ON THE EVE
_Τῶνδε δὲ ὄυτε πλούτον tis τις τὴν ἒτι ἀπόλαυσιν προτιμήσας
ἐμαλακίσθη οῦτε πενίας ἐλπίδι, ὡς κᾶν ἒτι διαφογὼν αοτὴν
πλουτήσειεν, ἀναβολὴν τοῦ δεινοῦ ἐποιήσατο. Τὴν δὲ τῶν ἐναντίων
timôτιμωρίαν ποθεινοτέραμ αὐτῶν λαβὀντες καὶ κινδύνωυ ἀμα
τὂνδε κάλλιστον νομίσαντες ἑβουλήθησαν μετ, αύτοῦ τοὺς μὲν
τιμωρεῖσθαι, τὼν δε ἐφιεσθαι, ἐλπίδι μὲν τὸ ἀφανὲς τοῦ κατορθώσειν
επιτρέψαντες, ἕργῳ δὲ περὶ τοῦ ἤδη ὁρομόνου σφίσιν αυτοῖς
ἀξιοῦντες πεποιθέναι, καὶ ἑν αὐτῷ τῶ ἀμύνεσθαι καὶ παθεῖν μᾶλλον
ἡγησάμενοι ἢ [τὸ] ἐνδόντες σώζεσθαι, τὸ μὲν αἲσχρὸν τοῧ λὀγου
ἔφυγον, τὸ δ' ἔργον τῷ σόματι ὑπέμειναν καὶ δι, ἐλαχιστου καιροῦ
τύχης ἃμα ἀκμῆ τῆς δόξης μᾶλλον ἢ τοῧ δέος ἀπηλλάγησαν_
_Thucydides_, II. 42.
I
In choosing the late summer of 1914 for the "inevitable war",
which, to the eyes of Bernhardi and of his school, was to lead
ultimately either to "world-power" or "downfall", the German great
general staff chose the moment when its own organisation was most
efficient and when its adversaries were jointly and severally less
well able or inclined to accept the challenge than at any time
since the Anglo-French _entente_. At home, the Kiel Canal had been
reconstructed and the western strategic railways completed; abroad,
Russia, with her slow, cumbrous mobilisation, could be left out of
account for three weeks; and three weeks was thought sufficient
to crumple up an army which the French, true till death to their
policy of giving everything to their country but the money in
their pockets, had neglected to equip. Politically, too, France was
distracted by one of her periodical Caillaux scandals.
There remained Great Britain; and, if the French were uncertain
of armed support until the first units of the expeditionary force
landed, the German general staff may be excused for thinking that
the expeditionary force would never embark. For months it was
believed at the German Embassy in London that England was faced
with volcanic labour disturbances; Sir Edward Carson and Lady
Londonderry on one side, Mr. Asquith and Mr. Birrell on the other
had brought Ireland to the brink of civil war; and a government
which could not restrain unruly women from breaking windows and
burning churches was not an efficient machine for waging a war
in which the last ounce of ability and determination would tip
the balance. Never, since the day when the triple _entente_ first
loomed in the delirium of German statecraft as an aggressive
encircling movement in diplomacy, had it seemed flimsier and more
vulnerable to the first shock of the "inevitable" war.
This, as will be seen later, is not to hold the German government
solely responsible for the war nor to admit that war was
inevitable. The ancestral voices of the Chauvinists who in 1914
took most credit for their prescience in prophesying war might have
been stilled by the reflection that from the Fashoda incident to
the Lansdowne _entente_ they had predicted a no less inevitable
war with France, as, a generation earlier, they had predicted one
with Russia; the good-will, moreover, which Great Britain for
half-a-dozen years before the war extended to Russia and France had
its exact counterpart in the former good-will which obtained when
Lord Salisbury presented Heligoland to Germany and when, earlier,
English sympathy was on the side of Prussia in the war of 1870.
No war is inevitable until it breaks out, if then; and successful
diplomacy in effect and in intention is the history of inevitable
wars which have never taken place.
