THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND
I met one hearty Unionist, not to say Coercionist in Ireland, in such a
manner as to talk to him at some length; one quite genial and genuine
Irish gentleman, who was solidly on the side of the system of British
government in Ireland. This gentleman had been shot through the body by
the British troops in their efforts to suppress the Easter Rebellion.
The matter just missed being tragic; but since it did, I cannot help
feeling it as slightly comic. He assured me with great earnestness that
the rebels had been guilty of the most calculated cruelties, and that
they must have done their bloody deeds in the coldest blood. But since
he is himself a solid and (I am happy to say) a living demonstration
that the firing even on his own side must have been rather wild, I am
inclined to give the benefit of the doubt also to the less elaborately
educated marksmen. When disciplined troops destroy people so much at
random, it would seem unreasonable to deny that rioters may possibly
have been riotous. I hardly think he was, or even professed to be, a
person of judicial impartiality; and it is entirely to his honour that
he was, on principle, so much more indignant with the rioters who did
not shoot him than with the other rioters who did. But I venture to
introduce him here not so much as an individual as an allegory. The
incident seems to me to set forth, in a pointed, lucid, and picturesque
form, exactly what the British military government really succeeded
in doing in Ireland. It succeeded in half-killing its friends, and
affording an intelligent but somewhat inhumane amusement to all its
enemies. The fire-eater held his fire-arm in so contorted a posture as
to give the wondering spectator a simple impression of suicide.
Let it be understood that I speak here, not of tyranny thwarting
Irish desires, but solely of our own stupidity in thwarting our own
desires. I shall discuss elsewhere the alleged presence or absence of
practical oppression in Ireland; here I am only continuing from the
last chapter my experiences of the recruiting campaign. I am concerned
now, as I was concerned then, with the simple business matter of
getting a big levy of soldiers from Ireland. I think it was Sir Francis
Vane, one of the few really valuable public servants in the matter
(I need not say he was dismissed for having been proved right) who
said that the mere sight of some representative Belgian priests and
nuns might have produced something like a crusade. The matter seems
to have been mostly left to elderly English landlords; and it would
be cruel to record their adventures. It will be enough that I heard,
on excellent testimony, that these unhappy gentlemen had displayed
throughout Ireland a poster consisting only of the Union Jack and the
appeal, ‘Is not this your flag? Come and fight for it!’ It faintly
recalls something we all learnt in the Latin grammar about questions
that expect the answer no. These remarkable recruiting-sergeants did
not realise, I suppose, what an extraordinary thing this was, not
merely in Irish opinion, but generally in international opinion. Over
a great part of the globe, it would sound like a story that the Turks
had placarded Armenia with the Crescent of Islam, and asked all the
Christians who were not yet massacred whether they did not love the
flag. I really do not believe that the Turks would be so stupid as to
do it. Of course it may be said that such an impression or association
is mere slander and sedition, that there is no reason to be tender
to such treasonable emotions at all, that men ought to do their duty
to that flag whatever is put upon that poster; in short, that it is
the duty of an Irishman to be a patriotic Englishman, or whatever
it is that he is expected to be. But this view, however logical and
clear, can only be used logically and clearly as an argument for
conscription. It is simply muddle-headed to apply it to any appeal
for volunteers anywhere, in Ireland or England. The whole object of a
recruiting poster, or any poster, is to be attractive; it is picked out
in words or colours to be picturesquely and pointedly attractive. If
it lowers you to make an attractive offer, do not make it; but do not
deliberately make it, and deliberately make it repulsive. If a certain
medicine is so mortally necessary and so mortally nasty, that it must
be forced on everybody by the policeman, call the policeman. But do not
call an advertisement agent to push it like a patent medicine, solely
by means of ‘publicity’ and ‘suggestion,’ and then confine him strictly
to telling the public how nasty it is.
