For no particular reason, I have been reading a 1939 Australian school English text book.
At the end of the first chapter I found the following:
EXERCISES AND SUBJECTS FOR DISCUSSION
Beverley Nichols has suggested that if we are to think properly about war as it waged today, we should drop the word "war" and substitute the word "mass-murder" because the meaning of "war" for most people is inappropriate to what is actually done by armies to-day. Do you agree with this? And what is the meaning you give to the word "war"? [p12]
I don't know how I would have tackled the question at the age of 15, but this is what I would say about it today.
*
If the word "murder" means "killing", then "mass murder" simply means the killing of a lot of people at the same time (as opposed to "serial murder" which means the killing of a lot of people one after the other). So to say that war is synonymous with mass murder is to say that many people are killed in wars. This is true, but so obvious as to be hardly worth saying.
But if "murder" means "unlawful killing" then we run into problems. A soldier who kills another soldier under orders from a superior officer is not acting unlawfully: indeed, he would be committing an offence if he refused to do so. So the claim that "war is unlawful killing on a large scale" is simply false.
So perhaps when Mr Nichols wrote "war is mass murder" he meant "war ought to be mass murder": a soldier who kills another soldier (in a just and lawful war under orders from a legitimate superior) ought to be subject to the same criminal penalties as a private citizen who kills another citizen in a private quarrel. But to the best of my knowledge, no-one has ever proposed this. There are such things as war-crimes; and there are often demands for reparations at the end of hostilities; but I have never heard anyone argue that individual enemy combatants should be tried in civilian courts.
I don't think Mr Nichols was using the word figuratively. I don't think he was suggesting that we say "The Battle of the Somme was murder" in the way a motorist might say "The M25 was murder this afternoon!" Nor do I think he was saying "The soldiers in the next war are going to murder each other" in the sense that a teenager might say "When Dad finds I took his cigarettes, he's going to murder me."
Vegetarians occasionally wear badges saying "Meat is murder!" I am pretty sure they are not saying that they think that eating meat involves the premeditated unlawful killing of human beings. They don't literally think that non-vegetarians are cannibals. Neither do I think they are seriously proposing that meat ought to be murder. Even the extremist does not say that anyone who has at any time wrung the neck of a chicken ought to get twenty years to life in prison, and that a customer who frequents KFC should be charged as an accessory.
After the exoneration of Derek Bentley, his surviving relatives proposed carving "Murdered by the British government" on his gravestone. I don't think that they literally thought that the judge, the home secretary or the hangman ought to have been charged and jailed in a court of law. It is theoretically possible that if individual police officers could be shown to have given false testimony under oath at a capital trial, they could have been charged with murder, but I don't think that was the point the survivors wanted to make.
It is possible that some anti-abortion activists do, in fact, think that a woman who takes an emergency contraceptive pill, a doctor who prescribes it and a pharmacist who supplies it are literally guilty of the same offence that Lucy Letby was convicted of, and should be punished by life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Donald Trump has used the term "execution" to refer to late-term abortion although he wouldn't apply the word “murder” to actual executions.
But in general "abortion is murder", "meat is murder", and "capital punishment is murder" are vivid ways of saying “we do not approve of abortion”, “we do not approve of meat eating" and “we do not approve of the death penalty”. So perhaps “War is mass murder" is nothing more than a vivid way of saying "I disapprove of war."
As a matter of fact, the authors of the 1939 Australian School English text book which I happened to be reading for no particular reason have misquoted Beverley Nichols. .The phrase he actually suggested adopting when we have deleted the word "war" from the dictionary is “the mass murder of civilians."
But if anything, this makes matters worse. If by "civilians" he means "people" then all he is saying is that many people are killed in war. Which we already knew. But if by "civilians" he means "people who are not soldiers" then he is trying to have his cake and eat it. The distinction between soldiers and civilians is a matter of great legal and moral significance—in war. From the medieval law of arms to the Geneva conventions it has been generally agreed that soldiers may lawfully kill each other in lawfully declared and just wars; but they may not lawfully kill anyone else.
To say that war is murder is to say that there is no such category as war: an English soldier stabbing an SS officer with a bayonet on the field of battle is no different from a Mod stabbing a Rocker with a flick-knife on the seafront at Southend; or Miss Scarlet stabbing Mr Black in the kitchen with the breadknife. But if there is indeed no such category as war, then the distinction between civilians and soldiers does not exist. An Englishman in uniform opening fire on a group of Germans in uniform in a trench is doing exactly the same thing as an Englishman in civvies who opens fire on a group of German gentlemen enjoying some hofbrau in a bierhalle.
You can't have it both ways. You can say that war involves killing lots of civilians, or you can say that war involves murdering lots of people, but you can't logically say both.
