sufficiently platitudinous to gain universal and immediate acceptance.
Roughly speaking we are all of one mind about the conduct of this war;
the minority in opposition is so small that it can be disregarded, but
we are all at variance as to method, and on the Ship of State that
steers such an erratic course through the hurricane of strife there is
hardly a passenger who is not convinced that he could reach the goal
much more rapidly than the man at the wheel is likely to.
Those who criticise the steering are suspect, for the national temper
is a little upset, our situation is without precedent, and an
Englishman dislikes novelty. I cannot help my belief that it is the
novelty rather than the tragedy of the hour that troubles him most. He
is giving, to the best of his capacity, blood, labour, treasure, but he
is not thinking as deeply as he should, perhaps because he understands
that when you begin to think and believe you see a great truth clearly,
you are morally bound to communicate that truth to others. Then the
Defence of the Realm comes in and you are likely to be hailed a
traitor to all good causes by the first person who--with or without
understanding your views--disagrees with them!
Yet for all the prejudices with which the expression of opinion is
beset, it is hard to keep silent when something presents itself to the
mind in the guise of a vital truth, and now, after more than two years
of war have forced reflection and taught us to see the world tragedy as
a whole, there are things that must needs be said, protests that must
needs be made.
Of all the iniquities that are associated with war, war as distinct
from murder I would add, there is nothing quite so horrible as the
sacrifice of young life. It is common to all the nations at war. We
read of boys of fifteen fighting in the ranks of our enemies, and,
at home, of boys who have added a year or two to their proper age to
deceive a not too inquisitive recruiting sergeant. To raw lads in
their utter ignorance, war is a great joy and adventure; they are proud
to help their country and to be redeemed from the charge of being
"slackers." So when the cup of life is hardly at their lips they go,
some to die, some to be maimed, some to return prematurely old and
broken down.
While the plots and counter plots that made for war were being hatched,
these young warriors were in the nursery, or at school. Even now they
have reached no perception of the real forces for which men strive;
until war broke out their lives were still supposed to be under the
protection of their parents.
But as soon as the State is beset it calls for aid, not alone upon
matured men, who understand and have a sense of responsibility, but
upon the lads whom it ought to be protecting as the one irreplaceable
asset of the next generation.
Wise old gentlemen with a very tolerable imitation of the spirit of
prophecy in their hearts, pens in their hands, and bees in their
bonnets, wrote indignant articles in the best read organs of the press
that our downfall, if we did not introduce conscription, is merely a
matter of months. Sometimes it was weeks. The time given to us varied
according to the measure of the writers' chronic dyspepsia.
Yet if these people would only think, they would have little
difficulty in admitting that the lads who have been well educated, well
trained and prepared with infinite labour for life are just those who
should not be surrendered to death under any normal conditions until
they have fulfilled their primary function toward the State.
I will go farther and suggest that their elders have no right to rob
them of the few years in which they taste the joys of life. I was told
recently by a man who knew what he was talking about that under the
Mosaic Code the Jews did not allow their married men to go to war until
they had spent one year with their wives. A man who was betrothed was
instructed to marry, and even if a man married a second time he had to
remain for one year at home. In this way the continuity of the race
was assured and the Jews, eminently a fighting nation, preserved their
virility.
There was no question of sentiment involved--it was hard, common sense
applied to war. And, horrible irony, the British Government recognises
the simple truth, but has only learned down to the present to apply
it to farm stock. I saw last year a printed notice in the country
post-offices issued to farmers by the Board of Agriculture, telling
them not to kill lamb and veal because whatever the price offered the
removal of immature stock is dangerous wastefulness which the country
cannot afford.
Here is a copy of the notice:
BOARD OF AGRICULTURE AND FISHERIES
SPECIAL NOTICE TO FARMERS
PRESERVE OUR FLOCKS AND HERDS!
MAINTAIN OUR MEAT SUPPLY!
