The War Years
GILBERT WAS TAKING up life again and with it the old friendships and
the old debates, in the new atmosphere created by the war.
To Bernard Shaw he wrote:
June 12th, 1915
MY DEAR BERNARD SHAW,
I ought to have written to you a long time ago, to thank you for
your kind letter which I received when I had recovered and still more
for many other kindnesses that seem to have come from you during the
time before the recovery. I am not a vegetarian; and I am only in a
very comparative sense a skeleton. Indeed I am afraid you must
reconcile yourself to the dismal prospect of my being more or less
like what I was before; and any resumption of my ordinary habits must
necessarily include the habit of disagreeing with you. What and where
and when is "Uncommon Sense about the War?" How can I get hold of it?
I do not merely ask as one hungry for hostilities, but also as one
unusually hungry for good literature. "Il me faut des géants," as
Cyrano says; so I naturally wish to hear the last about you. You
probably know that I do not agree with you about the War; I do not
think it is going on of its own momentum; I think it is going on in
accordance with that logical paradox whereby the thing that is most
difficult to do is also the thing that must be done. If it were an
easy war to end it would have been a wicked war to begin. If a cat
has nine lives one must kill it nine times, saving your humanitarian
feelings, and always supposing it is a witch's cat and really draws
its powers from Hell. I have always thought that there was in Prussia
an evil will; I would not have made it a ground for going to war, but
I was quite sure of it long before there was any war at all. But I
suppose we shall some day have an opportunity of arguing about all
that. Meanwhile my thanks and good wishes are as sincere as my
opinions; and I do not think those are insincere.
Yours always sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
Bernard Shaw replied:
22nd June 1915
MY DEAR CHESTERTON
I am delighted to learn under your own hand that you have recovered
all your health and powers with an unimpaired figure. You have also
the gratification of knowing that you have carried out a theory of
mine that every man of genius has a critical illness at 40, Nature's
object being to make him go to bed for several months. Sometimes
Nature overdoes it: Schiller and Mozart died. Goethe survived, though
he very nearly followed Schiller into the shades. I did the thing
myself quite handsomely by spending eighteen months on crutches,
having two surgical operations, and breaking my arm. I distinctly
noticed that instead of my recuperation beginning when my breakdown
ended, it began before that. The ascending curve cut through the tail
of the descending one; and I was consummating my collapse and rising
for my next flight simultaneously.
It is perfectly useless for you to try to differ with me about the
war. NOBODY can differ with me about the war: you might as well
differ from the Almighty about the orbit of the sun. I have got the
war right; and to that complexion, you too must come at last, your
nature not being a fundamentally erroneous one.
At the same time, it is a great pity you were not born in Ireland.
You would have had the advantage of hearing the burning patriotism of
your native land expressing itself by saying exactly the same things
about England that English patriotism now says about Prussia, and of
recognizing that though they were entirely true, they were also a
very great nuisance, as they prevented people from building the
future by conscientious thought. Also, Cecil would have seen what the
Catholic Church is really like when the apostolic succession falls to
the farmer's son who is cleverer with school books than with
agricultural implements. In fact you would have learned a devil of a
lot of things for lack of which you often drive me to exclaim
"Gilbert, Gilbert, why persecutest thou me."
As to the evil will, of course there is an evil will in Prussia.
Prussia isn't Paradise. I have been fighting that evil will, in
myself and others, all my life. It is the will of the brave Barabbas,
and of the militant Nationalists who admired him and crucified the
pro-Gentile. But the Prussians must save their own souls. They also
have their Shaws and Chestertons and a divine spark in them for these
to work on. . . . What we have to do is to make ridiculous the cry of
"Vengeance is mine, saith Podsnap," and, whenever anyone tells an
Englishman a lie, to explain to the poor devil that it is a lie, and
that he must stop cheering it as a splendid speech. For an Englishman
never compares speeches either with facts or with previous speeches:
to him a speech is art for art's sake, the disciples of our favoured
politicians being really, if they only knew it, disciples of
Whistler. Also, and equally important, we have to bear in mind that
the English genius does not, like the German, lie in disciplined
idealism. The Englishman is an Anarchist and a grumbler: he has no
such word as Fatherland, and the idea which he supposes corresponds
to it is nothing but the swing of a roaring chorus to a patriotic
song. Also he is a muddler and a slacker, because tense and
continuous work means thought; and he is lazy and fat in the head.
But as long as he is himself, and grumbles, it does not matter. Given
a furious Opposition screaming for the disgrace of tyrannical and
corrupt ministers, and a press on the very verge of inviting Napoleon
to enter London in triumph and deliver a groaning land from the
intolerable burden of its native rulers' incapacity and rapacity and
obsolescence, and the departments will work as well as the enemy's
departments (perhaps better), and the government will have to keep
its wits at full pressure. But once let England try what she is
trying now: that is, to combine the devoted silence and obedience of
the German system with the slack and muddle of Coodle and Doodle, and
we are lost. Unless you keep up as hot a fire from your ink-bottle on
the Government as the soldier keeps up from the trenches you are
betraying that soldier. Of course they will call you a pro-German.
What of that? They call ME a pro-German. We also must stand fire. As
Peer Gynt said of hell, if the torture is only moral, it cannot be so
very bad.
I grieve to say that some fool has stolen my title, and issued a
two page pamphlet called Uncommon Sense about the War. So I shall
have to call mine More Common Sense About the War. It is not yet in
type: I haven't yet quite settled its destination. Any chance of
seeing you both if we drive over from Ayot to Beaconsfield some
Sunday or other afternoon.
Yours ever,
G.B.S.
Wells too was rejoicing over his recovery--
DEAR OLD G.K.C.,
I'm so delighted to get a letter from you again. As soon as I can I
will come to Beaconsfield and see you. I'm absurdly busy in bringing
together the Rulers of the country and the scientific people of whom
they are totally ignorant. Lloyd George has never heard of
Ramsey--and so on, and the hash and muddle and quackery on our
technical side is appalling. It all means boys' lives in Flanders and
horrible waste and suffering. Well, anyhow if we've got only obscure
and cramped and underpaid scientific men we have a bench of fine fat
bishops and no end of tremendous lawyers. One of the best ideas for
the Ypres position came from Robert Mond but the execution was too
difficult for our officers to attempt. So we've got a row of wounded
and mangled men that would reach from Beaconsfield to Great
Marlow--just to show we don't take stock in these damned scientific
people.
