marriage, I felt that Barbara was thinking less of the familiar faces,
which she would not see again, than of those which would inevitably
reappear in London when each man returned to his own place. Among our
distressingly free-spoken friends it was commonly reported that she was
half engaged at the beginning of the war to young Jack Waring; and,
though she never pretended to be in love with him, the
engagement—according to the Crawleighs—kept her from marrying Eric
Lane, with whom she was in love beyond all shadow of doubt. Jack was in
England looking for work. Eric had been lecturing and travelling in
America and Japan; he would be coming to England as soon as he had a new
play to produce. I did not want Barbara to be reminded, I did not want
to be reminded myself, that she only married me when Eric vanished from
her world.
“We want to begin our married life in some place with no associations,”
she went on, half to herself. Then, as though to protest that she was
not thinking of Eric, she looked up with a smile and took my arm.
“George and I have had no honeymoon yet; and my beloved parents didn’t
make things very comfortable for us when I married without a
dispensation. Perhaps they’ll be more reconciled if we give them a
holiday. . . . How soon will peace be signed?”
“That depends how soon the conference opens,” Lucien answered with a
shrug. “You are to have your general election first; and we . . . you
will not find we are in any hurry. There are nearly five lost years to
make up. France too is tired.”
The lost years were being recovered when we reached Paris in the last
days of November. We had seen the war ending in London; here we watched
it being buried. Every one who could get a passport and a ticket seemed,
like us, to be heading for the Riviera and spending a week in Paris on
the way. Every one, too, seemed to share our vagueness and indifference
to what lay ahead of this holiday. For the first time in four years, our
time was our own; for the first time in four years Paris could dine and
dance without fear of being bombed or shelled. Barbara bought frocks;
Lucien arranged parties; and I added the hall of the Ritz to the brief
list—headed by Port Said and Charing Cross—of the places where a man,
without waiting unduly long, can be sure of meeting every one who has
ever crossed his path before.
I doubt if in any other single week I have eaten so many meals or spent
so much money. From time to time Lucien grumbled half-heartedly at all
this waste of time: he had been recalled from the embassy in London to
assist in drafting the agenda for the conference, and I felt he owed a
grumble to his conscience. For myself, I blessed every hour of delay
that enabled us to shed the memories of the last five years and to
forget the acerbities of the last five months. Lucien had long been an
old enough friend to drop his diplomatic reserve in talking to me; and
there were times, before and after the expeditions to Gallipoli and
Salonica, before and after the United States entered the war, before and
after the Italian reverse and the Russian collapse, when the alliance
would have been severed if we had been responsible for it. Now, as I
told him, this brief spell of dissipation had saved us from becoming
stale. With Victor Boscarelli, from the Italian embassy, and Clifford
van Oss, from the American Red Cross, we formed a private international
alliance, each entertaining the others by turn and all swearing
friendships that death itself would be powerless to sunder. A critic
might have been puzzled to say whether Clifford’s Italian was worse than
my French; but our radiant good-will transcended the halting
interpretation of words, and I felt a warmer liking for my neighbours
than I had ever, in my pitiable insularity, been able to achieve before
with men of another race.
“At last,” I pointed out to Lucien, “we can talk amicably without
discussing whether one country did all the work and another made all the
money. There’s a real understanding. France, England, America: all are
at the very top of their prestige. If we can pull together, we can make
what we like of the peace.”
“I still think we ought to have gone on to Berlin,” he persisted.
“However, if you back us up and if we can get what we want without it, I
shan’t complain.”
“Remember you’re all coming to stay with us at Cannes,” I said.
And, on that word, we set out for a house where the rumour of war and
world-settlement seemed never to have penetrated.
Looking back on the three months which we spent with my mother, I am in
one way reminded of the two years which Jack Waring passed as a prisoner
in Germany. So complete was our isolation that, when we emerged from it,
we found a world of peace hardly less different from the one we had left
than Jack’s war-world of tanks and gothas and tear-shells was different
from the one which was blotted out in the early days of 1915. In the
first weeks we saw no visitors; we read no papers; and, when we were
rested enough to think and talk, we turned to the days when the world
had last been at peace and speculated why the war had come and how other
wars were to be prevented.