The Board of Agriculture and Fisheries strongly urge all Farmers
to RAISE AS MUCH STOCK AS POSSIBLE during the war.
Their advice to you is:
DO NOT send breeding and immature stock to the BUTCHER simply
because prices are attractive now.
DO NOT MARKET half-finished animals; it is wasteful of the
country's resources and is against your own interests.
DO NOT KILL CALVES--rear them; it is well worth it.
DO NOT REDUCE your stock; when you cannot buy stores, buy calves.
MAINTAIN your flocks and breed your sows; it will pay you to do so.
The Board of Agriculture and Fisheries make the above
recommendations not only for the NATIONAL WELFARE but because they
believe them to be for the ultimate benefit of BRITISH AGRICULTURE.
It seems almost too ridiculous to be true that the Government has more
concern for lambs or calves than for boys on the threshold of manhood,
but the facts convict them.
For myself I would rather see a thousand of the bloodthirsty old
gentlemen who preached conscription sent to the front from their club
smoke-rooms and editorial chairs, than five hundred lads from whom
their country has something to expect!
I do not think I am a sentimentalist, certainly I do not plead for
the exemption of mere boys from the battlefield in order that they
may have what is called a good time, though I hold that they should
not be deprived deliberately of the few halcyon years that are in one
fashion or another the reward of one and all. I would work them to the
last ounce of their capacity in seasons like these. They should have
long hours, Spartan fare, and spells of physical drill, they should
put in eight hours of labour for the Government in the factory, in the
munition works, wherever their services could be best employed.
They might be under military rule, amenable to the same discipline as
the soldier, but they should not go into the firing line, because they
belong to the next generation.
They are to sire it; no nation can afford to leave that responsibility
to the physically unfit, and to those who have passed fighting age.
This duty done, they would be free to join the fighting forces for
which their drill, their labour and their self-denial would have
prepared them. My soldier relatives and friends tell me that the lad in
his teens is of little value in a prolonged campaign. He may have all
the necessary courage, but he lacks the essential stamina. He is fitter
to march and endure when he is twenty-five than when he is nineteen,
fitter still at thirty.
But, asks my critic, where will you recruit your fighting men? I look
round at my men friends, and I find them, up to the age of fifty,
taking their chance in the forefront of things. The outcry against the
married man as combatant is valid only in so far as his family depends
upon him for support. My friends chance for the greater part to belong
to the comfortable classes. They have enjoyed the best that England
has to offer; they are prepared to pay the price, with their lives if
need be. Above all they are articulate, they have the franchise, they
can speak their mind. Collectively they support in one form and another
the conditions that make war possible. They are conscious of a certain
responsibility.
Where, for example, on the other hand, is the responsibility of the
midshipman on the torpedoed battleship? I take his bravery for granted.
I am quite convinced that could he read my plea he would disavow any
shadow of sympathy with it, but I am concerned for the country and not
for him. He has a duty toward civilisation, he is well-bred, highly
trained, efficient. I say that the State owes him at least a few
years of manhood and should see that he is allowed to reach maturity,
although he is neither veal nor lamb!
It is false economy that raises the outcry against married men as
soldiers. They alone in the community can be spared, they have
fulfilled, or partly fulfilled, the function upon which civilisation
depends. Potentially, if not always actually, they are fathers.
Economists insist that pensions and allowances are an extravagance
that the nation cannot afford. I reply that war is a still greater
extravagance, the wickedest form of indulgence known to mankind,
and that worse than war is the destruction of the fairest hopes of
the future, the race to come. Again, if those who light the fire
were compelled to feed the flames I believe there would be fewer
conflagrations.
I feel that I do but set down facts that are known to thinkers, who,
as a rule, prefer to keep silence at times like these lest their
patriotism be suspect. After the war they will deplore the ruin;
trustees for the generation to come, they will see that they have
failed in their trust. They will shift the responsibility on to the
nature of things, they will declare that war was inevitable and that
destruction of all we hold most dear must follow in its wake.
