standing controversies between Democracy and Junkerism in their acutest
form, and taking advantage of the war emergency to press them to a
series of parliamentary victories for Labour, whether in negotiations
with the Government whips, in divisions on the floor of the House, or in
strenuously contested bye-elections. No doubt our Junkers will try to
disarm their opponents by representing that it would be in the last
degree unfair, un-English, and ungentlemanly on the part of the Labour
members to seize any tactical advantage in parliamentary warfare, and
most treacherous and unpatriotic to attack their country (meaning the
Junker Party) when it is at war. Some Labour members will be easily
enough gulled in this way: it would be laughable, if the consequences
were not so tragic, to see how our parliamentary beginners from the
working class succumb to the charm of the Junker appeal. The Junkers
themselves are not to be coaxed in this manner: it is no use offering
tracts to a missionary, as the poor Kaiser found when he tried it on.
The Labour Party will soon learn the value of these polite
demonstrations that it is always its duty not to hamper the governing
classes in their very difficult and delicate and dangerous task of
safeguarding the interests of this great empire: in short, to let itself
be gammoned by elegant phrases and by adroit practisings on its personal
good-nature, its inveterate proletarian sentimentality, and its secret
misgivings as to the correctness of its manners. The Junkers have
already taken the fullest advantage of the war to paralyze democracy. If
the Labour members do not take a vigorous counter-offensive, and fight
every parliamentary trench to the last division, the Labour Movement
will be rushed back as precipitately as General von Kluck rushed the
Allies back from Namur to the gates of Paris. In truth, the importance
of the war to the immense majority of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans
lies in the possibility that when Junkers fall out common men may come
by their own.
*III.*
*THE TERMS OF PEACE.*
*Natural Limits to Duration of the War.*
So much for the recruiting. Now for the terms of peace. It is time to
take that subject in hand; for Lord Kitchener's notion that we are going
to settle down to years of war as we did a century ago is soldierly, but
not sensible. It is, of course, physically possible for us to continue
for twenty years digging trenches and shelling German troops and shoving
German armies back when they are not shoving us, whilst old women pull
turnips and tend goats in the fire zones across which soldiers run to
shelter. But we cannot afford to withdraw a million male adults who have
passed a strictish health test from the work of parentage for several
years unless we intend to breed our next generation from parents with
short sight, varicose veins, rotten teeth, and deranged internal organs.
Soldiers do not think of these things: "theirs not to reason why: theirs
but to do and die"; but sensible civilians have to. And even soldiers
know that you cannot make ammunition as fast as you can burn it, nor
produce men and horses as instantaneously as you can kill them by
machinery. It would be well, indeed, if our papers, instead of writing
of ten-inch shells, would speak of £1,000 shells, and regimental bands
occasionally finish the National Anthem and the Brabançonne and the
Marseillaise with the old strain, "That's the way the money goes: Pop
goes the Ten Inch." It is easy to rebuke Mr. Norman Angell and Herr
Bloch for their sordid references to the cost of war; and Mr. H.G. Wells
is profoundly right in pointing out that the fact that war does not pay
commercially is greatly to its credit, as no high human activity ever
does pay commercially. But modern war does not even pay its way. Already
our men have "pumped lead" into retreating Germans who had no lead left
to pump back again; and sooner or later, if we go on indefinitely, we
shall have to finish the job with our fists, and congratulate ourselves
that both Georges Carpentier and Bombardier Wells are on our side. This
war will stop when Germany throws up the sponge, which will happen long
before she is utterly exhausted, but not before we ourselves shall be
glad enough of a rest. Nations are like bees: they cannot kill except at
the cost of their own lives.
The question of terms will raise a fierce controversy. At the extremes
of our public opinion we have two temperaments, first, our gentlemen,
our sportsmen, our daredevils, our _preux chevaliers_. To these the
notion of reviling your enemy when he is up; kicking him when he is
knocked down by somebody else; and gouging out his eyes, cutting out his
tongue, hewing off his right arm, and stealing all his money, is
abhorrent and cowardly. These gallants say, "It is not enough that we
can fight Germany to-day. We can fight her any day and every day. Let
her come again and again and yet again. We will fight her one to three;
and if she comes on ten to one, as she did at Mons, we will mill on the
retreat, and drive her back again when we have worn her down to our
weight. If her fleet will not come out to fight us because we have too
many ships, we will send all the odds in our favour back to Portsmouth
and fight ship to ship in the North Sea, and let the bravest and best
win." That is how gallant fighters talk, and how Drake is popularly
(though erroneously) supposed to have tackled the Armada.
