PATRIOTISM AND POWER IN WAR AND PEACE
In the preceding chapter attention has been called to a phenomenon which
is nothing short of a 'moral miracle' if our ordinary reading of war
psychology is correct. The phenomenon in question is the very definite
and sudden worsening of Anglo-American relations, following upon common
suffering on the same battle-fields, our soldiers fighting side by side;
an experience which we commonly assume should weld friendship as nothing
else could.[58]
This miracle has its replica within the nation itself: intense
industrial strife, class warfare, revolution, embittered rivalries,
following upon a war which in its early days our moralists almost to a
man declared at least to have this great consolation, that it achieved
the moral unity of the nation. Pastor and poet, statesman and professor
alike rejoiced in this spiritual consolidation which dangers faced in
common had brought about. Never again was the nation to be riven by the
old differences. None was now for party and all were for the State. We
had achieved the '_union sacrée_' ... 'duke's son, cook's son.' On this
ground alone many a bishop has found (in war time) the moral
justification of war.[59]
Now no one can pretend that this sacred union has really survived the
War. The extraordinary contrast between the disunity with which we
finish war and the unity with which we begin it, is a disturbing thought
when we recollect that the country cannot always be at war, if only
because peace is necessary as a preparation for war, for the creation of
things for war to destroy. It becomes still more disturbing when we add
to this post-war change another even more remarkable, which will be
dealt with presently: the objects for which at the beginning of a war we
are ready to die--ideals like democracy, freedom from military
regimentation and the suppression of military terrorism, the rights of
small nations--are things about which at the end of the War we are
utterly indifferent. It would seem either that these are not the things
that really stirred us--that our feelings had some other unsuspected
origin--or that war has destroyed our feeling for them.
Note this juxtaposition of events. We have had in Europe millions of men
in every belligerent country showing unfathomable capacity for
disinterested service. Millions of youngsters--just ordinary folk--gave
the final and greatest sacrifice without hesitation and without
question. They faced agony, hardship, death, with no hope or promise of
reward save that of duty discharged. And, very rightly, we acclaim them
as heroes. They have shown without any sort of doubt that they are
ready to die for their country's cause or for some even greater
cause--human freedom, the rights of a small nation, democracy, or the
principle of nationality, or to resist a barbarous morality which can
tolerate the making of unprovoked war for a monarchy's ambition or the
greed of an autocratic clique.
And, indeed, whatever our final conclusion, the spectacle of vast
sacrifices so readily made is, in its ultimate meaning one of infinite
inspiration and hope. But the War's immediate sequel puts certain
questions to us that we cannot shirk. For note what follows.
After some years the men who could thus sacrifice themselves, return
home--to Italy, or France, or Britain--and exchange khaki for the
miner's overall or the railway worker's uniform. And it would then seem
that at that moment their attitude to their country and their country's
attitude to them undergo a wonderful change. They are ready--so at least
we are told by a Press which for five years had spoken of them daily as
heroes, saints, and gentlemen--through their miners' or railway Unions
to make war upon, instead of for, that community which yesterday they
served so devotedly. Within a few months of the close of this War which
was to unify the nation as it had never been unified before (the story
is the same whichever belligerent you may choose) there appear divisions
and fissures, disruptions and revolutions, more disturbing than have
been revealed for generations.
Our extreme nervousness about the danger of Bolshevist propaganda shows
that we believe that these men, yesterday ready to die for their
country, are now capable of exposing it to every sort of horror.
Or take another aspect of it. During the War fashionable ladies by
thousands willingly got up at six in the morning to scrub canteen floors
or serve coffee, in order to add to the comfort of their working-class
countrymen--in khaki. They did this, one assumes, from the love of
countrymen who risked their lives and suffered hardship in the
execution of duty. It sounds satisfactory until the same countryman
ceases fighting and turns to extremely hard and hazardous duties like
mining, or fishing in winter-time in the North Sea. The ladies will no
longer scrub floors or knit socks for him. They lose all real interest
in him. But if it was done originally from 'love of fellow-countrymen,'
why this cessation of interest? He is the same man. Into the psychology
of that we shall inquire a little more fully later. The phenomenon is
explained here in the conviction that its cause throws light upon the
other phenomenon equally remarkable, namely, that victory reveals a most
astonishing post-war indifference to those moral and ideal ends for
which we believed we were fighting. Is it that they never were our real
aims at all, or that war has wrought a change in our nature with
reference to them?