The last of my reasons for hurrying abroad was that I could take up no
work in England until I had discharged the task which Violet Loring
imposed on me within a few hours of her husband’s death. As the world in
which we had been brought up was swallowed by the war, she asked me to
set down my memories of it for the later instruction of her boy. I had
carried my account to 1915; but, after that, the mass of material was
too great for me to attack in odd hours after my work at the Admiralty.
A steamer-trunk, filled with memoirs and monographs, kept me company to
Cannes; and, in the few weeks that remained before my cousin came to
demand her bond, I philosophized about the deluge and described the
world before it and speculated about the world that would appear when
the waters had subsided.
Small wonder if at this time, with my mother placidly dipping into
Victorian biographies and with Barbara dreaming over her share in the
history I was writing, we knew little and cared less about what was
happening in Paris and London, Washington and Rome! While Lucien de
Grammont drew the lines of a recreated Europe, I was living again
through the years when Sandy Loring’s father and I were fellow-fags and
fellow-monitors at Melton, when we were freshmen at Oxford, when we
ventured together into Edwardian London. The dead so came to life, as I
wrote about them, that sometimes I would lay down my pen and forget the
war for the days before David O’Rane was blinded and Tom Dainton killed,
the days when every one was quoting Barbara’s latest epigram and
discussing Val Arden’s last novel, the days when Sonia Dainton broke a
heart a week and an engagement a season. Musing of days and nights
softened by time, I felt that never had there been such years in the
life of any country, never had there been women and men like those of
our generation.
“In two or three years I expect everything will be very much as it was
before the war,” predicted Barbara.
“The people will be different,” I answered; “and they’ll make everything
else different. Sandy’s world will never be like Jim’s.”
And then I fell to wondering what Sandy’s father would have made of the
new dispensation which was taking shape before our eyes. He and I, who
agreed on little else, agreed that we were saying good-bye, that last
night at Loring Castle, to a phase in history. The old ruling families
had lost their power since the first marquess commanded his fifteen
seats in the unreformed House of Commons and “Trimmer” Crawleigh dodged
in and out of George the Fourth’s ministries, leaving a broken
government in his train; under a new distribution of wealth they might
lose their prestige. The _arrivistes_ of the nineties, who had floated
on waves of beer and diamonds into the arid heights of a depressed
territorial aristocracy, would find their places taken, in the
nineteen-twenties, by social adventurers of ambition equal to Lady
Dainton’s and of wealth greater than Sir Adolph Erckmann’s. A new class
of politician, officer, publicist and financier must inevitably be
brought to birth by the new demands of public life: the sons of the new
men would quickly preponderate in the old schools and universities,
their daughters would soon come to dominate a new society. That which I
had denounced, in my hotter radical days, as “privilege” would count for
less in Sandy Loring’s life.
It was not within my terms of reference to say if the one order was in
any way better or worse than the other: it was different. My haphazard
recollections, covering a period of about fifteen years, were chosen
solely for the light which they threw on the generation that was of
military age when war broke out.
“_As_,” I wrote in conclusion, “_the French Revolution challenged and
overthrew the territorial aristocracies and feudal kingships of the
middle ages, so the Great War challenged the systems which the French
Revolution had evolved in their place._”
There—for the moment—I stopped, for no one could say what systems the
Great War would evolve in place of those which it overturned. Later, in
brooding over these reminiscences of a vanished generation, I began to
read a moral into them; and, on the morning of Violet’s arrival, when
Barbara bent over my chair to ask if I had finished my work, I had to
answer that, so far as I could see, it was only beginning.
“If I’m right,” I explained, “the old governing classes are being
superseded, under our eyes . . .”
“The new lot will pick up the old ideas,” she interrupted.
“That’s just what I’m afraid of,” I said.
