Let the reader take what follows with more than a grain of salt. No one
can foretell--surely not this writer--with anything approaching
certainty what will be the final effect of this war on the
soldier-workman. One can but marshal some of the more obvious and
general liabilities and assets, and try to strike a balance. The whole
thing is in flux. Millions are going into the crucible at every
temperature; and who shall say at all precisely what will come out or
what conditions the product issuing will meet with, though they
obviously cannot be the same as before the war? For in considering this
question, one must run into the account on either side not only the
various effects of the war on the soldier-workman, but the altered
influences his life will encounter in the future, so far as one can
foresee; and this is all navigation in uncharted waters.
Talking with and observing French soldiers during the winter of
1916-1917, and often putting to them this very question: How is the war
going to affect the soldier-workman? I noticed that their answers
followed very much the trend of class and politics. An adjutant,
sergeant, or devout Catholic considered that men would be improved, gain
self-command, and respect for law and order, under prolonged discipline
and daily sacrifice. A freethinker of the educated class, or a private
of Socialistic tendencies, on the other hand, would insist that the
strain must make men restless, irritable, more eager for their rights,
less tolerant of control. Each imagined that the war would further the
chances of the future as they dreamed of it. If I had talked with
capitalists--there are none among French soldiers--they would doubtless
have insisted that after-war conditions were going to be easier, just as
the "_sans-sous_" maintained that they were going to be harder and
provocative of revolution. In a word, the wish was father to the
thought.
Having observed this so strongly, the writer of these speculations says
to himself: "Let me, at all events, try to eliminate any bias, and see
the whole thing as should an umpire--one of those pure beings in white
coats, purged of all the prejudices, passions, and predilections of
mankind. Let me have no temperament for the time being, for I have to
set down--not what would be the effect on me if I were in their place,
or what would happen to the future if I could have my way, but what
would happen all the same if I were not alive. Only from an impersonal
point of view, if there be such a thing, am I going to get even
approximately at the truth."
Impersonally, then, one notes the credit facts and probabilities towards
the future's greater well-being; and those on the debit side, of
retrogression from the state of well-being, such as it was, which
prevailed when war was declared.
First, what will be the physical effect of the war on the
soldier-workman? Military training, open-air life, and plentiful food
are of such obvious physical advantage in the vast majority of cases as
to need no pointing out. And how much improvement was wanted is patent
to any one who has a remnant left of the old Greek worship of the body.
It has made one almost despair of industrialised England to see the
great Australians pass in the streets of London. We English cannot
afford to neglect the body any longer; we are becoming, I am much
afraid, a warped, stunted, intensely plain people. On that point I
refuse to speak with diffidence, for it is my business to know something
about beauty, and in our masters and pastors I see no sign of knowledge
and little inkling of concern, since there is no public opinion to drive
them forward to respect beauty. One-half of us regard good looks as
dangerous and savouring of immorality; the other half look upon them as
"swank," or at least superfluous. Any interest manifested in such a
subject is confined to a few women and a handful of artists. Let any one
who has an eye for looks take the trouble to observe the people who pass
in the streets of any of our big towns, he will count perhaps one in
five--not beautiful--but with some pretensions to being not absolutely
plain; and one can say this without fear of hurting any feelings, for
all will think themselves exceptions. Frivolity apart, there is a dismal
lack of good looks and good physique in our population; and it will be
all to the good to have had this physical training. If that training had
stopped short of the fighting line it would be physically entirely
beneficial; as it is, one has unfortunately to set against its
advantages--leaving out wounds and mutilation altogether--a considerable
number of overstrained hearts and nerves, not amounting to actual
disablement; and a great deal of developed rheumatism.
Peace will send back to their work very many men better set up and
hardier; but many also obviously or secretly weakened. Hardly any can go
back as they were. Yet, while training will but have brought out
strength which was always latent, and which, unless relapse be guarded
against, must rapidly decline, cases of strain and rheumatism will for
the most part be permanent, and such as would not have taken place under
peace conditions. Then there is the matter of venereal disease, which
the conditions of military life are carefully fostering--no negligible
factor on the debit side; the health of many hundreds must be written
off on that score. To credit, again, must be placed increased personal
cleanliness, much greater handiness and resource in the small ways of
life, and an even more complete endurance and contempt of illness than
already characterised the British workman, if that be possible. On the
whole I think that, physically, the scales will balance pretty evenly.