But the British blunder in Ireland was a much deeper and more
destructive thing. It can be summed up in one sentence; that whether or
no we were as black as we were painted, we actually painted ourselves
much blacker than we were. Bad as we were, we managed to look much
worse than we were. In a horrible unconsciousness we re-enacted history
through sheer ignorance of history. We were foolish enough to dress
up, and to play up, to the part of a villain in a very old tragedy. We
clothed ourselves almost carelessly in fire and sword; and if the fire
had been literally stage-fire or the sword a wooden sword, the merely
artistic blunder would have been quite as bad. For instance, I soon
came on the traces of a quarrel about some silly veto in the schools,
against Irish children wearing green rosettes. Anybody with a streak of
historical imagination would have avoided a quarrel in that particular
case about that particular colour. It is touching the talisman, it is
naming the name, it is striking the note of another relation in which
we were in the wrong, to the confusion of a new relation in which we
were in the right. Anybody of common sense, considering any other case,
can see the almost magic force of these material coincidences. If the
English armies in France in 1914 considered themselves justified
for some reason in executing some Frenchwoman, they would perhaps be
indiscreet if they killed her (however logically) tied to a stake in
the market-place of Rouen. If the people of Paris rose in the most
righteous revolt against the most corrupt conspiracy of some group of
the wealthy French Protestants, I should strongly advise them not to
fix the date for the vigil of St Bartholomew, or to go to work with
white scarfs tied round their arms. Many of us hope to see a Jewish
commonwealth reconstituted in Palestine; and we could easily imagine
some quarrel in which the government of Jerusalem was impelled to
punish some Greek or Latin pilgrim or monk. The Jews might even be
right in the quarrel and the Christian wrong. But it may be hinted that
the Jews would be ill-advised if they actually crowned him with thorns,
and killed him on a hill just outside Jerusalem. Now we must know by
this time, or the sooner we know it the better, that the whole mind
of that European society which we have helped to save, and in which
we have henceforth a part right of control, regards the Anglo-Irish
story as one of those black and white stories in a history book. It
sees the tragedy of Ireland as simply and clearly as the tragedy of
Christ or Joan of Arc. There may have been more to be said on the
coercive side than the culture of the Continent understands. So there
was a great deal more than is usually admitted to be said on the side
of the patriotic democracy which condemned Socrates; and a very great
deal to be said on the side of the imperial aristocracy which would
have crushed Washington. But these disputes will not take Socrates
from his niche among the pagan saints, or Washington from his pedestal
among the republican heroes. After a certain testing time substantial
justice is always done to the men who stood in some unmistakable manner
for liberty and light against contemporary caprice and fashionable
force and brutality. In this intellectual sense, in the only competent
intellectual courts, there is already justice to Ireland. In the wide
daylight of this world-wide fact we or our representatives must get
into a quarrel with children, of all people, and about the colour
green, of all things in the world. It is an exact working model of
the mistake I mean. It is the more brutal because it is not strictly
cruel; and yet instantly revives the memories of cruelty. There need be
nothing wrong with it in the abstract, or in a less tragic atmosphere
where the symbols were not talismans. A schoolmaster in the prosperous
and enlightened town of Eatanswill might not unpardonably protest
against the school-children parading in class the Buff and Blue favours
of Mr Fizkin and Mr Slumkey. But who but a madman would not see that to
say that word, or make that sign, in Ireland, was like giving a signal
for keening and the lament over lost justice that is lifted in the
burden of the noblest of national songs; that to point to that rag of
that colour was to bring back all the responsibilities and realities
of that reign of terror when we were, quite literally, hanging men
and women too for wearing of the green? We were not literally hanging
these children. As a matter of mere utility, we should have been more
sensible if we had been.