3
My discovery—the one incontrovertible moral that I could read into the
war—had been made by others before me; and I doubt not that some at
least of them reached it by the same road after toiling conscientiously
through the official explanations and apologies which every foreign
office in Europe issued in proof of its own innocence. The polychromatic
outpouring of white papers, green books and red books was succeeded by a
vaster flood of unofficial polemics, in which defensive chancellors and
prime ministers, field-marshals and admirals demonstrated that some one
else was responsible for the war and that peace would have been
preserved or victory secured if only their advice had been followed. To
the strategical arguments I paid little attention: nothing will make me
understand strategy by land or sea, and it was hardly relevant to my
main enquiry. The diplomatic defence, on the other hand, I studied with
care, deciding—as, I imagine, most people outside Germany have decided
independently—that, while Berlin was guilty of starting the
conflagration, every other power lent a hand in piling up an inflammable
heap of suspicions, jealousies and misunderstandings. It was this
conclusion that pointed me my moral.
“And what do you make of it all?,” my mother asked as I laid aside the
last of these bitter, aggressive manifestoes.
“Well,” I said, “whoever made the war, it’s clear that no single
country, no single form of government was able to keep the peace.”
With that conclusion no one could disagree.
“In contrasting Jim’s world with the present,” I told Violet Loring,
when my essay was ready for her criticism, “the outstanding lesson is
that the government of man by his fellow-man has broken down in every
form that’s been tried. You had constitutional monarchy in England,
absolutism in Russia, a republic in France and America, a feudal
kingship in Austria-Hungary. None of them could perform the elementary
duty of protecting the life and liberty of their citizens. Those who
took no part lived on the sufferance of the belligerents. From China to
Honduras . . .”
“When once war breaks out . . .” Violet began helplessly.
“The governments that allowed war to break out failed in their first
duty,” I maintained. “By negligence or malignity or impotence they’re
responsible for the death or mutilation of some ten million human
beings. It’s not enough to put the blame on Germany or the kaiser or
Bernhardi. If a homicidal maniac runs amok in England, we blame the
police for not stopping him.”
While my cousin turned the pages of my manuscript, I flung a similar
cold douche of first principles over the head of Philip Hornbeck, who
had come to us for a week between dismantling his old department and
erecting the new.
“If you’d had a bigger police-force,” he suggested, “your homicidal
maniac would have had no run for his money. If we’d smashed the German
navy while it was building . . .”
“And turned homicidal maniac on our own account?,” I interrupted.
“If you like to put it that way. It’s not much use arguing with me,
George, because I’m one of the old impenitents who believe that there
will always be wars and what not. _Admitting_ that it’s the duty of all
governments to keep the peace, _admitting_ that every government has
failed in its duty, what are you going to do then?”
“Try a different kind of government,” I answered.
“A soviet?,” he asked. “If the aristocracy and _bourgeoisie_ have
failed, that’s all you have left.”
“I’d sooner have a soviet that thought it could keep peace than an
aristocracy that admits it can’t.”
“You should go and live in Russia,” Hornbeck recommended.
The battle-piece which I was composing for Violet seemed naturally to
take the form of a triptych; and the first two panels shewed that the
governing classes in all countries had failed to keep the peace and had
bungled the business of making war. When the third panel came to be
painted, I wondered whether they would be more successful in making
peace.
“Is this going to be a _lasting_ settlement?,” I asked Lucien de
Grammont, when he came to refresh himself after his work on the agenda.
“We’re doing our best,” he answered. “As I told you at the time, the war
stopped too soon. If we’re to secure that France is never again to be
menaced, we must to some extent carry the war on into the peace.”
“Do you still think there will be another war in fifty years’ time?”
“I won’t pin myself to a date, but you’ll never abolish war.”
“Then,” I said, “it’s time you made way for somebody who will. The old
systems, the old diplomacy, the old men who ran the old system, are a
self-confessed failure.”
Lucien twirled his neat moustache and addressed to his neatly-shod feet
a muttered confidence about doctrinaire idealists. Gerald Deganway, for
the honour of the old diplomacy as practised in the British Foreign
Office, screwed his eye-glass into place and exclaimed:
“I say, you know, George, you’re an absolute bolshevist!”
And Hornbeck administered the most damaging criticism by accepting my
premises and proceeding to a diametrically opposite conclusion.
