HATRED
It is, I fear, true that national hatreds are in the main created and
kept alive by the educated and upper classes. Working men and women
throughout the world, absorbed as they are in daily toil and often
preoccupied about the next meal, have no leisure for the cultivation
of abstract sentiments. With a greater simplicity of outlook they
take people and things as they find them and do not theorise about
their faults. The scholastic attitude as regards hatred is an ironical
commentary on some of the byways into which education is apt to stray.
Professors--German professors in particular--are notorious for their
bloodthirstiness. The ordinary fighting soldier, who has been over
the top half a dozen times, is a man of peace compared with certain
ferocious persons of academic distinction. The brandishing of quills
has apparently a more permanently disturbing effect on character than
the hurling of hand grenades. The man in the trench has, after all,
a certain tie of fellowship with the man in the trench opposite.
They are linked together by a common sense of duty fulfilled and of
horrors equally endured. Each knows that the other is a man very much
like himself, sick with the misery and dirt of the whole business,
whose heart in all probability is yearning just in the same way for a
wife, and home, and child. Men under these circumstances do not give
themselves up to abstract hatreds.
But among civilians, a man or woman’s gift of warlike talk is often
in inverse ratio to any sort of personal capacity to shoulder the
responsibilities of battle. Women are always apt to be more bitter than
men because their measure of personal sacrifice in the war has been
invariably less. They have seen their loved ones perish and the light
of happiness quenched in their own lives. It is not easy for them to
think steadily of the great ideals for which men died, and to realise
that bitterness breeds a spirit which makes the fulfilment of such
ends impossible. The case of the professors is even worse. In Germany
the subservience of high academic authorities to the most abominable
doctrines of the militarists was a grave and sinister feature in the
history of the years preceding the war. The beating of tom-toms by men
presumably of education goes a long way to justify the jibe of the “New
Ignorance” applied to education by Mr. James Stephens. Education left
to itself is just a force, and if it throws off the right sort of moral
controls, becomes, as the whole history of latter-day Germany proves, a
very dangerous force. Probably in Germany to-day there is no class more
bitter, no class more full of hatred and the desire for revenge, than
that of the professors. But a similar attitude may often be found among
well-to-do people of all races, people who, whether or not they have
been educated in the real sense of the term, have had the opportunities
and advantages which spring from worldly status and prosperity.
No side of the Occupation has been more interesting than the points of
contact it has provided between the English and the Germans. Social
intercourse on the upper levels is non-existent. Germany and England
were at war when the Rhineland was occupied, and the relations then
inevitable between conqueror and conquered have remained unaltered.
Many of the English families now living in Cologne can hardly be
conscious that they are in a foreign country. The English military
community lives a life apart. At hardly any point, except in the shops,
do they come in contact with the Germans. The large majority of English
people, men and women alike, do not speak the language, and few make
any effort to learn it.
It is not easy to say what impressions of Germany and the Germans
many of these people will bring away. Opinion on the subject varies
considerably, and the views expressed are as wide asunder as the
poles. Some people admit frankly that their judgment and outlook have
been modified considerably by all they have seen and heard. Others
brought a stock-in-trade of prejudices from England and have guarded
it jealously from any contact with facts. If an Occupation following
on a war has any moral value, it is that necessarily it brings the
enemies of yesterday in touch, and so helps to break down a certain
amount of prejudice and to soften bitter feeling. Thus the way is paved
to the resumption, sooner or later, of normal relations. It is easy to
hate the abstract entity Germany. It is less easy to hate individual
Germans who may prove on acquaintance to be estimable people. Little
of this modifying influence has made itself felt on the Occupation.
Many women, and some officers, declare that the behaviour of the Boche
is rude and insolent; that he jostles English women in the streets,
and is generally lying and dishonest in all his ways. Circumstantial
stories are related in this sense. It has been stated in my presence
that a certain lady could not use the trams owing to the gross
incivility of the conductors. I am left wondering how far people who
have these experiences provoke them by trailing their coats. Obviously,
English women who talk loudly in a tram about “the beastly Boche” may
find themselves in trouble with their fellow-passengers, the German
ignorance of foreign languages not being as great as their own.
Speaking for myself, I have never received one rude or uncivil word
from man, woman, or child during the year I spent in Germany. I went
about sometimes wearing the official arm-band, and therefore obviously
English; sometimes not. I have never noticed the smallest difference
in the behaviour of the people on the pavements or in the street cars.