Yours ever,
H.G.
No one however mad could have called Gilbert a pro-German: it was
perhaps the only accusation the _New Witness_ escaped. But while he
largely agreed with Shaw's analysis of the Englishman as a natural
Anarchist and grumbler, while he believed in the voluntary principle
and disliked conscription, his general outlook was as different from
Shaw's as were the pamphlets they both wrote.
In a book addressed to a German professor G.K. frankly confessed the
real _Crimes of England_, for which she was now making reparation.
To any Englishman living in the native atmosphere the suggestion that
England had been preparing an aggression against Germany seemed more
than faintly ludicrous. We were not engaged in plotting in Europe--on
the contrary we were far too careless of Europe. And the funds of the
Liberal Party (which was in power) actually depended chiefly on
Quaker Millionaires who were noted pacifists and at whose bidding
national honour was jeopardised by our delay in declaring our support
of France. We were not prepared for war and probably only the shock
of the invasion of Belgium made certain our stand with France.
. . . It may seem an idle contradiction to say that our strength in
this war came from not being prepared. But there is a truth that
cannot be otherwise expressed. The strongest thing in sane anger is
surprise. If we had time to think we might have thought better--that
is worse. Everything that could be instinctive managed to be strong;
the instant fury of contempt with which the better spirit in our
rulers flung back the Prussian bribe; the instant solidarity of all
parties; above all, the brilliant instinct by which the Irish leader
cast into the scale of a free Europe the ancient sword of Ireland.*
[* _The Uses of Diversity_.]
Our crimes were in the past, not the present. The first had been when
we gave aid to Prussia against Austria, Austria which was "not a
nation" but "a kind of Empire, a Holy Roman Empire that never came,"
which "still retained something of the old Catholic comfort for the
soul." We had helped to put Prussia instead of Austria at the head of
the Germanies--Prussia which in the person of Frederick the Great
"hated everything German and everything good." Francophile as
Chesterton was, he yet had a certain tenderness for those old
Germanies which "preserved the good things that go with small
interests and strict boundaries, music, etiquette, a dreamy
philosophy and so on."
Our next crimes had been in calling Prussia to our aid against
Napoleon and in failing to assist Denmark against her. And by far our
worst had been the using of Prussian mercenaries with their ghastly
tradition of cruelty in Ireland in the '98.
There is in this little book one drawback from the historian's point
of view: its view of the past is so oddly selective. Doubtless it is
lawful to examine your own nation's conscience as you do your
own--and not your neighbour's. Yet history should be rather an
examination of facts than an examination of conscience. And
historically Richelieu's policies had had quite something to say in
the creation of Prussia; the conscript armies of the French
Revolution had first made Europe into an armed camp. It was an undue
simplification to insist exclusively on The Crimes of England.
But even while he did so Chesterton rejoiced that now at long last
England was on the right side, on the side of Europe and of sanity.
The _New Witness_ group had always seen the issue as their countrymen
were now suddenly beginning to see it. They had no sympathy with the
"liberal" thinking, made in Germany, that had in the name of biblical
and historical criticism been undermining the bases of Christianity.
Their love of logic and of clarity had made German philosophy
intolerable to them--it was wind, and it was fog. Finally their love
of France had always made them conceive of Europe as centering in
that country. For them there was one profound satisfaction even amid
the horrors of war: that the issues were so clear.
But were they as clear to the whole world? If not they must be made
so.
There were two main problems to be overcome in this matter, one of
which was less pronounced at the time than it became later--the
economic interpretation of history. Started by Karl Marx the idea that
all history can be interpreted solely by economic causes has come
since to have an extraordinary popularity even among those whose own
philosophy and sociology are most widely removed from Marx. It is a
view which Chesterton would always have dismissed with the contempt
it deserves. Both he and Belloc saw as the determining factor in
history, because it is the determining factor in human life, the free
will of man. This does not mean that they would deny that the
economic factor has often been powerful in conquering man's liberty,
or a motive in its exercise. But Chesterton regarded the present age
as a diseased one precisely because the money motive held so
disproportionate a place in it. He looked back to the past and saw
the world of today as almost unique in that respect. He looked
forward to the future and hoped for a release from it.
And as he looked back into the past he saw something in the history
of mankind far stronger than the economic motive--whether that mean
the strife for wealth or the mere struggle for subsistence. He saw
the all-pervading power of religion, which in bygone ages had
presided over man's activities and turned the exercise of that most
noble faculty free-will to the building of a civilization today
undreamed of.
But in 1914 it was easier to get away from the economic
interpretation of history than it was to overcome another difficulty
in the minds of those who had not the Chesterton vision of Europe,
and to whom it seemed that in a war between nations it was extremely
likely that all parties were more or less equally to blame.
"History," said Chesterton, "tends to be a façade of faded
picturesqueness for most of those who have not specially studied it:
a more or less monochrome background for the drama of their own day."
But the nature of that background and the vision of today's drama
will vary with the varying angle of historic vision.
There were two possible meanings for the statement that all nations
were to blame for the world war. All nations had gone away from God.
Motives of personal and national greed had ousted the old ideal of
Christendom. It might roughly be said that no nation was seriously
trying to seek the Kingdom of God and His Justice. International
Finance had become a shadow resting on all the earth, and it could
not have got this power if Governments had been governing solely for
the good of their peoples. "Bow down your heads before God," is the
invocation constantly used in the Missal during the penitential
season of Lent and the government of every nation needed this call to
repentance.
With this interpretation Chesterton would have agreed. All nations
were to blame for the predisposing causes that made a world-war
possible. But when we come to the question of actual responsibility
for making this particular war, the statement means something very
different and something with which Chesterton was prepared to join
issue. Against him those who disliked France or England, and saw the
history of those two countries as a history of Imperialism, were
saying: if Germany had not attacked France, France would have
attacked Germany; or: England would have been equally treacherous if
it had paid her--look at the Treaty of Limerick.
Chesterton kept imploring people simply to look at the facts. Germany
had in fact broken her word to France and attacked her. France had
not attacked Germany. Germany had invaded Belgium. England had not
invaded Holland "to seize a naval and commercial advantage; and
whether they say that we wished to do it in our greed or feared to do
it in our cowardice, the fact remains that we did not do it. Unless
this common-sense principle be kept in view, I cannot conceive how
any quarrel can possibly be judged. A contract may be made between
two persons solely for material advantage on each side: but the moral
advantage is still generally supposed to lie with the person who
keeps the contract."*
[* _The Barbarism of Berlin_, 15-16.]
