sleep. I watched, over the quarter, the Start Light flashing pale and
white in the broadening day, and at last extinguished. Then the sun
rose, as I have said. Immediately after its rising a sort of light haze
filled the air to eastward. It was denser than it seemed to be, for
it did not obscure the low disc of the sun, nor redden it, but, as you
will read in a moment, it performed a mystery. The little ship slipped
on, up past the Skerries Bank, and I could see far off the headland
which bounds Dart Bay. There was no sail in sight. I was alone upon
the sea; and the breeze, neither freshening nor lowering, but giving a
hearty line of course (along which we slipped, perhaps, five knots or
six), made the water speak merrily upon the bows and along the run of
our low sides. In this loneliness and content, as I sailed northward, I
chanced to look, after an hour’s steering or so, eastward again towards
the open sea—and then it was that there passed me the vision I shall
remember forever, or for so long as the longest life may last.
Like ghosts, like things themselves made of mist, there passed between
me and the newly risen sun a procession of great forms, all in line,
hastening eastward. It was the Fleet recalled.
The slight haze along that distant water had thickened, perhaps,
imperceptibly; or perhaps the great speed of the men-of-war buried them
too quickly in the distance. But, from whatever cause, this marvel was
of short duration. It was seen for a moment, and in a moment it was
gone.
Then I knew that war would come, and my mind was changed.
The bright air was the same around me and the heartening morning wind,
the happy course of the Nona, making for a known port with all in her
favour and something of youth in her and all round. What that war would
bring, its magnitude, its character, was veiled from us all; but the
advent of it, the mass of it coming, put a new face on everything I
saw and felt and heard; on the steady breeze, on the little lapping
of the salt sea-water, on the strong headlands of England. So went
I northward alone as the day grew, until by mid-morning, the breeze
having dropped somewhat and the boat running more sluggishly, we lay
abeam of the rock called the Druid’s Mare, and began to run up the
coast for Torbay. My companion wakened and came on deck. I told him
what I had seen.
These strong emotions, though they colour all the mind, soon lose
their edge, and we fell to talking of the coast we passed, and of the
chance of holding the wind, which declined a little and was not so
steady as we rounded the last headland. My mind turned nothing over of
the possibilities of what was to come. It was later, when I had come
ashore again, and had reached London, that I learnt of the prolonged
hesitation among the politicians, men by their petty trade unused to
and unfit for tasks of magnitude; of the French President’s letter and
the ambiguous reply to it, drafted and published; of the final voting
when, by a majority of one, the Cabinet decided upon war. Had the
virility of such a decision been known even four brief days earlier,
war would not have come. But it was too late.
Among the nine who gave their votes in favour of the neutrality of
Britain, some were actuated, as we know, by base, one, as we know too
well, by the basest of motives: mere trivial personal ambition for
success in the wretched tawdry game of professional politics, which was
the only craft he knew. But some also acted from the noblest motives
and rise for the moment above the fetid marsh-mist of Westminster.
These I shall always respect for the strength of their wills and the
clarity of their convictions in so awful a moment.
Still more did I then, and do I still, respect them for the deliberate
choice they made to accept what was certain to be a vivid, and might
be a very dangerous unpopularity, when the first shots should be
fired. These men were convinced that it would be to the advantage of
their country if the Continental forces should be left to thrash out
their own decisions. They were opposed, perhaps, to the majority of
their countrymen at the time (it is not so sure; for the mass of their
countrymen had hardly had time to decide, so swift was the last rush
of events). They would certainly be opposed, as they knew, to the vast
majority of their countrymen in a few days. They were the more English,
the more characteristic of the blood which they boasted, in that they
took such a decision fearlessly. I can believe that to this day the
best of them still thinks that his judgment was sound and that great
evils now passed, and other evils dreadfully threatening us now, more
than ten years after, would have been saved us altogether, if England
had refused war. But the best-instructed opinion, the opinion with the
widest view, was opposed to them. War followed; with what full fruits
only men now young can live to discover.