Tram conductors I have found almost without exception a polite and
efficient body of men. All great cities contain a proportion of gross
and undesirable people. Cologne is no exception to this rule, but the
particular elements are not more conspicuous here than elsewhere. So
far from hostility, I have received much courtesy and consideration
from Germans with whom I came into casual touch. I am not denying
the reality of other people’s contrary experiences. I can only state
my own. Temperament is a mirror which deflects the passage of facts,
and some of the English in Cologne have arrived at fixed judgments
about Germany before setting foot in the country. If they find the
inhabitants civil they at once call them servile, if they show spirit
they denounce them as insolent. In Cologne drawing-rooms English
women will sometimes discuss the Germans much in the spirit of the
Mohammedans who sat in a circle and spat at a ham. I have never been
able to understand on what grounds they founded that extreme view.
Upper-class Germany has vanished from the Occupied Areas, and no
one regrets their disappearance. But as regards the humbler classes
with whom we of the Occupation come in touch, the working-men and
country-folks, the shopkeepers, small business people and minor
bureaucracy, I have no hesitation in saying that they are, generally
speaking, hard-working civil people, correct in their attitude and
bearing. Reasonable people should find no difficulty in maintaining
the superficial amenities of life with them, even under the abnormal
conditions which have thrown us together.
However varied the views among the officer class, the rank and file of
the Army have settled down to friendly relations with the Germans--too
friendly many people think. Men who have never understood the French
temperament or outlook find themselves very much at home in Germany.
From time to time agitated articles appear in the English papers
deploring the fact that English soldiers are “getting to like Germans,”
and calling on some one to do something drastic. The fact that the
bow of hatred does not remain tense and strung, as desired by some
people, will certainly cause no regret to those who are appalled by the
perils of the present state of Europe. Better relations between nations
will, I believe, be built up ultimately on working-class levels. The
diplomacy of the politicians in power is too bitter and too tortuous
to further the cause of European reconstruction. From this point of
view the Occupation has been wholly to the good, inasmuch as tens of
thousands of Englishmen who have passed through the country have gone
home with a saner appreciation of the situation.
German households, on whom many of these men were quartered, found
to their amazement that instead of proving, as they feared, demons
incarnate, the British soldiers were good-hearted, good-tempered
fellows who shared the family life, peeled potatoes, and played with
the children. The soldiers on their side appreciated the kindly
treatment they received and were touched by the many evidences of
hunger and suffering among the working-classes. Some day I hope we
shall have a “Book of Decent Deeds” showing that among all belligerents
there is another side to war besides that of atrocities. We may smile
at the true story of the British Tommy writing home to his mother to
send him a feeding-bottle, with tubes and apparatus complete, for a
German baby in his billet who was in a poor way owing to the lack of
these things. The German mother burst into tears when she was given the
bottle which meant the difference between life and death to the child.
But such an act and the Spirit it breathes is a ray of light in the
darkness.
Loud protests are sometimes made by well-fed, well-to-do people as to
the impropriety of helping the starving children of Central Europe.
Very different was the attitude of the soldiers who had overthrown the
German military power. It is to the eternal honour of the conquering
army which marched into the Rhineland, that its first act was one of
pity and mercy to the hungry women and children of Cologne. It was
necessary for the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Plumer, to telegraph to
the Peace Conference that, unless supplies were forthcoming for the
underfed German civilians, he could not be responsible for the effect
on the discipline of the Army. The soldiers were up in arms at the
spectacle of starvation, and nothing could prevent them, contrary to
orders, from sharing their rations with the enemy.
I think the question of hatred is one which calls for clear thinking
at the present crisis in the world’s history. Many people imagine that
when they have abused the Boche in round terms they have “done their
bit” towards squaring the accounts of devastated France or Belgium. All
that they have done is to feed and sustain the spirit which led in the
first place to the devastations. Whatever enormities Germany may have
committed during the war, the task of punishment is not the problem of
supreme urgency which here and now confronts us all. What we are face
to face with is the question as to whether civilisation as a whole
can survive the blows rained on it. The responsibility of Germany for
this state of affairs is at the moment less important than the rescue
of civilisation from the brink of the chasm on which it is trembling.
It is useless to go on saying that Germany must be punished or that
Germany must pay, if in fact the actual policy pursued is calculated to
involve conquerors and conquered alike in common ruin. At times it is
difficult to avoid the gloomy conclusion that we are approaching the
end of a cycle of history, and that a period of darkness and chaos bids
fair to overwhelm a world incapable of saving itself. The economic and
political condition of Europe is grave in the extreme. In every country
wild forces are surging upwards, the peril of which lies in the absence
of any powers of moral and spiritual counteraction. The strain of the
war has swallowed up the spiritual reserves of the world, and its
moral credit is not only exhausted but overdrawn.
