LONDON AGAIN
" ... After a little while He saw one whose face and raiment were
painted and whose feet were shod with pearls. And behind her came,
slowly as a hunter, a young man who wore a cloak of two colours....
And He followed swiftly and touched the hand of the young man and
said to him, 'Why do you look at this woman and in such wise?'
And the young man turned round and recognised Him and said, 'But I
was blind once, and you gave me sight. At what else should I look?'
And He ran forward and touched the painted raiment of the woman,
and said to her, 'Is there no other way in which to walk save the
way of sin?'
And the woman turned round and recognised Him, and laughed and
said, 'But you forgave me my sins, and the way is a pleasant
way....'
And when He had passed out of the city He saw seated by the
roadside a young man who was weeping.
And He went towards him and touched the long locks of his hair and
said to him, 'Why are you weeping?'
And the young man looked up and recognised Him and made answer,
'But I was dead once and you raised me from the dead. What else
should I do but weep?'"
OSCAR WILDE: _The Doer of Good_.
I
London during the second half of 1917 differed from London during
the late months of 1916 in that, so soon as the United States
abandoned neutrality, the Allies were assured of victory unless
the German submarine fleet obtained the mastery of the Atlantic
and prevented troops and food from reaching Europe or unless the
German army, no longer menaced on the eastern frontier since the
Russian Revolution, could break through on the west and capture
Paris or the channel ports. The second course was tried in March,
1918, the first never ceased to be tried until the armistice; but,
whereas in the winter of 1916-17 there was widespread doubt in
England whether the war could end otherwise than in a stalemate,
from the middle of 1917 it was evident that the war could and would
be fought to a finish and that the ultimate military decision lay
with the inexhausted and inexhaustible armies of the west.
It was to Washington, therefore, that the centre of interest now
shifted; and those who had lately returned from America were
bombarded with enquiries about the feeling and condition of the
United States. The corporate life of the Balfour mission came to
an end with the welcome accorded to its head at the Guildhall and
at the Mansion House luncheon on July 13th; and, when its members
had reported their return to their departments, they were free to
study the psychology of London in what, even then, was known to be
the last phase of the war. Since 1914 they had been too busy to
catch more than a passing glimpse of their friends as they flashed
to and from the front or from their work at home; and the novels
and memoirs of this period will be an untrustworthy guide to future
social historians in so far as they suggest a life of unrelieved
frivolity and pleasure-seeking when the greatest war effort had
yet to be made. There were certainly days and nights of epidemic
excitement, which occasionally turned to sporadic insanity; now,
as in every phase of the war, there were men and women who made of
the public disorganisation an excuse for abandoning all recognised
restraints; but the general change was little more than a universal
restlessness in which the nerves that had been kept tense by
the daily demands of the war refused to be relaxed in hours of
leisure. If there were more distractions in 1917 than in 1915,
there was also more work done, and it was better organised; the
novels and memoirs, naturally enough, give little space to daily
routine; but it is less true to suggest that those who lived in
London were grown indolent or callous to the war than that they had
accommodated their private lives to public requirements. No one was
surprised if a man went from his office to dinner without dressing
or if he was made late for luncheon by a daylight air-raid.
Informality, first imposed by necessity, was found to be amusing in
itself; and an element of impromptu picnic crept into most of the
parties of that time.
This deliberate attempt to preserve as much of the old life and
interests as the war would allow was in part a self-imposed
discipline and a refusal to be stampeded; in part it was an effort
to make London tolerable for those who were on leave from their
service abroad and at home; and in part it was an instinctive
struggle to retain something familiar in an unfamiliar world and to
refresh the brain with a diversion in which war had no share. The
years from 1915 to 1919 saw a prodigious output of new literature
and music; and, if it is still too early to judge of its quality,
there can be no question about the intellectual stimulus which it
supplied. Every kind of book was read and discussed; every new
school of painting had its followers; and love of music, ceasing
to be the foible of the few, became the craving of the many.
