These letters weighed heavily upon Mr. Britling's mind. He perceived
that this precociously wise, subtle youngster of his was now close up to
the line of injury and death, going to and fro from it, in a perpetual,
fluctuating danger. At any time now in the day or night the evil thing
might wing its way to him. If Mr. Britling could have prayed, he would
have prayed for Hugh. He began and never finished some ineffectual
prayers.
He tried to persuade himself of a Roman stoicism; that he would be
sternly proud, sternly satisfied, if this last sacrifice for his country
was demanded from him. He perceived he was merely humbugging himself....
This war had no longer the simple greatness that would make any such
stern happiness possible....
The disaster to Teddy and Mrs. Teddy hit him hard. He winced at the
thought of Mrs. Teddy's white face; the unspoken accusation in her eyes.
He felt he could never bring himself to say his one excuse to her: "I
did not keep Hugh back. If I had done that, then you might have the
right to blame."
If he had overcome every other difficulty in the way to an heroic pose
there was still Hugh's unconquerable lucidity of outlook. War _was_ a
madness....
But what else was to be done? What else could be done? We could not give
in to Germany. If a lunatic struggles, sane men must struggle too....
Mr. Britling had ceased to write about the war at all. All his later
writings about it had been abandoned unfinished. He could not imagine
them counting, affecting any one, producing any effect. Indeed he was
writing now very intermittently. His contributions to _The Times_ had
fallen away. He was perpetually thinking now about the war, about life
and death, about the religious problems that had seemed so remote in the
days of the peace; but none of his thinking would become clear and
definite enough for writing. All the clear stars of his mind were hidden
by the stormy clouds of excitement that the daily newspaper perpetually
renewed and by the daily developments of life. And just as his
professional income shrank before his mental confusion and impotence,
the private income that came from his and his wife's investments became
uncertain. She had had two thousand pounds in the Constantinople loan,
seven hundred in debentures of the Ottoman railway; he had held similar
sums in two Hungarian and one Bulgarian loan, in a linoleum factory at
Rouen and in a Swiss Hotel company. All these stopped payments, and the
dividends from their other investments shrank. There seemed no limit set
to the possibilities of shrinkage of capital and income. Income tax had
leapt to colossal dimensions, the cost of most things had risen, and the
tangle of life was now increased by the need for retrenchments and
economies. He decided that Gladys, the facetiously named automobile, was
a luxury, and sold her for a couple of hundred pounds. He lost his
gardener, who had gone to higher priced work with a miller, and he had
great trouble to replace him, so that the garden became disagreeably
unkempt and unsatisfactory. He had to give up his frequent trips to
London. He was obliged to defer Statesminster for the boys. For a time
at any rate they must go as day boys to Brinsmead. At every point he met
this uncongenial consideration of ways and means. For years now he had
gone easy, lived with a certain self-indulgence. It was extraordinarily
vexatious to have one's greater troubles for one's country and one's son
and one's faith crossed and complicated by these little troubles of the
extra sixpence and the untimely bill.
What worried his mind perhaps more than anything else was his gradual
loss of touch with the essential issues of the war. At first the
militarism, the aggression of Germany, had seemed so bad that he could
not see the action of Britain and her allies as anything but entirely
righteous. He had seen the war plainly and simply in the phrase, "Now
this militarism must end." He had seen Germany as a system, as
imperialism and junkerism, as a callous materialist aggression, as the
spirit that makes war, and the Allies as the protest of humanity against
all these evil things.
Insensibly, in spite of himself, this first version of the war was
giving place to another. The tawdry, rhetorical German Emperor, who had
been the great antagonist at the outset, the last upholder of Cæsarism,
God's anointed with the withered arm and the mailed fist, had receded
from the foreground of the picture; that truer Germany which is thought
and system, which is the will to do things thoroughly, the Germany of
Ostwald and the once rejected Hindenburg, was coming to the fore. It
made no apology for the errors and crimes that had been imposed upon it
by its Hohenzollern leadership, but it fought now to save itself from
the destruction and division that would be its inevitable lot if it
accepted defeat too easily; fought to hold out, fought for a second
chance, with discipline, with skill and patience, with a steadfast
will. It fought with science, it fought with economy, with machines and
thought against all too human antagonists. It necessitated an implacable
resistance, but also it commanded respect. Against it fought three great
peoples with as fine a will; but they had neither the unity, the
habitual discipline, nor the science of Germany, and it was the latter
defect that became more and more the distressful matter of Mr.