Next, what will be the effect of the war on the mental powers of the
soldier-workman? Unlike the French (sixty per cent. of whose army are
men working on the land), our army must contain at least ninety per
cent. of town workers, whose minds in time of peace are kept rather more
active than those of workers on the land by the ceaseless friction and
small decisions of town life. To gauge the result of two to five years'
military life on the minds of these town workers is a complicated and
stubborn problem. Here we have the exact converse of the physical case.
If the army life of the soldier-workman stopped short of service at the
front one might say at once that the effect on his mind would be far
more disastrous than it is. The opportunity for initiative and decision,
the mental stir of camp and depôt life is _nil_ compared with that of
service in the fighting line. And for one month at the front a man
spends perhaps five at the rear. Military life, on its negative side, is
more or less a suspension of the usual channels of mental activity. By
barrack and camp life the normal civilian intellect is, as it were,
marooned. On that desert island it finds, no doubt, certain new and very
definite forms of activity, but any one who has watched old soldiers
must have been struck by the "arrested" look which is stamped on most of
them--by a kind of remoteness, of concentrated emptiness, as of men who
by the conditions of their lives have long been prevented from thinking
of anything outside a ring fence. Two to five years' service will not be
long enough to set the old soldier's stamp on a mind, but one can see
the process beginning; and it will be quite long enough to encourage
laziness in minds already disposed to lying fallow. Far be it from this
pen to libel the English, but a feverish mental activity has never been
their vice; intellect, especially in what is known as the working-class,
is leisurely; it does not require to be encouraged to take its ease.
Some one has asked me: "_Can_ the ordinary worker think less in the
army than when he wasn't in the army?" In other words: "Did he ever
think at all?" The British worker is, of course, deceptive; he does not
look as if he were thinking. Whence exactly does he get his
stolidity--from climate, self-consciousness, or his competitive spirit?
All the same, thought does go on in him, shrewd and "near-the-bone";
life-made rather than book-made thought. Its range is limited by its
vocabulary; it starts from different premises, reaches different
conclusions from those of the "pundit," and so is liable to seem to the
latter non-existent. But let a worker and an educated man sit opposite
each other in a railway carriage without exchanging a word, as is the
fashion with the English, and which of their two silent judgments on the
other will be superior? I am not sure, but I rather think the worker's.
It will have a kind of deadly realism. In camp and depôt life the mind
standing-at-ease from many civilian frictions and needs for decision,
however petty, and shaken away from civilian ruts, will do a good deal
of thinking of a sort, be widened, and probably re-value many
things--especially when its owner goes abroad and sees fresh types,
fresh manners, and the world. But actual physical exertion, and the
inertia which follows it, bulk large in military service, and many who
"never thought at all" before they became soldiers will think still
less after! I may be cynical, but it seems to me that the chief stimulus
to thought in the ordinary mind is money, the getting and the spending
thereof; that what we call "politics," those social interests which form
at least half the staple of the ordinary worker's thought, are made up
of concern as to the wherewithal to live. In the army money is a fixed
quantity which demands no thought, neither in the getting nor the
spending; and the constant mental activity which in normal life circles
round money of necessity dries up.
But against this indefinite general rusting of mind machinery in the
soldier-workman's life away from the fighting line certain definite
considerations must be set. Many soldiers will form a habit of
reading--in the new armies the demand for books is great; some in sheer
boredom will have begun an all-round cultivation of their minds; others
again will be chafing continually against this prolonged holding-up of
their habitual mental traffic--and when a man chafes he does not exactly
rust; so that, while the naturally lazy will have been made more lazy,
the naturally eager may be made very eager.