Though not yet conspicuously prompt in payment, the gratitude
of thousands is due to the devotion of Sir Thomas Beecham and of
his supporters for the opera which they maintained at Drury Lane
with untiring enterprise and energy; without their labours, Covent
Garden would be as dead as the London Opera House; no opera in
English would ever get a hearing; and in 1917 and 1918 London would
not have had its mixed programme of English, Russian, French,
Italian and German opera.
II
Early in 1918 came the black days of the last German offensive.
All the optimism and relief of 1917 evaporated before the quick,
merciless rain of blows that battered Amiens and threatened Calais,
shattered Rheims and overhung Paris. In the southwesterly onrush of
1914 the French declared that, if Paris fell, they would transfer
their seat of government to Bordeaux (as they did) and, if need
be, to the foot-hills of the Pyrenees; in 1918 any defeat was
temporary, for in time the new American levies must burst by sheer
weight of metal through any army that had been carded down by four
years of fighting; but by 1918 many were asking themselves whether
the French spirit would still be equal to this last desperate
resolution, whether the British could carry on with a spear-head
through their line at Amiens and whether the Americans would make
headway in a country as completely overrun as Belgium had been.
To civilians, the crisis of March 1918 arose suddenly; they may be
thankful that it ended no less suddenly, but the results of the
crisis outlived the crisis itself. In so far as it is true to say
that the English ever lost their heads, they lost them between the
March offensive and the December general election of 1918. For more
than four years there had been the relaxation of bonds which is
natural when life is no longer secure: sexual relationships became
increasingly promiscuous, marriages were contracted, abandoned
and dissolved with reckless disregard of private morals or public
responsibility; and the craving for such excitement as would bring
forgetfulness led to the excessive indulgence of every physical
appetite. While this relaxation continued at a steadily increasing
pace, it was only in the final months of the war that the loss of
self-control became inconsistent with a balanced mind. The sordid
scandals of this last phase, born of intemperance in drink or drugs
and stimulated to their climax by undisciplined passions, were
occasionally dragged to light in a police-court or at a coroner's
inquest; but in degeneracy, as in crime, it is usually the
inexpert who is detected, and any one who lived in London during
those feverish months had forced upon his notice a spectacle of
debauchery which would have swelled the record of scandal if it had
been made public but which is mercifully forgotten because it was
incredible.
This is neither the place nor time to pass a judgement on it;
and perhaps it does not deserve to be too strictly condemned. In
threatening all and in fulfilling with many the unexpected fate
of material ruin, physical mutilation and premature death, a war
which strikes at the normal security of life must be accepted
with abnormal resignation or resisted with abnormal resolution.
As the instinct of self-preservation, rising sublime into pride,
sinking into base fear and ranging through every spiritual state
between these extremes, automatically precludes the alternative
of surrender, the abnormal resistance has to be fortified by an
abnormal appeal to primitive reserves of endurance and courage
which modern man, inheriting from his earliest ancestors, keeps
stored for rare moments of emergency. The bodily and mental
tortures of an unanticipated catastrophe, be it war, earthquake,
shipwreck or fire, are only made supportable by the aid of
qualities so primitive as to be extraneous to the character of
civilised man; and, as it would be unreasonable to expect that
he should be able to unbar an ancient door and to release one
potent force while keeping all others enchained, the additional
fortitude by means of which the war was borne at least with general
dignity had to be accompanied by the accession of qualities less
conventionally admirable.
In short phrase, the restraints of modern civilisation were
burst on the resurgence of primitive man. Honourable, kindly,
fastidious, gentle and reserved spirits, dragged back across the
ages, lied and cheated, fought and bullied in an orgy of intrigue
and self-seeking, of intoxication and madness. Only in this way
and at this price could those who had fared delicately and lived
softly endure hardships which for generations or centuries had been
removed from the average experience of civilisation; the bravery
of the savage emerged hand in hand with the savage's ferocity, his
licence, his superstition and his credulity.
While time and tranquillity are needed before these unruly forces
can be finally subdued, the panic rush of mob-madness passed
quickly.
With the second battle of the Marne even a civilian knew that it
was a matter of months or weeks before the Germans capitulated.