No nation ever went to war in a spirit more grave and more responsible
than that in which the British people accepted the German challenge.
The call to arms is invariably a great and inspiring moment. At such a
time men and women realise that they are caught up and raised on the
wing of ideals greater than themselves. But it is part of the evil of
war that the longer it lasts the more black and the more bitter the
spirit it breeds. From August 1914 and the hush of consecration which
fell on the nation, to December 1918 and what was well described by a
distinguished publicist as the “organized blackguardism” of the General
Election, is a falling away in temper and standard almost unbearable to
contemplate.
I have often wondered whether the men and women who lent themselves
casually to “hatred stunts” during the war ever realised what cruel
suffering was caused to a large number of humble and obscure folk. Now
that the spirit of sanity and moderation is making itself heard again,
English people must surely look back with shame on the treatment meted
out to inoffensive enemy aliens. Busybodies obsessed by spy mania were
merely a source of nuisance and ridicule to the Secret Service. That
Service was highly efficient, and its agents were quite capable of
doing their work without the interference of officious amateurs. The
German wife and the English woman with a German husband were in many
cases treated as outcasts. Years of residence in England, even the fact
of children fighting with the British Army, did not serve in many cases
to mitigate the violence and hatred of their neighbours. The German
wives of English subjects, and the English wives of Germans, were
naturally in a painful and trying position and one which was bound to
excite prejudice. The degree, however, to which a group of men within
Parliament, and a section of the Press without, sought deliberately
to inflame the lowest passions of the mob in this matter, is the most
sordid page in the history of the war. Helpless, friendless, without
money, unable to make their voices heard, these unhappy people, treated
as pariahs both in the land of their birth and in that of their
adoption, were hunted from pillar to post.
Periodically “intern-them-all” campaigns were worked up which led to
obscure Germans of proved respectability being locked up. Many of these
people had English wives and families, who suffered severely through
the removal of the breadwinner. English women were forced to take
refuge in Germany from the persecutions of their own countrymen. What
are we to think of the spirit and policy which could drive from the
shores of England--England the home of Liberty, England the safe asylum
of the oppressed--women of our own race who found the treatment meted
out to them too hard to be endured?
Wives and families landed in Germany not speaking one word of the
language, to be welcomed naturally by a spirit as hard and bitter as
any they had left. The lot of English wives resident in Germany was
unenviable. But I do not gather that enemy aliens were treated with
a greater measure of harshness in Germany during the war than what
occurred in England. Many English women living in Germany throughout
the war did not suffer in any marked degree from the hostility of their
neighbours. Naturally these would-be pogroms never catch the right
person. Rich people who may be really mischievous escape; the poor man
is hunted. The Junkers whom it would be satisfactory to punish are
living in comfort and prosperity on their estates. The poor starve and
are driven down into inconceivable depths of misery both of body and
soul.
Even to-day the position of many English women in Germany who are
married to Germans is most pitiful. Under the Peace Treaty the Allies
reserved the power to retain and liquidate all property belonging
to German nationals. I am not concerned at this point to raise the
question as to how far this precedent of confiscation may prove a
double-edged weapon in the capitalist world. But again, it is not
the rich man who suffers. Large fortunes can always take care of
themselves. The people who have been ground to powder by this provision
are women with tiny incomes or annuities, the complete stopping
of which has meant literal starvation. Most painful cases of this
character came to my notice in the Rhineland. In some instances women
are told that if they leave their husbands and return to England
the money will be paid. Is a war fought for “truth and justice” to
eventuate in alternatives of such a character? Are women, at the end
of an agonising experience, to choose between husbands they may love
and the stark fact of starvation? I heard of one English woman, too
proud to beg or receive alms, who came by stealth and searched the
swill-tubs of a mess in order to pick out food from it. The British
military authorities have shown invariable sympathy and kindness to
these unfortunates. They have done what lay in their power to mitigate
the circumstances. Soldiers do not fail in compassion to the poor
and needy. The little group of politicians conspicuous for their
Hun-hunting activities have not served with the colours. The British
Army fights its enemies in the field. It does not persecute women
and decrepit old men. But the soldiers cannot alter the confiscation
clauses of the Treaty which press with such peculiar hardship on people
of small incomes. If these clauses are directed to searching the
pockets of the Stinnes and the Krupps, let exceptions at least be made
on the lower levels. The Treaty of Versailles in many of its provisions
merely reflects the current hatreds of the hour. Modification of these
clauses is inevitable when the wave of passion has subsided.