By 1914, as indeed in 1911, the blundering of four Foreign Offices
had produced a state of tension in which war was very difficult
to avoid; but the phrase-fed population which repeated in solemn
tones that Germany had "been preparing for this war for forty
years" seemed never to enquire why the war had not been fought by
instalments (as, all were told, Germany would assuredly do if Great
Britain did not play her part in 1914) and why the first attack had
not been launched in 1905 when Russia was exhausted by her struggle
with Japan in Manchuria and distracted at home by revolution and
experiments in constitution-making. So she might have rid herself
for many years of the Russian menace; and, if France had been drawn
in, it is inconceivable that so early as 1906 Great Britain would
have been drawn in too. The reconstruction of the Kiel Canal was
therefore unimportant; and, for an occasion of war, nothing less
flimsy than the assassination of an archduke was ever necessary.
And archdukes were plentiful. That Germany did not provoke a
conflict in 1905 suggests that she had not in fact devoted forty
years to preparing for a world-war and, further, that in that
year she did not regard a war of any kind as inevitable. By 1914
her view of world-politics had swung round; and, if other nations
contributed to bring war nearer, Germany must bear full and sole
responsibility for provoking it.
What had happened between 1905 and 1914 to bring about this change
of heart? Now that the war is at last over and truth is no longer
disguised or concealed for the purposes of propaganda, now too
that every nation of the world is wondering what benefit any one
has secured by nearly five years of unequalled sacrifice and
suffering, it is interesting to examine why this war should have
been considered inevitable. It is more than interesting, it is
vital; for the horrors of war are being forgotten even by those
who suffered most from them, and, in a few years' time, another
government of men who are themselves over military age may see,
with one eye, the "necessity" of war and, with the other, its
romance or glory, as, before 1914, the youth and age of England
alike saw chiefly the "romance" of the Napoleonic wars without
remembering the brutality of the press-gang, the nightmare
tortures of field surgery unaided by anæsthetics and antiseptics,
the calculated atrocities of the Peninsular campaign and the
unromantic, hideous reality of killing and maiming at all times.
If the war was inevitable, someone should surely have benefited by
it materially. Belgium, a pawn on the board of inevitability, has
been dragged from the conflict of the great powers and restored
for a few years at least to the number of small nations; and all
who went to the succour of Belgium may feel that they risked the
world to gain their own souls. Nevertheless, if Belgian neutrality
was indeed but the occasion of a war which the great powers could
no longer avoid and if no one of them is richer, stronger, safer,
healthier or happier, it would have been better not to undertake
it; and, before any have time to forget, all should take steps to
make other wars impossible.
Yet not even this boon has been secured. Since 1914 mankind has
gained the creed of the league of nations, which is reverently
mumbled with as much conviction as would be exhibited by a
well-bred agnostic who found himself shepherded to church and
discovered his neighbours mumbling the apostles' creed. The league
of nations has been accepted with the blithe vagueness of a man
who proclaims that he "believes in progress and all that sort of
thing." M. Clemenceau accepted it, with the reservation that it
must not remove the foot of France from the neck of her adversary;
President Wilson accepted it, with the reservation that he could
not bring pressure to bear on Congress if Congress refused to take
a hand in policing the world; Mr. Lloyd George accepted it, with
the reservation that the work of the league was to be entrusted
indefinitely to the supreme council of the allies.
It would be foolish to disparage a machine which is being
deliberately kept from functioning by a number of men too
suspicious or too lustful of power to give the fly-wheel its
preliminary spin: if that international duelling which men call
war is to be stamped out as, a hundred years ago, duelling between
individuals was stamped out in England, every nation must make a
vast preliminary sacrifice by surrendering the right of private
vengeance and aggression, as the individual perforce surrendered
his private right to punish an enemy or to protect his own
honour at the sword-point; there must no more be reservations in
arbitration between states than there are reservations to the
English law under which aggressor and aggrieved submit their case,
even where it involve their fortune and honour, to the judgement
of an impartial court. Want of courage or of honesty has kept
most champions of the league[23] from admitting, still more from
insisting on, this repugnant idea of sacrifice; the league remains
an abstraction; and already there is talk of an "inevitable" war
between the United States and Japan, "inevitable" rivalry in
ship-building between Great Britain and the United States.