*The Ignoble Attitude of Cruel Panic.*
But we are not all _preux chevaliers._ We have at the other extremity
the people who are craving for loot and vengeance, who clamour for the
humiliation and torture of the enemy, who rave against the village
burnings and shootings by the Prussians in one column and exult in the
same proceedings by the Russians in another, who demand that German
prisoners of war shall be treated as criminals, who depict our Indian
troops as savage cutthroats because they like to think of their enemies
being mauled in the spirit of the Indian Mutiny, who shriek that the
Kaiser must be sent to Devil's Island because St. Helena is too good for
him, and who declare that Germany must be so maimed and trodden into the
dust that she will not be able to raise her head again for a century.
Let us call these people by their own favourite name, Huns, even at the
risk of being unjust to the real Huns. And let us send as many of them
to the trenches as we can possibly induce to go, in the hope that they
may presently join the lists of the missing. Still, as they rather cling
to our soil, they will have to be reckoned with when the settlement
comes. But they will not count for much then. Most of them will be
heartily ashamed of what they said in those first three or four weeks of
blue funk (I am too timid myself not to make allowances for that most
distressing and universal, but fortunately transient effect of war); and
most of those who are not will be ashamed to bear malice publicly.
*The Commercial Attitude.*
Far more weighty in the matter will be the intermediate sections. First,
our commercial main body, which thinks that chivalry is not business,
and that rancour is childish, but cannot see why we should not make the
Germans pay damages and supply us with some capital to set the City
going again, forgetting that when France did that after 1871 for Berlin,
Berlin was set going so effectually that it went headlong to a colossal
financial smash, whilst the French peasant who had provided the capital
from his old stocking throve soberly on the interest at the expense of
less vital classes. Unfortunately Germany has set the example of this
kind of looting. Prussian generals, like Napoleon's marshals, have
always been shameless brigands, keeping up the seventeenth and
eighteenth century tradition of making cities bribe them to refrain from
sack and pillage and even billeting, and being quite incapable of the
magnificence of the great Condé (or was it Turenne?), who refused a
payment offered by a city on the ground that he had not intended to
march through it. Blucher's fury when Wellington would not allow him to
plunder Paris, and his exclamation when he saw London "What a city to
loot!" is still regarded as fair soldiering; and the blackmail levied
recently by the Prussian generals on the Belgian and French towns they
have occupied must, I suppose, be let pass as ransom, not as ordinary
criminal looting. But if the penalty of looting be thus spared, the
Germans can hardly complain if they are themselves held to ransom when
the fortunes of war go against them. Liège and Lille and Antwerp and the
rest must be paid their money back with interest; and there will be a
big builder's bill at Rheims. But we should ourselves refrain strictly
from blackmail. We should sell neither our blood nor our mercy. If we
sell either we are as much brigands as Blucher.
*Vindictive Damages.*
And we must not let ourselves be tempted to soil our hands under pretext
of vindictive damages. The man who thinks that all the money in Germany
could pay for the life of a single British drummer boy ought to be shot
merely as an expression of the feeling that he is unfit to live. We
stake our blood as the Germans stake theirs; and in that _ganz
besonderes Saft_ alone should we [missing text]r accept payment. We had
better **[missing text]y to the Kaiser at the end of the **[missing
text] "Scoundrel: you can never replace **[missing text] Louvain
library, nor the sculpture of Rheims; and it follows logically that you
shall empty your pockets into ours." Much better say: "God forgive us
all!" If we cannot rise to this, and must soil our hands with plunder,
at least let us call it plunder, and not profane our language and our
souls by giving it fine names.