Here I join issue with them. The world is for all practical purposes
ruled by mankind. Nothing but the catastrophes like the tidal wave and
the earthquake escape man's control. Famine, disease, and mortality he
can arrest; he can increase his stature morally, mentally, physically.
If he elect to play the prodigal he does so at his own risk, but he has
no right to tamper with the vital resources of the generations that
must follow. War is delirium, or he would bear this fundamental truth
in mind. I think it has escaped him. He is immersed in the pursuit of
the end, and no means are spared. Thus we hear the outcries because the
fat money bags are growing thin, but nothing is said of the great asset
that no trading, however successful, can restore.
We can find in some barbarous land wealth only comparable to that
which Sindbad discovered in the Valley of Diamonds, but what will that
profit a race that must depend upon old and exhausted stock to renew
its vitality? The desire for wealth is at least one of the contributory
causes of war, the thought of wealth wasted makes men forget they are
wasting what no wealth can replace.
I am sure that women feel this eternal truth in their hearts, but all
too many fear to be thought afraid. They fear their own mankind, those
for whom they would gladly sacrifice all that life holds for them of
good. They fear to be thought jealous for their own boys, while if the
truth be told their fear is all for the young sons of all women quite
irrespective of nationality. At least this is how the situation appeals
to me, and I dare not keep silent if there be any medium of appeal to
those who think with me that will set my thoughts down. There is a
slumbering conscience of humanity only waiting the call that will break
through its dreams. I am not so bold as to believe that I can utter it,
but I may perchance stimulate some more gifted pen.
In any case, I cannot hide my thoughts merely because they may meet no
response, for after all there is not in all the world a single great
belief that was not once the unregarded possession of a single mind.
XIII
THOUGHTS ON COMPULSION
While I am firmly opposed to conscription in any form that does not
embrace national wealth and resources as well as men, or that singles
out one class of men to the exclusion of others, while I believe that,
even subject to this view of national obligation, conscription should
be treated as a war measure and blotted out of the statute book in the
month that sees the restoration of peace, I am not writing to protest
or to complain. We are told that every cloud has its silver lining, and
when the Government decided to demand the services of those unmarried
men who, far more by reason of apathy than cowardice, had remained to
be taken, I could not help thinking that much good might come of it.
Against the hideous doctrine that the end justifies the means we may
set the equally old saying that necessity knows no law, and against the
compulsory making of soldiers which is an evil, I set the waking of the
national consciousness, and that is a gain.
For centuries England led the vanguard of the workers for freedom.
Against the will of the people the power of the great barons and
of their Kings bent and broke. There were generations in which the
people as a people were articulate, they stood up for their rights
and privileges and were a force that few dared defy. The discovery of
steam, the growth of factories, the increase of population and the
struggle for life combined to make a large section of the working
classes helpless. The hideous poverty and ugliness of life in the
great centres of wealth drove men, and women too, to shut out the
ugliness of their lives with the aid of brief spells of dissipation.
Strong drink became alike a source of revenue to the country, a source
of "honours"--generally paid for in hard cash--to the prosperous
brewer and distiller, and the source of brief forgetfulness, misery,
disease, crime and savage punishment to those who sought its dangerous
solace. National expenditure and party funds alike clamoured for
the maintenance of the evil, and those who are most concerned with
what is euphemistically called "keeping the working classes in their
places" turned a deaf ear to schemes that sought to make the places of
leisure for the worker more attractive and less dangerous. Pure Beer
Bills and legislation to restrict the sale of spirits to such spirit
as is matured, met with no effective support. Give the worker the
nineteenth and twentieth century substitutes for his old time _panem
et circenses_ and he would continue until strength failed him to sow
that others might reap and to earn the opprobrium and contempt of those
he enriched.
