Into such an unpromising atmosphere of national hostility the war came
down on us, in July 1914, like a thunderbolt. In spite of grave warnings
few or none in this country were at that moment giving a thought to it.
On the contrary, we were thinking of all manner of immeasurably smaller
things, for Great Britain, although governing more than one-fifth of the
habitable globe, has an extraordinary capacity for becoming absorbed in
the affairs of its two little islands. It was so in the autumn of 1914,
when we thought Home Rule and Land Reform covered all our horizon,
although a thunder-cloud that was to silence these big little guns had
already gathered in the sky.
Perhaps it was not altogether our fault if secret diplomacy had too
long concealed from us the storm that was so soon to break. That kind
of surprise must never come to us again. Many and obvious may be the
dangers of allowing the public to participate in delicate and difficult
negotiations between nations, but if democracy has any rights surely the
chief of them is to know step by step by what means its representatives
are controlling its destiny. We did not hear what was happening in the
Cabinets of Europe, under that miserable disguise of the Archduke’s
assassination, until the closing days of July. Consequently, we reeled
under the danger that threatened us, and were not at first capable of
comprehending the cause and the measure of it.
“What is this wretched conspiracy in Serbia to us, and why in God’s name
should we have to fight about it?” we thought. Or perhaps, “We’ve always
been told that treaties between nations are safeguards of peace, but
here, heaven help us, they are dragging us into war.”
So general was this sentiment of revolt during the last tragic days that
it is commonly understood to have extended to the Cabinet. Six members
are said to have opposed war. One of them, a philosopher and historian
of high distinction, could not see his way with his colleagues, and
retired from their company. Another, who came from the working-classes,
is understood to have resigned from thought of the sufferings which
any war, however justifiable, must inevitably inflict upon the poor. A
third, a lawyer in a position of the utmost authority, is believed
to have had grave misgivings about our legal right to call Germany to
account. And I have heard that a fourth, who had been prominent as a
pacifist in the days of an earlier conflict, had written a letter to a
colleague as late as the evening of August 1, saying that a war declared
merely on grounds of problematical self-interest would create such an
outcry in Great Britain as had never been heard here before--leaving us
a derided and, therefore, easily-vanquished people.