled
and stimulated the others. They left their creative work to
drudge at destruction, exactly as they would have left it to
take their turn at the pumps in a sinking ship. They did not,
like some of the conscientious objectors, hold back because
the ship had been neglected by its officers and scuttled by its
wreckers. The ship had to be saved, even if Newton had to
leave his fluxions and Michael Angelo his marbles to save it;
so they threw away the tools of their beneficent and enno-
bling trades, and took up the blood-stained bayonet and the
murderous bomb, forcing themselves to pervert their divine
instinct for perfect artistic execution to the effective han-
dling of these diabolical things, and their economic faculty
for organization to the contriving of ruin and slaughter. For
it gave an ironic edge to their tragedy that the very talents
they were forced to prostitute made the prostitution not only
effective, but even interesting; so that some of them were
rapidly promoted, and found themselves actually becoming
artists in wax, with a growing relish for it, like Napoleon and
all the other scourges of mankind, in spite of themselves. For
many of them there was not even this consolation. They
“stuck it,” and hated it, to the end.