the spring of 1918 that almost carried the Germans to Paris, the
Central Powers collapsed. They had come to an end of their spirit and
resources.
LXVI
THE REVOLUTION AND FAMINE IN RUSSIA
But a good year and more before the collapse of the Central Powers the
half oriental monarchy of Russia, which had professed to be the
continuation of the Byzantine Empire, had collapsed. The Tsardom had
been showing signs of profound rottenness for some years before the
war; the court was under the sway of a fantastic religious impostor,
Rasputin, and the public administration, civil and military, was in a
state of extreme inefficiency and corruption. At the outset of the war
there was a great flare of patriotic enthusiasm in Russia. A vast
conscript army was called up, for which there was neither adequate
military equipment nor a proper supply of competent officers, and this
great host, ill supplied and badly handled, was hurled against the
German and Austrian frontiers.
There can be no doubt that the early appearance of Russian armies in
East Prussia in September, 1914, diverted the energies and attention of
the Germans from their first victorious drive upon Paris. The
sufferings and deaths of scores of thousands of ill-led Russian
peasants saved France from complete overthrow in that momentous opening
campaign, and made all western Europe the debtors of that great and
tragic people. But the strain of the war upon this sprawling,
ill-organized empire was too heavy for its strength. The Russian
common soldiers were sent into battle without guns to support them,
without even rifle ammunition; they were wasted by their officers and
generals in a delirium of militarist enthusiasm. For a time they
seemed to be suffering mutely as the beasts suffer; but there is a
limit to the endurance even of the most ignorant. A profound disgust
for Tsardom was creeping through these armies of betrayed and wasted
men. From the close of 1915 onward Russia was a source of deepening
anxiety to her Western Allies. Throughout 1916 she remained largely on
the defensive, and there were rumours of a separate peace with Germany.
On December 29th, 1916, the monk Rasputin was murdered at a dinner
party in Petrograd, and a belated attempt was made to put the Tsardom
in order. By March things were moving rapidly; food riots in Petrograd
developed into a revolutionary insurrection; there was an attempted
suppression of the Duma, the representative body, there were attempted
arrests of liberal leaders, the formation of a provisional government
under Prince Lvoff, and an abdication (March 15th) by the Tsar. For a
time it seemed that a moderate and controlled revolution might be
possible—perhaps under a new Tsar. Then it became evident that the
destruction of popular confidence in Russia had gone too far for any
such adjustments. The Russian people were sick to death of the old
order of things in Europe, of Tsars and wars and of Great Powers; it
wanted relief, and that speedily, from unendurable miseries. The
Allies had no understanding of Russian realities; their diplomatists
were ignorant of Russian, genteel persons with their attention directed
to the Russian Court rather than to Russia, they blundered steadily
with the new situation. There was little goodwill among these
diplomatists for republicanism, and a manifest disposition to embarrass
the new government as much as possible. At the head of the Russian
republican government was an eloquent and picturesque leader, Kerensky,
who found himself assailed by the forces of a profounder revolutionary
movement, the “social revolution,” at home and cold-shouldered by the
Allied governments abroad. His Allies would neither let him give the
Russian peasants the land for which they craved nor peace beyond their
frontiers. The French and the British press pestered their exhausted
ally for a fresh offensive, but when presently the Germans made a
strong attack by sea and land upon Riga, the British Admiralty quailed
before the prospect of a Baltic expedition in relief. The new Russian
Republic had to fight unsupported. In spite of their naval
predominance and the bitter protests of the great English admiral, Lord
Fisher (1841-1920), it is to be noted that the British and their
Allies, except for some submarine attacks, left the Germans the
complete mastery of the Baltic throughout the war.
The Russian masses, however, were resolute to end the war. At any
cost. There had come into existence in Petrograd a body representing
the workers and common soldiers, the Soviet, and this body clamoured
for an international conference of socialists at Stockholm. Food riots
were occurring in Berlin at this time, war weariness in Austria and
Germany was profound, and there can be little doubt, in the light of
subsequent events, that such a conference would have precipitated a
reasonable peace on democratic lines in 1917 and a German revolution.