Britling's thoughts. France after her initial experiences, after her
first reeling month, had risen from the very verge of defeat to a steely
splendour of resolution, but England and Russia, those twin slack
giants, still wasted force, were careless, negligent, uncertain.
Everywhere up and down the scale, from the stupidity of the uniform
sandbags and Hugh's young officer who would not use a map, to the
general conception and direction of the war, Mr. Britling's inflamed and
oversensitised intelligence perceived the same bad qualities for which
he had so often railed upon his countrymen in the days of the peace,
that impatience, that indolence, that wastefulness and inconclusiveness,
that failure to grip issues and do obviously necessary things. The same
lax qualities that had brought England so close to the supreme
imbecility of a civil war in Ireland in July, 1914, were now muddling
and prolonging the war, and postponing, it might be for ever, the
victory that had seemed so certain only a year ago. The politician still
intrigued, the ineffectives still directed. Against brains used to the
utmost their fight was a stupid thrusting forth of men and men and yet
more men, men badly trained, under-equipped, stupidly led. A press
clamour for invention and scientific initiative was stifled under a
committee of elderly celebrities and eminent dufferdom; from the outset,
the Ministry of Munitions seemed under the influence of the "business
man."...
It is true that righteousness should triumph over the tyrant and the
robber, but have carelessness and incapacity any right to triumph over
capacity and foresight? Men were coming now to dark questionings
between this intricate choice. And, indeed, was our cause all
righteousness?
There surely is the worst doubt of all for a man whose son is facing
death.
Were we indeed standing against tyranny for freedom?
There came drifting to Mr. Britling's ears a confusion of voices, voices
that told of reaction, of the schemes of employers to best the trade
unions, of greedy shippers and greedy house landlords reaping their
harvest, of waste and treason in the very households of the Ministry, of
religious cant and intolerance at large, of self-advertisement written
in letters of blood, of forestalling and jobbery, of irrational and
exasperating oppressions in India and Egypt.... It came with a shock to
him, too, that Hugh should see so little else than madness in the war,
and have so pitiless a realisation of its essential futility. The boy
forced his father to see--what indeed all along he had been seeing more
and more clearly. The war, even by the standards of adventure and
conquest, had long since become a monstrous absurdity. Some way there
must be out of this bloody entanglement that was yielding victory to
neither side, that was yielding nothing but waste and death beyond all
precedent. The vast majority of people everywhere must be desiring
peace, willing to buy peace at any reasonable price, and in all the
world it seemed there was insufficient capacity to end the daily
butchery and achieve the peace that was so universally desired, the
peace that would be anything better than a breathing space for further
warfare.... Every day came the papers with the balanced story of
battles, losses, destructions, ships sunk, towns smashed. And never a
decision, never a sign of decision.
One Saturday afternoon Mr. Britling found himself with Mrs. Britling at
Claverings. Lady Homartyn was in mourning for her two nephews, the
Glassington boys, who had both been killed, one in Flanders, the other
in Gallipoli. Raeburn was there too, despondent and tired-looking.
There were three young men in khaki, one with the red of a staff
officer; there were two or three women whom Mr. Britling had not met
before, and Miss Sharsper the novelist, fresh from nursing experience
among the convalescents in the south of France. But he was disgusted to
find that the gathering was dominated by his old antagonist, Lady
Frensham, unsubdued, unaltered, rampant over them all, arrogant,
impudent, insulting. She was in mourning, she had the most splendid
black furs Mr. Britling had ever seen; her large triumphant profile came
out of them like the head of a vulture out of its ruff; her elder
brother was a wounded prisoner in Germany, her second was dead; it would
seem that hers were the only sacrifices the war had yet extorted from
any one. She spoke as though it gave her the sole right to criticise the
war or claim compensation for the war.
Her incurable propensity to split the country, to make mischievous
accusations against classes and districts and public servants, was
having full play. She did her best to provoke Mr. Britling into a
dispute, and throw some sort of imputation upon his patriotism as
distinguished from her own noisy and intolerant conceptions of
"loyalty."
She tried him first with conscription. She threw out insults at the
shirkers and the "funk classes." All the middle-class people clung on to
their wretched little businesses, made any sort of excuse....
Mr. Britling was stung to defend them. "A business," he said acidly,
"isn't like land, which waits and grows rich for its owner. And these
people can't leave ferrety little agents behind them when they go off to
serve. Tens of thousands of middle-class men have ruined themselves and
flung away every prospect they had in the world to go to this war."