*Our Annihilationists.*
Then we shall have the Militarists, who will want to have Germany "bled
to the white," dismembered and maimed, so that she may never do it
again. Well, that is quite simple, if you are Militarist enough to do
it. Loading Germany with debt will not do it. Towing her fleet into
Portsmouth or sinking it will not do it. Annexing provinces and colonies
will not do it. The effective method is far shorter and more practical.
What has made Germany formidable in this war? Obviously her
overwhelmingly superior numbers. That was how she rushed us back almost
to the gates of Paris. The organization, the readiness, the sixteen-inch
howitzer helped; but it was the multitudinous _Kanonenfutter_ that
nearly snowed us under. The British soldier at Cambrai and Le Cateau
killed and killed until his rifle was too hot to hold and his hand was
paralyzed with slayer's cramp; but still they came and came.
*Why Not Kill the German Women?*
Well, there is no obscurity about that problem. Those Germans who took
but an instant to kill had taken the travail of a woman for
three-quarters of a year to breed, and eighteen years to ripen for the
slaughter. All we have to do is to kill, say, 75 per cent, of all the
women in Germany under 60. Then we may leave Germany her fleet and her
money, and say "Much good may they do you." Why not, if you are really
going in to be what you, never having read "this Neech they talk of,"
call a Nietzschean Superman? War is not an affair of sentiment. Some of
our newspapers complain that the Germans kill the wounded and fire on
field hospitals and Red Cross Ambulances. These same newspapers fill
their columns with exultant accounts of how our wounded think nothing of
modern bullet wounds and hope to be back at the front in a week, which I
take to be the most direct incitement to the Germans to kill the wounded
that could be devized. It is no use being virtuously indignant: "stone
dead hath no fellow" is an English proverb, not a German one. Even the
killing of prisoners is an Agincourt tradition. Now it is not more
cowardly to kill a woman than to kill a wounded man. And there is only
one reason why it is a greater crime to kill a woman than a man, and why
women have to be spared and protected when men are exposed and
sacrificed. That reason is that the destruction of the women is the
destruction of the community. Men are comparatively of no account: kill
90 per cent, of the German men, and the remaining 10 per cent. can
repeople her. But kill the women, and _Delenda est Carthago_. Now this
is exactly what our Militarists want to happen to Germany. Therefore the
objection to killing women becomes in this case the reason for doing it.
Why not? No reply is possible from the Militarist, disable-your-enemy
point of view. If disablement is your will, there is your way, and the
only effectual way. We really must not call the Kaiser and Von Bernhardi
disciples of the mythical Neech when they have either overlooked or
shrunk from such a glaring "biological necessity." A pair of puling
pious sentimentalists if you like. But Supermen! Nonsense. O, my brother
journalists, if you revile the Prussians, call them sheep led by snobs,
call them beggars on horseback, call them sausage eaters, depict them in
the good old English fashion in spectacles and comforter, seedy overcoat
buttoned over paunchy figure, playing the contrabass tuba in a street
band; but do not flatter them with the heroic title of Superman, and
hold up as magnificent villainies worthy of Milton's Lucifer these
common crimes of violence and raid and lust that any drunken blackguard
can commit when the police are away, and that no mere multiplication can
dignify. As to Nietzsche, with his Polish hatred of Prussia (who
heartily reciprocated the sentiment), when did he ever tell the Germans
to allow themselves to be driven like sheep to the slaughter in millions
by mischievous dolts who, being for the most part incapable of reading
ten sentences of a philosophic treatise without falling asleep, allow
journalists as illiterate as themselves to persuade them that he got his
great reputation by writing a cheap gospel for bullies? Strictly between
ourselves, we also are an illiterate people; but we may at least hold
our tongues about matters we don't understand, and not say in the face
of Europe that the English believe that the composer of Parsifal was a
Militarist Prussian (he was an exiled revolutionist); that Nietzsche was
a diciple of Wagner (Nietzsche preferred the music of Bizet, a
Frenchman); and that the Kaiser is a disciple of Nietzsche, who would
have laughed his childish pietism to scorn.