The importance of knowing what really moves us is obvious enough. If our
potential power is to stand for the protection of any principle--nationality
or democracy--that object must represent a real purpose, not a
convenient clothing for a quite different purpose. The determination
to defend nationality can only be permanent if our feeling for it
is sufficiently deep and sincere to survive in the competition of
other moral 'wishes.' Where has the War, and the complex of desires
it developed, left our moral values? And, if there has been a
re-valuation, why?
The Allied world saw clearly that the German doctrine--the right of a
powerful State to deny national independence to a smaller State, merely
because its own self-preservation demanded it--was something which
menaced nationality and right. The whole system by which, as in Prussia,
the right of the people to challenge the political doctrines of the
Government was denied (as by a rigorous control of press and education),
was seen to be incompatible with the principles upon which free
government in the West has been established. All this had to be
destroyed in order that the world might be made 'safe for democracy.'
The trenches in Flanders became 'the frontiers of freedom.' To uphold
the rights of small nations, freedom of speech and press, to punish
military terror, to establish an international order based on right as
against might--these were things for which free men everywhere should
gladly die. They did die, in millions. Nowhere so much, perhaps, as in
America were these ideals the inspiration which brought that country
into the War. She had nothing to gain territorially or materially. If
ever the motive to war was an ideal motive, America's was.
Then comes the Peace. And the America which had discarded her tradition
of isolation to send two million soldiers on the European continent, 'at
the call of the small nation,' was asked to co-operate with others in
assuring the future security of Belgium, in protecting the small States
by the creation of some international order (the only way in which they
ever can be effectively protected); to do it in another form for a small
nation that has suffered even more tragically than Belgium, Armenia;
definitely to organise in peace that cause for which she went to war.
And then a curious discovery is made. A cause which can excite immense
passion when it is associated with war, is simply a subject for boredom
when it becomes a problem of peace-time organisation. America will give
lavishly of the blood of her sons to fight for the small nations; she
will not be bothered with mandates or treaties in order to make it
unnecessary to fight for them. It is not a question whether the
particular League of Nations established at Paris was a good one. The
post-war temper of America is that she does not want to be bothered with
Europe at all: talk about its security makes the American public of 1920
irritable and angry. Yet millions were ready to die for freedom in
Europe two years ago! A thing to die for in 1918 is a thing to yawn
over, or to be irritable about, when the war is done.
Is America alone in this change of feeling about the small State?
Recall all that we wrote and talked about the sacredness of the rights
of small nations--and still in certain cases talk and write. There is
Poland. It is one of the nations whose rights are sacred--to-day. But in
1915 we acquiesced in an arrangement by which Poland was to be
delivered, bound hand and foot, at the end of the war, to its worst and
bitterest enemy, Czarist Russia. The Alliance (through France, to-day
the 'protector of Poland') undertook not to raise any objection to any
policy that the Czar's Government might inaugurate in Poland. It was to
have a free hand. A secret treaty, it will be urged, about which the
public knew nothing? We were fighting to liberate the world from
diplomatic autocracies using their peoples for unknown and unavowed
purposes. But the fact that we were delivering over Poland to the
mercies of a Czarist Government was not secret. Every educated man knew
what Russian policy under the Czarist Government would be, must be, in
Poland. Was the Russian record with reference to Poland such that the
unhampered discretion of the Czarist Government was deemed sufficient
guarantee of Polish independence? Did we honestly think that Russia had
proved herself more liberal in the treatment of the Poles than Austria,
whose Government we were destroying? The implication, of course, flew in
the face of known facts: Austrian rule over the Poles, which we proposed
to destroy, had proved itself immeasurably more tolerant than the
Russian rule which we proposed to re-enforce and render more secure.
And there were Finland and the Border States. If Russia had remained in
the War, 'loyal to the cause of democracy and the rights of small
nations,' there would have been no independent Poland, or Finland, or
Esthonia, or Georgia; and the refusal of our Ally to recognise their
independence would not have disturbed us in the least.