But the same fact took an even more fantastic form. We not only dressed
up as our ancestors, but we actually dressed up as our enemies. I need
hardly state my own conviction that the Pacifist trick of lumping the
abuses of one side along with the abominations of the other was a
shallow pedantry come of sheer ignorance of the history of Europe and
the barbarians. It was quite false that the English evil was exactly
the same as the German. It was quite false; but the English in Ireland
laboured long and devotedly to prove it was quite true. They were not
content with borrowing old uniforms from the Hessians of 1798; they
borrowed the newest and neatest uniforms from the Prussians of 1914. I
will give only one story that I was told, out of many, to show what I
mean. There was a sort of village musical festival at a place called
Cullen in County Cork, at which there were naturally national songs
and very possibly national speeches. That there was a sort of social
atmosphere, which its critics would call Sinn Fein, is exceedingly
likely; for that now exists all over Ireland, and especially that
part of Ireland. If we wish to prevent it being expressed at all, we
must not only forbid all public meetings but all private meetings,
and even the meeting of husband and wife in their own house. Still
there might have been a case, on coercionist lines, for forbidding
this public meeting. There might be a case, on coercionist lines,
for imprisoning all the people who attended it; or a still clearer
case, on those lines, for imprisoning all the people in Ireland. But
the coercionist authorities did not merely forbid the meeting, which
would mean something. They did not arrest the people at the meeting,
which would mean something. They did not blow the whole meeting to
hell with big guns, which would also mean something. What they did
apparently was this. They caused a military aeroplane to jerk itself
backwards and forwards in a staggering fashion just over the heads of
the people, making as much noise as possible to drown the music, and
dropping flare rockets and fire in various somewhat dangerous forms in
the neighbourhood of any men, women, and children who happened to be
listening to the music. The reader will note with what exquisite art,
and fine fastidious selection, the strategist has here contrived to
look as Prussian as possible without securing any of the advantages of
Prussianism. I do not know exactly how much danger there was, but there
must have been some. Perhaps about as much as there generally has been
when boys have been flogged for playing the fool with fireworks. But
by laboriously climbing hundreds of feet into the air, in an enormous
military machine, these ingenuous people managed to make themselves a
meteor in heaven and a spectacle to all the earth; the English raining
fire on women and children just as the Germans did. I repeat that they
did not actually destroy children, though they did endanger them; for
playing with fireworks is always playing with fire. And I repeat that,
as a mere matter of business, it would have been more sensible if they
had destroyed children. That would at least have had the human meaning
that has run through a hundred massacres: ‘wolf-cubs who would grow
into wolves.’ It might at least have the execrable excuse of decreasing
the number of rebels. What they did would quite certainly increase it.
An artless Member of Parliament, whose name I forget, attempted an
apology for this half-witted performance. He interposed in the Unionist
interests, when the Nationalists were asking questions about the
matter, and said with much heat, ‘May I ask whether honest and loyal
subjects have anything to fear from British aeroplanes?’ I have often
wondered what he meant. It seems possible that he was in the mood of
that mediæval fanatic who cried, ‘God will know his own’; and that he
himself would fling any sort of flaming bolts about anywhere, believing
that they would always be miraculously directed towards the heads
harbouring, at that moment, the most incorrect political opinions.
Or perhaps he meant that loyal subjects are so superbly loyal that
they do not mind being accidentally burnt alive, so long as they are
assured that the fire was dropped on them by Government officials out
of a Government apparatus. But my purpose here is not to fathom such a
mystery, but merely to fix the dominant fact of the whole situation;
that the Government copied the theatricality of Potsdam even more
than the tyranny of Potsdam. In that incident the English laboriously
reproduced all the artificial accessories of the most notorious crimes
of Germany; the flying men, the flame, the selection of a mixed crowd,
the selection of a popular festival. They had every part of it, except
the point of it. It was as if the whole British army in Ireland had
dressed up in spiked helmets and spectacles, merely that they might
_look_ like Prussians. It was even more as if a man had walked across
Ireland on three gigantic stilts, taller than the trees and visible
from the most distant village, solely that he might look like one of
those unhuman monsters from Mars, striding about on their iron tripods
in the great nightmare of Mr Wells. Such was our educational efficiency
that, before the end, multitudes of simple Irish people really had
about the English invasion the same particular psychological reaction
that multitudes of simple English people had about the German invasion.