The promise and the vow were fundamental to Chesterton's view of
human life. Discussing divorce he claims as essential to manhood the
right to bind oneself and to be taken at one's word. The marriage vow
was almost the only vow that remained out of the whole mediaeval
conception of chivalry and he could not endure to see it set at
nought. But even in the modern world there still remained some notion
of the sacredness of a solemn promise.
"It is plain that the promise, or extension of responsibility through
time, is what chiefly distinguishes us, I will not say from savages,
but from brutes and reptiles. This was noted by the shrewdness of the
Old Testament, when it summed up the dark, irresponsible enormity of
Leviathan in the words, 'Will he make a pact with thee?' . . . The
vow is to the man what the song is to the bird, or the bark to the
dog; his voice whereby he is known."* There were two chief marks
whereby it seemed to Chesterton that the Prussian invasion of Belgium
was fundamentally an attack on civilization. Contempt for a promise
was the first. He called it the war on the word.
[* Ibid., 32-33.]
The other mark of barbarism he called the refusal of reciprocity.
"The Prussians," he wrote, "had been told by their literary men that
everything depends upon Mood: and by their politicians that all
arrangements dissolve before 'necessity.'"* This was not merely a
contempt for the word but also an assumption that German necessity
was like no other necessity because the German "cannot get outside
the idea that he, because he is he and not you, is free to break the
law; and also to appeal to the law." Thus the Kaiser at once violated
the Hague Convention openly himself and wrote to the President of the
United States to complain that the Allies were violating it. "For
this principle of a quite unproved racial supremacy is the last and
worst of the refusals of reciprocity."**
[* Ibid., 37.]
[* Ibid., p. 60.]
If these two ideas were allowed to prevail they must destroy
civilization and so to Chesterton the war was a crusade and, to his
profound joy, was understood as such by the people of England. The
democratic spirit of our country "is rather unusually sluggish and
far below the surface. And the most genuine and purely popular
movement that we have had since the Chartists has been the enlistment
for this war." Chesterton loved the heroic humour of the trenches:
the cry of "Early Doors" from the boys rushing on death; the term
Blighty for England and congratulations on a severe wound as a "good
Blighty one"; the song under showers of bullets, "When It's Raining
Keep Your Umbrella Up." The English, he once said, had no religion
left except their sense of humour but I think he meant that they hung
out humour somewhat defiantly as a smoke-screen for other things.
Anyhow he doubted neither that the war was worth winning nor that it
could be won by our soldiers and sailors. And with the soldiers and
sailors stood the munition workers and the Trades Unions which had
sacrificed their cherished rights for the war period. If the only
danger to England was on the Home Front it was not, in his eyes, to
be found in the mass of the nation. Nor was he at first too
apprehensive of the actions of the Government. Asquith and Sir Edward
Grey might have been slow in declaring war but both were patriotic
Englishmen and with them stood with equal patriotism the mass of the
governing classes. If as has later been said the war had really been
brought about by English political and financial interests, it is
strange that Lord Desborough, head of the London house of J. P.
Morgan and a leading financier of England, should have lost his two
elder sons and the Prime Minister his eldest.
But the _New Witness_ did see two dangers at home which might
jeopardise the success of our armies in the field and bring about a
premature and dishonourable peace. These were international finance,
and the Press magnates.
Nothing so reminds me of how we were all feeling about the Daily
papers just then as finding this letter to E. C. Bentley (dated July
20, 1915):
I was delighted to hear from you though very sorry to hear you have
been bad. I mean physically bad; morally and intellectually you have
evidently been very good. Seriously, I think you have done something
to save this country; for the _Telegraph_ continues to be almost the
only paper that the crisis has sobered and not tipsified. I take it
in myself and know many others who do so. Part of the fun about
'Armsworth is that quite a lot of old ladies of both sexes go about
distinguishing elaborately between the _Daily Mail_ and the _Times_.*
It is a stagnant state of mind created in people who have never been
forced by revolution or other public peril to distinguish between the
things they are used to and the thoughts for which the things are
supposed to stand. If you printed the whole of Ally Sloper's Half
Holiday and called it the Athenaeum, they would read it with unmoved
faces. So long as St. Paul's Cathedral stood in the usual place they
would not mind if there was a Crescent on top of it instead of a
Cross. By the way, I see the Germans have actually done what I
described as a wild fancy in the Flying Inn; combined the Cross and
the Crescent in one ornamental symbol. . . .
[* Both these papers were then owned by the same man--Alfred
Harmsworth, who had become Lord Northcliffe.]
I am inclined to think that the attack upon Harmsworth which the _New
Witness_ developed attributed too much to purposed malice and did not
allow enough for the journalistic craving for news and for "scoops."
Probably some of the posters and articles to which they objected were
not the work of Lord Northcliffe but of some young journalist anxious
to sell his paper. Nevertheless the _New Witness_ attack was not only
largely justified but was also remarkably courageous. The staff of
the _New Witness_ were themselves journalists and men of letters. In
both capacities as powerful a newspaper owner as Lord Northcliffe
could damage them severely--and did. Never henceforward would any of
them be able to write in one of his numerous papers, never would one
of their books receive a favourable review. For Belloc did not
hesitate to call Lord Northcliffe a traitor for the way in which he
had attacked Kitchener, while Cecil amused himself by reviewing and
pointing out the illiteracy of that strange peer's own writing. Later
too when the Harmsworth papers were in full cry for the fall of
Asquith and the substitution of Lloyd George, the _New Witness_ took
a strong stand. They pointed out too the way in which censorship was
exercised against the smaller newspapers while the Northcliffe press
seemed immune. Here was the fundamental danger. Whatever the motive,
some of the attacks and articles printed were undoubtedly calculated,
in military language, to cause alarm and despondency. It was
appalling that in time of war this should be permitted; and, as they
saw it, permitted because the Harmsworth millions had been used to
secure a hold on certain politicians. To the _New Witness_ "George"
was simply Harmsworth's man.