“You’re proving too much, old son,” he argued. “I agree that governments
should prevent wars, I agree that every government in the world failed
to prevent this last one. That only shews you’re asking governments to
do an impossibility. Take every nation in turn, from Belgium to the
States, and tell me how the government of any one could have kept out of
the war. When once the racket begins . . .”
“We must go back a stage, then,” I said, “to the time before it begins.
We must have a ‘will to peace’.”
“Didn’t we have that in England?,” asked Violet. “Honour apart, we
couldn’t afford to stay out in 1914.”
“You must go beyond England,” I told her. “We want an international
‘will to peace’; a solemn league and covenant, not between foreign
secretaries, but between the units of the world’s cannon-fodder. War
will end of its own accord when you can’t fill your armies.”
“And how will you set your solemn league and covenant to work?,”
Hornbeck enquired sceptically.
I could make no reply until I had found more time to think; time, too,
perhaps, to talk with my uncle Bertrand of the old Disarmament League
and of the propaganda that issued from _Peace_ office before the war.
When I told Barbara that, so far as I could see, my work was only
beginning, I felt that in all likelihood the task before our generation
would be to create a ‘will to peace’ out of the present disgust with
war. If history was human nature repeating itself, there had been the
same disgust at the end of every great war; but the memory of that
disgust faded quickly. It was no match for the urgent plea that honour
or security was at stake; no match for the cynical resignation of those
who said that there always had been wars and always would be.
“Of course you’re right to try,” was the utmost encouragement that I
could win even from Violet, “but these Hague Conventions and things
haven’t done much good, have they?”
“No one has yet appealed to the rank-and-file,” I answered. “No one has
appealed while the full horror of war was vividly remembered. No one has
shewn the dumb millions of the world how much alike they all are, how
they swim together and sink together. In all I’ve been reading these
last few weeks I’ve been amazed by the sameness of conditions in all
countries. If we can work on that till the sameness becomes a oneness
. . .”
In aiming at perspective for my second panel, I tried to set my own
impressions and experiences of the war beside those of the cosmopolitan
population that floated through Cannes in these first weeks of the
armistice. When we had passed the stage of fancying that our individual
histories were unique, I was more struck by the similarities of what I
heard than by the differences. Necessarily, the islander and the
continental must always disagree on foreign politics; and in Cannes I
met for the first time the chronic terror that is begotten of land
frontiers. “It’s all very well for you,” I was told by Italians, Greeks,
Poles and Dutch: “You’re an island.” With allowance for this, I felt
that the war had left on every country an almost identical mark. The
Austrians and Germans whom I met in Monte Carlo, old journalistic
allies—for the most part—, were as bitterly convinced that the war had
been forced upon them as we in England were convinced that they had
forced it on us; but, when we had agreed to differ, their description of
the last four years in their own countries might have been applied,
almost without a word changed, to England. There were, I discovered,
idlers, _embusqués_ and adventurers of both sexes in all classes
everywhere; and it was amusing, for one who thought of a German
alternately as a sheep and a genius, to hear the tribute of Austria and
Germany to our more than Teutonic docility and enterprise. France had
her rapacious profiteers, Prussia her bloated munition-makers. The
drinking that was said to obtain in English high-places could be matched
by the drugging that was reported to be corrupting Austrian society. I
was assured, without calling for proof, that there was little to choose
for courage and endurance between the best troops of any two countries;
and, when the public morale broke, any one class in its own way cut as
sorry a figure as any other. If I despaired of the populace that
believed the grotesque stories in the Pemberton-Billing case, I
despaired more profoundly of Lady Dainton when she told me that Prince
Louis of Battenberg had been executed in the Tower for treason.
“The moral is,” I told Violet Loring, “that, under an abnormal strain,
the sublime and the dastardly go hand-in-hand. Five years ago, we didn’t
know the meaning of danger or suffering. To face it without breaking, we
called up the primitive beast that lies inside all of us: he was a very
brave beast, but he was also very treacherous, savage, credulous.” . . .
