war had now lasted three years and eight months. It had become the
aching habit of the whole world. Throughout the winter it had been for
the most part a great and terrible boredom, but now a phase of acute
anxiety was beginning. The “Kaiser’s Battle” was raging in France; news
came through sparingly; but it was known that General Gough had lost
tens of thousands of prisoners, hundreds of guns, and vast stores of
ammunition and railway material. It was rumoured that he had committed
suicide. But the standards of Tory England differ from those of Japan.
Through ten sanguinary days, in a vaster Inkerman, the common men of
Britain, reinforced by the French, had fought and died to restore the
imperilled line. It was by no means certain yet that they had succeeded.
It seemed possible that the French and British armies would be broken
apart, and Amiens and Paris lost. Oswald’s mind was still dark with
apprehension.
The particular anxieties of this crisis accentuated the general worry
and inconveniences of the time, and deepened Oswald’s conviction of an
incredible incompetence in both the political and military leadership of
his country. In spite of every reason he had to the contrary, he had
continued hitherto to hope for some bright dramatic change in the course
of events; he had experienced a continually recurring disappointment
with each morning’s paper. His intelligence told him that all the
inefficiency, the confusion, the cheap and bad government by press and
intrigue, were the necessary and inevitable consequences of a neglect of
higher education for the past fifty years; these defects were now in the
nature of things, almost as much as the bleakness of an English February
or the fogs of a London November, but his English temperament had
refused hitherto to accept the decision of his intelligence. Now for the
first time he could see the possibility of an ultimate failure in the
war. To this low level of achievement, he perceived, a steadfast
contempt for thought and science and organization had brought Britain;
at this low level Britain had now to struggle through the war,
blundering, talking, and thinking confusedly, suffering
enormously—albeit so sound at heart. It was a humiliating realization.
At any rate she could still hope to struggle through; the hard-won
elementary education of the common people, the stout heart and sense of
the common people, saved her gentlefolk from the fate of their brother
inefficients in Russia. But every day he fretted afresh at the costly
and toilsome continuance of an effort that a little more courage and
wisdom in high places on the allied side, a little more knowledge and
clear thinking, might have brought to an entirely satisfactory close in
1917.
For a man of his age, wounded, disappointed, and a chronic invalid,
there was considerable affliction in the steadily increasing hardships
of the Fourth Year. A number of petty deprivations at which a healthy
man might have scoffed, intensified his physical discomfort. There had
been a complete restriction of his supply of petrol, the automobile now
hung in its shed with its tyres removed, and the railway service to
London had been greatly reduced. He could not get up to London now to
consult books or vary his moods without a slow and crowded and fatiguing
journey; he was more and more confined to Pelham Ford. He had been used
to read and work late into the night, but now his home was darkened in
the evening and very cheerless; there was no carbide for the acetylene
installation, and a need for economy in paraffin. For a time he had been
out of coal, and unable to get much wood because of local difficulties
about cartage, and for some weeks he had had to sit in his overcoat and
read and write by candlelight. Now, however, that distress had been
relieved by the belated delivery of a truckload of coal. And another
matter that may seem trivial in history, was by no means trivial in
relation to his moods. In the spring of 1918 the food supply of Great
Britain was at its lowest point. Lord Rhondda was saving the situation
at the eleventh hour. The rationing of meat had affected Oswald’s health
disagreeably. He had long ago acquired the habit of living upon chops
and cutlets and suchlike concentrated nourishment, and he found it
difficult to adapt himself now to the bulky insipidity of a diet that
was, for a time, almost entirely vegetarian. For even fish travels by
long routes to Hertfordshire villages. The frequent air raids of that
winter were also an added nervous irritation. In the preceding years of
the war there had been occasional Zeppelin raids, the Zeppelins had been
audible at Pelham Ford on several occasions and once Hertford had
suffered from their bombs; but those expeditions had ended at last in a
series of disasters to the invaders, and they had never involved the
uproar and tension of the Gotha raids that began in the latter half of
1917. These latter raids had to be met by an immense barrage of
anti-aircraft guns round London, a barrage which rattled every window at
Pelham Ford, lit the sky with star shells, and continued intermittently
sometimes for four or five hours. Oswald would lie awake throughout that
thudding conflict, watching the distant star shells and searchlights
through the black tree boughs outside his open window, and meditating
drearily upon the manifest insanity of mankind....