Kerensky implored his Western allies to allow this conference to take
place, but, fearful of a worldwide outbreak of socialism and
republicanism, they refused, in spite of the favourable response of a
small majority of the British Labour Party. Without either moral or
physical help from the Allies, the unhappy “moderate” Russian Republic
still fought on and made a last desperate offensive effort in July. It
failed after some preliminary successes, and there came another great
slaughtering of Russians.
The limit of Russian endurance was reached. Mutinies broke out in the
Russian armies, and particularly upon the northern front, and on
November 7th, 1917, Kerensky’s government was overthrown and power was
seized by the Soviets, dominated by the Bolshevik socialists under
Lenin, and pledged to make peace regardless of the Western powers. On
March 2nd, 1918, a separate peace between Russia and Germany was signed
at Brest-Litovsk.
A VIEW IN PETERSBURG UNDER BOLSHEVIK RULE
A VIEW IN PETERSBURG UNDER BOLSHEVIK RULE
A wooden house has been demolished for firewood
_By courtesy of Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton_
It speedily became evident that these Bolshevik socialists were men of
a very different quality from the rhetorical constitutionalists and
revolutionaries of the Kerensky phase. They were fanatical Marxist
communists. They believed that their accession to power in Russia was
only the opening of a world-wide social revolution, and they set about
changing the social and economic order with the thoroughness of perfect
faith and absolute inexperience. The western European and the American
governments were themselves much too ill-informed and incapable to
guide or help this extraordinary experiment, and the press set itself
to discredit and the ruling classes to wreck these usurpers upon any
terms and at any cost to themselves or to Russia. A propaganda of
abominable and disgusting inventions went on unchecked in the press of
the world; the Bolshevik leaders were represented as incredible
monsters glutted with blood and plunder and living lives of sensuality
before which the realities of the Tsarist court during the Rasputin
regime paled to a white purity. Expeditions were launched at the
exhausted country, insurgents and raiders were encouraged, armed and
subsidized, and no method of attack was too mean or too monstrous for
the frightened enemies of the Bolshevik regime. In 1919, the Russian
Bolsheviks, ruling a country already exhausted and disorganized by five
years of intensive warfare, were fighting a British Expedition at
Archangel, Japanese invaders in Eastern Siberia, Roumanians with French
and Greek contingents in the south, the Russian Admiral Koltchak in
Siberia and General Deniken, supported by the French fleet, in the
Crimea. In July of that year an Esthonian army, under General
Yudenitch, almost got to Petersburg. In 1920 the Poles, incited by the
French, made a new attack on Russia; and a new reactionary raider,
General Wrangel, took over the task of General Deniken in invading and
devastating his own country. In March, 1921, the sailors at Cronstadt
revolted. The Russian Government under its president, Lenin, survived
all these various attacks. It showed an amazing tenacity, and the
common people of Russia sustained it unswervingly under conditions of
extreme hardship. By the end of 1921 both Britain and Italy had made a
sort of recognition of the communist rule.
But if the Bolshevik Government was successful in its struggle against
foreign intervention and internal revolt, it was far less happy in its
attempts to set up a new social order based upon communist ideas in
Russia. The Russian peasant is a small land-hungry proprietor, as far
from communism in his thoughts and methods as a whale is from flying;
the revolution gave him the land of the great landowners but could not
make him grow food for anything but negotiable money, and the
revolution, among other things, had practically destroyed the value of
money. Agricultural production, already greatly disordered by the
collapse of the railways through war-strain, shrank to a mere
cultivation of food by the peasants for their own consumption. The
towns starved. Hasty and ill-planned attempts to make over industrial
production in accordance with communist ideas were equally
unsuccessful. By 1920 Russia presented the unprecedented spectacle of
a modern civilization in complete collapse. Railways were rusting and
passing out of use, towns were falling into ruin, everywhere there was
an immense mortality. Yet the country still fought with its enemies at
its gates. In 1921 came a drought and a great famine among the peasant
cultivators in the war-devastated south-east provinces. Millions of
people starved.