Much is to be hoped from sane historical education; but, whatever
contribution the League of Nations may make to the peace of the
world, the first preparatory lesson, which no one as yet should
have had time to forget, is that every modern war is a complex
which includes "men disembowelled by guns five miles away" and
that a war between several of the great powers, conducted with
modern methods of destruction, is one in which no one, probably,
gains anything. The second lesson is that, as the late war struck
at combatants and noncombatants, neutrals and belligerents
impartially if not with the same force, involving German women
and children in the starving grip of the allied blockade and
spattering the walls of English coast-towns with the brains and
blood of British women and children slaughtered in some naval
bombardment or air-raid, so any future war, with its call for the
last resources of the nation, will convert into belligerents and
potential victims the old men who are left to till the fields and
the boys who stand at a lathe, the girls who fill a shell-case
and the mothers who suckle future soldiers: all are providing the
sinews of war; and the sinews of war have to be cut without too
nice concern for age or sex. The third lesson is that there is no
inherent, life-and-death antagonism between a Stettin dock-hand
and a Bristol dock-hand, between a London physician and a Berlin
physician, between Professor Gilbert Murray and Professor von
Willamowitz-Moellendorff. So, at least, one school would be
inclined to assert; and, if the assertion hold truth, it was no
less true in 1914. Why, then, was this unnecessary war, which has
impoverished the world in everything but bravery and suffering,
considered necessary?
There was much ill intention, it may be submitted; more ignorance;
and bad faith most of all. Russia and Germany stood, like every
autocracy, to gain by a successful blood-bath; the triumph of
a "spirited foreign policy" deflected attention from domestic
politics and strengthened the bonds of discipline. France nurtured
a spirit of hatred and revenge against the power which had after
many years curtailed her privilege of exploiting and disturbing the
German states for her own profit; she hankered, also, to recover
two provinces which had been torn from her side as ruthlessly
as she had torn them from the side of another. So much for ill
intention.
There was ignorance in the epidemic of international fear which
arose and spread from the day in 1892 when Germany made overtures
of friendship to Great Britain. Before the government of the day
had time to promulgate its historic doctrine of insularity, France
was overtaken by panic at the possibility of being encircled; to
counter an Anglo-German alliance which never came to birth, she
purchased the alliance of Russia by financing the trans-Siberian
railway and acquired at second-hand an interest in the thieves'
kitchen of south-east Europe and a responsibility for its
periodical conflagration. It was now Germany's turn to suspect an
encircling movement directed at her immense double frontier; the
uneasy suspicion turned to active alarm when the pacific geniality
of King Edward and the cautious diplomacy of Lord Lansdowne added
the resources of the world's greatest naval power to those of the
world's most numerous and of Europe's most scientific armies.
In such an atmosphere of suspicion, the "race of armaments"
progressed apace and was fostered by an economic hallucination
that, if Great Britain or Germany could destroy the other's trade,
the survivor would be roughly twice as rich--with the embarrassing
richness of a seller who brings his goods to a market where no
one has anything to offer him in exchange. In brief sun-bursts
of sanity, the manipulators of British foreign policy sickened
of the suspicion-disease which themselves had spread; there were
"peace talks" and peace missions: Mr. Churchill proposed a naval
holiday; Lord Haldane visited Germany, flitting between Potsdam and
Windsor, from one soveran to another, with a pregnant gravity and
consequence that would have turned the head of a man less prone
to personal vanity. By this time, unfortunately, the suspicion
was too deep-seated to be charmed away by the bilingual fluency
of a philosophic chancellor; the offer of a naval holiday, by a
power which was already predominant at sea, suggested some kind of
confidence trick; and the German government not only believed that
an attack was impending, but knew well that, if the parts had been
reversed, a boat-load of German Churchills and Haldanes would have
been sent with messages of good-will to England. And no one outside
the ranks of labour had proclaimed the simple doctrine that the
Nürnberg toy-maker had no inherent, life-and-death quarrel with the
toy-maker of Birmingham. So much for ignorance.
II
In England at least there was also bad faith.
A new chapter in British foreign policy began with the Anglo-French
_entente_: designed originally to end a long period of friction in
North Africa, it effectually ended the longer period of British
isolation from continental politics. So successful was its work as
an instrument of peace that a similar _entente_ was established
with Russia; and, as soon as London and Paris had disposed of North
Africa, London and Petersburg turned their attention to unsettled
problems in Persia. It was speciously claimed that the _entente_
principle reduced the menace of war: henceforth all international
differences could be accommodated by friendly chats between the
foreign ministers of _entente_ powers; if Germany would join the
happy family, the menace of war would vanish.