Parliament, immersed in politics to the exclusion of government,
cared little for the real welfare of the people. It contrived by
skilful electioneering to stimulate their interests in things that
do not matter, and when they were not wanted at the polls their
representatives--save the mark--left them severely alone. So it
happened, as time passed, that the old interest in vital questions
was passing from a large section of the proletariat. Powerful through
the medium of their Unions they supported these great organisations
for little better than the right to live. It was so hard to improve
the conditions of a trade or a group of allied industries that the
effort to this end left them with no energies to enter into larger
fields. Those leaders of the people who have the gift of clear vision
could meet with no adequate response, they alone could see the wood,
their followers had their gaze riveted on one particular tree. England
tended more and more to become the paradise of the capitalist and the
purgatory of the working man, and because he was always protesting
against conditions that will fill future generations with wonder and
shame, conditions improved beyond recognition by the country with
which we are now engaged in a life-and-death struggle, it became the
practice of the comfortable classes to denounce the workman and all
his ambitions. He was, in their view, sent into this world to create
wealth, not to enjoy what it creates; that was the privilege of his
betters. The Englishman's natural sense of fair play has been obscured
by the newspapers that pander to him and give him all his thoughts
ready made; if anybody thinks this is an extreme statement, let him
turn to the files of the reactionary press from the time when John
Burns led the Dockers' Strike down to the outbreak of war (and since)
and see whether he can find anywhere a solitary favourable verdict for
the worker as against the employer. He will search in vain.
There is a certain psychological aspect of the labour question that
has, I think, been overlooked. A generation or two of oppressive
conditions tends to produce a race that loses national consciousness.
The worker learns to take the view that he is no longer a part of Great
Britain, that his interests are exclusively personal, like those of his
employers, that he has no status in the country and that his business
is to get the most tolerable conditions of life that he can secure
by combination and agitation, and to ignore the trend of politics,
religion, social progress, and the rest of the life forces of
civilisation. He knows himself for one who hews wood and draws water,
it suffices him to carry a minimum of logs to the pile and buckets from
the spring. He knows that there is for him no glimpse of the larger
life and that because he is collectively a multitude there will be
keen competition to batten on his small savings or surpluses. He has
the feeling that if he loses his job he will take his place in the
ranks of a submerged tenth, ranks easy to slip into, almost impossible
to rise from. My long intercourse with those who fast that others may
feast has revealed this attitude to me in a hundred shapes, all tragic,
some dangerous. It has been the despair of those who are working for
the people and know that if they would but combine to grasp the sorry
state of things environing them they could "shatter it to pieces and
remould it nearer to the heart's desire." Unhappily it is impossible to
fight what is called _vis inertiæ_, you cannot bruise a feather pillow
or hurt a sack of sand by striking it, and while long hours, scanty
holidays, mean pleasures and continual anxiety dogged the footsteps
of the working classes, it seemed impossible to secure the unity of
action, the collective wisdom that would not only enable labour to find
its place in the sun, but would destroy the parasites that thrive upon
it. I think that the careful observer who noted the social condition of
England down to the late summer of 1914 will be disposed to agree that
I have not overstated the case or put the ugly lighting unfairly on the
foreground of the picture.
Then came war with its strange, unmistakable revelation to the working
man and working woman. In the blinding light born of battle they saw
their country assaulted by an enemy completely trained and organised.
Women saw that their own rulers had been too immersed in the great
games of party politics and business development to give proper thought
for the safety of the country. They saw, too, that the limitations
of capitalism and capitalist were visible in the eyes of the world.
They could help, they could leaven the dough of profit-making with the
yeast of personal sacrifice, some have done so, but for the salvation
of the country they appealed to the working man. Government adopted
some of his own panaceas, they accepted schemes of pure socialism
as props for the pillars of the State, they taxed riches and laid
sacrilegious hands upon the Dagon of wealth to the infinite rage of
certain Philistines who are still grieving for the god's lost hands
and feet, but it was to the working classes Government turned in the
hour of their distress, and Labour responded nobly. Those into whose
souls the iron of corruption, disappointment and indifference had not
entered, set themselves to labour seven days a week for long hours in
evil atmosphere, or left their sweethearts and wives to strike a blow
for the country that had displayed to them more of the qualities of a
step-mother than a mother. Many have laid down their lives, and in the
hearts of those who survive national consciousness has been re-born.