But the question of the distresses and the possible recuperation of
Russia brings us too close to current controversies to be discussed
here.
LXVII
THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE WORLD
The scheme and scale upon which this History is planned do not permit
us to enter into the complicated and acrimonious disputes that centre
about the treaties, and particularly of the treaty of Versailles, which
concluded the Great War. We are beginning to realize that that
conflict, terrible and enormous as it was, ended nothing, began nothing
and settled nothing. It killed millions of people; it wasted and
impoverished the world. It smashed Russia altogether. It was at best an
acute and frightful reminder that we were living foolishly and
confusedly without much plan or foresight in a dangerous and
unsympathetic universe. The crudely organized egotisms and passions of
national and imperial greed that carried mankind into that tragedy,
emerged from it sufficiently unimpaired to make some other similar
disaster highly probable so soon as the world has a little recovered
from its war exhaustion and fatigue. Wars and revolutions make nothing;
their utmost service to mankind is that, in a very rough and painful
way, they destroy superannuated and obstructive things. The great war
lifted the threat of German imperialism from Europe, and shattered the
imperialism of Russia. It cleared away a number of monarchies. But a
multitude of flags still waves in Europe, the frontiers still
exasperate, great armies accumulate fresh stores of equipment.
The Peace Conference at Versailles was a gathering very ill adapted to
do more than carry out the conflicts and defeats of the war to their
logical conclusions. The Germans, Austrians, Turks and Bulgarians were
permitted no share in its deliberations; they were only to accept the
decisions it dictated to them. From the point of view of human welfare
the choice of the place of meeting was particularly unfortunate. It
was at Versailles in 1871 that, with every circumstance of triumphant
vulgarity, the new German Empire had been proclaimed. The suggestion
of a melodramatic reversal of that scene, in the same Hall of Mirrors,
was overpowering.
Whatever generosities had appeared in the opening phases of the Great
War had long been exhausted. The populations of the victorious
countries were acutely aware of their own losses and sufferings, and
entirely regardless of the fact that the defeated had paid in the like
manner. The war had arisen as a natural and inevitable consequence of
the competitive nationalisms of Europe and the absence of any Federal
adjustment of these competitive forces; war is the necessary logical
consummation of independent sovereign nationalities living in too small
an area with too powerful an armament; and if the great war had not
come in the form it did it would have come in some similar form—just as
it will certainly return upon a still more disastrous scale in twenty
or thirty years’ time if no political unification anticipates and
prevents it. States organized for war will make wars as surely as hens
will lay eggs, but the feeling of these distressed and war-worn
countries disregarded this fact, and the whole of the defeated peoples
were treated as morally and materially responsible for all the damage,
as they would no doubt have treated the victor peoples had the issue of
war been different. The French and English thought the Germans were to
blame, the Germans thought the Russians, French and English were to
blame, and only an intelligent minority thought that there was anything
to blame in the fragmentary political constitution of Europe. The
treaty of Versailles was intended to be exemplary and vindictive; it
provided tremendous penalties for the vanquished; it sought to provide
compensations for the wounded and suffering victors by imposing
enormous debts upon nations already bankrupt, and its attempts to
reconstitute international relations by the establishment of a League
of Nations against war were manifestly insincere and inadequate.
