_A paper read to the Essay Society, Eton College, March 14, 1918._
When you asked me to read or speak to you, I promised to speak about the
War. What I have to say is wholly orthodox, but it is none the worse for
that. Indeed, when I think how entirely the War possesses our thoughts
and how entirely we are agreed concerning it, I seem to see a new
meaning in the creeds of the religions. These creeds grew up by general
consent, and no one who believed them grudged repeating them. In the
face of an indifferent or hostile world the faithful found themselves
obliged to define their belief, and to strengthen themselves by an
unwearying and united profession of faith. It is the enemy who gives
meaning to a religious creed: without our creed we cannot win. So I am
willing to remind you of what you know, rather than to try to introduce
you to novelties.
The strength of the enemy lies in his creed; not in the lands that he
has ravished from his neighbours. If his creed does not prevail, his
lands will not help him. Germany has taken lands from Belgium, Serbia,
Roumania, Russia, and the rest, but unless her digestion is as strong as
her appetite, she will fail to keep them. If she is to hold them in
peace, the peoples who inhabit these lands must be either exterminated
or converted to the German creed. Lands can be annexed by a successful
campaign; they can be permanently conquered only by the operations of
peace. The people who survive will be a weakness to the German Empire
unless they accept what they are offered, a share in the German creed.
That creed has not many natural attractions for the peoples on whom it
is imposed by force. It is an intensely patriotic creed; it insists on
racial supremacy, and on unity to be achieved by violence. Pleading and
persuasion have little part in it except as instruments of deceit. There
is no use in listening to what the Germans say; they do not believe it
themselves. What they say is for others; what they do is for themselves.
While they are at war, language for them has only two uses--to conceal
their thoughts, and to deceive their enemies.
The creed of Western civilization, for which they feel nothing but
contempt, and on which they will be broken, is not a simple thing, like
theirs. The words by which it is commonly expressed--democracy,
parliamentarism, individual liberty, diversity, free development--are
puzzling theoretic words, which make no instinctive appeal to the heart.
Nevertheless, we stand for growth as against order; and for life as
against death. If Germany wins this war, her system will have to be
broken or to decay before growth can start again. Must we lose even a
hundred years in shaking ourselves free from the paralysis of the German
nightmare?
The Germans have shown themselves strong in their unity, and strong in
their willingness to make great sacrifices to preserve that unity. No
one can deny nobility to the sacrifice made by the simple-minded German
soldier who dies fighting bravely for his people and his creed. His
narrowness is his strength, and makes unselfishness easier by saving his
mind from question. 'This one thing you shall do', his country says to
him, 'fight and die for your country, so that your country and your
people shall have lordship over other countries and other peoples. You
are nothing; Germany is everything.'
We who live in this island love our country with at least as deep a
passion; but a creed so simple as the German creed will never do for us.
We are patriotic, but our patriotism is often overlaid and confused by a
wider thought and a wider sympathy than the Germans have ever known.
Much extravagant praise has lately been given to the German power of
thinking, which produces the elaborate marvels of German organization.
But this thinking is slave-thinking, not master-thinking; it spends
itself wholly on devising complicated means to achieve a very simple
end. That is what makes the Germans so like the animals. Their wisdom is
all cunning. I have had German friends, two or three, in the course of
my life, but none of them ever understood a word that I said if I tried
to say what I thought. You could talk to them about food, and they
responded easily. It was all very restful and pleasant, like talking to
an intelligent dog.
If each of the allied nations were devoted to the creed of nationalism,
the alliance could not endure. We depend for our strength on what we
hold in common. The weakness of this wider creed is that it makes no
such immediate and strong appeal to the natural instincts as is made by
the mother-country. It demands the habitual exercise of reason and
imagination. Further, seeing that we are infinitely less tame and less
docile than the Germans, we depend for our strength on informing and
convincing our people, and on obtaining agreement among them. Questions
which in Germany are discussed only in the gloomy Berlin head-quarters
of the General Staff are discussed here in the newspapers. In the press,
even under the censorship, we think aloud. It records our differences
and debates our policy. You could not suppress these differences and
these debates without damaging our cause. There is no freedom worth
having which does not, sooner or later, include the freedom to say what
you think.