Casualties would still be recorded; agony would be endured,
uncertainty would continue; there might be a final berserk outburst
on sea and land, but ultimately the German government would sue
for peace. No one was surprised when the "fourteen points" were
flashed on the sky from Washington; no one was surprised when the
Germans saw in the west the grey, hopeless light which was yet the
only light that they could ever hope to see. Capitulations poured
in until some of the onlookers, in the spirit of Horace Walpole,
searched eagerly through their papers of a morning to see which new
enemy had surrendered.
And yet, when the maroons burst the stillness of London at the
eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, all
were surprised; not by the fact of peace but by the imponderable
significance of peace. Did this ear-splitting salvo mean one last
raid by every aeroplane in the German fleet, an _auto-da-fé_
which should at least achieve that, when peace was negotiated, it
would be elsewhere than in the smoking, brain-splashed ruins of a
shattered London? In late afterthought, with an air of discovery
and a dread of revealing emotion, every one decided that the
Germans must have accepted the armistice terms.
Ten minutes later the government departments were belched forth on
holiday. Along the Processional Avenue moved slowly a double line
of cars and taxis, packed inside and out and above with atoms of
a vast concourse infected by a lust for moving from any one place
to any other. Beyond this, no one knew what to do. The king had
already spoken from a window of Buckingham Palace. Superficially
it was all a little boring; and, below the deliberately suave,
unemotional surface, all knew that the day was so tremendous that
none dared look at it yet. A child-typist from a Government-office
hut rushed into the Mall, white-faced, bareheaded and delirious.
"The war's over! Now daddy'll come home!" By her side a woman
winced and looked, groping after sympathy, for someone who, like
herself, knew that the armistice had come too late. Throughout the
world there were houses in which the glory of peace would be turned
to mourning by news of a son who had been killed in the last few
hours of fighting: the roll of honour is not yet complete; and,
more than two years after the armistice, there are still men in the
blue jackets and trousers of their hospital.
III
With the armistice another chapter would seem to open; but, in
spite of the tangible fact of victory which should have divided all
that came before from all that came after, the abrupt transition
to peace was effected in the psychological atmosphere produced by
the last months of war. Had this not been so, there would have
been no purpose in making more than a passing reference to the
war insanity which followed the dread and despair of the March
offensive; unhappily for the peace of the world and for all hopes
of a universal spirit, the Versailles conference was inspired
by frenzied memories of the mad election of December 1918 and
the mad election translated into actuality and crystallised that
mood of madness whereof a mental pathologist would have said that
epidemic hysteria was abroad, others--in the words of an old
chronicler--that "Christ and His angels slept."
Public degradation in England has scored many good totals; in the
vulgar abuse showered upon O'Connell, in the salacious persecution
of Stead, in periodic waves of insensate arrogance, cruelty,
ignorance and injustice; the English have had their South African
war, their yellow labour and their persecution of conscientious
objectors to remind the world that, whatever their pretensions,
they are still human. The personal experience of the oldest and
the historical reading of the most erudite would have difficulty
in finding a greater collective degradation than was reached in
the public attitude, during the last months of the war, to what is
known as the "Pemberton-Billing case."
The slightest reference may unprison the foul gases of that trial;
it is best to regard it as the necessary result of a nervous
and physical strain too great to be borne. Day after day, in
an English court of law, before a British jury and the senior
judge of the King's Bench Division there was recited a tale of
intrigue and debauchery from which the librettist of a melodrama
would have turned away in unbelief and the alienist in disgust.
Honoured names were introduced as pegs for the charge of treason
and sexual perversion; the educational influence of the press was
exerted to secure that a hundred thousand villages should be made
acquainted with the bewildering nomenclature of infamous vices.
When the original newspaper charges were met with a countercharge
of criminal libel, the direction of the judge and the intelligence
of a British jury resulted in a verdict of "Not Guilty." And there
was cheering in court and in the street. And some people believed
that, as the prisoner had been acquitted, the charges must be true.