There is not perhaps in all history (of the sort which has full records
behind it) any group of days on which men will debate more and will
find it less easy to establish a permanent conclusion than those last
days of July and first days of August, 1914. But there are certain
structural lines supporting even the most confused and the most debated
of records. Thus, men will never be exactly certain what Harold did
at the Court of William, nor of how the first directive events of
that great quarrel lay. Men will never arrive at a fixed and general
conclusion upon the initiative responsible for the revolutionary
wars, nor even, perhaps, for the renewed attack upon Napoleon, or by
Napoleon, after Elba. But these debates are, for all that, built round
a solid skeleton of certain conclusions, and in this great matter
of the Great War I do not think that posterity will depart from the
general conclusion of our own times (which is certainly mine) that an
early declaration of the British attitude would have prevented war.
It is a question easily confused with a totally different one, and
the two must be kept carefully apart. The _right_ of Great Britain
to remain neutral should surely be admitted, not only in law but in
common sense. In law there was no definite agreement with the French.
There was no accepted obligation to support the French in the West
or elsewhere. A great number of acts had been accomplished which
could have had only such a support for their object; the military
situation had been studied, contingent military dispositions had been
carefully planned in detail. The general policy of the preceding
years, especially after Agadir, had pointed to the same end; but the
Government of this country had always, in the most insistent manner,
affirmed and provided for its freedom of choice when the crisis should
come. And the very fact that it had thus so continuously maintained
that freedom of choice, and specifically asserted it, is proof that
every other step, however obviously designed for common action in arms,
was _not_ to be given the interpretation of a binding alliance.
Since this great point in history involves a moral judgment quite as
much as the mere interpretation of texts, it should also, I think,
be laid down that, in matters of life and death, a nation, like an
individual, has the right to stretch even a formal text to the very
limits of interpretation.
I would say that even if a formal and solemn alliance had existed,
any one holding authority in England at that moment and conceiving
that participation in the Continental war would ultimately ruin Great
Britain, had a right to seek for any phrase in the written pact which
could save his country from disaster—and such phrases can always be
found. I will go further: I will say that the certitude of disaster
on such a scale would excuse even a breach of faith: but I know that
this is passing the bounds ordinarily allowed; and I say it only
because there seems to me an implied distinction between war for a
local object which could do no more than advantage or hurt a country
somewhat, and war of a sort which this war turned out to be, wherein
the whole structure of human society was imperilled. In the same way,
if I have promised to help a man and support him in various details of
his domestic life, even though I have taken good consideration for my
services, I have the right to fly from his house if it catches fire in
order to save my child from being burnt to death. A vast difference in
the scale between the reasonably expected effects of a compact and the
suddenly discovered real effects would seem to release a man from the
obligation of that compact.
But in this case there was not even a definite compact. Therefore,
no one could advance a moral plea against the hesitation which our
politicians showed in that grave moment. No, what is to be advanced
against the politicians who so lamentably bungled that affair is a
charge drawn from the intellectual, not from the moral side of our
nature. They acted stupidly, as indeed their trade leads men to act:
for professional politics is a trade in which the sly outweigh the
wise. It was bad judgment to leave the matter in doubt to the last;
and the decision was deferred and deferred again, simply because
your professional politician, always absorbed in a wretched personal
intrigue, blinked and was bewildered by a great issue suddenly thrust
upon him.
You will often hear it said war could not but come when once the three
great Continental Powers had mobilised. It has been repeated that the
act of mobilisation—of full mobilisation—renders war necessary. The
statement is untrue. Certainly the French mobilisation did not, even up
to the very last moment, render war necessary; and the same is true of
the German.
Again, it is still said by fanatics that the Russian Government
intended and provoked the war. And many men not fanatics, but ignorant
of Europe, or at issue with Christendom, repeat the myth. Those who
plead in favour of Prussia and of the German General Staff (they
are numerous in England to-day) still pretend, as do all the German
writers, that the mobilisation ordered from Berlin was but a reply to
the earlier orders issued from Saint Petersburg.