He was now walking up and down his lawn, waiting until it should be time
to start for the station with Joan to meet Peter.
For Peter, convalescent again and no longer fit for any form of active
service—he was lamed now as well as winged—was to take up a minor
administrative post next week at Adastral House, and he was coming down
for a few days at Pelham Ford before carrying his wife off for good to a
little service flat they had found in an adapted house in the Avenue
Road. They had decided not to live at The Ingle-Nook, although Arthur
had built it to become Peter’s home, but to continue the tenancy of
Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe. They did not want to disturb those two ladies,
whose nervous systems, by no means stable at the best of times, were now
in a very shaken condition. Aunt Phyllis was kept busy restraining Aunt
Phœbe from inflicting lengthy but obscure prophetic messages upon most
of the prominent people of the time. To these daily activities Aunt
Phœbe added an increasing habit of sleep-walking that broke the nightly
peace of Aunt Phyllis. She would wander through the moonlit living rooms
gesticulating strangely, and uttering such phrases as “Blood! Blood!
Seas of blood! The multitudinous seas incarnadine”; or “Murder most
foul!”
She had a fixed idea that it was her business to seek out the Kaiser and
either scold him or kill him—or perhaps do both. She held that it was
the duty of women to assassinate. Men might fight battles, it was their
stupid way; but surely women were capable of directer things. If some
woman were to kill any man who declared war directly he declared war,
there would be a speedy end to war. She could not, she said, understand
the inactivity of German wives and mothers. She would spend hours over
her old school German grammar, with a view to writing an “Open Letter to
German Womankind.” But her naturally rich and very allusive prose was
ill adapted to that sort of translation.
Many over-sensitive people were suffering more or less as Aunt Phœbe was
suffering—from a sense of cruelty, wickedness, and disaster that
staggered their minds. They had lived securely in a secure world; they
could not readjust. Even for so sane a mind as Oswald’s, hampered as it
was by the new poison his recent wound had brought into his blood,
readjustment was difficult. He suffered greatly from insomnia, and from
a haunting apprehension of misfortunes. His damaged knee would give him
bouts of acute distress. Sometimes it would seem to be well and he would
forget it. Then it would become painfully lame by day and a neuralgic
pain at night. His moods seemed always exaggerated now; either he was
too angry or too sorrowful or too hopeful. Sometimes he experienced
phases of blank stupidity, when his mind became unaccountably sluggish
and clumsy....
Joan was indoors now packing up a boxful of books that were to go with
her to the new home.
He was feeling acutely—more acutely than he wanted to feel—that his
guardianship was at an end. Joan, who had been the mistress of his
house, and the voice that sang in it, the pretty plant that grew in it,
was going now—to return, perhaps, sometimes as a visitor—but never more
to be a part of it; never more to be its habitual presence. Peter, too,
was severing the rope, a long rope it had seemed at times during the
last three years, that had tethered him to Pelham Ford....
Oswald did not want to think now of his coming loneliness. What he
wanted to think about was the necessity of rounding off their
relationship properly, of ending his educational task with some sort of
account rendered. He felt he owed it to these young people and to
himself to tell them of his aims and of what he considered the whole of
this business of education amounted to. He had to explain what had
helped and what had prevented him. “A Valediction,” he said. “A
Valediction.” But he could not plan out what he had to say that morning.
He could not arrange his heads, and all the while that he tried to fix
his thoughts upon these topics, he was filled with uncontrollable
self-pity for the solitude ahead of him.
He was ashamed at these personal distresses that he could not control.