After three years we can look back on judge and jury, prisoner
and public with less disgust than pity; to the psychologist the
Pemberton-Billing trial is a reminder that he must be on his guard
whenever he hears stereotyped phrases about the political instinct,
the justice and sanity, still more the chivalry of the English. Not
even as a political manœuvre was it successful.
The "low intelligence and high credulity"[45] of a public which,
periodically and in the last resort, is entrusted with an imperial
mission among several hundred millions of people may be measured
by the belief accorded to a single allegation. In the course of
the trial frequent reference was made to a "black book," then
romantically entrusted to the blackmailing custody of Prince
Wilhelm of Wied, in which were recorded the names of at least
47,000 people who occupied some prominent position in English
society and who lay, by reason of their vices, at the mercy of the
first enemy who threatened them. Any one whose work has taken him
among books, any one who has had occasion to consult a card-index,
would know that it requires a bulky catalogue to print, even in
"brilliant," 47,000 names with enough crimesheet to each to ensure
that its bearer could be hushed or drummed out of public life. The
book, whatever its size, was filled with matter so confidential
that, when a taste of its contents was to be offered to an officer
who was conveniently dead before the case came to trial, it had to
be carried beyond the reach of spies and eavesdroppers and laid
bare under the sky of the English countryside; there was no room,
there was no open space in London where its guilty secrets could
be revealed. The limits of a novelist's daring are more quickly
reached than those of a jury's simple faith.
This case, with its startling blend of melodrama and pruriency,
wounded and injured in greater or lesser degree everyone whose
name the learned judge tolerantly allowed to be mentioned. That,
perhaps, was the fortune of law as administered, with all the
responsibility and decorum attaching to his great office, by Mr.
Justice Darling. What was said really does not matter so much as
that thousands of people believed it to be true. By this test,
if it were indeed ever needed, a big part of the British public
shewed itself to be as ignorant, suspicious, cruel and base-minded
as any big part of any other public, including that which had
persecuted Dreyfus--to the righteous indignation of the equitable
English. And, though perhaps the ignorance and suspicion, the
base-mindedness and cruelty were the after-result of fear, from
which the Englishman suffers as much as any one else, the public
temper at the time of the Pemberton-Billing trial--not wholly
unlike the temper of a mob in a southern state when a negro is
being lynched--survived when fear had been laid to rest: ignorance
and suspicion, fear, revenge and greed provided the atmosphere of
the conference in which the statesmen of the world met together to
contrive a peace which should end war.
It was in the power of the prime minister to allay these evil
passions or to stimulate them. With the unbounded prestige that
attaches to the head of any government still in office at the end
of a long war, he could have united all parties in his struggle for
a great and durable peace not less certainly than he had united
them in his prosecution of the war; as they had responded to every
demand in war, so they would have made every sacrifice for peace;
as he had curbed their impatience and lightened their despondency,
so he could check their greed and set an ideal before their eyes.
Mr. Lloyd George saw the light and turned his back upon it. With
all an old demagogue's art in playing on popular passion, he outbid
the wildest and outdid the most sanguinary: the cry for indemnities
and the howl for revenge were drowned in his own shouted promise
that England should have her fill of blood and gold if she would
but return him to power.
It is at least arguable that Germany in defeat should have paid
not less than she would have exacted, in victory, from another
power; one school considers that to leave the ex-Kaiser and his
associates unpunished is to condone the atrocities for which they
were responsible and to make these the permissible minimum in
any future war. No armistice terms would be complete unless they
made provision for bringing the war-criminals to book. Equally,
no armistice terms deserve serious attention if they promise that
which their signatories know to be incapable of fulfilment. Mr.
Lloyd George's offence against the people of his own and of all
future generations lay in his giving pledges which could not be
redeemed.