Not sorrow, loss, and suffering, but the temper born and bred of war,
is its real and essential evil. The ruthless and cruel spirit which
dominated the German war-machine and the many crimes committed are
mainly responsible for the bitterness which was developed among the
British peoples during the struggle. However natural the growth of
this temper, its survival to-day is a menace to the future of the
world. Hatred when it takes possession of the soul of a man or woman
is a wholly corroding and destructive force. Where hatred abides the
powers of darkness have their being, ready to sally forth and work
havoc anew. Meanwhile the breaking of this coil promises to be no easy
task. The war let loose in every country a new and evil force called
propaganda--in plain language, organised lying. It is one of the
foibles of propagandists that they insist on speaking of themselves as
super-George Washingtons. But during the war any fiction which came to
hand was good enough so long as it served to inflame national hatreds.
Propaganda during the last years of the struggle did a great deal to
obscure the moral issues for which we were fighting. It corrupted both
character and temper. But the propaganda genie, having emerged from its
bottle in clouds of smoke and dirt, entirely refuses to subside now the
struggle is over. It is one of the horrid forces with vitality derived
from the war which continues to pursue an independent existence. It is
the weapon-in-chief for keeping open sores and exasperating passions
which good sense would try to allay. Nations catch sight of each
other dimly through mists of misrepresentation and bitterness. Truth
and justice disappear in the welter, and without truth and justice
the practical affairs of the world drift daily towards an ultimate
whirlpool of chaos.
Great, therefore, as I see it is the responsibility of all who to-day
throw their careless offerings on the altars of hatred, so that the
flames of discord flare up anew. The men and women who talk and act
thus must try to realise that the world is reaching its limit of
endurance, and the situation calls not for any post-war fomenting of
the terrible legacy of strife, but for a truce of God between victors
and vanquished. No prejudices are harder to shift than those which
ignorance has exalted into moral principles of the first order. Thought
is apt to be an unpleasant and disturbing process; the clichés of
hatred are easy to use--why alter them when they round off a sentence
so well? But unless some movement can develop between nations, unless
the forces of destruction can be checked, then civilisation in the form
we know it would appear to be doomed.
Germany has still a whole volume of bitter truth to learn as to the
part she has played in the world catastrophe provoked by her rulers.
Until she recognises and admits the evil done she cannot regain her
place in the fellowship of nations. But after the great bartering of
ideals represented by the Treaty of Versailles, the Allies are hardly
in a position to preach sermons to her day in and day out on moral
failures. The practical fact which confronts us all is that the world
is in ruin, and that where the politicians have failed hopelessly the
decent people of all nations have to get together and make it habitable
again. To dismiss the German nation as a gang of criminals unfit for
human intercourse may be a magnificent gesture on the part of the
thoughtless. But it is not business. There are good Germans and bad
Germans, Germans animated by a quite detestable spirit, others who are
conscientious and high-minded. The wholesale indictment of a nation is
as absurd as the wholesale indictment of a class. Human nature falls
into types of character far more than into social and racial divisions.
In the ultimate issue society is divided into two sets of people: those
who behave decently and those who do not. People of the first type
have a common kinship whatever their race or colour, and the need for
asserting that kinship was never more urgent than at present.
If the world is to survive, tolerable social, economic, and political
relations must be resumed sooner or later between enemy countries. It
is of the first importance that the better elements in Germany should
be encouraged and strengthened, so that through their influence a new
spirit should animate the general German outlook on life. When no
effort is made to discriminate, when good and bad are branded alike in
one sweeping condemnation, hope of improvement vanishes. A nation to
whom all place for repentance is denied loses heart and ceases to try.
Reasonable men cannot make their voices heard under such conditions.
Anger and bitterness at what is considered unfair treatment surge
upwards again, and from them the desire for revenge is born anew. It is
foolish to kick a man repeatedly in the face and then to complain that
he does not behave like a gentleman. If the spirit of hatred is to rule
in Europe we are heading straight for another war. This eventuality
should, I think, be recognised clearly by the hotheads of all nations.
Germany cannot continue indefinitely to fulfil the function of the
whipping-boy of Europe. The Junkers and soldiers who made the war, and
were responsible for all that was cruel and brutal in its conduct,
have disappeared. Owing to gross mismanagement in connection with the
war criminals, many Germans guilty of specific acts of cruelty who
should have been dealt with severely have slipped through the net. But
where statesmanship has blundered inexcusably, it is unjust to visit
vicariously on a whole community the sins of a class or of individuals.