Again, there was Serbia, on behalf of whose 'redemption' in a sense, the
War began. An integral part of that 'redemption' was the inclusion of
the Dalmatian coast in Serbia--the means of access of the new Southern
Slav State to the sea. Italy, for naval reasons, desired possession of
that coast, and, without informing Serbia, we undertook to see that
Italy should get it. (Italy, by the way, also entered the War on behalf
of the principle of Nationality.)[60]
It is not to be supposed, however, that the small State itself, however
it may declaim about 'liberty or death,' has, when the opportunity to
assert power presents itself, any greater regard for the rights of
nationality--in other people. Take Poland. For a hundred and fifty years
Poland has called upon Heaven to witness the monstrous wickedness of
denying to a people its right to self-determination; of forcing a people
under alien rule. After a hundred and fifty years of the martyrdom of
alien rule, Poland acquires its freedom. That freedom is not a year old
before Poland itself becomes in temper as imperialistic as any State in
Europe. It may be bankrupt, racked with typhus and famine, split by
bitter factional quarrels, but the one thing upon which all Poles will
unite is in the demand for dominion over some fifteen millions of
people, not merely non-Polish, but bitterly anti-Polish. Although Poland
is perhaps the worst case, all the new small States show a similar
disposition: Czecho-Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Finland, Greece, have
all now their own imperialism, limited only, apparently, by the extent
of their power. All these people have fought for the right to national
independence; there is not one that is not denying the right to national
independence. If every Britain has its Ireland, every Ireland has its
Ulster.
But is this belief in Nationality at all? What should we have thought of
a Southerner of the old Slave States fulminating against the crime of
slavery? Should we have thought his position any more logical if he had
explained that he was opposed to slavery because he did not want to
become a slave? The test of his sincerity would have been, not the
conduct he exacted of others, but the conduct he proposed to follow
towards others. 'One is a Nationalist,' says Professor Corradini, one of
the prophets of Italian _sacro egoismo_, 'while waiting to be able to
become an Imperialist.' He prophesies that in twenty years 'all Italy
will be Imperialist.'[61]
* * * * *
The last thing intended here is any excuse of German violence by a
futile _tu quoque_. But what it is important to know, if we are to
understand the real motives of our conduct--and unless we do, we cannot
really know where our conduct is leading us, where we are going--is
whether we really cared about the 'moral aims of war,' the things for
which we thought we were willing to die. Were we not as a matter of fact
fighting--and dying--for something else?
Test the nature of our feelings by what was after all perhaps the most
dramatised situation in the whole drama: the fact that in the Western
world a single man, or a little junta of military chiefs, could by a
word send nations into war, millions to their death; and--worse still in
a sense--that those millions would accept the fact of thus being made
helpless pawns, and with appalling docility, without question, kill and
be killed for reasons they did not even know. It must be made impossible
ever again for half a dozen Generals or Cabinet Ministers thus to play
with nations and men and women as with pawns.
The War is at last over. And in Eastern Europe, the most corrupt, as it
was one of the potentially most powerful of all the military
autocracies--that of the Czar--has either gone to pieces from its own
rottenness, or been destroyed by the spontaneous uprising of the people.
Bold experiments, in entirely new social and economic methods, are
attempted in this great community which may have so much to teach the
Western world, experiments which challenge not only old political
institutions, but old economic ones as well. But the men who were the
Czar's Ministers are still in Paris and London, in close but secret
confabulation with Allied Governments.
And one morning we find that we are at war with the first Workers'
Republic of the world, the first really to try a great social
experiment. There had been no declaration, no explanation. President
Wilson had, indeed, said that nothing would induce the Allies to
intervene. Their behaviour on that point would be the 'acid test' of
sincerity. But in Archangel, Murmansk, Vladivostock, the Crimea, on the
Polish border, on the shores of the Caspian, our soldiers were killing
Russians, or organising their killing; our ships sank Russian ships and
bombarded Russian cities. We found that we were supporting the Royalist
parties--military leaders who did not hide in the least their intention
to restore the monarchy. But again, there is no explanation. But
somewhere, for some purpose undefined, killing has been proclaimed. And
we kill--and blockade and starve.
The killing and blockading are not the important facts. Whatever may be
behind the Russian business, the most disturbing portent is the fact
which no one challenges and which indeed is most generally offered as a
sort of defence. It is this: Nobody knows what the policy of the
Government in Russia is, or was. It is commonly said they had no policy.
Certainly it was changeable. That means that the Government does not
need to give an explanation in order to start upon a war which may
affect the whole future form of Western society. They did not have to
explain because nobody particularly cared. Commands for youths to die in
wars of unknown purpose do not strike us as monstrous when the commands
are given by our own Governments--Governments which notoriously we do
not trouble to control. Public opinion as a whole did not have any
intense feeling about the Russian war, and not the slightest as to
whether we used poison gas, or bombarded Russian cathedrals, or killed
Russian civilians. We did not want it to be expensive, and Mr Churchill
promised that if it cost too much he would drop it. He admitted finally
that it was unnecessary by dropping it. But it was not important enough
for him to resign over. And as for bringing anybody to trial for it, or
upsetting the monarchy....[62]
There is another aspect of our feeling about the Prussian tendencies and
temper, to rid the world of which we waged the War.