History will not accept that. There is altogether too much against it.
There is the connection between the ‘Lokal Anzeiger’ and the German
General Staff. Still more there is the nature of German mobilisation,
which was so designed that _preliminary_ orders were, to its general
scheme, what _final_ orders were in any other country. The Prussian
scheme of mobilisation may be compared to a loaded gun. If I know that
a man has his gun loaded and he aims it at me, my then loading mine is
not a provocation.
Much more is there, against so strained and distorted a piece of
special pleading, the truth obvious to any one, even the most
superficial, who had seen Germany since 1911: the whole mass of that
population supported its government in a determination for what was
believed would prove a short and highly lucrative campaign, and one not
only highly lucrative, but settling forever the security of that great
experiment which Prussia had not quite consolidated by her series of
rapid victories a lifetime before.
But though the German mobilisation was indeed proof of the truth that
Prussia and her subjects desired war, that war so eagerly desired
was a Continental war only. The Continental war envisaged at Berlin
excluded the factor of English intervention. Not that it was believed
such intervention would make any great difference in what was assumed
would be an immediate and crushing victory in the West, but that sea
power continuously exercised could not but have given pause upon what
Berlin thought would be the probable result of the struggle in the
East. Granted an immediate and certain German victory in the West (as
a fact it failed), there would still be an Eastern campaign which the
German General Staff believed to be necessarily prolonged and which
they dreaded; blockade during _that_ trial they dared not face.
Two men, I think, deserved well of their country at that moment,
granted that an entry into the war sooner or later was inevitable. One
was Mr. Winston Churchill, who upon his own initiative mobilised the
Fleet; and the other was Lord Haldane, who convinced his colleagues
of the nature of the peril and who, it should be remembered, had made
possible the coöperation of Britain in the war by his scheme for
mobilisation. All that followed was based upon the work originally
done by him at the War Office at a time when, to the great bulk of his
countrymen, the idea of such a conflict was still quite unfamiliar and
its enormous implications incredible.
For the rest, it is neither generous nor wise to pick out any
particular set of misjudgments; for the whole of Europe, all its
culture and all its intelligence, was at fault in estimates of the war.
You may say of all the mass of stuff that has been written since the
Armistice that it can be graded in degrees of intelligence according
to its admission of the unexpected and the fortuitous throughout those
terrible years. The less intelligent the writer the more he ascribes
this or that development to a plan; the more intelligent he is the
more he admits factors independent of our wills and our intelligences:
factors proceeding, as our fathers would have said, and as I believe,
consciously from a Will above humanity or (as it is the modern fashion
to affirm) coming into human affairs from _no_ god, but blindly—at any
rate, factors external to human direction. In the individual actions
can be traced clearly enough what measure of conclusion their success
involved, or what lack of it their failure was due to. But, in the
general lines of the turmoil, it is not so. Here and there a chance
guess proved right, but it was no more than a guess, unless we except
Lord Kitchener’s warning that the war would last at least three years:
he gave it when most men thought it might not last three months.
It is with regard to the Great War as it is with regard to every set
of campaigns in history; if you omit that which was not subject to any
human will and intelligence, you omit nine tenths of the factors that
make for the final result—and that is why every great captain has put
his trust in Fortune and in a star, a destiny of his own. For great
captains know what part Fortune plays in their trade.
I remember Boulanger saying, when I was a boy of nineteen: ‘_La guerre
est une chose aléatoire._’ It was one of those enormous truisms which
make one shake with laughter, and, coming from the lips of such a
man, it was particularly comic; he, with the short stature which
he owed to his Welsh blood, with his middle-aged hesitations, and
his ludicrous incapacity for the rôle into which the popular anger
against politicians had unnaturally thrust him, and his very natural
disinclination, being what he was, to accept risk. I saw him in
Portland Place, and it was there that I heard him discourse in such
fashion. Young as I was, I hugely enjoyed the unconscious meiosis of
such a phrase. Yes, indeed: _la guerre est une chose aléatoire!_ Would
that this fortuitous character in it were confined to its immediate
operations! But they stretch outward over a lifetime at least and, in
some great effects, for much longer.