Meanwhile at Easter, 1916, came the awful tragedy of the Irish
rising. Chesterton had fallen into the sleep of his long illness soon
after the splendid gesture in which Redmond had offered the sword of
Ireland to the allied cause. And there seems little doubt that in
making this offer Redmond had with him, for the last time, the people
of Ireland. Recruiting began well but that awful fate of stupidity
that seems to overtake every Englishman dealing with Ireland even now
was overwhelming the two countries. Sir Francis Vane, an Irish
officer in the British Army, described in a series of articles in the
_New Witness_ the blunders made in the recruiting campaign: such
things as prominent Protestant Unionists being brought to the fore,
national sentiment discouraged, waving of Union Jacks, appeals to
patriotism not for Ireland but for England.
Vane himself found his attempt at recruiting on national lines
unpopular with authority and in the midst of his successful effort
was recalled to England. Still, though recruiting slackened, the
cause of the Allies remained in Ireland the popular cause and the
Easter Rising was the work only of a handful of men. Its immediate
cause was the fact that although the Home Rule Bill had been passed
and was on the Statute Book its operation was again deferred. All
Irishmen saw this as a breach of faith yet the majority were not at
that time behind the rising. The severity of its repression turned
it almost overnight into a national cause and erected yet another
barrier against friendship between England and Ireland.
For this friendship Chesterton longed ardently and worked
passionately, nor did he believe the barriers insurmountable. He even
held that there was between the people of the two countries a natural
amity. "There is something common to all the Britons, which even
Acts of Union have not torn asunder. The nearest name for it is
insecurity, something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge
of things. Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humour without
wit, perplex their critics and perplex themselves. Their souls are
fretted like their coasts."* The Irish and the English had suffered
oppression at the same hands--those of the rulers of England. If
Prussian soldiers had been used against Irish peasants, so too had
they been used against English Chartists. A typical Englishman,
William Cobbett, had suffered fine and long imprisonment because of
his protest against the flogging of an English soldier by a German
mercenary.
[* _A Short History of England_, p. 7.]
"Telling the truth about Ireland," wrote Chesterton, "is not very
pleasant to a patriotic Englishman; but it is very patriotic."* For
the lack of the essential patriotism of admitting past sin the rulers
of England were perpetuating an evil that many of them sincerely
desired to end. For this was a case where the right road could only
be found by retracing the steps of a long road of wrong.
[* _The Crimes of England_, p. 57.]
Before the end of the war G.K. visited Ireland and in the book that
he wrote after this visit may be found his best analysis of all this
matter. Ireland, he believed, was making a mistake in not throwing
herself into the cause of the defeat of Germany, not because she owed
anything to England but because of what Prussia was and of what
Europe meant. Ireland had been the friend of France and the enemy of
Prussia long before England had been either; she would do well to
hold to her ancient allegiance.
It was true that Ireland had been betrayed by the Liberal promise of
Home Rule--but the men who betrayed her were the Marconi men! Redmond
had made the great mistake of his career when from motives of
patriotism for Ireland he had helped the party hacks of the
Government Committee to whitewash these men, who had gone on to
betray Ireland as they were then betraying England. England too
needed Home Rule. England too needed deliverance from her "degenerate
and unworthy governing class."
There are a few pages in _Irish Impressions_--now out of print-which
find their place here in illustration of what he meant by his
championship of nationality:
A brilliant writer . . . once propounded to me his highly personal
and even perverse type of internationalism by saying, as a sort of
unanswerable challenge, "Wouldn't you rather be ruled by Goethe than
by Walter Long?" I replied that words could not express the wild love
and loyalty I should feel for Mr. Walter Long, if the only
alternative were Goethe. I could not have put my own national case in
a clearer or more compact form. I might occasionally feel inclined to
kill Mr. Long; but under the approaching shadow of Goethe, I should
feel more inclined to kill myself. That is the deathly element in
denationalisation; that it poisons life itself, the most real of all
realities. . . .
Some people felt it an affectation that the Irish should put up their
street signs in Gaelic but G.K. defended it. "It is well to remember
that these things, which we also walk past every day, are exactly the
sort of things that always have, in the nameless fashion, the
national note."
It is this sensation of stemming a stream, of ten thousand things
all pouring one way, labels, titles, monuments, metaphors, modes of
address, assumptions in controversy, that make an Englishman in
Ireland know that he is in a strange land. Nor is he merely
bewildered, as among a medley of strange things. On the contrary, if
he has any sense, he soon finds them united and simplified to a
single impression, as if he were talking to a strange person. He
cannot define it, because nobody can define a person, and nobody can
define a nation. He can only see it, smell it, hear it, handle it,
bump into it, fall over it, kill it, be killed for it, or be damned
for doing it wrong. He must be content with these mere hints of its
existence; but he cannot define it, because it is like a person, and
no book of logic will undertake to define Aunt Jane or Uncle William.
We can only say, with more or less mournful conviction, that if Aunt
Jane is not a person, there is no such thing as a person. And I say
with equal conviction that if Ireland is not a nation, there is no
such thing as a nation. . . .
* * * *
In September 1916 Cecil Chesterton bade farewell to the _New
Witness_. He was in the army as a private in the East in the East
Surreys, and G.K. took over the editorship.
I like Chesterton's paper, the _New Witness_ [wrote an American
journalist in the _New York Tribune_ (no, _not_ yet Herald-Tribune)],
since G.K.C. has taken it over. . . . Gilbert Chesterton seems to me
the best thing England has produced since Dickens. . . . I like the
things he believes in, and I hate sociological experts and
prohibitionists and Uhlan officers, which are the things he hates. I
feel in him that a very honest man is speaking. . . . I like his
impudence to Northcliffe. . . . As a journalist Chesterton gets only
about a quarter of himself into action. But even a quarter of
Chesterton is good measure. . . . He works very hard at his
journalism. That is why he doesn't do it as well as his careless
things, which give him fun. But for all that there is no other
editorial page in England or the United States written with the snap,
wit and honest humanity of his paragraphs. I hope he won't blunt
himself by overwork. It would be an international loss if that sane,
jolly mind is bent to routine. England has need of him.
The overwork and the high quality of it were alike undeniable, but
after the long repose of his illness G.K. seemed like a giant
refreshed and ready to run his course. Each week's _New Witness_ had
an Editorial, besides the paragraphs of which the _New York Tribune_
speaks (not all of these however written by himself), and a signed
article under the suggestive general heading "At the Sign of the
World's End." The difference between articles and a real book, and
the degree of work needed to turn the one into the other, may be seen
if the essays on Marriage in the paper be compared with _The
Superstition of Divorce_ for which they furnished material, and those
on Ireland with _Irish Impressions_. There were besides very many
articles in other papers English and American and he was also writing
his _History of England_.