All America (or Britain, for that matter: America is only a striking and
so a convenient example) knew that the Bismarckian persecution of the
Socialists, the imprisonment of Bebel, of Liebknecht, the prosecution of
newspapers for anti-militarist doctrines, the rigid control of
education, by the Government, were just the natural prelude to what
ended in Louvain and Aerschot, to the shooting down of the civilians of
an invaded country. Again, that was why Prussia had to be destroyed in
the interest of human freedom and the safety of democracy. The
newspapers, the professors, the churches, were telling us all this
endlessly for five years. Within a year of the end of the War, America
is engaged in an anti-Socialist campaign more sweeping, more ruthless,
by any test which you care to apply--the numbers arrested, the severity
of the sentences imposed, the nature of the offences alleged--than
anything ever attempted by Bismarck or the Kaiser. Old men of seventy
(one selected by the Socialist party as Presidential Candidate), young
girls, college students, are sent to prison with sentences of ten,
fifteen, or twenty years. The elected members of State Legislatures are
not allowed to sit, on the ground of their Socialist opinions. There are
deportations in whole shiploads. If one takes the Espionage Act and
compares it with any equivalent German legislation (the tests applied to
school teachers or the refusal of mailing privileges to Socialist
papers), one finds that the general principle of control of political
opinion by the Government, and the limitations imposed upon freedom of
discussion, and the Press, are certainly pushed further by the post-war
America than they were by the pre-war Germany--the Germany that had to
be destroyed for the precise reason that the principle of government by
free discussion was more valuable than life itself.
And as to military terrorism. Americans can see--scores of American
papers are saying it every day--that the things defended by the British
Government in Ireland are indistinguishable from what brought upon
Germany the wrath of Allied mankind. But they do not even know and
certainly would not care if they did know, that American marines in
Hayti--a little independent State that might one day become the hope and
symbol of a subject nationality, an unredeemed race that has suffered
and does suffer more at American hands than Pole or Alsatian ever
suffered at German hands--have killed ten times as many Haytians as the
Black and Tans have killed Irish. Nor for that matter do Americans know
that every week there takes place in their own country--as there has
taken place week after week in the years of peace for half a
century--atrocities more ferocious than any which are alleged against
even the British or the German. Neither of the latter burn alive,
weekly, untried fellow-countrymen with a regularity that makes the thing
an institution.
If indeed it was the militarism, the terrorism, the crude assertion of
power, the repressions of freedom, which made us hate the German, why
are we relatively indifferent when all those evils raise their heads,
not far away, among a people for whom after all we are not responsible,
but at home, near to us, where we have some measure of responsibility?
For indifferent in some measure to those near-by evils we all are.
The hundred million people who make up America include as many kindly,
humane, and decent folk as any other hundred million anywhere in the
world. They have a habit of carrying through extraordinary and unusual
measures--like Prohibition. Yet nothing effective has been done about
lynching, for which the world holds them responsible, any more than we
have done anything effective about Ireland, for which the world holds us
responsible. Their evil may one day land them in a desperate 'subject
nationality' problem, just as our Irish problem lands us in political
difficulty the world over. Yet neither they nor we can manage to achieve
one-tenth of the emotional interest in our own atrocity or oppression,
which we managed in a few weeks to achieve in war-time over the German
barbarities in Belgium. If we could--if every schoolboy and maid-servant
felt as strongly over Balbriggan or Amritsar as they felt over the
_Lusitania_ and Louvain--our problem would be solved; whereas the action
and policy which arose out of our feeling about Louvain did not solve
the evil of military terrorism. It merely made it nearly universal.
It brings us back to the original question. Is it mainly, or at all, the
cruelty or the danger of oppression which moves us, which is at the
bottom of our flaming indignation over the crimes of the enemy?