Those who sincerely hoped to see growing from the first _entente_an
informal United States of Europe revealed one blind spot in their
imagination. The object of war, seen from one angle, is to upset
the existing order in the interests of one belligerent; the object
of the _entente_ was to preserve the existing order; but, though
this brought substantial advantage to Great Britain, France and
Russia by putting North Africa and Persia out of bounds for
diplomatic skirmishing, it brought no corresponding advantage to
a country which joined the _entente_ after the spoils had been
divided. "You have helped yourselves," the German imperialist
might fairly say; "you not only refuse to let me participate,
but you wish me to guarantee you in permanent possession." The
German government refused to recognise the right of three nations
to distribute among themselves the unallocated territories of the
world; it presumed, further, to doubt their power; and the Agadir
episode was an experiment to test the strength of the _entente_. A
mailed fist and shining armour had prevailed against Russia when
Bosnia and Herzegovina were annexed; they were worth trying again.
The international crisis of 1911 proved that, _on this occasion
and on this subject_, Great Britain and France were not to be
intimidated; here, at least, the _entente_ was impregnable.
Would it always be as solid? Throughout Europe, after 1911, the
dominating question in foreign politics was whether the diplomacy
of Great Britain and of France could always count on the armed
backing of the other. Was there an offensive and defensive
alliance? In the absence of an alliance, was there a binding
obligation on either power to come to the assistance of the other?
The question was asked in the House of Commons:
"There is a very general belief," said Lord Hugh Cecil, on March
10th, 1913, "that this country is under an obligation, not a treaty
obligation, but an obligation arising owing to an assurance given
by the Ministry, in the course of diplomatic negotiations, to send
a very large armed force out of this country to operate in Europe.
That is the general belief."
To this Mr. Asquith replied:
"I ought to say that is not true."
A fortnight later he amplified his assurance by stating that
this country was not under any obligation, not public and known
to parliament, which compelled it to take part in any war. In
other words, if war arose between European powers, there were no
unpublished agreements, which would restrict or hamper the freedom
of the government, or of parliament, to decide whether or not Great
Britain should participate in a war. The use that would be made of
the naval and military forces, if the government and parliament
decided to take part in any war was, for obvious reasons, not a
matter about which public statements could be made.
If the House of Commons had received any assurance less
unequivocal, it is more than possible that the ministerial party
would have split and that the government would have fallen.
Though heavily reduced in numbers, the liberal majority was
identical in spirit with that which had been returned to support
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman; it was strongly radical, straitly
nonconformist and essentially pacific, knowing little of history
and nothing of foreign policy, neither understanding nor liking
continental adventures and occasionally resisting vehemently a
quarter-comprehended drifting which demonstrably absorbed in
armaments a revenue which might have been devoted to social reform.
It disliked Mr. Churchill's activities at the Admiralty, it
distrusted the liberal-imperialist elements which had risen to the
top of the cabinet in the persons of Mr. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey
and Lord Haldane; it had no quarrel with any one and, if its fears
had not been lulled by the prime minister's explicit assurances,
it would have taken steps to dissipate that danger of a European
war in which Great Britain began to be involved on the day when
she involved herself in continental politics. If the "obligation
of honour," disclosed in 1914, had been made public any time in
the three years preceding, if the government had fallen, if the
commons of Great Britain had shewn themselves to the pacific
minorities and majorities in every country of Europe as backing
their peace-talk with deeds, there would have been reality in the
professions of the foreign secretary; the naval holiday and Sir
Henry Campbell-Bannerman's hopes for proportional disarmament might
have had a hearing.
Perhaps there would have been no war.
When there was no obligation to participate, there was no cause for
uneasiness. It was not until August Bank Holiday, 1914, that the
House of Commons and the country discovered that "no obligation"
was the same as "an obligation of honour." Sir Edward Grey, in
guiding the House to war, used the words:
"For many years we have had a long-standing friendship with France
... how far that friendship entails ... an obligation, let every
man look into his own heart, and his own feelings, and construe the
extent of the obligation for himself."