I mean that it seemed to come not only from outside the nation, but
from outside the world. It was unearthly in the strict sense in which a
comet is unearthly. It was the more appallingly alien for coming close;
it was the more outlandish the farther it went inland. These Christian
peasants have seen coming westward out of England what we saw coming
westward out of Germany. They saw science in arms; which turns the very
heavens into hells.
I have purposely put these fragmentary and secondary impressions
before any general survey of Anglo-Irish policy in the war. I do
so, first because I think a record of the real things, that seemed
to bulk biggest to any real observer at any real moment, is often
more useful than the setting forth of theories he may have made up
before he saw any realities at all. But I do it in the second place
because the more general summaries of our statesmanship, or lack of
statesmanship, are so much more likely to be found elsewhere. But if
we wish to comprehend the queer cross-purposes, it will be well to
keep always in mind a historical fact I have mentioned already; the
reality of the old Franco-Irish Entente. It lingers alive in Ireland,
and especially the most Irish parts of Ireland. In the fiercely Fenian
city of Cork, walking round the Young Ireland monument that seems to
give revolt the majesty of an institution, a man told me that German
bands had been hooted and pelted in those streets out of an indignant
memory of 1870. And an eminent scholar in the same town, referring to
the events of the same ‘terrible year,’ said to me: ‘In 1870 Ireland
sympathised with France and England with Germany; and, as usual,
Ireland was right!’ But if they were right when we were wrong, they
only began to be wrong when we were right. A sort of play or parable
might be written to show that this apparent paradox is a very genuine
piece of human psychology. Suppose there are two partners named John
and James; that James has always been urging the establishment of a
branch of the business in Paris. Long ago John quarrelled with this
furiously as a foreign fad; but he has since forgotten all about it;
for the letters from James bored him so much that he has not opened
any of them for years. One fine day John, finding himself in Paris,
conceives the original idea of a Paris branch; but he is conscious in a
confused way of having quarrelled with his partner, and vaguely feels
that his partner would be an obstacle to anything. John remembers that
James was always cantankerous, and forgets that he was cantankerous
in favour of this project, and not against it. John therefore sends
James a telegram, of a brevity amounting to brutality, simply telling
him to come in with no nonsense about it; and when he has no instant
reply, sends a solicitor’s letter to be followed by a writ. How James
will take it depends very much on James. How he will hail this happy
confirmation of his own early opinions will depend on whether James is
an unusually patient and charitable person. And James is not. He is
unfortunately the very man, of all men in the world, to drop his own
original agreement and everything else into the black abyss of disdain,
which now divides him from the man who has the impudence to agree with
him. He is the very man to say he will have nothing to do with his own
original notion, because it is now the belated notion of a fool. Such
a character could easily be analysed in any good novel. Such conduct
would readily be believed in any good play. It could not be believed
when it happened in real life. And it did happen in real life; the
Paris project was the sense of the safety of Paris as the pivot of
human history; the abrupt telegram was the recruiting campaign, and the
writ was conscription.
As to what Irish conscription was, or rather would have been, I cannot
understand any visitor in Ireland having the faintest doubt, unless (as
is often the case) his tour was so carefully planned as to permit him
to visit everything in Ireland except the Irish. Irish conscription
was a piece of rank raving madness, which was fortunately stopped,
with other bad things, by the blow of Foch at the second battle of the
Marne. It could not possibly produce at the last moment allies on whom
we could depend; and it would have lost us the whole sympathy of the
allies on whom we at that moment depended. I do not mean that American
soldiers would have mutinied; though Irish soldiers might have done so;
I mean something much worse. I mean that the whole mood of America
would have altered; and there would have been some kind of compromise
with German tyranny, in sheer disgust at a long exhibition of English
tyranny. Things would have happened in Ireland, week after week, and
month after month, such as the modern imagination has not seen except
where Prussia has established hell. We should have butchered women
and children; they would have _made us_ butcher them. We should have
killed priests, and probably the best priests. It could not be better
stated than in the words of an Irishman, as he stood with me in a high
terraced garden outside Dublin, looking towards that unhappy city, who
shook his head and said sadly, ‘They will shoot the wrong bishop.’