We believed that we were fighting because of a passionate feeling for
self-rule; for freedom of discussion, of respect for the rights of
others, particularly the weak; the hatred of the mere pride of power out
of which oppression grows; of the regimentation of minds which is its
instrument. But after the War we find that in truth we have no
particular feeling about the things we fought to make impossible. We
rather welcome them, if they are a means of harassing people that we do
not happen to like. We get the monstrous paradox that the very
tendencies which it was the object of the War to check, are the very
tendencies that have acquired an elusive power in our own
country--possibly as the direct result of the War!
Perhaps if we examine in some detail the process of the break-up after
war, within the nation, of the unity which marked it during war, we may
get some explanation of the other change just indicated.
The unity on which we congratulated ourselves was for a time a fact. But
just as certainly the patriotism which prompted the duchess to scrub
floors was not simply love of her countrymen, or it would not suddenly
cease when the war came to an end. The self-same man who in khaki was a
hero to be taken for drives in the duchess's motor-car, became as
workman--a member of some striking union, say--an object of hostility
and dislike. The psychology revealed here has a still more curious
manifestation.
When in war-time we read of the duke's son and the cook's son peeling
potatoes into the same tub, we regard this aspect of the working of
conscription as something in itself fine and admirable, a real national
comradeship in common tasks at last. Colonel Roosevelt orates; our
picture papers give us photographs; the country thrills to this note of
democracy. But when we learn that for the constructive purposes of
peace--for street-cleaning--the Soviet Government has introduced
precisely this method and compelled the sons of Grand Dukes to shovel
snow beside common workmen, the same papers give the picture as an
example of the intolerable tyranny of socialism, as a warning of what
may happen in England if the revolutionists are listened to. That for
years that very thing _had_ been happening in England for the purposes
of war, that we were extremely proud of it, and had lauded it as
wholesome discipline and a thing which made conscription fine and
democratic, is something that we are unable even to perceive, so strong
and yet so subtle are the unconscious factors of opinion. This peculiar
psychological twist explains, of course, several things: why we are all
socialists for the purposes of war, and why socialism can then give
results which nothing else could give; why we cannot apply the same
methods successfully to peace; and why the economic miracles possible in
war are not possible in peace. And the outcome is that forces,
originally social and unifying, are at present factors only of
disruption and destruction, not merely internationally, but, as we shall
see presently, nationally as well.
When the accomplishment of certain things--the production of shells, the
assembling of certain forces, the carriage of cargoes--became a matter
of life and death, we did not argue about nationalisation or socialism;
we put it into effect, and it worked. There existed for war a will which
found a way round all the difficulties of credit adjustment,
distribution, adequate wages, unemployment, incapacitation. We could
take over the country's railways and mines, control its trade, ration
its bread, and decide without much discussion that those things were
indispensable for its purposes. But we can do none of these things for
the upbuilding of the country in peace time. The measures to which we
turn when we feel that the country must produce or perish, are precisely
the measures which, when the war is over, we declare are the least
likely to get anything done at all. We could make munitions; we cannot
make houses. We could clothe and feed our soldiers and satisfy all their
material wants; we cannot do that for the workers. Unemployment in
war-time was practically unknown; the problem of unemployment in peace
time seems beyond us. Millions go unclothed; thousands of workers who
could make clothes are without employment. One speaks of the sufferings
of the army of poverty as though they were dispensations of heaven. We
did not speak thus of the needs of soldiers in war-time. If soldiers
wanted uniforms and wool was obtainable, weavers did not go unemployed.
Then there existed a will and common purpose. That will and common
purpose the patriotism of peace-time cannot give us.
Yet, again, we cannot always be at war. Women must have time and
opportunity to bear and to bring up children, and men to build up a
country-side, if only in order to have men for war to slay and things
for war to destroy. Patriotism fails as a social cement within the
nation at peace, it fails as a stimulus to its constructive tasks; and
as between nations, we know it acts as a violent irritant and disruptive
force.
We need not question the genuineness of the emotion which moves our
duchess when she knits socks for the dear boys in the trenches--or when
she fulminates against the same dear boys as working men when they come
home. As soldiers she loved them because her hatred of Germans--that
atrocious, hostile 'herd'--was deep and genuine. She felt like killing
Germans herself. Consequently, to those who risked their lives to fulfil
this wish of hers, her affections went out readily enough. But why
should she feel any particular affection for men who mine coal, or
couple railway trucks, or catch fish in the North Sea? Dangerous as are
those tasks, they are not visibly and intimately related to her own
fierce emotions. The men performing them are just workpeople, the
relation of whose labour to her own life is not, perhaps, always very
clear. The suggestion that she should scrub floors or knit socks for
_them_ would appear to her as merely silly or offensive.