The matter of age, too, is not unimportant. A soldier of twenty,
twenty-five, even up to thirty, probably seldom feels that the mode of
life from which he has been taken is set and permanent. He may be
destined to do that work all his days, but the knowledge of this has not
so far bitten him; he is not yet in the swing and current of his career,
and feels no great sense of dislocation. But a man of thirty-five or
forty, taken from an occupation which has got grip on him, feels that
his life has had a slice carved out of it. He may realise the necessity
better than the younger man, take his duty more seriously, but must have
a sensation as if his springs were let down flat. The knowledge that he
has to resume his occupation again in real middle age, with all the
steam escaped, must be profoundly discouraging; therefore I think his
mental activity will suffer more than that of the younger man. The
recuperative powers of youth are so great that very many of our younger
soldiers will unrust quickly and at a bound regain all the activity
lost. Besides, a very great many of the younger men will not go back to
the old job. But older men, though they will go back to what they were
doing before more readily than their juniors, will go back with
diminished hope and energy, and a sort of fatalism. At forty, even at
thirty-five, every year begins to seem important, and several years will
have been wrenched out of their working lives just, perhaps, when they
were beginning to make good.
Turning to the spells of service at the front--there will be no rusting
there--the novelty of sensation, the demand for initiative and
adaptability are too great. A soldier said to me: "My two years in depôt
and camp were absolutely deadening; that eight weeks at the front before
I was knocked over were the best eight weeks I ever had." Spells at the
front must wipe out all or nearly all the rust; but against them must be
set the deadening spells of hospital, which too often follow, the
deadening spells of training which have gone before; and the more
considerable though not very permanent factor--that laziness and
dislocation left on the minds of many who have been much in the firing
line. As the same young soldier put it: "I can't concentrate now as I
could on a bit of work--it takes me longer; all the same, where I used
to chuck it when I found it hard, I set my teeth now." In other words,
less mental but more moral grip.
On the whole, then, so far as mental effect goes, I believe the balance
must come out on the debit side.
And, now, what will be the spiritual effect of the war on the
soldier-workman? And by "spiritual" I mean the effect of his new life
and emotional experience, neither on his intellect, nor exactly on his
"soul"--for very few men have anything so rarefied--but on his
disposition and character.
Has any one the right to discuss this who has not fought? It is with the
greatest diffidence that I hazard any view. On the other hand, the
effects are so various, and so intensely individual, that perhaps only
such a one has a chance of forming a general judgment unbiassed by
personal experience and his own temperament. What thousands of strange
and poignant feelings must pass through even the least impressionable
soldier who runs the gamut of this war's "experience"! And there will
not be too many of our soldier-workmen returning to civil life without
having had at least a taste of everything. The embryo Guardsman who
sticks his bayonet into a sack, be he never so unimaginative, with each
jab of that bayonet pictures dimly the body of a "Hun," and gets used to
the sensation of spitting it. On every long march there comes a time
that may last hours when the recruit feels done up, and yet has to go on
"sticking it." Never a day passes, all through his service, without some
moment when he would give his soul to be out of it all and back in some
little elysium of the past; but he has to grit his teeth and try to
forget. Hardly a man who, when he first comes under fire, has not a
struggle with himself which amounts to a spiritual victory. Not many
who do not arrive at a "Don't care" state of mind that is almost equal
to a spiritual defeat. No soldier who does not rub shoulders during his
service with countless comrades strange to him, and get a wider
understanding and a fuller tolerance. Not a soul in the trenches, one
would think, who is not caught up into a mood of comradeship and
self-suppression which amounts almost to exaltation. Not one but has to
fight through moods almost reaching extinction of the very love of life.