There was no "obligation," as stated by Mr. Asquith; there was
"a debt of honour," as implied by Sir Edward Grey. "I ought to
say that is not true," Mr. Asquith had replied in reference to
an alleged "assurance given by the Ministry, in the course of
diplomatic negotiations, to send a very large armed force out of
this country to operate in Europe"; yet, to judge from another
passage in Sir Edward Grey's same speech, there was so much
telepathic harmony between the naval staffs of Great Britain and
France that the French fleet had already withdrawn to protect
their joint trade routes in the Mediterranean and was leaving
the northern and western coast of France to the hypothetical
protection of the British navy. An Irishman, unversed in the
niceties of parliamentary good faith, has to pause for thought.
Bishop Thirlwall, when challenged to say whether he did not
prefer compulsory religion to no religion at all, is reported
to have confessed that the difference was too subtile for his
comprehension; any one of sensitive conscience must confess that
his comprehension is not subtile enough to detect any other
difference between an "obligation" and a "debt of honour" than that
the debt of honour, unbacked by such sanction as is purchasable by
a sixpenny contract-stamp, is the more strongly binding. Because
there had been no exchange of signed notes, it is arguable that Mr.
Asquith was justified by legal training and usage in denying that
an obligation existed; Sir Edward Grey appealed to the chivalry of
the House of Commons and defied it to say that there existed no
obligation of honour.
Chivalry was stronger than resentment; the pacific majority, which,
in its innocence of legalism, had kept the government in power on
the assurance that no continental commitments existed, voted the
country into war on the assurance that its honour was involved.
It only remains to put on record the impression left by this hazy
obligation on the mind of one party to it:
"We had a compact with France," said Mr. Lloyd George in August,
1918, "that, if she were wantonly attacked, the United Kingdom
would go to her support."
In reply to an objection he added:
"There was no compact as to what force we should bring into the
arena. In any discussion that ever took place, either in this
country or outside, there was no idea that we should ever be able
to supply a greater force than six divisions."
Later still he borrowed the qualifying language of predecessors
who had tried to keep faith with France and Great Britain at the
same time:
"I think," he said, "the word 'compact' was too strong for use in
that connection. In my judgement it was an obligation of honour...."
So much for bad faith. The people of England, apart from occasional
panics and blood-lusts, are justified in claiming that they did not
want war; misled--and it is hard to refrain from adding "wilfully
misled"--by their rulers, they were given no chance of preserving
peace.
The public, which was left to pay the bill, is unlikely to know for
many years how many members of the government shared with the prime
minister and the foreign secretary the responsibility of misleading
the House of Commons and the country. It is fair to assume that the
terms of this compact, which was not an obligation, but only a debt
of honour, were divulged to Lord Haldane before he carried out his
peace mission to Potsdam; and to so consistent a champion of peace,
of retrenchment on armaments and of social reform as Mr. Lloyd
George, before he lectured Germany in his Mansion House speech
during the Agadir crisis of 1911; and to Mr. Churchill, before he
changed in a night from a "little-navy" man to a "big-navy" man;
and to any one else who, like Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Churchill,
forced the cabinet door to see what manner of skeleton lay behind.
It is equally fair to assume that the smaller fry of the ministry
were not admitted to the guilty secret; nothing but ignorance could
justify so egregious a speech as that in which one member informed
the public that "he could conceive no circumstance in which
continental operations would not be a crime against the people of
this country."
From Agadir to Armageddon, those who believed in the word of
the government believed also that nothing in the international
position of those days could involve Great Britain in a continental
war. Sir Edward Grey's adroitness and love of peace had steered
Europe through a Moroccan crisis and two Balkan wars; when Austria
hurled her bullying ultimatum at Servia, it was hoped that his
intervention would again be successful and that, whatever the
foreign ministers might achieve, the world would not commit suicide
in revenge for the assassination of an Austrian archduke.
No one troubled; no one, surely, had reason to trouble. London in
1914 was an exaggerated caricature of London in 1913 or 1912. The
carnival moved with the inconsequent speed and false recklessness
of a _revue_. Of the thousands who besieged every railway-station
on the last Friday of July, bound for all parts of England and for
every kind of holiday, few can have fancied that it was their last
holiday in a world at peace.
III
An average group, assembling at Paddington, found the train
service disorganised by a minor strike and whiled away its time
of idleness enforced by exchanging news of the Buckingham Palace
conference and of the menace to peace in south-eastern Europe.