But unfortunately the story does not end there. During these years of
war her very genuine emotions of hate were fed and nourished by war
propaganda; her emotional hunger was satisfied in some measure by the
daily tale of victories over the enemy. She had, as it were, ten
thousand Germans for breakfast every morning. And when the War stopped,
certainly something went out of her life. No one would pretend that
these flaming passions of five years went for so little in her emotional
experience that they could just be dropped from one day to another
without something going unsatisfied.
And then she cannot get coal; her projected journey to the Riviera is
delayed by a railway strike; she has troubles with servants; faces a
preposterous super-tax and death duties; an historical country seat can
no longer be maintained and old associations must be broken up; Labour
threatens revolution--or her morning paper says it does; Labour leaders
say grossly unfair things about dukes. Here, indeed, is a new hostility,
a new enemy tribe, on which the emotions cultivated so assiduously
during five years, but hungry and unfed since the War, can once more
feed and find some satisfaction. The Bolshevist, or the Labour agitator,
takes the place of the Hun; the elements of enmity and disruption are
already present.
And something similar takes place with the miner, or labour man, in
reference to the duchess and what she stands for. For him also the main
problem of life had resolved itself during the War into something simple
and emotional; an enemy to be fought and overcome. Not a puzzling
intellectual difficulty, with all the hesitations and uncertainties of
intellectual decision dependent upon sustained mental effort. The
rights and wrongs were settled for him; right was our side, wrong the
enemy's. What we had to do was to crush him. That done, it would be a
better world, his country 'a land fit for heroes to live in.'
On return from the War he does not find quite that. He can, for
instance, get no house fit to live in at all. High prices, precarious
employment. What is wrong? There are fifty theories, all puzzling. As to
housing, he is sometimes told it is his own fault; the building unions
won't permit dilution. When the 'high-brows' are all at sixes and
sevens, what is a man to think? But it is suggested to him that behind
all this is one enemy: the Capitalist. His papers have a picture of him:
very like the Hun. Now here is something emotionally familiar. For years
he has learned to hate and fight, to embody all problems in the one
problem of fighting some definite--preferably personified--enemy. Smash
him; get him by the throat, and then all these brain-racking puzzles
will clear themselves up. Our side, our class, our tribe, will then be
on top, and there will be no real solution until it is. To this respond
all the emotions, the whole state of feeling which years of war have
cultivated. Once more the problem of life is simple; one of power,
domination, the fight for mastery; loyalty to our side, our lot, 'right
or wrong.' Workers to be masters, workers who have been shoved and
ordered about, to do the shoving and the ordering. Dictatorship of the
proletariat. The headaches disappear and one can live emotionally free
once more.
There are 'high-brows' who will even philosophise the thing for him, and
explain that only the psychology of war and violence will give the
emotional drive to get anything done; that only by the myths which mark
patriotism can real social change be made. Just as for the hate which
keeps war going, the enemy State must be a single 'person,' a
collectivity in which any one German can be killed as vengeance or
reprisal for any other,[63] so 'the capitalist class' must be a
personality, if class hatred is to be kept alive in such a way as to
bring the class war to victory.
But that theory overlooks the fact that just as the nationalism which
makes war also destroys the Alliances by which victory can be made
effective, so the transfer of the psychology of Nationalism to the
industrial field has the same effect of Balkanisation. We get in both
areas, not the definite triumph of a cohesive group putting into
operation a clear-cut and understandable programme or policy, but the
chaotic conflict of an infinite number of groups unable to co-operate
effectively for any programme.
If the hostilities which react to the Syndicalistic appeal were confined
to the Capitalist, there might be something to be said for it from the
point of view of the Labour movement. But forces so purely instinctive,
by their very nature repelling the restraint of self-imposed discipline
by intelligent foresight of consequences, cannot be the servant of an
intelligent purpose, they become its master. The hostility becomes more
important than the purpose. To the industrial Jingo, as to the
nationalist Jingo, all foreigners are potential enemies. The hostile
tribe or herd may be constituted by very small differences; slight
variations of occupation, interest, race, speech, and--most potently of
all perhaps--dogma or belief. Heresy-hunting is, of course, one
manifestation of tribal animosity; and a heretic is the person who has
the insufferable impudence to disagree with us.