No doubt we could, if necessary, carry on for a time without the press;
and I agree with those newspaper writers who have been saying recently
that the importance of the press is monstrously exaggerated by some of
its critics. The working-man, so far as I know him, does not depend for
his patriotism on the leader-writers of the newspapers. He takes even
the news with a very large grain of salt. 'So the papers say', he
remarks; 'it may be true or it may not.' Yet the press has done good
service, and might do better, in putting the meaning of the War before
our people and in holding them together. Freedom means that we must love
our diversity well enough to be willing to unite to protect it. We must
die for our differences as cheerfully as the Germans die for their
pattern. Or, if we can sketch a design of our cause, we must be as
passionate in defence of that large vague design as the Germans are
passionate in defence of their tight uniformity and their drill. If we
were to fail to keep together, our cause, I believe, would still
prevail, but at a cost that we dare not contemplate, by way of anarchy,
and the dissolution of societies, by long tortures, and tears, and
martyrdoms. If we refuse to die in the ranks against the German tyranny
we can keep our faith by dying at the stake. There are those who think
martyrdom the better way; and certainly that was how Christianity
prevailed in Europe; you can read the story in Caxton's translation of
the _Golden Legend_. But these saints and martyrs were making a
beginning; we are fighting to keep what we have won, and it would be a
huge failure on our part if we could keep nothing of it, but had to
begin all over again.
The business of the press, then, at this present crisis, is to keep the
cause for which we are fighting clearly before us, and this it has done
well; also, because we do not fight best in blinders, to tell us all
that can be known of the facts of the situation, and this it has done
not so well.
The power of the newspapers is that most people read them, and that many
people read nothing else. Their weakness is that they have to sell or
cease to be, so that by a natural instinct of self-preservation they
fall back on the two sure methods whereby you can always capture the
attention of the public. Any man who is trying to say what he thinks,
making full allowance for all doubts and differences, runs the risk of
losing his audience. He can regain their attention by flattering them or
by frightening them. Flattery and fright, the one following the other
from day to day, and often from paragraph to paragraph, is a very large
part of the newspaper reader's diet. If he is a sane and busy man, he is
not too much impressed by either. He is not mercurial enough for the
quick changes of an orator's or journalist's fancy, whereby he is called
on, one day, to dig the German warships like rats out of their harbour,
and, not many days later, to spend his last shilling on the purchase of
the last bullet to shoot at the German invader. He knows that this is
such stuff as dreams are made of. He knows also that the orator or
journalist, after calling on him for these achievements, goes home to
dinner. No great harm is done, just as no great harm is done by bad
novels. But an opportunity is lost; the press and the platform might do
more than they do to strengthen us and inform us, and help forward our
cause.
I name the press and the platform together because they are essentially
the same thing. Journalism is a kind of talk. The press, it is fair to
say, is ourselves; and every people, it may truly be said, has the press
that it deserves. But reading is a thing that we do chiefly for
indulgence and pleasure in our idle time; and the press falls in with
our mood, and supplies us with what we want in our weaker and lazier
moments. No responsible man, with an eager and active mind, spends much
of his time on the newspapers. Those who are excited to action by what
they read in the papers are mostly content with the mild exercise of
writing to these same papers to explain that some one else ought to do
something and to do it at once. Their excitement worries themselves more
than it hurts others. When the devil, with horns and hooves, appeared to
Cuvier, the naturalist, and threatened to devour him, Cuvier, who was
asleep at the time, opened his eyes and looked at the terrible
apparition. 'Hm,' he said, 'cloven-footed; graminivorous; needn't be
afraid of you;' and he went to sleep again. A man who says that he has
not time to read the morning papers carefully is commonly a man who
counts; he knows what he has to do, and he goes on doing it. So far as I
have observed, the cadets who are training for command in the army take
very little interest in the exhortations of the newspapers. They even
prefer the miserable trickle which is all that is left of football news.
One of the chief problems connected with the press is therefore
this--how can it be prevented from producing hysteria in the
feeble-minded? In time of war the censorship no doubt does something to
prevent this; and I think it might do more. 'Scare-lines', as they are
called--that is, sensational headings in large capital letters--might be
reduced by law to modest dimensions. More important, the censorship
might insist that all who write shall sign their names to their
articles. Why should journalists alone be relieved of responsibility to
their country? Is it possible that the Government is afraid of the
press? There is no need for fear. 'Beware of Aristophanes', says Landor,
'he can cast your name as a byword to a thousand cities of Asia for a
thousand years. But all that the press can do by its disfavour is to
keep your name obscure in a hundred cities of England for a hundred
days. Signed articles are robbed of their vague impressiveness, and are
known for what they are--the opinions of one man. I would also recommend
that a photograph of the author be placed at the head of every article.
I have been saved from many bad novels by the helpful pictorial
advertisements of modern publishers.