PASSENGER AEROPLANE FLYING OVER NORTHOLT
PASSENGER AEROPLANE FLYING OVER NORTHOLT
_(Photo taken by another ’plane by the Central Aerophoto Co.)_
So far as Europe was concerned it is doubtful if there would have been
any attempt whatever to organize international relations for a
permanent peace. The proposal of the League of Nations was brought
into practical politics by the President of the United States of
America, President Wilson. Its chief support was in America. So far
the United States, this new modern state, had developed no distinctive
ideas of international relationship beyond the Monroe Doctrine, which
protected the new world from European interference. Now suddenly it was
called upon for its mental contribution to the vast problem of the
time. It had none. The natural disposition of the American people was
towards a permanent world peace. With this however was linked a strong
traditional distrust of old-world polities and a habit of isolation
from old-world entanglements. The Americans had hardly begun to think
out an American solution of world problems when the submarine campaign
of the Germans dragged them into the war on the side of the anti-German
allies. President Wilson’s scheme of a League of Nations was an attempt
at short notice to create a distinctively American world project. It
was a sketchy, inadequate and dangerous scheme. In Europe however it
was taken as a matured American point of view. The generality of
mankind in 1918-19 was intensely weary of war and anxious at almost any
sacrifice to erect barriers against its recurrence, but there was not a
single government in the old world willing to waive one iota of its
sovereign independence to attain any such end. The public utterances
of President Wilson leading up to the project of a World League of
Nations seemed for a time to appeal right over the heads of the
governments to the peoples of the world; they were taken as expressing
the ripe intentions of America, and the response was enormous.
Unhappily President Wilson had to deal with governments and not with
peoples; he was a man capable of tremendous flashes of vision and yet
when put to the test egotistical and limited, and the great wave of
enthusiasm he evoked passed and was wasted.
Says Dr. Dillon in his book, _The Peace Conference:_ “Europe, when the
President touched its shores, was as clay ready for the creative
potter. Never before were the nations so eager to follow a Moses who
would take them to the long-promised land where wars are prohibited and
blockades unknown. And to their thinking he was just that great
leader. In France men bowed down before him with awe and affection.
Labour leaders in Paris told me that they shed tears of joy in his
presence, and that their comrades would go through fire and water to
help him to realize his noble schemes. To the working classes in Italy
his name was a heavenly clarion at the sound of which the earth would
be renewed. The Germans regarded him and his doctrine as their
sheet-anchor of safety. The fearless Herr Muehlon said: ‘If President
Wilson were to address the Germans and pronounce a severe sentence upon
them, they would accept it with resignation and without a murmur and
set to work at once.’ In German-Austria his fame was that of a
saviour, and the mere mention of his name brought balm to the suffering
and surcease of sorrow to the afflicted ... .”
Such were the overpowering expectations that President Wilson raised.
How completely he disappointed them and how weak and futile was the
League of Nations he made is too long and too distressful a story to
tell here. He exaggerated in his person our common human tragedy, he
was so very great in his dreams and so incapable in his performance.
America dissented from the acts of its President and would not join the
League Europe accepted from him. There was a slow realization on the
part of the American people that it had been rushed into something for
which it was totally unprepared. There was a corresponding realization
on the part of Europe that America had nothing ready to give to the old
world in its extremity. Born prematurely and crippled at its birth,
that League has become indeed, with its elaborate and unpractical
constitution and its manifest limitations of power, a serious obstacle
in the way of any effective reorganization of international
relationships. The problem would be a clearer one if the League did not
yet exist. Yet that world-wide blaze of enthusiasm that first welcomed
the project, that readiness of men everywhere round and about the
earth, of men, that is, as distinguished from governments, for a world
control of war, is a thing to be recorded with emphasis in any history.
Behind the short-sighted governments that divide and mismanage human
affairs, a real force for world unity and world order exists and grows.
From 1918 onward the world entered upon an age of conferences. Of
these the Conference at Washington called by President Harding (1921)
has been the most successful and suggestive. Notable, too, is the
Genoa Conference (1922) for the appearance of German and Russian
delegates at its deliberations. We will not discuss this long
procession of conferences and tentatives in any detail. It becomes
more and more clearly manifest that a huge work of reconstruction has
to be done by mankind if a crescendo of such convulsions and world
massacres as that of the great war is to be averted. No such hasty
improvisation as the League of Nations, no patched-up system of
Conferences between this group of states and that, which change nothing
with an air of settling everything, will meet the complex political
needs of the new age that lies before us. A systematic development and
a systematic application of the sciences of human relationship, of
personal and group psychology, of financial and economic science and of
education, sciences still only in their infancy, is required. Narrow
and obsolete, dead and dying moral and political ideas have to be
replaced by a clearer and a simpler conception of the common origins
and destinies of our kind.