As I write this, it is more than ten years since the dice of that
‘_chose aléatoire_’ were thrown, and no one can even yet determine what
interests in Europe have, upon the whole, most suffered; though (alas!)
the larger lines of the result are already apparent.
Some day, I suppose—but a good time hence—one of the mob of witnesses
to what went on in Paris between the Armistice and the Treaty of
Versailles will write us an amusing book full of truths, made up of
anecdote without much comment. Or perhaps, better still, we shall have
a highly readable book from the pen of a man who was not there. We had
a glimpse of such possibilities from a witness in a few sentences of
Mr. Keynes’, which were very illuminating; but Mr. Keynes’ book had not
for its object an historical relation, but rather financial propaganda,
so that the part dealing with the comedy of small men in big places
was too short. If he had confined himself to the words and gestures
of parliamentarians suddenly confronted with the task of diplomats, I
think he would have produced something memorable. One or two other pens
have dealt with that comic affair, but none sufficiently, nor at any
length.
I was not myself present. I was continually between Paris and London,
I had many friends and a few relations engaged, and I heard a mass of
stories from many who were witnesses. Of that mass of stories, not a
few sounded probable, and quite a reasonable number were vouched for by
witnesses whom I could trust. I have had quoted to me, for instance,
the excellent story of a Prime Minister pettishly complaining that
he would not be bothered about the Dalmatian coast because they had
not yet come to consider the Baltic. And the same man curiously moved
a squat forefinger along the river Save upon the map, saying with a
would-be-important smile, ‘Now here is the Upper Danube.’ Really in
this I have some sympathy with the little fellow; for when I first
went to school I always thought it a shame that the Save, running in a
straight line with the lower Danube, should not carry the same name. I
thought there was something irregular about the Danube taking its great
bend past Budapest.
Then there was that other story of the indignant politician who, upon
reading the French word ‘_demander_’ in a memorandum, indignantly
protested against this insolent use of the word ‘demand.’
Poland was a subject of ceaseless blunders. One politician vaguely
thought it a province of Russia; another was surprised to hear that
Danzig had ever been a Polish town; and the same man was contented to
express his simple conviction that it was no use setting up Poland
again, seeing that such a state could never last.
That they should get mixed up about their figures is pardonable;
there were more naughts than a man could count. Still, there is all
the difference between one hundred and twenty-five milli_ard_ francs
and one hundred and twenty-five milli_on_ francs: but I am assured it
was not always easy for every member of the august group to carry the
distinction clearly in his head, especially in the morning. Would that
some more than human power had suddenly descended—or lacking such a
Being, a corporal and four men—and taken the politicians forcibly into
three rooms, put paper and pen before them and bade them write down,
under heavy penalties, all they could remember of Europe! It would
have been a pretty examination!
Now parliamentarians such as these are ridiculous, not only by the
absurd disproportion between their nominal powers and their capacities,
but more by their ambition—which swells out to bursting the little
vessel containing it. They have not talent, save for intrigue against
fellow politicians: they cannot speak or write, let alone _do_,
anything worth hearing. None the less would you find, if you could
take the tin lid off their hollow minds and look in, a froth of insane
vanity, bred of years of speech-making; a more than kingly assurance
bred of knowing no control and of immunity; and (what is astonishing in
men of such calibre) ambition itself. A paltry ambition, to be sure: an
ambition to fill the newspapers: but still, ambition.
Yet, if there is one thing I have noted more than another in the few
men worthy of admiration in this our time (men worthy of admiration
through their capacities as well as through their characters), it is
the absence of ambition.