As Violet turned my pages, I looked through a palisade of palm-trees to
the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean and filled my lungs with warm,
scented air. Cannes, after London, was like the open street after an
opium-den; and, in thinking of the strange shapes seen in the long, mad
half-light of the war, I almost fancied that I had been dreaming. The
political intrigue and chicanery that began with the high-explosive
controversy in 1915 and continued until the 1918 election was incredible
unless one likened it to a panic on board a burning ship. If Violet had
told me four years earlier that one common acquaintance would be
imprisoned for trafficking in cocaine and that another would commit
suicide to avoid prosecution for forgery, I should not have believed
her. I could now hardly believe my own certain knowledge until I
remembered that every war has claimed its civil casualties.
“How long does it take to chain up your primitive beast?,” Violet asked.
“I mean, . . . these are the people that the war has left us to live
with and work with.” . . .
To that I had no answer ready. It was easier to say that Sonia O’Rane
would not have run away from her husband before the war than to be
certain she would not run away again. And it seemed idle to talk of
international conferences and a reconstructed world, of a new spirit and
a ‘will to peace’ while the passions of the war were still unfettered.
4
My triptych, displaying—in its centre—the war and—on either side—the
peace that preceded and should follow the war, spared no space for
dividing or linking frame-work: though I was working in the
transition-period between full war and full peace, I made little attempt
to describe the condition in which we all found ourselves at the moment
when a truce was called.
To some extent—in these blissful, lazy days, when we had nothing to do
but sleep and eat and smoke and gossip—we filled the blank by
discussing the present and future states of our friends. My battle-piece
was subjected to a more general scrutiny than I had intended; and for
many rather embarrassing days I was challenged to defend myself against
critics who opened wide fields of speculation with the words:
“_If_, as you think, the old political game is really played out . . .”;
or
“_If_ you’re right about the redistribution of wealth . . .”
In the morning, as we idled in long chairs on a glowing marble verandah;
at night, as we sat in a half-circle while Barbara played to us; in
leisurely afternoon walks and occasional peripatetic sessions from one
bedroom to another, we discussed war-literature and war-religion, the
new position of women, the fate of the demobilized soldier and the
day-to-day life which we expected to lead when peace was proclaimed.
Most of our predictions were unbelievably wild, in their assumption
either that everything or that nothing would be the same as before the
war; and our discussions were so formless that they could never be
summarized or recorded. When we abandoned conjecture for the concrete
plans that each was making for himself, I felt that—in the words used
at a dinner to Eric Lane in New York—‘the convulsion’s as great, when
you turn a soldier into a civilian, as when you turn a civilian into a
soldier.’ Sam Dainton, after ten years’ service, was leaving the army,
“to prey on society”, as he put it. Deganway was saying good-bye to the
Foreign Office; Barbara’s cousin, John Carstairs, to the Diplomatic.
Professionally, the climax in both their lives had been reached and
passed; the first wanted to make money, the second to look after his
estates.
At this time I began to detect the rise of that adventurer-class at
which history points a punctual finger after every great war but which I
somehow did not expect to see in my own time. When I was called back to
London, I found new men in Fleet Street and the City, new names at
Covent Garden and in the candidates’ books of the clubs; at Cannes I
discerned, in the good-looking person of Violet’s brother Laurence, an
adventurer in the making. As I became acquainted with his friends in the
course of the next three years, I saw the natural, perhaps the
necessary, evolution of a type which has not yet found its place in the
social void. My cousin had been snatched from Melton on his eighteenth
birthday and thrust into the Irish Guards, where his precocious
development as a man-of-the-world had been won at the expense of his
small aptitude for learning. The Hunter-Oakleighs could not afford to
maintain him in idleness; and Laurence, recognizing this, quartered
himself on Loring House and allowed Violet or any other of his relations
to maintain him. In theory, he was reading for the bar; and a text-book
on Roman law was always at hand to rebut the charge of idleness. In
practice, he blandly awaited pecuniary compensation from a society which
had taught him expensive tastes at a time when he might have been
teaching himself the means of gratifying them. The army had paralysed
his initiative; he believed—or affected to believe—that, at
one-and-twenty, his life-work was done; and already he had learned that
personal charm and rich friends were a fair substitute for industry.