He disliked himself for their quality. He did not like to think he was
thinking the thoughts in his mind. He walked up and down the lawn for a
time like a man who is being pestered by uncongenial solicitations.
In spite of his intense affection for both of them, he was feeling a
real jealousy of the happiness of these two young lovers. He hated the
thought of losing Joan much more than he hated the loss of Peter. Once
upon a time he had loved Peter far more than Joan, but by imperceptible
degrees his affection had turned over to her. In these war years he and
she had been very much together. For a time he had been—it was
grotesque, but true—actually in love with her. He had let himself
dream—. It was preposterous to think of it. A moonlight night had made
his brain swim.... At any rate, thank Heaven! she had never had a
suspicion....
She’d come now as a visitor—perhaps quite often. He wasn’t going to lose
his Joan altogether. But each time she would come changed, rather less
his Joan and rather more a new Joan—Peter’s Joan....
Some day they’d have children, these two. Joan would sit over her child
and smile down at it. He knew exactly how she would smile. And at the
thought of that smile Joan gave place to Dolly. Out of the past there
jumped upon him the memory of Peter bubbling in a cradle on the sunny
verandah of The Ingle-Nook, and how he had remarked that the very
sunshine seemed made for this fortunate young man.
“It _was_ made for him,” Dolly had said, with that faintly mischievous
smile of hers.
How far off that seemed now, and how vivid still! He could remember
Dolly’s shadow on the rough-cast wall, and the very things he had said
in reply. He had talked like a fool about the wonderful future of
Peter—and of the world. How long was that ago? Five-and-twenty years?
(Yes, Peter would be five-and-twenty in June.) How safe and secure the
European world had seemed then! It seemed to be loitering, lazily and
basely indeed, but certainly, towards a sort of materialist’s
millennium. And what a vast sham its security had been! He had called
Peter the “Heir of the Ages.” And the Heritage of the Ages had been
preparing even then to take Peter away from the work he had chosen and
from all the sunshine and leisure of his life and to splinter his
shoulder-blade, smash his wrist, snap his leg-bones with machine-gun
bullets, and fling him aside, a hobbling, stiff, broken young man to
limp through the rest of life....
§ 2
That was what his mind had to lay hold of, that was what he had to talk
about, this process that had held out such fair hopes for Peter and had
in the end crippled him and come near to killing him and wasting him
altogether. He had to talk of that, of an enormous collapse and breach
of faith with the young. The world which had seemed to be the glowing
promise of an unprecedented education and upbringing for Peter and his
generation, the world that had been, so to speak, joint guardian with
himself, had defaulted. This war was an outrage by the senior things in
the world upon all the hope of the future; it was the parent sending his
sons through the fires to Moloch, it was the guardian gone mad, it was
the lapse of all educational responsibility.
He had to keep his grasp upon that idea. By holding to that he could get
away from his morbidly intense wish to be personal and intimate with
these two. He loved them and they loved him, but what he wanted to say
was something quite beyond that.
What he had to talk about was Education, and Education alone. He had to
point out to them that their own education had been truncated, was rough
ended and partial. He had to explain why that was so. And he had to show
that all this vast disaster to the world was no more and no less than an
educational failure. The churches and teachers and political forms had
been insufficient and wrong; they had failed to establish ideas strong
and complete enough and right enough to hold the wills of men.
Necessarily he had to make a dissertation upon the war. To talk of life
now was to talk of the war. The war now was human life. It had eaten up
all free and independent living.
The war was an educational breakdown, that was his point; and in
education lay whatever hope there was for mankind. He had to say that to
them, and he had to point out how that idea must determine the form of
their lives. He had to show the political and social and moral
conclusions involved in it. And he had to say what he wanted to say in a
large manner. _He had to keep his temper while he said it._
Oswald, limping slowly up and down his lawn in the April sunshine, with
a gnawing pain at his knee, had to underline, as it were, that last
proviso in his thoughts. That was the extreme difficulty of these urgent
and tragic times. The world was in a phase of intense, but swift,
tumultuous, and distracting tragedy. The millions were not suffering and
dying in stateliness and splendour but in a vast uproar, amidst mud,
confusion, bickering, and incoherence indescribable. While it was
manifest that only great thinking, only very clear and deliberate
thinking, could give even the forms of action that would arrest the
conflagration, it was nevertheless almost impossible for any one
anywhere to think clearly and deliberately, so universal and various
were the compulsions, confusions, and distresses of the time. And even
the effect to see and state the issue largely, fevered Oswald’s brain.