And shall all this--and the many hard disappointments, and the long
yearning for home and those he loves, and the chafing against continual
restraints, and the welling-up of secret satisfaction in the "bit done,"
the knowledge that Fate is not beating, cannot beat him; and the sight
of death all round, and the looking into Death's eyes--staring those
eyes down; and the long bearing of pain; and the pity for his comrades
bearing pain--shall all this pass his nature by without marking it for
life? When all is over, and the soldier-workman back in civil life, will
his character be enlarged or shrunken? The nature of a man is never
really changed, no more than a leopard's skin, it is but developed or
dwarfed. The influences of the war will have as many little forms as
there are soldiers, and to attempt precision of summary is clearly
vain. It is something of a truism to suggest that the war will ennoble
and make more serious those who before the war took a noble and serious
view of life; and that on those who took life callously it will have a
callousing effect. The problem is rather to discover what effect, if
any, will be made on that medium material which was neither definitely
serious nor obviously callous. And for this we must go to consideration
of main national characteristics. It is--for one thing--very much the
nature of the Briton to look on life as a game with victory or defeat at
the end of it, and to feel it impossible that he can be defeated. He is
not so much concerned to "live" as to win this life match. He is
combative from one minute to the next, reacts instantly against any
attempt to down him. The war for him is a round in this great personal
match of his with Fate, and he is completely caught up in the idea of
winning it. He is spared that double consciousness of the French soldier
who wants to "live," who goes on indeed superbly fighting "_pour la
France_" out of love for his country, but all the time cannot help
saying to himself: "What a fool I am--what sort of life is this?" I have
heard it said by one who ought to know, if any one can, that the British
soldier hardly seems to have a sense of patriotism, but goes through it
all as a sort of private "scrap" in which he does not mean to be beaten,
and out of loyalty to his regiment, his "team," so to speak. This is
partly true, but the Briton is very deep, and there are feelings at the
bottom of his well which never see the light. If the British soldier
were fighting on a line which ran from Lowestoft through York to
Sunderland, he might show very different symptoms. Still, at bottom he
would always, I think, feel the business to be first in the nature of a
contest with a force which was trying to down him personally. In this
contest he is being stretched, and steeled--that is, hardened and
confirmed--in the very quality of stubborn combativeness which was
already his first characteristic.
Take another main feature of the national character--the Briton is
ironic. Well, the war is deepening his irony. It must, for it is a
monstrously ironic business.
Some--especially those who wish to--believe in a religious revival among
the soldiers. There's an authentic story of two convalescent soldiers
describing a battle. The first finished thus: "I tell you it makes you
think of God." The second--a thoughtful type--ended with a pause, and
then these words: "Who could believe in God after that?" Like all else
in human life, it depends on temperament. The war will speed up
"belief" in some and "disbelief" in others. But, on the whole, comic
courage shakes no hands with orthodoxy.
The religious movement which I think _is_ going on is of a subtler and a
deeper sort altogether. Men are discovering that human beings are finer
than they had supposed. A young man said to me: "Well, I don't know
about religion, but I know that my opinion of human nature is about
fifty per cent. better than it was." That conclusion has been arrived at
by countless thousands. It is a great factor--seeing that the belief of
the future will be belief in the God within; and a frank agnosticism
concerning the great "Why" of things. Religion will become the
exaltation of self-respect, of what we call the divine in man. "The
Kingdom of God" is within you. That belief, old as the hills, and
reincarnated by Tolstoi years ago, has come into its own in the war; for
it has been clearly proved to be the real faith of modern man,
underneath all verbal attempts to assert the contrary. This--the white
side of war--is an extraordinarily heartening phenomenon; and if it sent
every formal creed in the world packing there would still be a gain to
religion.
Another main characteristic of the Briton, especially of the "working"
Briton, is improvidence--he likes, unconsciously, to live from hand to
mouth, careless of the morrow. The war is deepening that characteristic
too--it must, for who could endure if he fretted over what was going to
happen to him, with death so in the wind?
Thus the average soldier-workman will return from the war confirmed and
deepened in at least three main national characteristics: His combative
hardihood, his ironic humour, and his improvidence. I think he will have
more of what is called "character"; whether for good or evil depends, I
take it, on what we connote by those terms, and in what context we use
them. I may look on "character" as an asset, but I can well imagine
politicians and trades union leaders regarding it with profound
suspicion. Anyway, he will not be the lamb that he was not even before
the war. He will be a restive fellow, knowing his own mind better, and
possibly his real interest less well; he will play less for safety,
since safety will have become to him a civilian sort of thing, rather
contemptible. He will have at once a more interesting and a less
reliable character from the social and political point of view.
