war upon Servia, Russia armed to protect a kindred country, and then
with the swiftness of years of premeditation Germany declared war upon
Russia and struck at France, striking through the peaceful land of
Belgium, a little country we English had pledged ourselves to protect, a
little country that had never given Germany the faintest pretext for
hostility, and in the hope of finding France unready. Of course, we went
to war. If we had not done so, could we English have ever looked the
world in the face again?
And it is with scarcely a dissentient voice that England is at war.
Never were the British people so unanimous; all Ireland is with us, and
the conscience of all the world. And, now this war has begun, we are
resolved to put an end to militarism in the world for evermore. We are
not fighting to destroy Germany; it is the firm resolve of England to
permit no fresh “conquered provinces” to darken the future of Europe.
Whatever betide, all German Germany will come out of this war undivided
and German still. Her own “conquests” she may have to relinquish, her
Poles and other subject peoples, but that is the utmost we shall exact
of her. With the accession of Austria, Germany may even come out of this
war a larger Germany than at the beginning. We have no hatred of things
German and German people. But we are fighting to break this huge
fighting machine for ever—this fighting machine which has been such an
oppression as no native-born American can dream of, to every other
nation in Europe. We are fighting to end Kaiserism and Kruppism for ever
and ever. There, shortly and plainly, is our case and our object. Now
let us come to the immediate substance of this appeal.
We do not ask you for military help. Keep the peace which it is your
unparalleled good fortune to enjoy so securely. But keep it fairly.
Remember that we fight now for national existence, and that in the
night, even as this is written, within a hundred miles or so of this
place, the dark ships feel their way among the floating mines with which
the Germans have strewn the North Sea, and our sons and the sons of
Belgium and France go side by side, not by the hundred nor by the
thousand, but by the hundred thousand, rank after rank, line beyond
line—to death. Even as this is written the harvest of death is being
reaped. Remember our tragic case. Europe is full of a joyless
determination to end this evil for ever; she plunges grimly and sadly
into the cruel monstrosities of war, and assuredly there will be little
shouting for the victors whichever side may win. At the end we do most
firmly believe there will be established a new Europe, a Europe riddened
of rankling oppressions, with a free Poland, a free Finland, a free
Germany, the Balkans settled, the little nations safe, and peace secure.
And it is of supreme importance that we should ask you now—What are you
going to do throughout the struggle, and what will you do at the end?
One thing we are told in England that you mean to do, a thing that has
moved me to this appeal. For it is not only a strange thing in itself,
but it may presently be followed by other similar ideas. Come what may,
all the liberal forces in England and France are resolved to respect the
freedom of Holland. But the position of Holland is, as you may see in
any atlas, a very peculiar one in this war. The Rhine runs along the
rear of the long German line as if it were a canal to serve that line
with supplies, and then it passes into Holland and so by Rotterdam to
the sea. So that it is possible for any neutral power, such as you are,
to pour a stream of food supplies and war material by way of Holland
almost into the hands of the German combatant line. Even if we win our
battles in the field this will enormously diminish our chance of
concluding this war. But we shall suffer it; it is within the rights of
Holland to victual the Germans in this way, and we cannot prevent it
without committing just such another outrage upon the laws of nations as
Germany was guilty of in invading Belgium.
And here is where your country comes in. In your harbours lie a great
number of big German ships that dare not venture to sea because of our
fleet. It is proposed, we are told, to arrange a purchase of these ships
by American citizens, to facilitate by special legislation their
transfer to your flag, and then to load them with food and war material
and send them across the Atlantic and through the narrow seas, seas that
at the price of a cruiser and many men we have painfully cleared of
German contact mines, to get war prices in Rotterdam and supply our
enemies. It is, we confess, a smart thing to do; it will give your
people not only huge immediate profits but a mercantile marine at one
_coup_; it will certainly prolong the war, and so it will mean the
killing and wounding of scores of thousands of young Germans,
Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Belgians, who might otherwise have escaped.