He grew angry with the multitudinous things that robbed him of his
serenity.
“Education,” he said, as if he called for help; “education.”
And then, collapsing into wrath: “A land of uneducated blockheads!”
No! It was not one of his good mornings. In a little while his steps had
quickened and his face had flushed. His hands clenched in his pockets.
“A universal dulness of mind,” he whispered. “Obstinacy....
Inadaptability.... Unintelligent opposition.”
Broad generalizations slipped out of his mind. He began to turn over one
disastrous instance after another of the shortness of mental range, the
unimaginative stupidity, the baseness and tortuousness of method, the
dull suspicions, class jealousies, and foolish conceits that had
crippled Britain through three and a half bitter years. With a vast
fleet, with enormous armies, with limitless wealth, with the loyal
enthusiasm behind them of a united people and with great allies, British
admirals and generals had never once achieved any great or brilliant
success, British statesmen had never once grasped and held the
fluctuating situation. One huge disappointment had followed another; now
at Gallipoli, now at Kut, now in the air and now beneath the seas, the
British had seen their strength ill applied and their fair hopes of
victory waste away. No Nelson had arisen to save the country, no
Wellington; no Nelson nor Wellington could have arisen; the country had
not even found an alternative to Mr. Lloyd George. In military and naval
as in social and political affairs the Anglican ideal had been—to
blockade. On sea and land, as in Ireland, as in India, Anglicanism was
not leading but obstruction. Throughout 1917 the Allied armies upon the
Western front had predominated over the German as greatly as the British
fleet had predominated at sea, and the result on either element had been
stagnation. The cavalry coterie who ruled upon land had demonstrated
triumphantly their incapacity to seize even so great an opportunity as
the surprise of the tanks afforded them; the Admiralty had left the
Baltic to the Germans until, after the loss of Riga, poor Kerensky’s
staggering government had collapsed. British diplomacy had completed
what British naval quiescence began; in Russia as in Greece it had
existed only to blunder; never had a just cause been so mishandled; and
before the end of 1917 the Russian debacle had been achieved and the
German armies, reinforced by the troops the Russian failure had
released, began to concentrate for this last great effort that was now
in progress in the west. Like many another anxious and distressed
Englishman during those darker days of the German spring offensive in
1918, Oswald went about clinging to one comfort: “Our men are tough
stuff. Our men at any rate will stick it.”
In Oswald’s mind there rankled a number of special cases which he called
his “sores.” To think of them made him angry and desperate, and yet he
could scarcely ever think of education without reviving the irritation
of these particular instances. They were his foreground; they blocked
his vistas, and got between him and the general prospect of the world.
For instance, there had been a failure to supply mosquito curtains in
the East African hospitals, and a number of slightly wounded men had
contracted fever and died. This fact had linked on to the rejection of
the services he had offered at the outset of the war, and became a
festering centre in his memory. Those mosquito curtains blew into every
discussion. Moreover there had been, he believed, much delay and
inefficiency in the use of African native labour in France, and a lack
of proper organization for the special needs of the sick and injured
among these tropic-bred men. And a shipload had been sunk in a collision
off the Isle of Wight. He had got an irrational persuasion into his head
that this collision could have been prevented. After his wound had
driven him back to Pelham Ford he would limp about the garden thinking
of his “boys” shivering in the wet of a French winter and dying on straw
in cold cattle trucks, or struggling and drowning in the grey channel
water, and he would fret and swear. “Hugger mugger,” he would say,
“hugger mugger! No care. No foresight. No proper grasp of the problem.