So the Sorelian philosophy of violence and instinctive pugnacity gives
us, not the effective drive of a whole movement against the present
social order (for that would require order, discipline, self-control,
tolerance, and toleration); it gives us the tendency to an infinite
splitting of the Labour movement. No sooner does the Left of some party
break off and found a new party than it is immediately confronted by its
own 'Leftism.' And your dogmatist hates the dissenting member of his own
sect more fiercely than the rival sect; your Communist some rival
Communism more bitterly than the Capitalist. Already the Labour movement
is crossed by the hostilities of Communist against Socialist, the Second
International against the Third, the Third against the Fourth; Trades
Unionism by the hostility of skilled against unskilled, and in much of
Europe there is also the conflict of town against country.
This tendency has happily not yet gone far in England; but here, as
elsewhere, it represents the one great danger, the tendency to be
watched. And it is a tendency that has its moral and psychological roots
in the same forces which have given us the chaos in the international
field: The deep human lust for coercion, domination; the irksomeness of
toleration, thought, self-discipline.
The final difficulty in social and political discussion is, of course,
the fact that the ultimate values--what is the highest good, what is the
worst evil--cannot usually be argued about at all; you accept them, you
see that they are good or bad as the case may be, or you don't.
Yet we cannot organise a society save on the basis of some sort of
agreement concerning these least common denominators; the final argument
for the view that Western Europe had to destroy German Prussianism was
that the system challenged certain ultimate moral values common to
Western society. On the morrow of the sinking of the _Lusitania_ an
American writer pointed out that if the cold-blooded slaughter of
innocent women and children were accepted as a normal incident of war,
like any other, the whole moral standards of the West would then
definitely be placed on another plane. That elusive but immeasurably
important moral sense, which gives a society sufficient community of aim
to make common action possible, would have been radically altered. The
ancient world--highly civilised and cultured as much of it was--had a
_Sittlichkeit_ which made the chattel-slavery of the greater part of the
human race an entirely normal--and, as they thought, inevitable--condition
of things. It was accepted by the slaves themselves, and it was this
acquiescence in the arrangement by both parties to it which mainly
accounted for its continuance through a very long period of a very high
civilisation. The position of women illustrates the same thing. There
are to-day highly developed civilisations in which a man of education
buys a wife, or several, as in the West he would buy a racehorse. And
the wife, or wives, accept that situation; there can be no change in
that particular matter until certain quite 'unarguable' moral values
have altered in the minds of those concerned.
The American writer raised, therefore, an extremely important question
in relation to the War. Has its total outcome affected certain values of
the fundamental kind just indicated? What has been its effect upon
social impulses? Has it any direct relation to certain moral tendencies
that have succeeded it?
Perhaps the War is now old enough to enable us to face a few quite
undeniable facts with some measure of detachment.
When the Germans bombarded Scarborough early in the War, there was such
a hurricane of moralisation that one rejoiced that this War would not be
marked on our side, at least, by the bombardment of open cities. But
when our Press began to print reports of French bombs falling on circus
tents full of children, scores being killed, there was simply no protest
at all. And one of the humours of the situation was that after more than
a year, in which scores of such reports had appeared in the Press, some
journalistic genius began an agitation on behalf of 'reprisals' for air
raids.[64]
At a time when it seemed doubtful whether the Germans would sign the
Treaty or not, and just what would be the form of the Hungarian
Government, the _Evening News_ printed the following editorial:--
'It might take weeks or months to bring the Hungarian Bolshevists
and recalcitrant Germans to book by extensive operations with
large forces. It might take but a few days to bring them to reason
by adequate use of aircraft.
'Allied airmen could reach Buda-pest in a few hours, and teach its
inhabitants such a lesson that Bolshevism would lose its
attractions for them.
'Strong Allied aerodromes on the Rhine and in Poland, well equipped
with the best machines and pilots, could quickly persuade the
inhabitants of the large German cities of the folly of having
refused to sign the peace.
'Those considerations are elementary. For that reason they may be
overlooked. They are "milk for babes."'[65]
Now the prevailing thesis of the British, and particularly the
Northcliffe Press, in reference to Bolshevism, was that it is a form of
tyranny imposed by a cruel minority upon a helpless people. The proposal
amounts, therefore, either to killing civilians for a form of Government
which they cannot possibly help, or to an admission that Bolshevism has
the support of the populace, and that as the outcome of our war for
democracy we should refuse them the right to choose the government they
prefer.