*The Simple Answer.*
Nietzsche would certainly have agreed that we must kill the German women
if we mean business when we talk of destroying Germany. But he would
also have answered my Why not?, which is more than any consistent
Militarist can. Indeed, it needs no philosopher to give the answer. The
first ordinary anti-Militarist human person you meet will tell you that
it would be too horrible; that life would be unbearable if people did
such things. And he would be quite right; so please let us hear no more
of kicking your enemy when he is down so that he may be unable to rise
for a whole century. We may be unable to resist the temptation to loot
Germany more or less if we conquer her. We are already actively engaged
in piracy against her, stealing her ships and selling them in our prize
courts, instead of honestly detaining them until the war is over and
keeping a strict account of them. When gentlemen rise in the House of
Commons and say that they owe Germans money and do not intend to pay it,
one must face the fact that there will be a strong popular demand for
plunder. War, after all, is simply a letting loose of organized murder,
theft, and piracy on a foe; and I have no doubt the average Englishman
will say to me what Falstaff said to Pistol concerning his share in the
price of the stolen fan: "Reason, you rogue, reason: do you think I'll
endanger my soul _gratis_?" To which I reply, "If you can't resist the
booty, take it frankly, and know yourself for half patriot, half
brigand; but don't talk nonsense about disablement. Cromwell tried it in
Ireland. He had better have tried Home Rule. And what Cromwell could not
do to Ireland we cannot do to Germany."
*The Sensible People.*
Finally we come to the only body of opinion in which there is any hope
of civilization: the opinion of the people who are bent, not on
gallantry nor revenge nor plunder nor pride nor panic nor glory nor any
of the invidiousnesses of patriotism, but on the problem of how to so
redraw the map of Europe and reform its political constitutions that
this abominable crime and atrocious nuisance, a European war, shall not
easily occur again. The map is very important; for the open sores which
have at last suppurated and burst after having made the world uneasy for
years, were produced by altering the colour of Alsace and Lorraine and
of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the map. And the new map must be settled,
not by conquest, but by consent of the people immediately concerned. One
of the broken treaties of Europe which has been mentioned less
frequently of late than the Belgian treaty is the treaty of Prague, by
which a plebiscite was to have been taken on the subject of the
nationality of Schleswig and Holstein. That plebiscite has never been
taken. It may have to be taken, with other plebiscites, before this war
is settled.
*German Unity Inviolable.*
But here let me warn those who are hoping for a disintegrated Germany
like that which Thackeray ridiculed, that their hopes are vain. The
southern Germans, the, friendliest, most easy-going people in the world
(as far as I know the world) dislike the Prussians far more heartily
than we do; but they know that they are respected and strong and big as
part of United Germany, and that they were weak and despised and petty
as separate kingdoms. Germany will hold together. No doubt the Germans
may reasonably say to the Prussian drill sergeant and his master
Hohenzollern, "A nice mess you have made of your job after all we have
endured from you because we believed you could make us invincible. We
thought that if you were hard masters you were at any rate good
grenadiers; but here are these piffling little Belgians and these
Russians who were beaten by the Japanese, and these English who made
such a poor show against a handful of Boer farmers, fighting and
organizing just as well as you. So, as the French and English are
organized as a republic and an extremely limited monarchy, we will try
how that sort of constitution will suit us." But they will not break up:
on the contrary, they are much more likely to extend the German
community by incorporating German Austria. And as this would raise the
question whether Hohenzollern or Hapsburg should rule the roost, the
simplest solution would be to get rid of them both, and take the sooner
or later inevitable step into the democratic republican form of
Government to which Europe is visibly tending, though "this king
business," as my American correspondents call it, has certain
conveniences when it is limited and combined with an aristocracy also
limited by primogeniture and politically controlled by a commonalty into
which all but the eldest brothers in the aristocratic families fall,
thus making the German segregation of the _adel_ class impossible. Such
a monarchy, especially when the monarch is a woman, as in Holland today,
and in England under Victoria, is a fairly acceptable working substitute
for a formal republic in old civilizations with inveterate monarchical
traditions, absurd as it is in new and essentially democratic States. At
any rate, it is conceivable that the western allies might demand the
introduction of some such political constitution in Germany and Austria
as a guarantee; for though the demand would not please Russia, some of
Russia's demands will not please us; and there must be some give and
take in the business.