If all Englishmen had kept the same unwavering gaze at reality as
Chesterton much of what he called "the rather feeble-minded reaction"
that followed the war might have been avoided and with it the advent
of Hitler. Particularly he opposed the tendency to call "Kaiserism"
what is now called "Hitlerism" and should always be called
Prussianism. While agreeing that care should be taken not to write of
German atrocities that could not be substantiated he insisted that
there was no ground for forgetting or ignoring the findings of the
American enquiry in Belgium which had established more than enough.
These horrors, the bombing of civilians, shelling of open towns and
sinking of passenger ships culminating with the Lusitania, were in
the main what brought America into the war. Here, as with England,
Chesterton did not admit as primary what has since been so
exclusively stressed--the economic motive. Here as with England he
took the volunteer army as one great proof of the will of a Nation.
And those of us who remember can testify that in America as in
England the will of the people was ahead of the decision of the
politicians.
On one point Chesterton's articles have a special interest: the
question of reprisals. When the Germans broke yet another of the
promises of the Hague Convention and initiated the use of poison gas
there was much discussion as to the ethics of reprisals and G.K. used
against reprisals two arguments one of which was a rare example of a
fallacy in his arguments. If a wasp stings you, he said, you do not
sting back. No, we might reply, but you squash it--you have as a man
an advantage over a wasp and so do not need to use its own weapons to
defeat it.
His other argument is far more powerful--is indeed overwhelming. If
you use, even as reprisals, unlawful weapons, it is harder to prove
you did not initiate them. And I remember well another feeling at the
time expressed by G.K. which was I believe that of the majority of
English people--if we use these things, if we accept the Prussian
gospel of "frightfulness" then spiritually we have lost the war.
Spiritually Prussia has conquered: as she has engulfed the old
Germanies and, first imposing her rule, then gained acceptance of her
ideas, so it may be with us. Ideas are everything and the barbarians
destroy more with ideas even than by material weapons, horrible as
these may be.
Inclined at first to hope for the fruits of democracy from the
Russian revolution Chesterton was soon being reproached by H. G.
Wells for "dirty" suspiciousness about the Bolshevik leaders and
their motives. But the collapse of Russia and the defeat of Rumania
alike only strengthened the necessity of the fight to a finish with
Prussia that became as the months passed the absorbing aim of the
_New Witness_. In the treaties respectively of Brest-Litovsk and
Bukarest Germany imposed upon these two countries incredibly harsh
terms.
Thus wrote the _New Witness_ after the Treaty of Bukarest:
We should like to ask the Pacifists and Semi-Pacifists, who are
fond of official documents, if they have read the White Paper dealing
with the plain facts about the peace with Roumania. If they have a
single word to say on the subject, we should be much interested to
hear what it is. It makes absolutely plain two facts, both of which
have a sort of frightful humour after all the humanitarian talk about
no annexations and no indemnities. The first is that the conquerors
have annexed in a direct and personal sense beyond what is commonly
meant by annexation; the second is that they have indemnified
themselves by an immediate coercion and extortion, which is generally
veiled by the forms of a recognised indemnity. In annexing some nine
thousand square miles, they have been particular to attach whole
forests to the hunting-grounds of Hungarian nobles and the timber
of Hungarian wood merchants; not merely annexing as a conqueror
annexes, but rather stealing as an individual steals. Further, the
fun growing fast and furious, they have taken country containing a
hundred and thirty thousand Roumanians, merely because it is
uninhabited land. For the second point, we often speak figuratively
of tyrants enslaving a country; but Teutons do literally enslave. All
the males of the occupied land, which happens to be two-thirds of
Roumania, are driven to work on pain of death or prison. All this is
clear and satisfactory enough; but the White Paper keeps the best to
the last. It is this sentence we would commend to our peaceful
friends: "The German delegates informed the Roumanian delegates, who
were appalled at being required to accept such conditions, that they
would appreciate their moderation when they knew those which would be
imposed on the Western Powers after the victory of the Central
Empires."
The reminder was needed. Far less than most people was Chesterton
subject to that weakness of the human spirit that brings weariness in
sustained effort and premature relaxation. Prussia had not, he said,
shown any evidence of repentance--merely of regret for lack of
success. The Kaiser said he had not wanted this war. No, said
Chesterton, he wanted a very different war. Chesterton might and did
say later that he himself had wanted a very different peace--the
destruction of Prussia, the reconstruction of the old German
states--but at present he wanted only to fight on until this became
possible.
I do not think he ever hated anybody--but he did hate Prussianism as
the "wickedness that hindered loving," and he had no liking for "the
patronizing pacifism of the gentleman [it was Romain Rolland] who
took a holiday in the Alps and said he was above the struggle; as if
there were any Alp from which the soul can look down on Calvary.
There is, indeed, one mountain among them that might be very
appropriate to so detached an observer--the mountain named after
Pilate, the man who washed his hands."*
[* _Uses of Diversity_, p. 40 (Fountain Library)]
His keen imagination could visualize the sufferings caused by war.
Vicariously he knew something of the life of the trenches, for Cecil
like many another C. Man* had managed to get to France. A delightful
article on Comradeship shows, what letters from soldiers confirm, how
perfectly at home was Private Chesterton among his fellows and how
much loved by them.
[* English soldiers are classed A, B, or C, according to their degree
of physical fitness, and Cecil was in Class C.]
I can understand a pagan, but not a Christian, who simply dismisses
the suffering of our soldiers as useless. He is like Dr. Hyde
scorning Father Damien or like those who cried at the foot of the
Cross: He saved others, Himself He cannot save. They saved others
these men, their suffering was that of the human race whose head is
Christ. With Him they bore, even if they knew it not, that mysterious
burden of humanity that makes some men question God's existence but
draws others into conscious membership of His mystical body. Many
were so drawn in those days and there seemed a new lifting up of the
Cross. The _New Witness_ does, I think, lack one note a little. They
were too busy hating Prussianism to give thought to the Christian
command to love Prussians, whose sufferings too were those of
humanity.
Into the opposite error there was no risk that they would fall. Never
for them would heroism be belittled in the name of the very horrors
it was encountering. In one article Belloc touched on this strange
perversion and reminded his readers that the power to ravage and
destroy was not really a new result of modern machinery. Attila and
his Huns had inflicted even greater devastation and had left a desert
behind them. Barbarism in its nature was destructive and we were
encountering barbarism. In so doing we were acting the part of
Christian men.