And what about his humanity? Can he go through all this hell of
slaughter and violence untouched in his gentler instincts? There will
be--there must be--some brutalisation. But old soldiers are not usually
inhumane--on the contrary, they are often very gentle beings. I distrust
the influence of the war on those who merely write and read about it. I
think editors, journalists, old gentlemen, and women will be brutalised
in larger numbers than our soldiers. An intelligent French soldier said
to me of his own countrymen: "After six months of civil life, you won't
know they ever had to 'clean up' trenches and that sort of thing." If
this is true of the Frenchman, it will be more true of the less
impressionable Briton. If I must sum up at all on what, for want of a
better word, I have called the "spiritual" count, I can only say that
there will be a distinct increase of "character," and leave it to the
reader to decide whether that falls on the debit or the credit side.
On the whole then, an increase of "character," a slight loss of mental
activity, and neither physical gain nor loss to speak of.
We have now to consider the rather deadly matter of demobilisation. One
hears the suggestion that not more than 30,000 men shall be disbanded
per week; this means two years at least. Conceive millions of men whose
sense of sacrifice has been stretched to the full for a definite object
which has been gained--conceive them held in a weary, and, as it seems
to them, unnecessary state of suspense. Kept back from all they long
for, years after the reality of their service has departed! If this does
not undermine them, I do not know what will. Demobilisation--they
say--must be cautious. "No man should be released till a place in the
industrial machine is ready waiting for him!" So, in a counsel of
perfection, speak the wise who have not been deprived of home life,
civil liberty, and what not for a dismal length of two, three, and
perhaps four years. No! Demobilisation should be as swift as possible,
and risks be run to make it swift. The soldier-workman who goes back to
civil life within two or three months after peace is signed goes back
with a glow still in his heart. But he who returns with a rankling sense
of unmerited, unintelligible delay--most prudently, of course,
ordained--goes back with "cold feet" and a sullen or revolting spirit.
What men will stand under the shadow of a great danger from a sense of
imminent duty, they will furiously chafe at when that danger and sense
of duty are no more. The duty will then be to their families and to
themselves. There is no getting away from this, and the country will be
well advised not to be too coldly cautious. Every one, of course, must
wish to ease to the utmost the unprecedented economic and industrial
confusion which the signing of peace will bring, but it will be better
to risk a good deal of momentary unemployment and discontent rather than
neglect the human factor and keep men back long months in a service of
which they will be deadly sick. How sick they will be may perhaps be
guessed at from the words of a certain soldier: "After the war you'll
_have_ to have conscription. You won't get a man to go into the army
without!" What is there to prevent the Government from beginning now to
take stock of the demands of industry, from having a great land
settlement scheme cut and dried, and devising means for the swiftest
possible demobilisation? The moment peace is signed the process of
re-absorption into civil life should begin at once and go on without
interruption as swiftly as the actual difficulties of transport permit.