A PEACEFUL GARDEN IN ENGLAND
A PEACEFUL GARDEN IN ENGLAND
Given wisdom, all mankind might live in such gardens
But if the dangers, confusions and disasters that crowd upon man in
these days are enormous beyond any experience of the past, it is
because science has brought him such powers as he never had before. And
the scientific method of fearless thought, exhaustively lucid
statement, and exhaustively criticized planning, which has given him
these as yet uncontrollable powers, gives him also the hope of
controlling these powers. Man is still only adolescent. His troubles
are not the troubles of senility and exhaustion but of increasing and
still undisciplined strength. When we look at all history as one
process, as we have been doing in this book, when we see the steadfast
upward struggle of life towards vision and control, then we see in
their true proportions the hopes and dangers of the present time. As
yet we are hardly in the earliest dawn of human greatness. But in the
beauty of flower and sunset, in the happy and perfect movement of young
animals and in the delight of ten thousand various landscapes, we have
some intimations of what life can do for us, and in some few works of
plastic and pictorial art, in some great music, in a few noble
buildings and happy gardens, we have an intimation of what the human
will can do with material possibilities. We have dreams; we have at
present undisciplined but ever increasing power. Can we doubt that
presently our race will more than realize our boldest imaginations,
that it will achieve unity and peace, that it will live, the children
of our blood and lives will live, in a world made more splendid and
lovely than any palace or garden that we know, going on from strength
to strength in an ever widening circle of adventure and achievement?
What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state, and all
this history we have told, form but the prelude to the things that man
has got to do.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
About the year 1000 B.C. the Aryan peoples were establishing themselves
in the peninsulas of Spain, Italy and the Balkans, and they were
established in North India; Cnossos was already destroyed and the
spacious times of Egypt, of Thothmes III, Amenophis III and Rameses II
were three or four centuries away. Weak monarchs of the XXIst Dynasty
were ruling in the Nile Valley. Israel was united under her early
kings; Saul or David or possibly even Solomon may have been reigning.
Sargon I (2750 B.C.) of the Akkadian Sumerian Empire was a remote
memory in Babylonian history, more remote than is Constantine the Great
from the world of the present day. Hammurabi had been dead a thousand
years. The Assyrians were already dominating the less military
Babylonians. In 1100 B.C. Tiglath Pileser I had taken Babylon. But
there was no permanent conquest; Assyria and Babylonia were still
separate empires. In China the new Chow dynasty was flourishing.
Stonehenge in England was already some hundreds of years old.
The next two centuries saw a renascence of Egypt under the XXIInd
Dynasty, the splitting up of the brief little Hebrew kingdom of
Solomon, the spreading of the Greeks in the Balkans, South Italy and
Asia Minor, and the days of Etruscan predominance in Central Italy. We
begin our list of ascertainable dates with
B.C. 800. The building of Carthage.
790. The Ethiopian conquest of Egypt (founding the XXVth Dynasty).
776. First Olympiad.
753. Rome built.
745. Tiglath Pileser III conquered Babylonia and founded the New
Assyrian Empire.
722. Sargon II armed the Assyrians with iron weapons.
721. He deported the Israelites.
680. Esarhaddon took Thebes in Egypt (overthrowing the Ethiopian
XXVth Dynasty).
664. Psammetichus I restored the freedom of Egypt and founded the
XXVIth Dynasty (to 610).
608. Necho of Egypt defeated Josiah, king of Judah, at the battle of
Megiddo.
606. Capture of Nineveh by the Chaldeans and Medes.
Foundation of the Chaldean Empire.
604. Necho pushed to the Euphrates and was overthrown by
Nebuchadnezzar II.
(Nebuchadnezzar carried off the Jews to Babylon.)
550. Cyrus the Persian succeeded Cyaxares the Mede.
Cyrus conquered Crœsus.