There could be no better commentary upon the days in which we live.
For it is reasonable and normal that men of great capacity should have
ambition to exercise it in government, in the ordering of their fellow
men. It was a chief quality always looked for by our fathers in those
who rose high, and were worthy so to rise; nor were they disappointed.
Ambition of old was a mark of greatness. But to-day it is the mark of
the capable man that ambition disgusts him. That mark is most notable
in Mussolini. It is most notable in Foch. It was notable in most of the
commanders of armies; in the admirals of fleets. It was most notable,
of course, in the saintly eminence of Mercier. It was notable in almost
every one I had the privilege to meet and watch during and after the
struggle who had been capable of doing something great in that time.
It is not difficult to discover when you speak with Mussolini that his
interest is in his job, not in his name. It is apparent to all that the
great work of the Cardinal Archbishop of Malines is remote from all
personal motive—and ambition is essentially personal. As for Foch,
it is manifest, not only in his every gesture and expression, but in
the life he has lived after saving Europe. But this novel feature, the
absence of ambition in our greatest men to-day, goes further. It has
been notable in our chief discoverers in physical science—all can bear
witness to that; it is even becoming apparent in the best writers,
though writers are among the vainest of mankind.
All men of real capacity in this our time seem to be agreed that the
peculiar odour of modern success is a thing for a decent man to avoid.
It is becoming a sort of habit of the mind throughout the West—that
is, throughout civilised Europe to-day—in such few men as can do some
great work, to do it silently and apart, and to disconnect it wholly
from immediate renown.
Conversely, you will have monstrous advertisement surrounding the mere
name of a man incompetent, and usually thoroughly dishonest as well,
because he is athirst for publicity of the modern sort, and loves it,
and because he is quite content to serve those lumps of wealth and
vulgarity who, through their possession of the mob newspapers, can
grant or withhold publicity.
Here is a situation thoroughly diseased: the spur of ambition withdrawn
from those who can do. It cannot last. How it will be resolved I do
not know, nor does any other man; but that it cannot last is apparent.
The mere force of competition, the mere mathematics of the world will
see to it that blaring incompetence shall not permanently wield even
nominal power; and it holds more than nominal power to-day.
I was interested, among the many things I heard from the more
advertised civilians of the Great War, to note two things: the first
was a rooted conviction in the most advertised Parliament men that
things and people foreign to their experience were inferior to them. We
know, of course, that that is the natural instinct of the schoolboy,
and of the very simple good person without experience; but the
astonishing thing was to find it in men whom one would expect, in spite
of their origins, to have become a little polished by long conversation
with their fellows, a little trained by responsibility. Before the end
of the conflict one would have thought that even your politician must
acquire some judgment from so much vivid and informing experience. Not
a bit of it! It went off him like so much water off a duck’s back, and
you may hear him to-day, six years after the Armistice, peddling the
same inanities as he peddled in 1913.
The second thing I noticed was the alarming difference between
politicians and the soldiers in the sense of reality. I say alarming
because, after the war, Europe, instead of continuing the rule of
soldiers as it should have done, returned to its vomit; and the
miserable parliamentary figures of the old degraded day put on again
costume and grease-paint, filed back upon the stage, and began to
play their old antics as though nothing had happened. The French, who
ought to know better (for they have found parliaments out), behaved
disgracefully in this matter. You may take up any French newspaper
to-day, and find yourself appalled with the recurrence of such names
as Caillaux, Briand, Herriot, Loucheur, who ought never to have been
mentioned again after such an experience as the Great War.
Italy has done better: but only under the stress of a threatened
dissolution. Society in Italy had to reach the point of acute peril
before that reaction took place which saved the country; but what
a fine reaction it was, not only in its virtues, but, what is more
important, in its spirit! What a strong critical sense Italy has shown!
What intelligence in rejection of sophistry, and what virility in
execution! May it last! But will it last? Even in Italy?