They, of themselves, will hold up demobilisation quite long enough. The
soldier-workman will recognise and bear with the necessary physical
delays, but he will not tolerate for a moment any others for his
so-called benefit.[A]
And what sort of civil life will it be which awaits the
soldier-workman? I suppose, if anything is certain, a plenitude, nay a
plethora, of work is assured for some time after the war. Capital has
piled up in hands which will control a vast amount of improved and
convertible machinery. Purchasing power has piled up in the shape of
savings out of the increased national income. Granted that income will
at once begin to drop all round, shrinking perhaps fast to below the
pre-war figures, still at first there must be a rolling river of demand
and the wherewithal to satisfy it. For years no one has built houses, or
had their houses done up; no one has bought furniture, clothes, or a
thousand other articles which they propose buying the moment the war
stops. Railways and rolling stock, roads, housing, public works of all
sorts, private motor cars, and pleasure requirements of every kind have
been let down and starved. Huge quantities of shipping must be replaced;
vast renovations of destroyed country must be undertaken; numberless
repairs to damaged property; the tremendous process of converting or
re-converting machinery to civil uses must be put through; State schemes
to deal with the land, housing, and other problems will be in full
blast; a fierce industrial competition will commence; and, above all, we
must positively grow our own food in the future. Besides all this we
shall have lost at least a million workers through death, disablement,
and emigration; indeed, unless we have some really attractive land
scheme ready we may lose a million by emigration alone. In a word, the
demand for labour, at the moment, will be overwhelming, and the vital
question only one of readjustment. In numberless directions women, boys,
and older men have replaced the soldier-workman. Hundreds of thousands
of soldiers, especially among the first three million, have been
guaranteed reinstatement. Hundreds of thousands of substitutes will,
therefore, be thrown out of work. With the exception of the skilled men
who have had to be retained in their places all through, and the men who
step back into places kept for them, the whole working population will
have to be refitted with jobs. The question of women's labour will not
be grave at first because there will be work for all and more than all,
but the jigsaw puzzle which industry will have to put together will try
the nerves and temper of the whole community. In the French army the
peasant soldier is jealous and sore because he has had to bear the chief
burden of the fighting, while the mechanic has to a great extent been
kept for munition making, transport, and essential civil industry. With
us it is if anything the other way. In the French army, too, the
feeling runs high against the "_embusqué_," the man who--often
unjustly--is supposed to have avoided service. I do not know to what
extent the same feeling prevails in our army, but there is certainly an
element of it, which will not make for content or quietude.
Another burning question after the war will be wages. We are assured
they are going to keep up. Well, we shall see. Certain special rates
will, of course, come down at once. And if, in general, wages keep up,
it will not, I think, be for very long. Still, times will be good at
first for employers and employed. At first--and then!
Some thinkers insist that the war has to an appreciable extent been
financed out of savings which would otherwise have been spent on luxury.
But the amount thus saved can easily be exaggerated--the luxurious class
is not really large, and against their saving must be set the spending
by the working classes, out of increased wages, on what in peace years
were not necessities of their existence. In other words, the luxurious
or investing class has cut off its peace-time fripperies, saved and lent
to the Government; the Government has paid the bulk of this money to the
working class, who have spent most of it in what to them would be
fripperies in time of peace. It may be, it _is_, all to the good that
luxurious tastes should be clipped from the wealthy, and a higher
standard of living secured to the workers, but this is rather a matter
of distribution and social health than of economics in relation to the
financing of the war.
There are those who argue that because the general productive effort of
the country during the war has been speeded up to half as much again as
that of normal times, by tapping women's labour, by longer hours and
general improvement in machinery and industrial ideas, the war will not
result in any great economic loss, and that we may with care and effort
avoid the coming of bad times after the first boom. The fact remains,
and anybody can test it for himself, that there is a growing shortage of
practically everything except--they say--cheap jewellery and pianos. I
am no economist, but that does seem to indicate that this extra
production has not greatly compensated for the enormous application of
labour and material resources to the quick-wasting ends of war instead
of to the slow-wasting ends of civil life. In other words, a vast amount
of productive energy and material is being shot away. Now this, I
suppose, would not matter, in fact might be beneficial to trade by
increasing demand, if the purchasing power of the public remained what
it was before the war. But in all the great countries of the world,
even America, the peoples will be faced with taxation which will soak up
anything from one-fifth to one-third of their incomes, and, even
allowing for a large swelling of those incomes from war savings, so that
a great deal of what the State takes with one hand she will return to
the investing public with the other, the diminution of purchasing power
is bound to make itself increasingly felt. When the reconversion of
machinery to civil ends has been completed, the immediate arrears of
demand supplied, shipping and rolling-stock replaced, houses built,
repairs made good, and so forth, this slow shrinkage of purchasing power
in every country will go hand in hand with shrinkage of demand, decline
of trade and wages, and unemployment, in a slow process, till they
culminate in what one fears may be the worst "times" we have ever known.