"And scores of thousands haven't!" said Lady Frensham. "They are the men
I'm thinking of."...
Mr. Britling ran through a little list of aristocratic stay-at-homes
that began with a duke.
"And not a soul speaks to them in consequence," she said.
She shifted her attack to the Labour people. They would rather see the
country defeated than submit to a little discipline.
"Because they have no faith in the house of lawyers or the house of
landlords," said Mr. Britling. "Who can blame them?"
She proceeded to tell everybody what she would do with strikers. She
would give them "short shrift." She would give them a taste of the
Prussian way--homoeopathic treatment. "But of course old vote-catching
Asquith daren't--he daren't!" Mr. Britling opened his mouth and said
nothing; he was silenced. The men in khaki listened respectfully but
ambiguously; one of the younger ladies it seemed was entirely of Lady
Frensham's way of thinking, and anxious to show it. The good lady having
now got her hands upon the Cabinet proceeded to deal faithfully with its
two-and-twenty members. Winston Churchill had overridden Lord Fisher
upon the question of Gallipoli, and incurred terrible responsibilities.
Lord Haldane--she called him "Tubby Haldane"--was a convicted traitor.
"The man's a German out and out. Oh! what if he hasn't a drop of German
blood in his veins? He's a German by choice--which is worse."
"I thought he had a certain capacity for organisation," said Mr.
Britling.
"We don't want his organisation, and we don't want _him_," said Lady
Frensham.
Mr. Britling pleaded for particulars of the late Lord Chancellor's
treasons. There were no particulars. It was just an idea the good lady
had got into her head, that had got into a number of accessible heads.
There was only one strong man in all the country now, Lady Frensham
insisted. That was Sir Edward Carson.
Mr. Britling jumped in his chair.
"But has he ever done anything?" he cried, "except embitter Ireland?"
Lady Frensham did not hear that question. She pursued her glorious
theme. Lloyd George, who had once been worthy only of the gallows, was
now the sole minister fit to put beside her hero. He had won her heart
by his condemnation of the working man. He was the one man who was not
afraid to speak out, to tell them they drank, to tell them they shirked
and loafed, to tell them plainly that if defeat came to this country the
blame would fall upon _them_!
"_No!_" cried Mr. Britling.
"Yes," said Lady Frensham. "Upon them and those who have flattered and
misled them...."
And so on....
It presently became necessary for Lady Homartyn to rescue Mr. Britling
from the great lady's patriotic tramplings. He found himself drifting
into the autumnal garden--the show of dahlias had never been so
wonderful--in the company of Raeburn and the staff officer and a small
woman who was presently discovered to be remarkably well-informed. They
were all despondent. "I think all this promiscuous blaming of people is
quite the worst--and most ominous--thing about us just now," said Mr.
Britling after the restful pause that followed the departure from the
presence of Lady Frensham.
"It goes on everywhere," said the staff officer.
"Is it really--honest?" said Mr. Britling.
Raeburn, after reflection, decided to answer. "As far as it is stupid,
yes. There's a lot of blame coming; there's bound to be a day of
reckoning, and I suppose we've all got an instinctive disposition to
find a scapegoat for our common sins. The Tory press is pretty rotten,
and there's a strong element of mere personal spite--in the Churchill
attacks for example. Personal jealousy probably. Our 'old families'
seem to have got vulgar-spirited imperceptibly--in a generation or so.
They quarrel and shirk and lay blame exactly as bad servants do--and
things are still far too much in their hands. Things are getting muffed,
there can be no doubt about that--not fatally, but still rather
seriously. And the government--it was human before the war, and we've
added no archangels. There's muddle. There's mutual suspicion. You never
know what newspaper office Lloyd George won't be in touch with next.
He's honest and patriotic and energetic, but he's mortally afraid of old
women and class intrigues. He doesn't know where to get his backing.
He's got all a labour member's terror of the dagger at his back. There's
a lack of nerve, too, in getting rid of prominent officers--who have
friends."
The staff officer nodded.
"Northcliffe seems to me to have a case," said Mr. Britling. "Every one
abuses him."
