THE POET ON CAPITOL HILL
15
tion to Germany
in
order to prevent such a catastrophe?)
he said
"My answers would be No." And "I should answer your first ques–
tion
[What will you do when America goes to war?]
as follows: I
should do everything in my power to prevent the United States
going to war under
any
circumstances. There is only one possible
position against the menace of militarism: absolute hostility. Any
other is romantic. Any other supplies the forces desiring war with.
the means of securing it."
81
These answers were given in the summer of 1935 while Italy
was preparing her invasion of Ethiopia, a few months after Hitler's
rearmament of the Rhine, one year after his first conference with
Mussolini at Venice, one year before the outbreak of those hostil–
ities in Spain which in 1937 Mr. MacLeish accepted as
"our
war,"
and two years before he made his first attack on the "irrespon·
sibles" by addressing the Phi Beta Kappa society at Columbia in
the following words:
0 scholars schooled upon the hooks:
· 0 skillful readers of the page:
lUse
from your labor now! Enlist
For warfare
in
this fighting age!
I say the guns are in your house:
I say there is no room for flight:
Arise 0 scholars from your peace!
Arise! Enlist! Take arms and fight!
82
In fact, two years before he answered the questionnaire Mr.
MacLeish had harsh things to say of war-skepticism. Reviewing.
Laurence Stallings'
The First World War,
he saw that war as
unjustly debunked of its "heroism, endurance, humor, death," its
"great courage," its " fine sights." "The Second World War is the
First World War as we now reconstruct it ... seen through a key–
hole, interpreted from a mountaintop, judged in its causes and its
effects ... a very impersonal and terrifying war" without heroes
or humanity, a sorry matter of "beginnings, devices, forces-the
greed of bankers, the treachery of politicians, the rapacity of muni–
tions makers, the starvation of nations, the death of millions," and
its "end is not victory or armistice ... but a spiritual destruction,
a world of dictatorships and tyranny, a dislocation of human life,