The democratic comradeship of the battlefield, embracing all classes,
has taught the working man that his foe in times of peace is not so
much the class whose representatives are of his own blood brotherhood,
but the system that dominates those who serve and those who accept
service. This lesson learned exclusively on the fields of war will
permeate the factories when war is over. One stumbling-block to
progress remained. It was, I venture to say, the presence in our midst
of hundreds of thousands of men who have been rendered listless and
apathetic by life conditions too easy or too hard. Now compulsion has
reached this class it will give them in return for unsought risks and
labour a sense of their place in the body politic. It will teach them
that whether they will or no they have a part to play in shaping the
destinies of Great Britain and that the reward will be in proportion
to the sacrifice. We must not forget that a new Britain, a new Empire,
a new Imperial outlook is being shaped over the far-flung area of war.
It will not be only to the British Empire that change will come, but
to all belligerent nations. The upheaval, sure as the succession of
day and night, is one we dare hardly contemplate, not by reason of
fear, but by reason of hope. To take advantage of the change as it
will affect our nation, all classes of the community must prepare,
and nothing could have clogged the wheels of progress in the near
future than the presence in our midst of so many thousands of men
whose inactivity would have been bitterly resented by those who have
borne the heat and burden of the day. Unity of action is a condition
precedent to the close and merciless revision of existing conditions,
the ending of privilege, the widening of the powers of democracy, the
whole peaceful solution of a question that two years ago promised to
develop into a war worse than this we are waging, a war of brother
against brother.
I repeat that I am opposed to conscription, particularly to a
conscription that picks and chooses, and does not demand capital as
freely as it demands life; equally am I opposed to the action of
the young and unattached men who shrink from assuming their proper
responsibilities. That they would have held back if the conditions
of their life, whether favourable or unfavourable, had been the true
conditions of an enlightened citizenship, I sincerely doubt, that they
should have been forced to undertake as a duty what they should have
embraced as a privilege is matter for regret. Happily they will not go
unrewarded, they will see their errors, and they will come back to a
country they have helped to save with the keenest determination to make
it worth living in as well as worth fighting for.
XIV
WOMEN AND WAR
"Why is it," wrote an editor, criticising a view of women that I had
put forward, "why is it that woman is actually a war lover at heart, an
inciter to and encourager of war? Can you explain why, while some women
condemn fighting, the great majority do not shrink from it, and even
regard the fighting man as the proper object of their admiration?" It
was a challenge, that I will answer to the best of my ability.
In the first place, I must admit that the statement is true about
countless women. Only yesterday I had a letter from a friend to whom
I had written my sympathy; her only son was killed in the British
advance. "I need no more consolation," she wrote. "Harry's colonel has
sent me a letter telling me of my poor boy's bravery. I am proud to
think that he has lived up to our tradition--ours has always been a
fighting family, you know."
I would not criticise a bereaved mother; I can never forget that my
eldest son has been in the fighting line, that my other boy gave up
Cambridge for the aviation school, and is now flying in France,
that my son-in-law is a soldier, and that of many friends and a few
relatives only the memory remains. But I feel, from the bottom of my
heart, that the death and glory idea is wrong; that the attraction of
medals, ribbons, stars, orders, titles and uniforms and brass buttons
is false, and that an ever-increasing number of women are conscious of
the truth, not only here but in France, Germany, Austria, Russia and
Italy.
That consciousness cannot become fully articulate until the war is
over. For each belligerent nation the duty at this moment is clear--it
must fight for what it holds to be right, must struggle for victory
until the end. When that end comes I believe that the reign of the old
ideas will end with it, and that all women will recognise the truth
that is already clear as daylight to the minority.