One of the party had been lunching with the Pilgrims and retailed
a rumour that there had been a slight run on the Bank of England
that morning; this was in the early days of rumours, and all
listened respectfully, though it was difficult to see why English
depositors should be alarmed at the Balkan imbroglio. Another of
the party enlivened the journey by exhibiting new maps of Servia
and south-east Austria, but, once away from the neurosis of London,
no one was interested in anything but the threatened civil war in
Ireland.
Any one who asked perfunctorily for news of Servia was assured that
she would yield to superior force at the last moment. Though a
journalist might whisper confidentially that the fleet had sailed
from Portsmouth with coal stacked on deck, this was very far from
making war unavoidable: if Servia refused to comply with the terms
of the ultimatum, Russia would indeed come to her protection
against Austria; but then Germany would come to the aid of Austria
against Russia, while France would hasten to help Russia against
Germany. The same automatic widening of the conflict had been
threatened when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina; but, as it
was then recognised that one great power would bring in another, so
it would be recognised now and prevented; as Great Britain could
not face a European war for Bosnia, so she could not now face it
for Servia.
Similar conversations were taking place at that hour in thousands
of similar houses. Few of all who took part in these last meetings
imagined that within a few days they would be training for
commissions; no one dreamed that, before a year had passed, almost
every man at all these tables would have entered the army, that
some would be wounded, others already killed. To most, a general
war only became conceivable two days later, when the Sunday
newspapers reported that German troops had crossed the frontiers of
France and Luxemburg.
Thereafter, more quickly than dazed minds could take in, the
impossible became the actual. On Monday, though Kuhlmann's
efforts to localise the conflict brought a moment's hope, letters
and telegrams, flying from one part of the country to another,
convinced even the most sanguine that war--in which Great Britain
would be involved--was inevitable; and, before nightfall, every
town and village was ringing with Sir Edward Grey's speech.
"How far that friendship entails ... an obligation, let every man
look into his own heart, and his own feelings, and construe the
extent of the obligation for himself...."
The thousands who had scattered four days earlier to every part of
England poured back, on a common impulse, to London. There, all
felt, they would gain readier news, perhaps better news, when the
silence and isolation of the country had become unbearable. They
assembled at hundreds of country stations, debating to the last
whether the peace-trained navy would stand the test of war; and,
as they read the morning papers, they found that the full text of
the foreign secretary's speech made war a certainty, unless Germany
submitted to a diplomatic rebuff more disastrously humiliating than
the worst defeat in the field.
London that afternoon lay at the mercy of the first war-expositors.
Those who had most vehemently attacked the 1909 ship-building
programme now most loudly thanked God that England was an island
protected by a strong fleet; a few railed against the earlier
course of a foreign policy which had embroiled Great Britain
in continental rivalries; no one at that time or in that place
suggested that war could be averted. When the major issues had been
discussed, confidences were exchanged about the ministers who
had resigned and wobbled and withdrawn their resignations. Lord
Morley and Mr. John Burns had left the cabinet, followed by a small
number of minor office-holders; Lord Beauchamp and others, who had
refused to support a war for which the sanction of the country had
been neither obtained nor sought, renewed their allegiance to the
government when the neutrality of Belgium, which Great Britain
was bound by treaty to defend, was violated; but the champions of
peace, who had vowed that British troops should only leave England
over their dead bodies, and the opponents of intervention, who had
explained to wavering colleagues that Great Britain was under no
international obligation to take part, remained snugly if silently
in office. The fleet, it was now heard, had been ordered to take
up war-stations and to seal the German forces in port before
the ultimatum was issued; the expeditionary force, it was also
heard, had received at least preliminary mobilization-orders while
war hung yet in the balance; and so quickly do moral standards
decline when personal security is threatened that those who had
attacked Germany for her too timely massing of troops congratulated
themselves that in England also there were men of laudable
vigilance and decision.
And, like punctuation-marks at the end of every sentence, came
interruptions from men torn out of familiar surroundings and flung
into a world whose very language they did not understand:
"They say there will be a run on the banks for gold ...," murmured
one.
"They say the Government will have to declare a moratorium ...,"
murmured another.
"They say there will very likely be bread riots...."
"They say that special constables are to be enrolled...."
