ABSTRACT
perhaps the first expression of anti-militarism in the development of historical writing, and an important one though only tacit and casual, is to be found in the eighteenth century. It was an expression of boredom and impatience at books stuffed with the accounts of wars and of the negotiations which prepared and ended them, and was accompanied by the demand for another kind of history to give something really satisfying to the deeper interests of the human heart and mind: histories of religion, of philosophy, of science, of art, of manners and of morality, in a word the history of civilisation. On these lines modern history continued to advance. It not only reduced the excessive space once given to military narratives but inspired even these with a spirit previously lacking. It related them to all forms of spiritual life, which reduces war to a mere means and its results to the material for renewed spiritual labours. Even technical military history, as one of the various techniques of human action, has its place in such a spiritual history, and, more precisely, in that of the various branches of science. But war merely as war does not lend itself to any historical understanding, since it falls under no distinct category or ideal. War, in fact, is a fever which periodically inflames men’s blood, so that, while it rages, nations and individuals, however noble their natures, wrestle for mutual suppression and destruction. The cool spectator, following the chances of this struggle from a distance, or reading of them in books, is stirred by imaginative participation as keen or keener than that of the audience in the. circus, the palestra or the cinema; but at bottom there is nothing but a restless alternation of beating and being beaten, in. which luck plays 121a great part, and which cannot be put into historical form because the historical connection and the logical significance are to be found elsewhere.