Whether those "times" will set in one, two, or even six years after the
war, is, of course, the question. A certain school of thought insists
that this tremendous taxation after the war, and the consequent
impoverishment of enterprise and industry, can be avoided, or at all
events greatly relieved, by national schemes for the development of the
Empire's latent resources; in other words, that the State should even
borrow more money to avoid high taxation and pay the interests on
existing loans, should acquire native lands, and swiftly develop mineral
rights and other potentialities. I hope there may be something in this,
but I am a little afraid that the wish is father to the thought, and
that the proposition contains an element akin to the attempt to lift
oneself up by the hair of one's own head; for I notice that many of its
disciples are recruited from those who in old days were opposed to the
State development of anything, on the ground that individual energy in
free competition was a still greater driving power.
However we may wriggle in our skins and juggle with the chances of the
future, I suspect that we shall have to pay the piper. We have without
doubt, during the war, been living to a great extent on our capital. Our
national income has gone up, _out of capital_, from twenty-two hundred
to about three thousand six hundred millions, and will rapidly shrink to
an appropriate figure. Wealth may, I admit, recover much more quickly
than deductions from the past would lead us to expect. Under the war's
pressure secrets have been discovered, machinery improved, men's
energies and knowledge brightened and toned up. The Prime Minister not
long ago said: "If you insist on going back to pre-war conditions, then
God help this country!" A wise warning. If the country could be got to
pull together in an effort to cope with peace as strenuous as our effort
to cope with the war has been one would not view the economic future
with disquietude. But one is bound to point out that if the war has
proved anything it has proved that the British people require a maximum
of danger dangled in front of their very noses before they can be roused
to any serious effort, and that danger in time of peace has not the
poster-like quality of danger in time of war; it does not hit men in the
eye, it does not still differences of opinion, and party struggles, by
its scarlet insistence. I hope for, but frankly do not see, the coming
of an united national effort demanding extra energy, extra organising
skill, extra patience, and extra self-sacrifice at a time when the whole
nation will feel that it has earned a rest, and when the lid has once
more been taken off the political cauldron. I fancy, dismally, that a
people and a Press who have become so used to combat and excitement will
demand and seek further combat and excitement, and will take out this
itch amongst themselves in a fashion even more strenuous than before the
war. I am not here concerned to try to cheer or depress for some
immediate and excellent result, as we have all got into the habit of
doing during the war, but to try to conjure truth out of the darkness
of the future. The vast reconstructive process which ought to be, and
perhaps is, beginning now will, I think, go ahead with vigour while the
war is on, and for some little time after; but I fear it will then split
into _pro_ and _con_, see-saw, and come to something of a standstill.
These, so sketchily set down, are a few of the probable items--credit
and debit--in the industrial situation which will await the
soldier-workman emerging from the war. A situation agitated,
cross-currented, bewildering, but busy, and by no means economically
tight at first, slowly becoming less bewildering, gradually growing less
and less busy, till it reaches ultimately a bad era of unemployment and
social struggle. The soldier-workman will go back, I believe, to two or
three years at least of good wages and plentiful work. But when, after
that, the pinch begins to come, it will encounter the quicker, more
resentful blood of men who in the constant facing of great danger have
left behind them all fear of consequences; of men who in the survival of
one great dislocation to their lives, have lost the dread of other
dislocations. The war will have implanted a curious deep restlessness in
the great majority of soldier souls. Can the workmen of the future
possibly be as patient and law-abiding as they were before the war, in
the face of what seems to them injustice? I don't think so. The enemy
will again be Fate--this time in the form of capital, trying to down
them; and the victory they were conscious of gaining over Fate in the
war will have strengthened and quickened their fibre to another fight,
and another conquest. The seeds of revolution are supposed to lie in
war. They lie there because war generally brings in the long run
economic stress, but also because of the recklessness or
"character"--call it what you will--which the habitual facing of danger
develops. The self-control and self-respect which military service under
war conditions will have brought to the soldier-workman will be an added
force in civil life; but it is a fallacy, I think, to suppose, as some