It is within your legal rights, and we will tell you plainly now that we
shall refuse to quarrel with you about it, but we ask you not to be too
easily offended if we betray a certain lack of enthusiasm for this idea.
And begun such enterprises as this, what are you going to do for mankind
and the ultimate peace of the world? You know that the Tsar has restored
the freedom of Finland and promised to re-unite the torn fragments of
Poland into a free kingdom, but probably you do not know that he and
England have engaged themselves to respect and protect from each other
and all the world the autonomy of Norway and Sweden, and of Sweden’s
vast and tempting stores of mineral wealth close to the Russian
boundary. We ask you not to be too cynical about the Tsar’s promises,
and to be prepared to help us and France and him to see that they become
real. And this with regard to Scandinavia, is not only Russia’s promise
but ours. This is more than a war of armies; it is a great moral
upheaval, and you must not judge of the spirit of Europe to-day by the
history of her diplomacies. When this war is ended, all Europe will cry
for disarmament. Are you going to help then or are you going to thwart
that cry? In Europe we shall attempt to extinguish that huge private
trade in war material, that “Kruppism” which lies so near the roots of
all this monstrous calamity. We cannot do that unless you do it too. Are
you prepared to do that? Are you prepared to come into a conference at
the end of this war to ensure the peace of the world, or are you going
to stand out, make difficulties for us out of our world perplexities,
snatch advantages, carp from your infinite security at our Allies, and
perhaps in the crisis of our struggle pick a quarrel with us upon some
secondary score? Are you indeed going to play the part of a merely
numerous little people, a cute trading, excitable people, or are you
going to play the part of a great nation in this life and death struggle
of the old world civilisations? Are you prepared now to take that lead
among the nations to which your greatness and freedom point you? It is
not for ourselves we make this appeal to you; it is for the whole future
of mankind. And we make it with the more assurance because already your
Government has stood for peace and the observation of treaties against
base advantages.
Already the wounds of our dead cry out to you.
X
COMMON SENSE AND THE BALKAN STATES
The Balkan States never have been a problem, they have only been a part
of a problem. That is why no human being has ever yet produced even a
paper solution acceptable to another human being.
The attempt to settle Balkan affairs with the Austro-Hungarian Empire
left out of the problem has been like an attempt to deal with a number
of hospital cases in which the head and shoulders of one patient, the
legs of another, the abdomen of a third had to be disregarded. The bulk
of the Servian people and a great mass of the Rumanians were in the
Austro-Hungarian system, and it was the Austrian bar to any development
of Servia towards the Adriatic that forced that country back into its
unhappy conflict with Bulgaria. Now everything has altered. English
people need trouble no longer about Austrian susceptibilities, and not
merely our interests but our urgent necessities march with the
reasonable ambitions of the four Balkan nations.
Let us begin by clearing away a certain amount of nonsense that is said
and believed by many good people about two of these States. It is too
much the custom to speak and write of Servia and Bulgaria as though they
were almost hopelessly barbaric and criminal communities, incapable of
participation in the fellowship of European nations. The murder of the
late King and Queen of Servia, the assassination of Serajevo, the
foolish onslaught of Bulgaria upon Servia that led to the break-up of
the Balkan League, and the endless cruelties and barbarities of the
warfare in Macedonia, are allowed to weigh too much against the clear
need of a reunited Greater Servia, a restored Bulgaria, and the
reasonable prospect of a rehabilitated Balkan League.
Now there is no getting over the hard facts of these crimes and
cruelties. But they have to be kept in their proper proportion to the
tremendous issues now before the world. Let us call in a few figures
that will fix the scale. The Servian people number altogether over ten
millions, the Rumanians as many, there are more than twenty million
Poles, and perhaps seven millions Bulgarians. The Czechs and Slovenes
total six or seven millions, the Magyars exceed ten millions, and the
Ruthenians still under Austrian control four millions. It is manifest to
every reasonable Englishman now that very few of these sixty or seventy
million people are likely to be socially and politically happy until
they have got themselves disentangled from intimate subjection to alien
rulers speaking unfamiliar tongues, and it is equally manifest that
until they are reasonably content, the peace of the rest of Europe will
remain uncertain. So that it is upon these regions that the peace of
England, France, Germany, Russia and Italy rests.