But the old fights still had to be waged on the home front: against
the money power and against what the _New Witness_ called Prussianism
at home. Unceasingly they battled for fair treatment for soldiers'
wives and children, for freedom from unmeaning and unnecessary
regulations, against the profiteering by big firms and the consequent
crushing of small. About two thousand small butchers' shops for
instance had to close at the very beginning of the war owing to a
cornering of supplies by the large firms. Against this and all the
ramifications of the meat "scandal" the _New Witness_ struggled,
publishing, they claimed, facts unpublished elsewhere and inspiring
questions in the House of Commons. Belloc's irony, Chesterton's wit,
point these articles and make them worth reading as literature; and
there is some of the old fooling. A further series on the Servile
State is attacked by Shaw who thinks that Belloc, since he is not a
Socialist, must be a follower of Herbert Spencer! G.K. accounts for
this by saying that Shaw had not read Belloc. "How do you know,"
retorts Shaw, "it is not Herbert Spencer I have not read? Suppose you
had your choice of not reading a book by Belloc and not reading one
by Spencer which would you choose? Hang it all, be reasonable."
The economic front was never abandoned and the paper continued to
attack all forms of Socialism including the recreation of Bumble by
Mrs. Sidney Webb, with all the regimentation of the poor "for their
own good" that Bumble represented. The inner secrets of the Fabian
Office are unfolded by Shaw in a letter to Gilbert (dated Aug. 6,
1917).
MY DEAR G.K.C.
If you want to expose a scandalous orgy in the _New Witness_, you
may depend on the following as being a correct account by an eye
witness.
You know that there is a body called The Fabian Research
Department, of which I have the hollow honour to be Perpetual Grand,
the real moving spirit being Mrs. Sidney Webb. A large number of
innocent young men and women are attracted to this body by promises
of employment by the said Mrs. S.W. in works of unlimited and
inspiring uplift, such as are unceasingly denounced, along with
Marconi and other matters, in your well-written organ.
Well, Mrs. Sidney Webb summoned all these young things to an
uplifting At Home at the Fabian office lately. They came in crowds
and sat at her feet whilst she prophesied unto them, with occasional
comic relief from the unfortunate Perpetual Grand. At the decent hour
of ten o'clock, she bade them good night and withdrew to her own
residence and to bed. For some accidental reason or other I lingered
until, as I thought, all the young things had gone home. I should
explain that I was in the two pair back. At last I started to go home
myself. As I descended the stairs I was stunned by the most infernal
din I have ever heard, even at the front, coming from the Fabian
Hall, which would otherwise be the back yard. On rushing to this
temple I found the young enthusiasts sprawling over tables, over
radiators, over everything except chairs, in a state of scandalous
abandonment, roaring at the tops of their voices and in a quite
unintelligible manner a string of presumably obscene songs,
accompanied on the piano with frantic gestures and astonishing
musical skill by a man whom I had always regarded as a respectable
Fabian Researcher, but who now turned out to be a Demon Pianist
out-Heroding (my secretary put in two rs, and explains that she was
thinking of Harrods) Svengali. A horribly sacrilegious character was
given to the proceedings by the fact that the tune they were singing
when I entered was Luther's hymn _Eine Feste Burg ist Unser Gott_. As
they went on (for I regret to say that my presence exercised no
restraint whatever) they sang their extraordinary and
incomprehensible litany to every tune, however august its
associations, which happened to fit it. These, if you please, are the
solemn and sour neophytes whose puritanical influence has kept you in
dread for so many years.
But I have not told you the worst. Before I fled from the building
I did at last discover what words it was they were singing. When it
first flashed on me, I really could not believe it. But at the end of
the next verse no doubt or error was possible. The young maenad
nearest me was concluding every strophe by shrieking that she didn't
care where the water went if it didn't get into the wine.* Now you
know.
[* The refrain of a poem in _The Flying Inn_.]
I have since ascertained that a breviary of this Black Mass can be
obtained at the Fabian Office, with notes of the numbers of the hymns
Ancient and Modern, and all the airs sacred and profane, to which
your poems have been set.
This letter needs no answer--indeed, admits of none. I leave you to
your reflections.
Ever
G.B.S.
"The Shaw Worm Turns on Wells" was a headline in the _New Witness_
over a vigorous and light-hearted attack. The others were apt to
score off Wells in these exchanges because he lost light-heartedness
and became irritable. Even with Gilbert he sometimes broke out,
although in a calmer moment he told Shaw that to get angry with
Chesterton was an impossibility. With Cecil Chesterton it was only
too easy to get angry at any rate as he appeared in the _New Witness_.
But I think when he heard Cecil was in France Wells must have
regretted one of the letters he wrote to Gilbert, just before the
change of editorship.
It was curious, the contrast between the genial personality so loved
by his friends and the waspishness so often shown by Cecil and his
staff in the columns of the paper. "His extraordinary personality,"
writes E. S. P. Haynes, "wonderfully penetrated the eccentricity of
his appearance. His features were slightly fantastic and his voice
was as loudly discordant as his laughter; but the real charm and
generosity of his character were so transparent that one never seemed
to be conscious of the physical medium."
Yet with all my sympathy for many of the _New Witness_ ideas my
nerves jangle when I read the volumes of Cecil's editorship, and I
think jangled nerves explain if they do not excuse this outburst by
Wells:
MY DEAR G.K.C.
Haven't I on the whole behaved decently to you? Haven't I always
shown a reasonable civility to you and your brother and Belloc?
Haven't I betrayed at times a certain affection for you? Very well,
then you will understand that I don't start out to pick a needless
quarrel with the _New Witness_ crowd. But this business of the
Hueffer book in the _New Witness_ makes me sick. Some disgusting
little greaser named ---- has been allowed to insult old F.M.H. in a
series of letters that make me ashamed of my species. Hueffer has
many faults no doubt but firstly he's poor, secondly he's notoriously
unhappy and in a most miserable position, thirdly he's a better
writer than any of your little crowd and fourthly, instead of
pleading his age and his fat and taking refuge from service in a
greasy obesity as your Brother has done, he is serving his country.
His book is a great book and ---- just lies about it--I guess he's a
dirty minded priest or some such unclean thing--when he says it is
the story of a stallion and so forth. The whole outbreak is so
envious, so base, so cat-in-the-gutter-spitting-at-the-passer-by,
that I will never let the _New Witness_ into the house again.