"They say you ought to lay in a certain amount of food...."
At eleven o'clock at night a state of war began between Great
Britain and Germany.
IV
From the moment when the ultimatum took effect until the day when
the first reports of military activity reached England, political
speculation and prophecy raged unconfined. In the betting-book of
one club stands recorded a wager that, in the event of war, there
will within ten years be not one crowned head in Europe. Now that
war had come, every one was calculating how long it could go on:
for all her preparation, it was said, Germany would soon run short
of certain essentials; but a decision must be reached quickly,
as banking experts were already predicting a general collapse of
credit in November. Memories of the Franco-German war suggested
that, with the precision of modern weapons and with the size of
modern armies, no nation in the world could support the strain for
more than a few weeks.
Nevertheless, whether peace were signed within three months or six,
the old national and international conditions under which the men
of military age had grown up were destroyed for ever: most of them,
though even now they did not realise it, would be killed or maimed;
a long war would bleed the world slowly to death, a short war would
be followed by such frenzied re-arming and re-equipment as would
exhaust every country not less surely. The days of general luxury,
perhaps even of common comfort, were over; taxation would close the
great houses and disperse the old retinues. Ethically, politically,
intellectually, economically and socially every war marked a
transition from one epoch to another; and, before the first unit
of the expeditionary force had landed in France, every one felt
dimly that an era had closed. As yet there had been no call for
more men, as yet none knew whether there was time to train them,
as yet it seemed likely that the casualties would be confined to
the professional soldiers of the regular army and to the volunteers
of the territorial forces; but, though imagination refused to
contemplate such an upheaval as took place within even one month,
the men between twenty and thirty felt that their world had passed
away. Before five years had run their course, the best of them had
passed away, too; and of one generation the finest work in the most
fruitful period of construction was lost for ever.
This was a time of meditation and heart-searching. So staggering
was the shock of war that men's minds refused to conceive of it as
the human punishment of human malevolence or folly: Fleet Street
dragged in Armageddon and laid the responsibility on God, while
finding an excuse for Him in the depravity of man. The moral
laxities of France and the perversions of Germany were to be
punished by a retribution not less overwhelming than that which
had fallen upon Sodom and Gomorrah; as Belgium, Russia and England
were included in the general destruction, it was explained that
they were being punished, respectively, for the Congo atrocities,
the Jewish massacres and the attempted disestablishment of the
Welsh church; only Servia, which suffered first and longest, and
Japan, which was far enough away to be forgotten, were overlooked
by those who set themselves to justify the ways of God to man. It
would take too long to trace the workings of providence in so many
countries, but of England at least it may be claimed that there
was a disproportion between her offence and her punishment: at the
worst her people were indolent, vulgar, selfish and lacking in
an imaginative conscience, but a nation would not seem ripe for
destruction when four or five million of its members voluntarily
offer themselves for mutilation and death.
Meditation passed away with the first bewilderment and was
discouraged with every forward step of a nation arming itself for
defence. From time to time spirits dwelling in isolation struggled
to preserve detachment, the young poets who lay out under the
stars in momentary expectation of death raised their voices in
challenge to incomprehensibility; but the first were arrested as
sedition-mongers and the second were dismissed as poets. Meditation
was not allowed to become articulate until the armistice. It
were fruitless and ungracious to dwell on the epidemic delusions
and organised fury of those first days: they are common to every
country in every war;[24] though they broke out periodically,
their grotesque violence abated as new work called for undivided
attention.
Not for long did it seem that the casualties would be confined
to the regular army and the expeditionary force. Officers of the
special reserve received their mobilisation-orders and reported
for duty on the south coast; after long and anxious silence, during
which it could only be assumed that they had crossed the channel
and were being hurried into Belgium, some of the survivors at
length wrote that they had been in the great advance and the great
retreat, that they had lost almost every part of their kit, but
were enjoying a moment's breathing-time. After the Marne, they
moved up again, "dodging death and danger, without rest or food
or drink ... till death seemed relaxation and a wound a luxury."
Although for more than four years hardly a day passed without
bringing news of the death, disablement or loss of some relation or
friend, for the men under thirty the casualties crowded thickest
in the early weeks; their generation was the most plenteously
represented in the first months; and, after four years, of their
generation fewest remained.