The lives, therefore, of hundreds of millions of people must be
affected, for good or evil, by the sane re-mapping and pacification of
south-eastern Europe. In that sane re-mapping and pacification we are,
in fact, dealing with matters so gigantic that the mere assassination of
this person or the murder of that dwindles almost to the vanishing
point. It is surely preposterous that the murder of an unwise young
King, who subordinated his nation’s destinies to a romantic love affair,
a murder done, not by a whole nation, not even by a mob, but by less
than a hundred officers, who were at least as patriotic as they were
cruel, or even the net of conspiracy that killed the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, should stand in the way of the liberation and unity of
millions of Serbs who were as innocent of these things as any Wiltshire
farmer. All nations have had their criminal and sanguinary phase; the
British and American people who profess such a horror of Servia’s
murders and Bulgaria’s massacres must be blankly ignorant of the history
of Scotland and Ireland and the darker side of the Red Indians’ destiny.
If murder conspiracy was hatched in Servia, were there no Fenians in
Ireland and America? We English, at any rate, have not let the
highly-organised Phœnix Park murders drown the freedom of Ireland for
ever, or cause a war with America. The sooner we English and Americans
clear our minds of this self-righteous cant against the whole Servian
race because of a few horrors inevitable in a state of barbaric
disturbance, the sooner we shall be able to help these peoples forward
to the freedom and security that alone can make such barbarities
impossible. It would be just as reasonable to vow undying hatred and
pitiless vengeance against the whole German-speaking race (of seventy
millions or so) because of the burning and killing in Liège. Stifled
nations, outraged races, are the fortresses of resentful cruelty. This
war is no cinematograph melodrama. The deaths of Queen Draga and the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand are scarcely in this picture at all. It is not
the business of statecraft to avenge the past, but to deal with the
possibilities of the present and the hope of the future.
And the open possibility of the present is for us to bring about a
revival of the Balkan League, and identify ourselves with the reasonable
hopes of these renascent peoples. In that revival England may play an
active and directing part. The break-up of the first Balkan League was a
deep disappointment to liberal opinion throughout the world; but it was
not an irrevocable disaster. The wonder was, indeed, not the rupture but
the union. And the rupture itself was very largely due to the thwarting
of Servia, not by her associates, but by Austria. Now Austria is out of
consideration. For Rumania and for each of the three Balkan Powers,
there is a plain, honourable and reasonable advantage in a common
agreement and concerted action with us now. There are manifest
compensations for Greece in Epirus and the islands and—we can spare
it—Cyprus. For Bulgaria there is a generous rectification of Macedonia.
The natural expansion of the two northern States has been already
indicated. And should Turkey be foolish and blunder at this crisis, then
further very natural and quite desirable readjustments become possible.
What holds these States back from concerted action on our side now, is
merely the distrusts and enmities left over from the break-up of the
first Balkan League. They will not readily trust one another again. But
they would trust England. They would sit down now at a conference in
which England and Russia and Italy were represented, and to which
England and Russia and Italy would bring assurances of a permanent
settlement and arrange every detail of their prospective boundaries in a
day. They would arrange a peace that would last a century. England could
do more than reconcile; she could finance. And the attack upon Vienna
and the German rear would then be reinforced immediately by six or seven
hundred thousand seasoned soldiers.
Moreover, it is scarcely possible that Italy could refuse to come into
this war if a reunited Balkan League did so. With the Servians in
Dalmatia it would be scarcely possible to keep the Italians out of
Trieste and Fiume, and long before that earnestly awaited Russian
avalanche won its way to Berlin, this southern attack might be in
Vienna. The time when the scope of this war could be restricted is past
long ago, and every fresh soldier who goes into action now shortens the
agony of Europe.