For this turpitude no excuse can be suggested; and of explanations
there is none less discreditable than that the old electioneering
hand could not resist its opportunity and that the old mob-orator
played instinctively with the known and proved shortness of the
public memory. The allies were not taken unawares by the idea of
an armistice: for more than four years they had been declaring
their war-aims and modifying them in accordance with the shifts
and changes of fortune; their agreement was sealed in successive
pacts; the utmost limits of what was possible in monetary
payment and territorial redistribution had been assigned in
the elaborate memoranda of countless experts; and, though this
work of preparation was speedily abandoned in the turmoil of the
Versailles conference, it should have controlled the exuberance
of the prime minister's electoral campaign and saved him from the
more flagrant forms of bad faith. Though he deceived others, he, a
former chancellor of the exchequer, could not have deceived himself
with the figures which were proposed as an estimate of German
indemnities; and thirteen years' unbroken tenure of office were
more than enough to teach a cabinet minister that the asylum which
the Dutch government was extending to the ex-Kaiser could not be
disturbed save by an unwarrantable declaration of war.
All this could have been explained to the public until the fever
of 1918 had abated. There was no need for a general election, and
no justification has even been attempted; but the opportunity was
irresistible, and the election was conducted on lines calculated to
wipe all opposition out of existence. Coalition conservatives and
coalition liberals consolidated their alliance by means of a system
which offered to candidates the choice of unconditional surrender
and of annihilation; ministers constructed their programme
of peace from the hysterical savagery of their most violent
supporters; and the government swept the country in triumph. It
would have made little difference to the result if the independent
liberal opposition had shewn the courage and justice to offer an
alternative programme, though the unseated liberals might have
consoled themselves with the thought that they had fallen in a
struggle for honesty and moderation. Against madness so widespread
not one dared to raise his voice in protest.
IV
Whether or not electors, who are amateurs in politics, deserve the
government which they get, at least they get the government for
which they have asked; however disagreeable, this is a necessary
part of their political education, and they might be left,
philosophically enough, to reap the wild oats that they have sown
if the harvest of disaster were confined to their own country and
to their own generation. Unhappily, the results of the mad election
are more far-reaching: not only is there no guarantee of peace at
the end of an unparalleled war, but bad blood has been created
between the three powers which, in the absence of an effective
league of nations, are responsible for even the temporary peace of
the world.
The German army, it is sometimes forgotten, ceased fire on
accepting the fourteen points promulgated by President Wilson.
Before the British would consent to an armistice, they reserved
liberty to alter certain naval provisions; otherwise it was
reasonably well understood that the American formula bound
President Wilson's associates and limited their utmost demand. At
the Versailles conference, as Mr. Maynard Keynes and Mr. Lansing
have shewn, the President was outwitted and overruled by M.
Clemenceau, who stood for a second Brest-Litovsk peace, and by
Mr. Lloyd George, who stood for everything in turn and nothing
long. A cynic observed of the completed treaty: "Gentlemen, in
this document we are sowing the seeds of a great and durable war";
whatever else may be said of it, no one could easily trace even
a faint resemblance to the settlement outlined in the fourteen
points. It was impossible for the British representatives to
keep faith at the same time with the president and with their
electors; the French prime minister was more in sympathy with the
blatant materialism of England than with the intangible idealism
of America; and before long Mr. Wilson was first deserted and then
overborne.
Though he has since been repudiated by his own people, the
divergence of opinion at Versailles has grown into a wide and
dangerous antagonism between the peoples of Great Britain and
of America; each feels that it has been betrayed by the other;
and, so long as the antagonism lasts, there can be no cooperation
between the two in world-politics. The ill-feeling is more than
the critical and petulant jealousy which breaks out among allies
at the end of every war: any one might have foretold that France
would impute to Great Britain a niggardly expenditure of men and
that Great Britain would resent the price charged by France for the
privilege of using her railways, occupying her trenches and finally
driving the invaders from her soil; Great Britain and France have
agreed privately that Italy has received more in proportion to
her sacrifices than any of the allies, that America and Japan
have feathered their nests and that the very name of Russia is
anathema; and America murmurs that, instead of thanking her for
coming to their rescue, the western powers of the old world only
calculated how much of their burden in money and casualties could
be transferred to the shoulders of the newcomer. There was the same
carping after the Napoleonic wars and after the wars of Marlborough.
Between America and Great Britain the antagonism is deeper-seated
because each has lost confidence in the good faith of the other.