*
Speaking personally, I would be very happy to stop talking about war—and also to stop talking about genocide, terrorism, pogroms and massacres —and instead adopt the neutral word "killing". It would then be necessary to distinguish between "OK-killing" and "not-OK-killing". Most of us would agree that the shooting of an armed terrorist by a law enforcement officer would be in the "OK-killing" category. Some of us think that strapping a person who carried out a not-OK-killing in 1994 to a chair and forcing them to inhale cyanide gas in 2024 would be "OK-killing"; some of us think that it would definitely not be. The British House of Commons is currently deciding whether the killing by a physician of a terminally ill patient who has positively asked them to do so is in the "OK" or "not-OK" category.
Such a usage would massively simplify our deliberations around the ongoing Middle-east Crisis. We would be obliged to say that Israeli bombardment of Gaza is OK-killing, because it comes in response to the October 7th attacks on Israel by Hamas, which were very definitely not-OK. Although unfortunately, we would also have to explain why the October 7th attacks were not rendered OK by the (presumably not-OK) killing of Palestinians by Israel prior to October 7th, or why those earlier killings were not, in fact not-OK.
Some of us might be inclined to say that none of this killing is OK and could both sides stop it as soon as conveniently possible.
*
The assertion that the word "war" ought to be dropped comes in Beverly Nichols’ 1933 book Cry Havoc. Nichols is an interesting figure; extremely famous in his time, but almost entirely forgotten today. He ghost wrote Nellie Melba's autobiography and was one of the few newsmen at the late Queen's coronation in 1953. He may also briefly have been Siegfried Sassoon's boyfriend. (Biographies still rather quaintly describe actor/playwright Cyril Butcher as his "lifelong companion".) Although he wrote plays, religious books, children's stories and murder mysteries, he was best known for his columns and broadcasts on the controversial subject of gardening. His writing is florid, self-deprecating, and rather witty; a little like Jerome K Jerome transposed to a minor key.
For I know that unless I write a gardening book now...swiftly and spread it before the last bud outside my window has spread its tiny fan...It will be too late to write it at all. For shortly I will know too much; will dilate, with tedious prolixity of the root formation of the winter aconite, instead of trying to catch on paper the glint of its gold through the snow, as I remember it last winter, like a fist full of largesse thrown over a satin quilt. [Down the Garden path, page viii]
Overwritten, of course, but overwriting was a fashion of the era. We'd now probably call it a "humblebrag": he's making a virtue out of the fact that he is not going to write a technical volume while making it quite clear that he knows a lot more about horticulture than you do. The book it comes from (Down the Garden Path) was sufficiently famous that Sellar and Yateman (authors of 1066 and All That) wrote a parody of it, lampooning Nichols as "Knachbull Twee". ("If one is a real garden lover it isn't necessary to definitely read gardening books....")
In 1932, Nichols had written a pamphlet stating that in any future war he intended to be a conscientious objector. No less a person than HG Wells disagreed. Wells argued that refusing to serve in the army didn't advance the cause of peace; and didn't in fact absolve the conscientious objector from blame for any bad things his country might do in the war. Every citizen contributes to the war effort and every citizen shares the fruits of victory. One recalls AA Milne's assertion that a pacifist was like the starving man who said that his conscience would not allow him to steal food—but was perfectly happy to sit down to dinner with someone who's conscience did. Being a CO, says Wells, is simply a sacrifice to the God of Peace; it may satisfy your own conscience but it does no good. Today he would probably have called it Virtue Signalling.
Beverley thinks this is a fair point. He thinks that the average pacifist "rails against the horrors of war and says he will have none of this nasty business". But refusing to fight doesn't go far enough: a consistent pacifist would refuse to pay his income tax, or at any rate, that part of it which goes to buy arms, and not support the war effort in any way at all
An out and out pacifist is therefore ipso facto an anarchist. It may be that he is right to be an anarchist—it may be that this denial of systems is the one system which would work. That is not the point. The point is that you cannot be an anarchist on some things and a constitutional liberal on others. [Cry Havoc, p15]
I don't know about you, but that paragraph made me catch my breath and make a mental note to donate £5 to the Beverley Nichols Preservation Society, should such an organisation exist. (There is certainly a trust which maintains his cottage in Huntingdonshire.) There is a bracing clarity and specificity to it, and a genuine anger as well. He is quite clear what point he is making and what point he is not making. And he seems to care about what the word "anarchist" actually means.
He doesn't think that the mere fact that war is horrible is sufficient to prove that pacifism is right; but he does think that is where the discussion should start. He also thinks that discussions about social justice should take the privations of individual poor people as their jumping off point.
If that sounds involved, I would merely explain, humbly, that I am trying to say that I should like to see a model of a hideously wounded soldier on the respectable tables of disarmament conferences, and I should like all parliamentary debates on unemployment relief to be carried out in the somber and foetid atmosphere of a Glasgow slum. [p15]
He goes on:
I am not trying to back out of the extreme pacifist attitude of complete non-resistance. It may be right after all... I shall not have made up my mind until I have written this book, which is the reason why I am writing it. [p14]
Writing a book about a question he doesn't know the answer to in order to help him make up his mind? This particular blogger wants to embrace the fellow and call him "brother".