To do so is to destroy any chance of the growth of a better spirit
among the German people as a whole. I recall the words of farewell
addressed to me by a saleswoman in a Cologne shop to whom I was saying
good-bye: “When you go back to England, tell your countrymen that
we are not such dreadful people as they think, and ask them also to
remember that we too have our pride and our self-respect.”
Many Germans are as much blinded by hatred as to our actions and
motives as we are about theirs. We recognise with angry exasperation
the measure of their misconceptions about ourselves. Is it not possible
that misconceptions may exist on our side as to the character and
attitude of, anyway, some Germans? We are sore, and sad, and bitter.
So are countless Germans who are convinced that their lives have
been ruined by our jealousy and ambition. Is it humanly possible to
carry on the business of life in a nightmare world, where millions of
human beings view each other through glasses so distorted? The moral
deadlock at the moment is complete. It can only be solved by the
spread of a new spirit of truth and charity. That cannot arise till
reasonable men and women of all nations, realising the perils which
confront us one and all, try and form unbiassed judgments, not only
of each other’s actions, but what is perhaps even more important, of
each other’s motives and principles. In all this there is no question
of slurring over evil where evil exists, or condoning wrong where
wrong has been done. It is a question of seeing these things in their
true scale and right proportion. Righteous anger may rouse a sense of
repentance where hatred only hardens and embitters. The wrath of man
has had its full play through years of strife and horror. Judged as a
constructive force, its fruits up to the present have been meagre. Is
it possible that, after all, Paul of Tarsus was right, and that the
fruits of the spirit, joy, peace, and righteousness, do not lie along
this particular path? In so far as the spirit of hatred is cultivated
and encouraged, it perpetuates all that is worst in war, without any of
the redeeming qualities of heroism and self-sacrifice which make war
tolerable. Hatred breeds hatred, strife further strife, violence yet
more violence. From this vicious circle, so long as we allow ourselves
to turn in it, there is no escape. Faith, hope, and charity alone can
break the wheel of torment in which at present we revolve, and bring
about the necessary moral and spiritual _détente_ without which the
world must surely perish.
Peace is not a question of documents and treaties. The world is still
in a condition of bitter strife, because the spiritual values which
make peace in the real sense possible are at present wholly lacking in
the relations of the respective nations. I am driven to the conclusion
that in this, as in other respects, the instinct of the great mass of
the people throughout Europe is sounder and better than that of their
rulers. Whatever the schemes and intrigues of a tortuous diplomacy,
it is already clear that the working-classes are determined not to be
made pawns in any fresh war of aggression. The German working-man is
saturated with the misery of war. He will have no more of it unless
some policy of oppression, suicidal in its character, re-creates the
temper and spirit of the post-Jena period. Among my memories of Germany
I dwell on none with more hope than an incident which befell us one
spring evening in the Eifel. We were spending Sunday at Nideggen, a
village perched high on its red volcanic cliffs above the valley of a
delectable trout stream. We stopped in the course of our walk to admire
a cottage garden where peas and beans were growing with mathematical
diligence and regularity. Care had obviously been lavished on every
plant and flower of the little plot, which lay on a sunny slope facing
south. The owner who was hard at work among the peas, seeing our
interest, asked if we would like to go over his garden. We accepted the
invitation willingly, and he conducted us with pride from one end to
the other of his tiny kingdom. He was an admirable type of peasant, a
tall grave man with honest eyes and courteous manners. He combined some
market-gardening with his business of stone-mason. The conversation
drifted as usual to the war. He had served in a pioneer corps but
had come through, “Gott sei dank,” unscathed. Of war or the possible
recurrence of war he spoke with that intense horror which marks all
the German working-classes. Never must such a thing happen again, he
said; never must there be another war. My mind fled across the seas to
a corner of Kent where I was well assured on this fine spring evening,
another friend of mine, one William Catt, a son of the soil, just as
honest and simple, just as devoted to his home and family, was also
attending to peas and runner beans. William Catt too had served in the
war. What crazy system could send those two good men with rifles in
their hands to shoot each other? The Nideggen peasant had reflected to
some purpose on “Earth’s return for whole centuries of folly, noise,
and sin.” Spade in hand he looked across the fair landscape at our
feet, where the river lay like a silver streak winding among woods and
meadows. Then he turned to me and said very seriously, “For a thousand
years men have been mad; now we must all learn to be more reasonable.”
Would that the diplomatists of all countries could take to heart words
so true and so wise! Here was the spirit which alone can create and
sustain the League of Nations. While the political wire-pullers of
Europe seek to make of the League the unhappy pushball of their own
intrigues, this German working-man had the root of the matter in him.
May his vision of a world in which men are learning to be “reasonable”
wax from dim hope into full and perfect realisation.