Regretfully yours,
H. G. WELLS.
Gilbert replied:
11 Warwick Gardens, Kensington W.
MY DEAR WELLS,
As you will see by the above address I have been away from home;
and must apologise for delay; I am returning almost at once, however.
Most certainly you have always been a good friend to me, and I have
always tried to express my pride in the fact. I know enough of your
good qualities in other ways to put down everything in your last
letter to an emotion of loyalty to another friend. Any quarrel
between us will not come from me; and I confess I am puzzled as to
why it should come from you, merely because somebody else who is not
I dislikes a book by somebody else who is not you, and says so in an
article for which neither of us is even remotely responsible. I very
often disagree with the criticisms of ----; I do not know anything
about the book or the circumstances of Hueffer. I cannot help being
entertained by your vision of ----, who is not a priest, but a poor
journalist, and I believe a Free-Thinker. But whoever he may be (and
I hardly think the problem worth a row between you and me) he has a
right to justice: and you must surely see that even if it were my
paper, I could not either tell a man to find a book good when he
found it bad, or sack him for a point of taste which has nothing in
the world to do with the principles of the paper. For the rest,
Haynes represents the _New Witness_ much more than a reviewer does,
being both on the board and the staff; and he has put your view in
the paper--I cannot help thinking with a more convincing logic. Don't
you sometimes find it convenient, even in my case, that your friends
are less touchy than you are?
By all means drop any paper you dislike, though if you do it for
every book review you think unfair, I fear your admirable range of
modern knowledge will be narrowed. Of the paper in question I will
merely say this. My brother and in some degree the few who have
worked with him have undertaken a task of public criticism for the
sake of which they stand in permanent danger of imprisonment and
personal ruin. We are incessantly reminded of this danger; and no one
has ever dared to suggest that we have any motive but the best. If
you should ever think it right to undertake such a venture, you will
find that the number of those who will commit their journalistic
fortunes to it is singularly small: and includes some who have more
courage and honesty than acquaintance with the hierarchy of art. It
is even likely that you will come to think the latter less important.
Yours, sans rancune,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
P.S. On re-reading your letter in order to be as fair as I am
trying to be, I observe you specially mention ----'s letters. You
will see, of course, that this does not make any difference; to stop
letters would be to stop Haynes' letter and others on your side; and
these could not be printed without permitting a rejoinder. I post
this from Beaconsfield, where anything further will find me.
It ended as all quarrels did that anyone started with Gilbert:
DEAR G.K.C.
Also I can't quarrel with you. But the Hueffer business aroused my
long dormant moral indignation and I let fly at the most sensitive
part of the _New Witness_ constellation, the only part about whose
soul I care. I hate these attacks on rather miserable exceptional
people like Hueffer and Masterman. I know these aren't perfect men
but their defects make quite sufficient hells for them without these
public peltings. I suppose I ought to have written to C.C. instead of
to you. One of these days I will go and have a heart to heart talk to
him. Only I always get so amiable when I meet a man. He, C.C., needs
it--I mean the talking to.
Yours ever
H.G.
Through the war's progress Wells appeared to Chesterton to be
expressing with a powerful and individual genius not his own
considered views but the reactions of public opinion. As Mr. Britling
he saw the war through, and even called it "a war to end war." As Mr.
Clissold he asked of what use it had all been. Chesterton speaks of
him as a "rather unstable genius," and the genius and instability
alike can be seen in his meteor appearances in the _New Witness_ and
in his books. Several of these he sent to Gilbert, who wrote (Sept.
12, 1917):
I have been trying for a long time, though perpetually baulked
with business and journalism, to write and thank you for sending me,
in so generous a manner, your ever interesting and delightful books;
especially as divisions touching the things we care most about, drive
me, every time I review them, to deal more in controversy and less in
compliment than I intend. The truth and the trouble, is that both of
us are only too conscious that there is a Great War going on all the
time on the purely mental plane; and I cannot help thinking your view
is often a heresy; and I know only too well that when you lead it, it
is likely to be a large heresy. I fear that being didactic means
being disproportionate; and that the temptation to attack something I
think I can correct leads to missing (in my writing, not in my
reading) a thousand fine things that I could never imitate. It is
lucky for me that you are not very often a book-reviewer, when I
bring out my own shapeless and amateurish books.
In the _Autobiography_ G.K. calls Wells a sportive but spiritual
child of Huxley. He delighted in his wit and swiftness of mind, but
he summarized in the same book the quality which runs through all his
work.
I have always thought that he re-acted too swiftly to everything;
possibly as a part of the swiftness of his natural genius. I have
never ceased to admire and sympathise; but I think he has always been
too much in a state of reaction. To use the name which would probably
annoy him most, I think he is a permanent reactionary. Whenever I met
him, he seemed to be coming from somewhere, rather than going
anywhere. . . . And he was so often nearly right, that his movements
irritated me like the sight of somebody's hat being perpetually
washed up by the sea and never touching the shore. But I think he
thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the
mind. Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the
mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
No change of mood in the public meant any change in the _New Witness_
group. In a powerful article in reply to an old friend who asked for
peace because the war was destroying freedom, Belloc told him that
freedom had gone long since for the mass of Englishmen. "How many,"
wrote G.K., "pacifists or semi-pacifists . . . resisted the detailed
destruction of all liberty for the populace _before the war?_ It is a
bitter choice between freedom and patriotism, but how many fought for
freedom before it gave them the chance of fighting against
Patriotism?"*
[* _New Witness_, May 31, 1917.]
Again and again they touched the spot on the question of trading with
the enemy. In this as in all their attacks they made one point of
enormous importance. Do not, they said, look for traitors and spies
among waiters and small traders--look up, not down. You will find
them in high places if you will dare to look. They dared.
And here came in once more what was commonly regarded as a strange
crank peculiar to the Chesterbelloc--their outlook towards Jews.
Usually those who referred to it spoke of a religious prejudice.
Again and again the _New Witness_, not always patiently but with
unvarying clarity, explained. They had no religious prejudice against
Jews, they had not even a racial prejudice against Jews (though this
I think was true only of some of the staff). Their only prejudice was
against the pretence that a Jew was an Englishman.
