Out of such talk revolution is born, and revolution will not be averted
by pretending that such words are not being spoken and that such
thoughts are not seething among our working-classes. It will only be
averted by cutting at the root of public suspicion, by cleansing our
political state of its corruption and folly, and by a clear, strong
call of noble-minded men to a new way of life in which a great people
believing in the honor and honesty of its leadership and in fair
reward for good labor shall face a period of poverty with courage, and
co-operate unselfishly for the good of the commonwealth, inspired by a
sense of fellowship with the workers of other nations. We have a long
way to go and many storms to weather before we reach that state, if, by
any grace that is in us, and above us, we reach it.
For there are disease and insanity in our present state, due to the
travail of the war and the education of the war. The daily newspapers
for many months have been filled with the record of dreadful crimes,
of violence and passion. Most of them have been done by soldiers or
ex-soldiers. The attack on the police station at Epsom, the destruction
of the town hall at Luton, revealed a brutality of passion, a murderous
instinct, which have been manifested again and again in other riots and
street rows and solitary crimes. Those last are the worst because they
are not inspired by a sense of injustice, however false, or any mob
passion, but by homicidal mania and secret lust. The many murders of
young women, the outrages upon little girls, the violent robberies
that have happened since the demobilizing of the armies have appalled
decent--minded people. They cannot understand the cause of this epidemic
after a period when there was less crime than usual.
The cause is easy to understand. It is caused by the discipline and
training of modern warfare. Our armies, as all armies, established an
intensive culture of brutality. They were schools of slaughter. It
was the duty of officers like Col. Ronald Campbell--“O.C. Bayonets” (a
delightful man)--to inspire blood-lust in the brains of gentle boys
who instinctively disliked butcher's work. By an ingenious system
of psychology he played upon their nature, calling out the primitive
barbarism which has been overlaid by civilized restraints, liberating
the brute which has been long chained up by law and the social code of
gentle life, but lurks always in the secret lairs of the human heart.
It is difficult when the brute has been unchained, for the purpose of
killing Germans, to get it into the collar again with a cry of, “Down,
dog, down!” Generals, as I have told, were against the “soft stuff”
preached by parsons, who were not quite militarized, though army
chaplains. They demanded the gospel of hate, not that of love. But
hate, when it dominates the psychology of men, is not restricted to one
objective, such as a body of men behind barbed wire. It is a spreading
poison. It envenoms the whole mind. Like jealousy.
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.
Our men, living in holes in the earth like ape-men, were taught the
ancient code of the jungle law, to track down human beasts in No Man's
Land, to jump upon their bodies in the trenches, to kill quickly,
silently, in a raid, to drop a hand-grenade down a dugout crowded with
men, blowing their bodies to bits, to lie patiently for hours in a
shell-hole for a sniping shot at any head which showed, to bludgeon
their enemy to death or spit him on a bit of steel, to get at his throat
if need be with nails and teeth. The code of the ape-man is bad for some
temperaments. It is apt to become a habit of mind. It may surge up again
when there are no Germans present, but some old woman behind an open
till, or some policeman with a bull's-eye lantern and a truncheon, or in
a street riot where fellow-citizens are for the time being “the enemy.”
Death, their own or other people's, does not mean very much to some who,
in the trenches, sat within a few yards of stinking corpses, knowing
that the next shell might make such of them. Life was cheap in war. Is
it not cheap in peace?...
The discipline of military life is mainly an imposed
discipline--mechanical, and enforced in the last resort not by reason,
but by field punishment or by a firing platoon. Whereas many men were
made brisk and alert by discipline and saw the need of it for the
general good, others were always in secret rebellion against its
restraints of the individual will, and as soon as they were liberated
broke away from it as slaves from their chains, and did not substitute
self-discipline for that which had weighed heavy on them. With all its
discipline, army life was full of lounging, hanging about, waste of
time, waiting for things to happen. It was an irresponsible life for
the rank and file. Food was brought to them, clothes were given to them,
entertainments were provided behind the line, sports organized, their
day ordered by high powers. There was no need to think for themselves,
to act for themselves. They moved in herds dependent on their leaders.
That, too, was a bad training for the individualism of civil life. It
tended to destroy personal initiative and willpower. Another evil of the
abnormal life of war sowed the seeds of insanity in the brains of men
not strong enough to resist it. Sexually they were starved. For months
they lived out of the sight and presence of women. But they came back
into villages or towns where they were tempted by any poor slut who
winked at them and infected them with illness. Men went to hospital with
venereal disease in appalling numbers. Boys were ruined and poisoned for
life. Future generations will pay the price of war not only in poverty
and by the loss of the unborn children of the boys who died, but by an
enfeebled stock and the heritage of insanity.
The Prime Minister said one day, “The world is suffering from
shell-shock.” That was true. But it suffered also from the symptoms of
all that illness which comes from syphilis, whose breeding-ground is
war.
The majority of our men were clean-living and clean--hearted fellows
who struggled to come unscathed in soul from most of the horrors of war.
They resisted the education of brutality and were not envenomed by the
gospel of hate. Out of the dark depths of their experience they looked
up to the light, and had visions of some better law of life than that
which led to the world-tragedy. It would be a foul libel on many of them
to besmirch their honor by a general accusation of lowered morality
and brutal tendencies. Something in the spirit of our race and in the
quality of our home life kept great numbers of them sound, chivalrous,
generous-hearted, in spite of the frightful influences of degradation
bearing down upon them out of the conditions of modern warfare. But the
weak men, the vicious, the murderous, the primitive, were overwhelmed
by these influences, and all that was base in them was intensified, and
their passions were unleashed, with what result we have seen, and shall
see, to our sorrow and the nation's peril.
The nation was in great peril after this war, and that peril will not
pass in our lifetime except by heroic remedies. We won victory in the
field and at the cost of our own ruin. We smashed Germany and Austria
and Turkey, but the structure of our own wealth and industry was
shattered, and the very foundations of our power were shaken and sapped.
Nine months after the armistice Great Britain was spending at the rate
of £2,000,000 a day in excess of her revenue. She was burdened with
a national debt which had risen from 645 millions in 1914 to 7,800
millions in 1919. The pre-war expenditure of £200,000,000 per annum on
the navy, army, and civil service pensions and interest on national debt
had risen to 750 millions.
Our exports were dwindling down, owing to decreased output, so that
foreign exchanges were rising against us and the American dollar was
increasing in value as our proud old sovereign was losing its ancient
standard. So that for all imports from the United States we were paying
higher prices, which rose every time the rate of exchange dropped
against us. The slaughter of 900,000 men of ours, the disablement of
many more than that, had depleted our ranks of labor, and there was a
paralysis of all our industry, owing to the dislocation of its machinery
for purposes of war, the soaring cost of raw material, the crippling
effect of high taxation, the rise in wages to meet high prices, and the
lethargy of the workers. Ruin, immense, engulfing, annihilating to our
strength as a nation and as an empire, stares us brutally in the eyes
at the time I write this book, and I find no consolation in the thought
that other nations in Europe, including the German people, are in the
same desperate plight, or worse.