And so death and torment for the men.”
While still so painful and feverish he had developed a new distress for
himself by taking up the advocacy of certain novelties and devices that
he became more and more convinced were of vital importance upon the
Western front. He entangled himself in correspondence, interviews,
committees, and complicated quarrels in connection with these ideas....
He would prowl about his garden, a baffled man, trying to invent some
way of breaking through the system of entanglements that held back
British inventiveness from the service of Great Britain. More and more
clearly did his reason assure him that no sudden blow can set aside the
deep-rooted traditions, the careless, aimless education of a negligent
century, but none the less he raged at individuals, at ministries, at
coteries and classes.
His peculiar objection to the heads of the regular army, for example,
was unjust, for much the same unimaginative resistance was evident in
every branch of the public activities of Great Britain. Already in 1915
the very halfpenny journalists were pointing out the necessity of a
great air offensive for the allies, were showing that in the matter of
the possible supply of good air fighters the Germans were altogether
inferior to their antagonists and that consequently they would be more
and more at a disadvantage in the air as the air warfare was pressed.
But the British mind was trained, so far that is as one can speak of it
as being trained at all, to dread “over-pressure.” The western allies
having won a certain ascendancy in the air in 1916 became so
self-satisfied that the Germans, in spite of their disadvantages, were
able to recover a kind of equality in 1917, and in the spring of 1918
the British, with their leeway recovered, were going easily in matters
aerial, and the opinion that a great air offensive might yet end the war
was regarded as the sign of a froward and revolutionary spirit.
The sea war had a parallel history. Long before 1914 Dr. Conan Doyle had
written a story to illustrate the dangers of an unrestricted submarine
attack, but no precaution whatever against such a possibility seemed to
have been undertaken by the British Admiralty before the war at all;
Great Britain was practically destitute of sea mines in the October of
1914, and even in the spring of 1918, after more than a year and a half
of hostile submarine activity, after the British had lost millions of
tons of shipping, after the people were on short commons and becoming
very anxious about rations, the really very narrow channel of the North
Sea—rarely is it more than three hundred miles wide—which was the only
way out the Germans possessed, was still unfenced against the coming and
going of these most vulnerable pests.
It is hard not to blame individual men and groups when the affairs of a
nation go badly. It is so much easier to change men than systems. The
former satisfies every instinct in the fierce, suspicious hearts of men,
the latter demands the bleakest of intellectual efforts. The former
justifies the healthy, wholesome relief of rioting; the latter
necessitates self-control. The country was at sixes and sevens because
its education by school and college, by book and speech and newspaper,
was confused and superficial and incomplete, and its education was
confused and superficial and incomplete because its institutions were a
patched-up system of traditions, compromises, and interests, devoid of
any clear and single guiding idea of a national purpose. The only wrongs
that really matter to mankind are the undramatic general wrongs; but the
only wrongs that appeal to the uneducated imagination are individual
wrongs. It is so much more congenial to the ape in us to say that if Mr.
Asquith hadn’t been lazy or Mr. Lloyd George disingenuous——! Then out
with the halter—and don’t bother about yourself. As though the worst of
individuals can be anything more than the indicating pustule of a
systemic malaise. For his own part Oswald was always reviling
schoolmasters, as though they, alone among men, had the power to rise
triumphant over all their circumstances—and wouldn’t. He had long since
forgotten Mr. Mackinder’s apology.
He limped and fretted to and fro across the lawn in his struggle to get
out of his jungle of wrathful thoughts, about drowned negroes and
rejected inventions, and about the Baltic failure and about Gough of the
Curragh and St. Quentin, to general and permanent things.
“Education,” he said aloud, struggling against his obsessions.
“Education! I have to tell them what it ought to be, how it is more or
less the task of every man, how it can unify the world, how it can save
mankind....”
And then after a little pause, with an apparent complete irrelevance,
“_Damn_ Aunt Charlotte!”
§ 4