Who, cries the one, could trust a nation which threw over its own
representative and shirked its share in the labour of policing
the world? Who, cries the other, could trust a nation which broke
faith from the beginning of the war, when it used the plight of
Belgium as an excuse for imperial expansion, until the end, when
it used the American armistice-terms as an excuse for disarming
and despoiling Germany? When once the recriminations begin,
every old cause of difference is dragged in to support one or
other side; and the vision of a lasting union between the two
greatest English-speaking peoples fades from sight and even from
imagination. This is the price which the English have to pay--the
price which they have also made others pay--for the dishonest
election of 1918.
As no protest was heard while the election raged, so, while
the peace conference was sitting, the only protest against
its activities came in occasional blustering telegrams from
self-important members of parliament who conceived themselves to
be responsible for keeping the prime minister up to the mark. The
great, unpolitical mass of the English people was addressing itself
to the new upheaval of demobilisation, to the prospect of hard-won
idleness and, more remotely, to the problems of reconstruction; the
professional politicians were more concerned with personalities
than with principles; and the centre of gravity shifted in 1919
to Paris. Of the great restless army of women who believe that
they influence domestic and foreign policy all who could secure
a passport and a ticket hurried abroad, there to compete with
the cosmopolitan army whose life is an imperceptible gliding
from Ritz to Ritz in waiting with loaded dinner-tables on the
fringe of the conference. One staked out a claim on one hotel and
statesman, another on another; London, on their return, was filled
with stories of their _protégés_ and listened patiently to what
Colonel House or "Clemmy" had said to each and, less patiently,
to what each had said to Mr. Balfour or to President Wilson; all
who remembered how the Germans had striven to divide the allies
during the war kept a vague look-out for attempts to sow dissension
between them in the making of peace and were vaguely comforted by
each new proof of solidarity among the high contracting parties. In
questions of detail it was agreed that there must be differences
of opinion; but, so long as a rupture was avoided, the principles
of peace were left to take care of themselves. President Wilson
might indeed, with a Disraelian gesture, order his ship to get
up steam; but, as he remained at the last moment to see one or
two more of his cardinal points rejected by the British and the
French, it was assumed that they were impracticable. The treaty
was signed on July 19th, and it was not until Mr. Maynard Keynes'
_Economic Consequences of the Peace_ had been digested that the
political army and the camp-followers ceased gossiping about the
personalities of the conference and turned their attention to the
settlement.
They then discovered that their representatives had imposed on
Germany terms which could not be fulfilled and which the fourteen
points gave them no right to impose; the league of nations was
left as a nebulous aspiration; and the pacific future of the world
was based on the twin hope that the central powers were now bled
too white ever again to rear an aggressive head and that, if they
did, the association of Great Britain, France and America would
endure to beat it once more into the dust. To the old-fashioned
system of secret diplomacy, of defensive and offensive alliances,
of competition in armaments, of exploitation and intrigue and
of "preventive wars"--the system which had given birth to the
greatest war in history--the wisdom of the Versailles conference
could offer no alternative; the one new idea which it contributed
to international politics was that of sharing with America the
privilege of suffering again in the future from a system which had
lately brought the whole world to the brink of ruin and dissolution.
This privilege the people of the United States declined; and Europe
in 1919 differed chiefly from Europe in 1914 by the eclipse of
Russia on the one side and of Austro-Hungary on the other. The
old system and the old spirit have remained. It does not lie in
the mouth of those who threw overboard the fourteen points to
reproach those who repudiated the covenant and mandates of the
league of nations. President Wilson pretended to more power than
he possessed, and his political opponents took their revenge by
disowning him; Mr. Lloyd George carried out, so far as he was able,
the policy of spoliation and punishment which he had promised to
the electors as the price of their support in the election that
gave him his revenge on his political opponents.
So the needless, mad war, fed year after year with the life-blood
of an entire generation, came to an end in a hopeless, mad peace.
If those who cried loudest in their frenzy of greed and revenge got
the peace which they deserved, it was not the peace for which one
man, turning his back on the splendid promise of youth, had gone
forth to die.