The real work of the Press, as I said, is to help to hold the people
together. Nothing else that it can do is of any importance compared with
this. We are at one in this War as we have never been at one before
within living memory, as we were not at one against Napoleon or against
Louis XIV. Our trial is on us; and if we cannot preserve our oneness, we
fail. What would be left to us I do not know; but I am sure that an
England which had accepted conditions of peace at Germany's hands would
not be the England that any of us know. There might still be a few
Englishmen, but they would have to look about for somewhere to live.
Serbia would be a good place; it has made no peace-treaty with Germany.
We are profoundly at one; and are divided only by illusions, which the
press, in times past, has done much to keep alive. One of these
illusions is the illusion of party. I have never been behind the scenes,
among the creaking machinery, but my impression, as a spectator, is that
parties in England are made very much as you pick up sides for a game. I
have observed that they are all conservative. The affections are
conservative; every one has a liking for his old habits and his old
associates. There is something comic in a well-nourished rich man who
believes that he is a bold reformer and a destructive thinker. For real
clotted reactionary sentiment I know nothing to match the table-talk of
any aged parliamentary Radical. When we get a Labour Government, it will
be patriotic, prejudiced, opposed to all innovation, superstitiously
reverential of the past, sticky and, probably, tyrannical.
The party illusion has been much weakened by the War, and those who
still repeat the old catch-words are very near to lunacy. There is a
deeper and more dangerous illusion which has not been killed--the class
illusion. We are all very much alike; but we live in water-tight
compartments called classes, and the inhabitants of each compartment
tend to believe that they alone are patriotic. This illusion, to be
just, is not fostered chiefly by the press, which wants to sell its work
to all classes; but it has strong hold of the Government office. The
Government does not know the people, except as an actor knows the
audience; and therefore does not trust the people. It is pathetic to
hear officials talking timidly of the people--will they endure hardships
and sacrifices, will they carry through? Yet most of the successes we
have won in the War have to be credited not so much to the skill of the
management as to the amazing high courage of the ordinary soldier and
sailor. Even soldiers are often subject to class illusion. I remember
listening, in the first month of the War, to a retired colonel, who
explained, with some heat, that the territorials could never be of any
use. That illusion has gone. Then it was Kitchener's army--well-meaning
people, no doubt, but impossible for a European war. Kitchener's army
made good. Now it is the civil population, who, though they are the
blood relatives of the soldiers, are distrusted, and believed to be
likely to fail under a strain. Yet all the time, if you want to hear
half-hearted, timid, pusillanimous talk, the place where you are most
likely to hear it is in the public offices. Most of those who talk in
this way would be brave enough in fight, but they are kept at desks, and
worried with detailed business, and harassed by speculative dangers, and
they lose perspective. Soon or late, we are going to win this War; and
it is the people who are going to win it.
If the press (or perhaps the Government, which controls the press) is
not afraid of the people, why does it tell them so little about our
reverses, and the merits of our enemies? For information concerning
these things we have to depend wholly on conversation with returned
soldiers. For instance, the horrible stories that we hear of the brutal
treatment of our prisoners are numerous, and are true, and make a heavy
bill against Germany, which bill we mean to present. But are they fair
examples of the average treatment? We cannot tell; the accounts
published are almost exclusively confined to the worst happenings. Most
of the officers with whom I have talked who had been in several German
military prisons said that they had nothing serious to complain of.
Prison is not a good place, and it is not pleasant to have your
pea-soup and your coffee, one after the other, in the same tin dipper;
but they were soldiers, and they agreed that it would be absurd to make
a grievance of things like that. One private soldier was an even greater
philosopher. 'No', he said, 'I have nothing to complain of. Of course,
they do spit at you a good deal.' That man was unconquerable.
In shipping returns and the like we are given averages; why are we told
nothing at all of the milder experiences of our soldier prisoners? It
would not make us less resolved to do all that we can to better the lot
of those who are suffering insult and torture, and to exact full
retribution from the enemy. And it would bring some hope to those whose
husbands or children or friends are in German military prisons, and who
are racked every day by tales of what, in fact, are exceptional
atrocities.