But it is not with the immediate military advantages of a Balkan League
that I am most concerned. A Balkan League of Peace, for mutual
protection, will be an absolute necessity in a regenerated Europe. It is
necessary for the tranquillity of the world. It is necessary if the
Wiltshire farmer is to herd his sheep in peace; it is necessary if
people are to be prosperous and happy in Chicago and Yokohama. Perhaps
“Balkan League” is now an insufficiently extensive word, since Rumania
is not in the Balkan Peninsula, and Italy must necessarily be involved
in any enduring settlement. But it is clear that the settlement of
Europe upon liberal lines involves the creation of these various
ten-to-twenty-million-people States, none of them powerful enough to be
secure alone, but amounting in the aggregate to the greatest power in
Europe, and it is equally clear that they must be linked by some common
bond and understanding.
There can be no doubt of the very serious complication of all these
possibilities by the jerry-built dynastic interests that have been
unhappily run up in these new States. It is unfortunate that we have to
reckon not only with peoples but kings. Such a monarchy as that of
Servia or Bulgaria narrows, personifies, intensifies and misrepresents
national feeling. National hatreds and national ambitions can no doubt
be at times very malign influences in the world’s affairs, but it is the
greed and vanities of exceptional monarchs, of the Napoleons and
Fredericks the Great, and so forth, that bring these vague, vast
feelings to an edge and a crisis. And it will be these same concentrated
and over individualised purposes, these little gods of the coin and
postage stamp that will stand most in the way of a reasonable
Schweitzerisation and pacification of south-eastern Europe. The more
clearly this is recognised in Europe now, the less likely are they, the
less able will they be to obstruct a sane settlement. On our side, at
least, this is a war of nations and not of princes.
It is for that reason that we have to make the discussion of these
national arrangements as open and public as we possibly can. This is not
a matter for the quiet little deals of the diplomatists. This is no
chance for kings. All the civilised peoples of the earth have to form an
idea of the general lines upon which a pacific Europe can be
established, an idea clear and powerful enough to prevent and override
the manœuvres of the chancelleries. The nations themselves have to
become the custodians of the common peace. In Italy, indeed, this is
already the case. The Italian monarchy is a strong and Liberal monarchy,
secure in the confidence of its people; but were it not so, it is a
fairly evident fact that no betrayal by its rulers would induce the
Italian people to make war upon France in the interests of Austria and
Prussia. I doubt, too, if the present King of Bulgaria can afford to
blunder again. The world moves steadily away from the phase of
Court-centred nationalism to the phase of a collective national purpose.
It is for the whole strength of western liberalism to throw itself upon
the side of that movement, and in no direction can it make its strength
so effective at the present time as in the open and energetic promotion
of a new and greater Balkan League.
XI
THE WAR OF THE MIND
All the realities of this war are things of the mind. This is a conflict
of cultures, and nothing else in the world. All the world-wide pain and
weariness, fear and anxieties, the bloodshed and destruction, the
innumerable torn bodies of men and horses, the stench of putrefaction,
the misery of hundreds of millions of human beings, the waste of
mankind, are but the material consequences of a false philosophy and
foolish thinking. We fight not to destroy a nation, but a nest of evil
ideas.
We fight because a whole nation has become obsessed by pride, by the
cant of cynicism and the vanity of violence, by the evil suggestion of
such third-rate writers as Gobineau and Stewart Chamberlain that they
were a people of peculiar excellence destined to dominate the earth, by
the base offer of advantage in cunning and treachery held out by such
men as Delbruck and Bernhardi, by the theatricalism of the Kaiser, and
by two stirring songs about Deutschland and the Rhine. These things,
interweaving with the tradesmen’s activities of the armaments trust and
the common vanity and weaknesses of unthinking men, have been sufficient
to release disaster—we do not begin to measure the magnitude of the
disaster. On the back of it all, spurring it on, are the idea-mongers,
the base-spirited writing men, pretentious little professors in frock
coats, scribbling colonels. They are the idea. They pointed the way and
whispered “Go!” They ride the world now to catastrophe. It is as if God
in a moment of wild humour had lent his whirlwinds for an outing to
half-a-dozen fleas.