*
In 1914, a British general is alleged to have said that although the new flying machines were terribly clever, they would never be widely used in warfare because they would frighten the horses.[*] Nichols likewise sees the introduction of air warfare as marking a decisive break with the past. The battle of Mons in August 1914 was one of the first engagements in which aircraft were deployed:
"That Saturday was one of the last Saturdays, on this planet, when the word 'war' was still invested with a certain morality. It was also one of the last Saturdays when it still bore the remotest resemblance to the wars of the past.” [p24]
He claims that the beginning of the battle was not very different from Waterloo and Agincourt: organised groups of soldiers fighting each other, with even a certain amount of sportsmanship. "The enemy" he says "was largely composed of Bavarian ploughboys in German uniforms". The British dragoons decently refused to charge them with bayonets while their backs were turned. But this old fashioned sense of decency and fair play was obliterated by the arrival of the impersonal and indiscriminate bi-planes. It is presumably not a coincidence that a legend developed that on the night before the battle, the soldiers had seen a vision of ghostly archers or angels.
Nichols couldn't know, of course, that twelve years after he wrote, allied aircraft would be dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese cities. Like HG Wells, he assumed that World War II would be fought with poisoned gas. But he was quite correct in thinking that the new warplanes would inevitably be deployed against civilians. His remark that it was now possible to "blow up babies in Baghdad by pushing a button in Birmingham" is disturbingly prescient.
At any rate, after 1914, he believed that you could no longer talk about the morality or the nobility of war.
(Chivalry) died inevitably, a little later, and for ever, on the poisoned fields of Flanders. That there was magnificent and incredible individual sacrifice and heroism, on both sides, no man in his senses will deny. But chivalry, as a unifying, purifying spirit fled affrighted from all the armies at last, whether of the Allies or of the central powers. [p23]
He says that if he is going to write a book about war, the word "war" needs to be clearly defined "unless we are going to argue at cross-purposes". Someone who used language in such a flowery way would naturally be concerned with finding the mot juste.
As soon as the first shot in the air was fired the word “war” became obsolete. It should have been struck out of the dictionaries of the world, and a new word should have been put in its place…. [p24]
But he is not really talking about clarity and definitions. He wasn't, like Private Baldrick, suggesting that the 1914-18 conflict was only "a sort of a war." He didn't think that if the Prime Minister were to come on the BBC and announce that a state of war existed between England and Germany, the people listening to their wireless sets would be in the slightest doubt as to what he was talking about. And he's not like one of those pedants who chips in and says that, actually, I think you'll find, a conflict fought in the air is not a war but merely a sparkling white wine. He's not talking about lexical meaning at all.
What he is talking about are the emotional associations of the word war. When children who have learned about history in English schools hear the word
Across their young brains there flashes the silver of ancient swords, over the shallow waters of their understandings there flutters the reflected gold of flags flying in forgotten winds... [p25]
Even if they have seen supposedly realistic war movies, they will have picked up the sense that war is a "grand and inspiring affair"
We want another word. What is it to be? It must be a word devoid of decency, a word devoid of sense....A word with no historical associations, carrying no sonorous echoes of tragic beauty. A word trailing no clouds of glory. There is no such word. And the only phrase which truly expresses the situation is ‘mass murder of civilians. [p26]
You might think that there is sometimes some excuse for the mass murder of civilians. You could be perfectly sane and still believe that the large-scale unlawful killing of noncombatants is a lesser evil than Hitler's Thousand Year Reich would have been. But that isn't the point. The person who takes that view needs to justify his position, rather than hide behind the normalising word "war".
If instead of the phrase “we shall not sheathe the sword" [Prime Minister Asquith] had used the phrase “we shall not desist from gassing babies” the emotions of his audience might not have been so exalted. [p26]
This is hardly an original insight. You can't name a thing without also saying how you feel about that thing. A person who lets off a bomb may be a "terrorist" or a "freedom fighter" depending on how you feel about his politics. A person who strikes a child might be "smacking" or "hitting" (or even "beating") depending on how you feel about that particular form of punishment. We evangelise; you proselytise; they are religious fanatics. Chaucer spotted it six hundred years ago: a rich woman and a poor woman may both go to bed with man who is not her husband:
The word "war" has a reference ("armed conflict between nations") and also emotive content ("noble heroes fighting with honour"). What Nichols wants is a word with the same reference, but which invokes different emotions.
And this is presumably why the authors of the Australian text book which I am reading for no particular reason asked their students to think about Mr Nichols. They believe that the distinction between reference and emotive content is the whole key to literary appreciation, English composition, and the control of language.
*Mrs Patrick Campbell is alleged to have made the same remark about homosexuals.