Or take the question of the conduct of German officers. We know that the
Prussian military Government, in its approved handbooks, teaches its
officers the use of brutality and terror as military weapons. The German
philosophy of war, of which this is a part, is not really a philosophy
of war; it is a philosophy of victory. For a long time now the Germans
have been accustomed to victory, and have studied the arts of breaking
the spirit and torturing the mind of the peoples whom they invade. Their
philosophy of war will have to be rewritten when the time comes for them
to accommodate their doctrine to their own defeat. In the meantime they
teach frightfulness to their officers, and most of their officers prove
ready pupils. There must be some, one would think, here and there, if
only a sprinkling, who fall short of the Prussian doctrine, and are
betrayed by human feeling into what we should recognize as decent and
honourable conduct. And so there are; only we do not hear of them
through the press. I should like to tell two stories which come to me
from personal sources. The first may be called the story of the
Christmas truce and the German captain. In the lull which fell on the
fighting at the time of the first Christmas of the War, a British
officer was disquieted to notice that his men were fraternizing with the
Germans, who were standing about with them in No-man's land, laughing
and talking. He went out to them at once, to bring them back to their
own trenches. When he came up to his men, he met a German captain who
had arrived on the same errand. The two officers, British and German,
fell into talk, and while they were standing together, in not unfriendly
fashion, one of the men took a snapshot photograph of them, copies of
which were afterwards circulated in the trenches. Then the men were
recalled to their duty, on the one side and the other, and, after an
interval of some days, the war began again. A little time after this the
British officer was in charge of a patrol, and, having lost his way,
found himself in the German trenches, where he and his men were
surrounded and captured. As they were being marched off along the
trenches, they met the German captain, who ordered the men to be taken
to the rear, and then, addressing the officer without any sign of
recognition, said in a loud voice, 'You, follow me!' He led him by
complicated ways along a whole series of trenches and up a sap, at the
end of which he stopped, saluted, and, pointing with his hand, said
'Your trenches are there. Good day.'
My second story, the story of the British lieutenant in No-man's land,
is briefer. I was with a friend of mine, a young officer back from the
front, wounded, and the conduct of German officers was being discussed.
He said, 'You can't expect me to be very hard on German officers, for
one of them saved my life'. He then told how he and a companion crept
out into No-man's land to bring in some of our wounded who were lying
there. When they had reached the wounded, and were preparing to bring
them in, they were discovered by the Germans opposite, who at once
whipped up a machine-gun and turned it on them. Their lives were not
worth half a minute's purchase, when suddenly a German officer leapt up
on to the parapet, and, angrily waving back the machine-gunners, called
out, in English, 'That's all right. You may take them in.'
These are no doubt exceptional cases; the rule is very different. But a
good many of such cases are known to soldiers, and I have seen none of
them in the press. Soldiers are silent by law, and journalists either do
not hear these things, or, believing that hate is a valuable asset,
suppress all mention of them. If England could ever be disgraced by a
mishap, she would be disgraced by having given birth to those
Englishmen, few and wretched, who, when an enemy behaves generously,
conceal or deny the fact. And consider the effect of this silence on the
Germans. There are some German officers, as I said, who are better than
the German military handbooks, and better than their monstrous chiefs.
Which of them will pay the smallest attention to what our papers say
when he finds that they collect only atrocities, and are blind to
humanity if they see it in an enemy? He will regard our press accounts
of the German army as the work of malicious cripples; and our perfectly
true narrative of the unspeakable brutality and filthiness of the German
army's doings will lose credit with him.
If I had my way, I would staff the newspaper offices, as far as
possible, with wounded soldiers, and I would give some of the present
staff a holiday as stretcher-bearers. Then we should hear more of the
truth.
Is it feared that we should have no heart for the War if once we are
convinced that among the Germans there are some human beings? Is it
believed that our people can be heroic on one condition only, that they
shall be asked to fight no one but orangoutangs? Our airmen fight as
well as any one, in this world or above it, has ever fought; and we owe
them a great debt of thanks for maintaining, and, by their example,
actually teaching the Germans to maintain, a high standard of decency.
This War has shown, what we might have gathered from our history, that
we fight best up hill. From our history also we may learn that it does
not relax our sinews to be told that our enemy has some good qualities.
We should like him better as an enemy if he had more. We know what we
have believed; and we are not going to fail in resolve or perseverance
because we find that our task is difficult, and that we have not a
monopoly of all the virtues.
Most of us will not live to see it, for our recovery from this disease
will be long and troublesome, but the War will do great things for us.
It will make a reality of the British Commonwealth, which until now has
been only an aspiration and a dream. It will lay the sure foundation of
a League of Nations in the affection and understanding which it has
promoted among all English-speaking peoples, and in the relations of
mutual respect and mutual service which it has established between the
English-speaking peoples and the Latin races. Our united Rolls of Honour
make the most magnificent list of benefactors that the world has ever
seen. In the end, the War may perhaps even save the soul of the main
criminal, awaken him from his bloody dream, and lead him back by degrees
to the possibility of innocence and goodwill.