do, that it will be a force on the side of established order. It is all
a question of allegiance, and the allegiance of the workman in time of
peace is not rendered to the State, but to himself and his own class. To
the service of that class and the defence of its "rights" this new force
will be given. In measuring the possibilities of revolution, the
question of class rides paramount. Many hold that the war is breaking
down social barriers and establishing comradeship, through hardship and
danger shared. For the moment this is true. But whether that new
comradeship will stand any great pressure of economic stress after
direct regimental relationship between officer and man has ceased and
the war is becoming just a painful memory, is to me very doubtful. But
suppose that to some extent it does stand, we have still the fact that
the control of industry and capital, even as long as ten years after the
war, will be mainly in the hands of men who have not fought, of business
men spared from service either by age or by their too precious
commercial skill. Towards these the soldier-workman will have no tender
feelings, no sense of comradeship. On the contrary--for somewhere back
of the mind of every workman there is, even during his country's danger,
a certain doubt whether all war is not somehow hatched by the
aristocrats and plutocrats of one side, or both. Other feelings obscure
this instinct during the struggle, but it is never quite lost, and will
spring up again the more confirmed for its repression. That we can avoid
a straitened and serious time a few years hence I believe impossible.
Straitened times dismally divide the classes. The war-investments of the
working class may ease things a little, but war-savings will not affect
the outlook of the soldier-workman, for he will have no war-savings,
except his life, and it is from him that revolution or disorder will
come, if it come at all.
Must it come? I think most certainly, unless between now and then means
be found of persuading capital and labour that their interests and their
troubles are identical, and of overcoming secrecy and suspicion between
them. There are many signs already that capital and labour are becoming
alive to this necessity. But to talk of unity is an amiable distraction
in which we all indulge these days. To find a method by which that talk
may be translated into fact within a few years is perhaps more
difficult. One does not change human nature; and unless the interests of
capital and labour are _in reality_ made one, true co-operation
established, and factory conditions transformed on the lines of the
welfare system--no talk of unity will prevent capitalist and working man
from claiming what seem to them their rights. The labour world is now,
and for some time to come will be, at sixes and sevens in matters of
leadership and responsibility; and this just when sagacious leadership
and loyal following will be most needed. The soldier-workman was already
restive under leadership before the war; returned to civil life, he will
be far more restive. Yet, without leadership, what hope is there of
co-operation with capital; what chance of finding a golden mean of
agreement? But even if the problems of leadership are solved, and
councils of capitalists and labour leaders established, whose decisions
will be followed--one thing is still certain: no half-measures will do;
no seeming cordialities with mental reservations; no simulated
generosity which spills out on the first test; nothing but genuine
friendliness and desire to pull together. Those hard business heads
which distrust all sentiment as if it were a poison are the most
short-sighted heads in the world. There is a human factor in this
affair, as both sides will find to their cost if they neglect it.
Extremists must be sent to Coventry, "caste" feeling dropped on the one
hand, and suspicion dropped on the other; managers, directors, and
labour leaders, all must learn that they are not simply trustees for
their shareholders or for labour, but trustees of a national interest
which embraces them all--or worse will come of it.
But I am not presumptuous enough to try to teach these cooks how to make
their broth, neither would it come within the scope of these
speculations, which conclude thus: The soldier-workman, physically
unchanged, mentally a little weakened, but more "characterful" and
restive, will step out through a demobilisation--heaven send it be
swift, even at some risk!--into an industrial world, confused and busy
as a beehive, which will hum and throb and flourish for two or three
years, and then slowly chill and thin away into, may be, the winter
ghost of itself, or at best an autumn hive. There, unless he be
convinced, not by words but facts, that his employer is standing side by
side with him in true comradeship, facing the deluge, he will be quick
to rise, and with his newly-found self-confidence take things into his
own hands. Whether, if he does, he will make those things better for
himself would be another inquiry altogether.
1917.
[A] Since these words were written one hears of demobilization
schemes ready to the last buttons. Let us hope the buttons won't come
off.--J. G.