*Limits of Constitutional Interference.*
Let us consider this possibility for a moment. First, it must be firmly
postulated that civilized nations cannot have their political
constitutions imposed on them from without if the object of the
arrangement is peace and stability. If a victorious Germany were to
attempt to impose the Prussian constitution on France and England, they
would submit to it just as Ireland submitted to Dublin Castle, which, to
say the least, would not be a millennial settlement. Profoundly as we
are convinced that our Government of India is far better than any native
Indian government could be (the assumption that "natives" could govern
at all being made for the sake of argument with due reluctance), it is
quite certain that until it becomes as voluntary as the parliamentary
government of Australia, and has been modified accordingly, it will
remain an artificial, precarious, and continually threatening political
structure. Nevertheless, we need not go to the opposite extreme and
conclude that a political constitution must fit a country so accurately
that it must be home-made to measure. Europe has a stock of ready-made
constitutions, both Monarchical and Republican, which will fit any
western European nation comfortably enough. We are at present
considerably bothered by the number of Germans who, though their own
country and constitution is less than a day's journey away, settle here
and marry Englishwomen without feeling that our constitution is
unbearable. Englishmen are never tired of declaring that "they do things
better abroad" (as a matter of fact they often do), and that the ways of
Prussia are smarter than the ways of Paddington. It is therefore quite
possible that a reach-me-down constitution proposed, not by the
conquerors, but by an international congress with no interest to serve
but the interests of peace, might prove acceptable enough to a nation
thoroughly disgusted with its tyrants.
*Physician: Heal Thyself.*
Now a congress which undertook the Liberalization of Germany would
certainly not stop there. If we invite a congress to press for a
democratization of the German constitution, we must consent to the
democratization of our own. If we send the Kaiser to St. Helena (or
whatever the title of the Chiselhurst villa may be) we must send Sir
Edward Grey there, too. For if on the morrow of the peace we may all
begin to plot and plan one another's destruction over again in the
secrecy of our Foreign Office, so that in spite of Parliament and free
democratic institutions the Foreign Secretary may at any moment step
down from the Foreign Office to the House of Commons and say, "I
arranged yesterday with the ambassador from Cocagne that England is to
join his country in fighting Brobdingnag; so vote me a couple of hundred
millions, and off with you to the trenches," we shall be just where we
were before as far as any likelihood of putting an end to war is
concerned. The congress will certainly ask us to pledge ourselves that
if we shake the mailed fist at all we shall shake it publicly, and that
though we may keep our sword ready (let me interject in passing that
disarmament is all nonsense: nobody is going to disarm after this
experience) it shall be drawn by the representatives of the nation, and
not by Junker diplomatists who despise and distrust the nation, and have
planned war behind its back for years. Indeed they will probably demur
to its being drawn even by the representative of the nation until the
occasion has been submitted to the judgment of the representatives of
the world, or such beginnings of a world representative body as may be
possible. That is the true _Weltpolitik_.
*The Hegemony of Peace.*
For the main business of the settlement, if it is to have any serious
business at all, must be the establishment of a Hegemony of Peace, as
desired by all who are really capable of high civilization, and
formulated by me in the daily Press in a vain attempt to avert this
mischief whilst it was brewing. Nobody took the smallest public notice
of me; so I made a lady in a play say "Not bloody likely," and instantly
became famous beyond the Kaiser, beyond the Tsar, beyond Sir Edward
Grey, beyond Shakespeare and Homer and President Wilson, the papers
occupying themselves with me for a whole week just as they are now
occupying themselves with the war, and one paper actually devoting a
special edition to a single word in my play, which is more than it has
done for the Treaty of London (1839). I concluded then that this was a
country which really could not be taken seriously. But the habits of a
lifetime are not so easily broken; and I am not afraid to produce
another dead silence by renewing my good advice, as I can easily recover
my popularity by putting still more shocking expressions into my next
play, especially now that events have shewn that I was right on the
point of foreign policy.
*East Is East; and West Is West.*