And the real task before mankind is quite beyond the business of the
fighting line, the simple awful business of discrediting and
discouraging these stupidities by battleship, artillery, rifle and the
blood and courage of seven million men. The real task of mankind is to
get better sense into the heads of these Germans, and therewith and
thereby into the heads of humanity generally, and to end not simply a
war, but the idea of war. What printing and writing and talking have
done, printing and writing and talking can undo. Let no man be fooled by
bulk and matter. Rifles do but kill men, and fresh men are born to
follow them. Our business is to kill ideas. The ultimate purpose of this
war is propaganda, the destruction of certain beliefs, and the creation
of others. It is to this propaganda that reasonable men must address
themselves.
And when I write propaganda, I do not for a moment mean the propaganda
with which the name of Mr. Norman Angell is associated; this great
modern gospel that war does not _pay_. That is indeed the only decent
and attractive thing that can still be said for war. Nothing that is
really worth having in life does pay. Men live in order that they may
pay for the unpaying things. Love does not pay, art does not pay,
happiness does not pay, honesty is not the best policy, generosity
invites the ingratitude of the mean; what is the good of this huckster’s
argument? It revolts all honourable men. But war, whether it pay or not,
is an atrociously ugly thing, cruel, destroying countless beauties. Who
cares whether war pays or does not pay, when one thinks of some
obstinate Belgian peasant woman being interrogated and shot by a
hectoring German officer, or of the weakly whimpering mess of some poor
hovel with little children in it, struck by a shell? Even if war paid
twelve-and-a-half per cent. per annum for ever on every pound it cost to
wage, would it be any the less a sickening abomination to every decent
soul? And, moreover, it is a bore. It is an unendurable bore. War and
the preparation for war, the taxes, the drilling, the interference with
every free activity, the arrest and stiffening up of life, the obedience
to third-rate people in uniform, of which Berlin-struck Germans have
been the implacable exponents, have become an unbearable nuisance to all
humanity. Neither Belgium nor France nor Britain is fighting now for
glory or advantage. I do not believe Russia is doing so; we are all, I
believe, fighting in a fury of resentment because at last after years of
waste and worry to prevent it, we have been obliged to do so. Our
grievance is the grievance of every decent life-loving German, of every
German mother and sweetheart who watched her man go off under his
incompetent leaders to hardship and mutilations and death. And our
propaganda against the Prussian idea has to be no vile argument to the
pocket, but an appeal to the common sense and common feeling of
humanity. We have to clear the heads of the Germans, and keep the heads
of our own people clear about this war. Particularly is there need to
dissuade our people against the dream of profit-filching, the “War
against German Trade.” We have to reiterate over and over again that we
fight, resolved that at the end no nationality shall oppress any
nationality or language again in Europe for ever, and by way of
illustration, we want not those ingenious arrangements of figures that
touch the Angell imagination, but photographs of the Kaiser in his glory
at a review, and photographs of the long, unintelligent side-long face
of the Crown Prince, his son, photographs of that great original Krupp
taking his pleasures at Capri and, to set beside these, photographs
pitilessly showing men killed and horribly torn upon the battlefield,
and men crippled and women and men murdered, and homes burnt and, to the
verge of indecency, all the peculiar filthiness of war. And the case
that has thus to be stated has to be brought before the minds of the
Germans, of Americans, of French people, and English people, of Swedes
and Russians and Italians as our common evil, which, though it be at the
expense of several Governments, we have to end.