"I'd stop his _Daily Mail_," said Raeburn. "I'd leave _The Times_, but
I'd stop the _Daily Mail_ on the score of its placards alone. It
overdoes Northcliffe. It translates him into the shrieks and yells of
underlings. The plain fact is that Northcliffe is scared out of his wits
by German efficiency--and in war time when a man is scared out of his
wits, whether he is honest or not, you put his head in a bag or hold a
pistol to it to calm him.... What is the good of all this clamouring for
a change of government? We haven't a change of government. It's like
telling a tramp to get a change of linen. Our men, all our public men,
are second-rate men, with the habits of advocates. There is nothing
masterful in their minds. How can you expect the system to produce
anything else? But they are doing as well as they can, and there is no
way of putting in any one else now, and there you are."
"Meanwhile," said Mr. Britling, "our boys--get killed."
"They'd get killed all the more if you had--let us say--Carson and
Lloyd George and Northcliffe and Lady Frensham, with, I suppose, Austin
Harrison and Horatio Bottomley thrown in--as a Strong Silent
Government.... I'd rather have Northcliffe as dictator than that.... We
can't suddenly go back on the past and alter our type. We didn't listen
to Matthew Arnold. We've never thoroughly turned out and cleaned up our
higher schools. We've resisted instruction. We've preferred to maintain
our national luxuries of a bench of bishops and party politics. And
compulsory Greek and the university sneer. And Lady Frensham. And all
that sort of thing. And here we are!... Well, damn it, we're in for it
now; we've got to plough through with it--with what we have--as what we
are."
The young staff officer nodded. He thought that was "about it."
"You've got no sons," said Mr. Britling.
"I'm not even married," said Raeburn, as though he thanked God.
The little well-informed lady remarked abruptly that she had two sons;
one was just home wounded from Suvla Bay. What her son told her made her
feel very grave. She said that the public was still quite in the dark
about the battle of Anafarta. It had been a hideous muddle, and we had
been badly beaten. The staff work had been awful. Nothing joined up,
nothing was on the spot and in time. The water supply, for example, had
gone wrong; the men had been mad with thirst. One regiment which she
named had not been supported by another; when at last the first came
back the two battalions fought in the trenches regardless of the enemy.
There had been no leading, no correlation, no plan. Some of the guns,
she declared, had been left behind in Egypt. Some of the train was
untraceable to this day. It was mislaid somewhere in the Levant. At the
beginning Sir Ian Hamilton had not even been present. He had failed to
get there in time. It had been the reckless throwing away of an army.
And so hopeful an army! Her son declared it meant the complete failure
of the Dardanelles project....
"And when one hears how near we came to victory!" she cried, and left it
at that.
"Three times this year," said Raeburn, "we have missed victories because
of the badness of our staff work. It's no good picking out scapegoats.
It's a question of national habit. It's because the sort of man we turn
out from our public schools has never learnt how to catch trains, get to
an office on the minute, pack a knapsack properly, or do anything
smartly and quickly--anything whatever that he can possibly get done for
him. You can't expect men who are habitually easy-going to keep bucked
up to a high pitch of efficiency for any length of time. All their
training is against it. All their tradition. They hate being prigs. An
Englishman will be any sort of stupid failure rather than appear a prig.
That's why we've lost three good fights that we ought to have won--and
thousands and thousands of men--and material and time, precious beyond
reckoning. We've lost a year. We've dashed the spirit of our people."
"My boy in Flanders," said Mr. Britling, "says about the same thing. He
says our officers have never learnt to count beyond ten, and that they
are scared at the sight of a map...."
"And the war goes on," said the little woman.
"How long, oh Lord! how long?" cried Mr. Britling.
"I'd give them another year," said the staff officer. "Just going as we
are going. Then something _must_ give way. There will be no money
anywhere. There'll be no more men.... I suppose they'll feel that
shortage first anyhow. Russia alone has over twenty millions."
"That's about the size of it," said Raeburn....
"Do you think, sir, there'll be civil war?" asked the young staff
officer abruptly after a pause.
There was a little interval before any one answered this surprising
question.
"After the peace, I mean," said the young officer.
"There'll be just the devil to pay," said Raeburn.
"One thing after another in the country is being pulled up by its
roots," reflected Mr. Britling.
"We've never produced a plan for the war, and it isn't likely we shall
have one for the peace," said Raeburn, and added: "and Lady Frensham's
little lot will be doing their level best to sit on the safety-valve....
They'll rake up Ireland and Ulster from the very start. But I doubt if
Ulster will save 'em."
"We shall squabble. What else do we ever do?"
No one seemed able to see more than that. A silence fell on the little
party.
"Well, thank heaven for these dahlias," said Raeburn, affecting the
philosopher.
The young staff officer regarded the dahlias without enthusiasm....