It was undeniable that there were (for example) Rothschilds in Paris,
London and Berlin, all related and conducting an international family
banking business. There were d'Erlangers in London and Paris
(pronounced in the French style) whose cousins were Erlangers
(pronounced in the German style) in Berlin. How, the _New Witness_
asked, could members of such families feel the same about the war as
an Englishman? They could not, to put it at its lowest, have the same
primary loyalty to England or to Germany either. Their primary
loyalty must be, indeed it ought to be, to their own race and kindred.
Yet this was surely an excessive simplification. We have only to
remember that lately a son of the d'Erlanger house died gallantly as
an English airman: we have only to remember the thousands of Jews who
fought in our ranks in this war and the last. Very many Jews _are_
patriotic for England and for America: many were patriotic for
Germany. This, no doubt, makes the problem more acute, but any
discussion is nonsense that omits this certain fact. There are Jews
patriotic first for the country they live in, the country that gave
them home and citizenship, of which often their wives and mothers are
descended; there are others who feel that Jewry is their _patria_.
This was the fact the _New Witness_ could never forget. A Jew might
not be specially pro-German in feeling, yet his actions might help
Germany by being pro-Jewish. International Jewish trading _was_
trading with the enemy and was to a very large extent continuing in
spite of assurances to the contrary. Moreover international finance
was getting nervous over the continuance of the war as a menace to
its own future: it wanted peace, a peace that should still leave it
in possession in this country--and in Germany. Gilbert Chesterton was
passionately determined to cast it out.
He was a Zionist. He wished for the Jewish people the peaceful
possession of a country of their own, but he demanded urgently that
they should no longer be allowed to govern his country. Marconi still
obsessed him, and the surrender of English politics to the money
power seemed to him to represent as great a danger for the future as
Prussianism. For a moment the two dangers were the one danger, and
against them was set the people of England.
It was at this moment that Chesterton published his epic of the
English people which he called a History. Frank Swinnerton has told*
how this book came to be written. Chatto & Windus (for whom
Swinnerton worked) had asked G.K. to write a history of England: he
refused "on the ground that he was no historian." Later he signed a
contract with the same publishers for a book of essays, then
discovered that he was already under contract to give this book to
another firm. He asked Chatto & Windus to cancel their contract and
offered to write something else for them. Swinnerton's account
continues:
[* _Georgian Scene_, p. 93.]
The publishers, concealing jubilation, sternly recalled their
original proposal for a short history of England. Shrieks and groans
were distinctly heard all the way from Beaconsfield, but the promise
was kept. The _Short History of England_ was what Chesterton must
have called a wild and awful success. It probably has been the most
generally read of all his books. But while the credit for it is his,
he must not be blamed for impudence in essaying history, when the
inspiration arose in another's head (not mine) and when in fact no
man ever went to the writing of a literary work with less confidence.
You can find no dates in this History and a minimum of facts, but you
can find vision. The history professors at London University said to
Lawrence Solomon that it was full of inaccuracies, yet "He's got
something we hadn't got." G.K. might well have borrowed from Newman
and called it an Essay in Aid of a History of England. He showed
"something of the great moral change which turned the Roman Empire
into Christendom, by which each great thing, to which it afterwards
gave birth, was baptised into a promise or at least into a hope of
permanence. It may be that each of its ideas was, as it were, mixed
with immortality."
The English people had been free and happy as a part of this great
thing, cultivating their own land, establishing by their Guilds a
social scheme based upon "pity and a craving for equality," building
cathedrals and worshipping God, with the "Holy Land much nearer to a
plain man's house than Westminster, and immeasurably nearer than
Runnymede." All life was made lovely by "this prodigious presence of
a religious transfiguration in common life" and only began to darken
with the successful "Rebellion of the Rich" under Henry VIII.
Probably too big a proportion is given by Chesterton to the great
crime that overshadowed for him the rest of English history. Yet he
does justice in brilliant phrasing to the Eighteenth Century Whigs:
still more to Chatham and Burke and to Dr. Johnson whom he so loved
and to whom he was often compared. But supremely he loved Nelson "who
dies with his stars on his bosom and his heart upon his sleeve." For
Nelson was the type and chief exemplar of the ordinary Englishman.
. . . the very hour of his death, the very name of his ship, are
touched with that epic completeness which critics call the long arm
of coincidence and prophets the hand of God. His very faults and
failures were heroic, not in a loose but in a classic sense; in that
he fell only like the legendary heroes, weakened by a woman, not
foiled by any foe among men. And he remains the incarnation of a
spirit in the English that is purely poetic; so poetic that it
fancies itself a thousand things, and sometimes even fancies itself
prosaic. At a recent date, in an age of reason, in a country already
calling itself dull and business-like, with top-hats and factory
chimneys already beginning to rise like towers of funereal
efficiency, this country clergyman's son moved to the last in a
luminous cloud, and acted a fairy tale. He shall remain as a lesson
to those who do not understand England, and a mystery to those who
think they do. In outward action he led his ships to victory and died
upon a foreign sea; but symbolically he established something
indescribable and intimate, something that sounds like a native
proverb; he was the man who burnt his ships, and who for ever set the
Thames on fire.
The _Ballad of the White Horse_ had been a poem about English legends
and origins. The _History_ too was called a poem by the reviewers.
And it was. It was a poem about Falstaff and Sam Weller and even the
Artful Dodger who in so many British colonies had turned into
Robinson Crusoe. His rulers had tried to educate him, they had tried
to Germanize him and to teach him "to embrace a Saxon because he was
the other half of an Anglo-Saxon." All English culture had been based
for a century and more on ardent admiration for German _Kultur_. And
then--
. . . the day came, and the ignorant fellow found he had other
things to learn. And he was quicker than his educated countrymen,
for he had nothing to unlearn.
He in whose honour all had been said and sung, stirred, and
stepped across the border of Belgium. Then were spread out before
men's eyes all the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of his
organization; then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what light
we had followed and after what image we had laboured to refashion
ourselves. Nor in any story of mankind has the irony of God chosen
the foolish things so catastrophically to confound the wise. For the
common crowd of poor and ignorant Englishmen, because they only
knew that they were Englishmen, burst through the filthy cobwebs
of four hundred years and stood where their fathers stood when they
knew that they were Christian men. The English poor, broken in
every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long despoiled of property,
and now being despoiled of liberty, entered history with a noise of
trumpets, and turned themselves in two years into one of the iron
armies of the world. And when the critic of politics and literature,
feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks around him to find the
hero, he can point to nothing but a mob.