Of the meaning of this huge furnace of defiance I shall write when I
write of the national idea itself. I am concerned here not for their
nation but for mine; and especially for its peril from Prussia and
its help from America. And it is simply a question of considering
what these real things are really like. Remember that the American
Republic is practically founded on the fact, or fancy, that England is
a tyrant. Remember that it was being ceaselessly swept with new waves
of immigrant Irishry telling tales (too many of them true, though not
all) of the particular cases in which England had been a tyrant. It
would be hard to find a parallel to explain to Englishmen the effect
of awakening traditions so truly American by a prolonged display of
England as the tyrant in Ireland. A faint approximation might be found
if we imagined the survivors of Victorian England, steeped in the
tradition of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, watching the American troops march
through London. Suppose they noted that the negro troops alone had
to march in chains, with a white man in a broad-brimmed hat walking
beside them and flourishing a whip. Scenes far worse than that would
have followed Irish conscription; but the only purpose of this chapter
is to show that scenes quite as stupid marked every stage of Irish
recruitment. For it certainly would not have reassured the traditional
sympathisers with Uncle Tom to be told that the chains were only a part
of the uniform, or that the niggers moved not at the touch of the whip,
but only at the crack of it.
Such was our practical policy; and the single and sufficient comment
on it can be found in a horrible whisper which can scarcely now be
stilled. It is said, with a dreadful plausibility, that the Unionists
were deliberately trying to prevent a large Irish recruitment, which
would certainly have meant reconciliation and reform. In plain words,
it is said that they were willing to be traitors to England, if they
could only still be tyrants to Ireland. Only too many facts can be made
to fit in with this; but for me it is still too hideous to be easily
believed. But whatever our motives in doing it, there is simply no
doubt whatever about what we did, in this matter of the Pro-Germans
in Ireland. We did not crush the Pro-Germans; we did not convert
them, or coerce them, or educate them or exterminate them or massacre
them. We manufactured them; we turned them out patiently, steadily,
and systematically as if from a factory; we made them exactly as we
made munitions. It needed no little social science to produce, in any
kind of Irishman, any kind of sympathy with Prussia; but we were equal
to the task. What concerns me here, however, is that we were busy at
the same work among the Irish-Americans, and ultimately among all the
Americans. And that would have meant, as I have already noted, the
thing that I always feared; the dilution of the policy of the Allies.
Anything that looked like a prolonged Prussianism in Ireland would
have meant a compromise; that is, a perpetuated Prussianism in Europe.
I know that some who agree with me in other matters disagree with me
in this; but I should indeed be ashamed if, having to say so often
where I think my country was wrong, I did not say as plainly where I
think she was right. The notion of a compromise was founded on the
coincidence of recent national wars, which were only about the terms
of peace, not about the type of civilisation. But there do recur, at
longer historic intervals, universal wars of religion, not concerned
with what one nation shall do, but with what all nations shall be. They
recommence until they are finished, in things like the fall of Carthage
or the rout of Attila. It is quite true that history is for the most
part a plain road, which the tribes of men must travel side by side,
bargaining at the same markets or worshipping at the same shrines,
fighting and making friends again; and wisely making friends quickly.
But we need only see the road stretch but a little farther, from a hill
but a little higher, to see that sooner or later the road comes always
to another place, where stands a winged image of victory; and the ways
divide.