When the Germans bombarded Scarborough and dropped bombs on London, the
Northcliffe Press called Heaven to witness (_a_) that only fiends in
human form could make war on helpless civilian populations, women, and
children; (_b_) that not only were the Huns dastardly baby-killers for
making war in that fashion, but were bad psychologists as well, because
our anger at such unheard-of devilries would only render our resistance
more unconquerable than ever; and (_c_) that no consideration whatever
would induce English soldiers to blow women and children to pulp--unless
it were as a reprisal. Well, Lord Northcliffe proposed to _commence_ a
war against Hungarians (as it had already been commenced against the
Russians) by such a wholesale massacre of the civil population that a
Government, which he tells us is imposed upon them against their will,
may 'lose its attractions.' This would be, of course, the second edition
of the war waged to destroy militarist modes of thought, to establish
the reign of righteousness and the protection of the defenceless and the
weak.
The _Evening News_ is the paper, by the way, whose wrath became violent
when it learned that some Quakers and others were attempting to make
some provision for the children of interned Austrians and Germans. Those
guilty of such 'un-English' conduct as a little mercy and pity extended
to helpless children, were hounded in headlines day after day as
'Hun-coddlers,' traitors 'attempting to placate the Hun tiger by bits of
cake to its cubs'; and when the War is all over--a year after all the
fighting is stopped--a vicar of the English Church opposes, with
indignation, the suggestion that his parish should be contaminated by
'enemy' children brought from the famine area to save them from
death.[66]
On March 3, 1919, Mr Winston Churchill stated in the House of Commons,
speaking of the blockade:--
' ... This weapon of starvation falls mainly upon the women and
children, upon the old and the weak and the poor, after all the
fighting has stopped.'
One might take this as a prelude to a change of policy. Not at all: he
added that we were 'enforcing the blockade with rigour' and would
continue to do so.
Mr Churchill's indication as to how the blockade acts is important. We
spoke of it as 'punishment' for Germany's crimes, or Bolshevist
infamies, as the case may be. But it did not punish 'Germany' or the
Bolshevists.[67] Its penalties are in a peculiar degree unevenly
distributed. The country districts escape almost entirely, the peasants
can feed themselves. It falls on the cities. But even in the cities the
very wealthy and the official classes can as a rule escape. Virtually
its whole weight--as Mr Churchill implies--falls upon the urban poor,
and particularly the urban child population, the old, the invalids, the
sick. Whoever may be the parties responsible for the War, these are
guiltless. But it is these we punish.
Very soon after the Armistice there was ample evidence available as to
the effect of the blockade, both in Russia and in Central Europe.
Officers of our Army of Occupation reported that their men 'could not
stand' the spectacle of the suffering around them. Organisations like
the 'Save the Children Fund' devoted huge advertisements to
familiarising the public with the facts. Considerable sums for relief
were raised--but the blockade was maintained. There was no connection
between the two things--our foreign policy and the famine in Europe--in
the public mind. It developed a sort of moral shock absorber. Facts did
not reach it or disturb its serenity.
This was revealed in a curious way at the time of the signature of the
Treaty. At the gathering of the representatives, the German delegate
spoke sitting down. It turned out afterwards that he was so ill and
distraught, that he dared not trust himself to stand up. Every paper was
full of the incident, as also of the fact that the paper-cutter in front
of him on the table was found afterwards to be broken; that he placed
his gloves upon his copy of the Treaty; and that he had thrown away his
cigarette on entering the room. These were the offences which prompted
the _Daily Mail_ to say: 'After this no one will treat the Huns as
civilised or repentant.' Almost the entire Press rang with the story of
'Rantzau's insult.' But not one paper, so far as I could discover, paid
any attention to what Rantzau had said. He said:--
'I do not want to answer by reproaches to reproaches.... Crimes in
war may not be excusable, but they are committed in the struggle
for victory and in the defence of national existence, and passions
are aroused which make the conscience of peoples blunt. The
hundreds of thousands of non-combatants who have perished since
November 11 by reason of the blockade, were killed with cold
deliberation, after our adversaries had conquered and victory had
been assured them. Think of that when you speak of guilt and
punishment.'
No one seems to have noticed this trifle in presence of the heinousness
of the cigarette, the gloves, and the other crimes. Yet this was an
insult indeed. If true, it shamefully disgraces England--if England is
responsible. The public presumably simply did not care whether it was
true or not.
A few months after the Armistice I wrote as follows:--
'When the Germans sank the _Lusitania_ and slew several hundred
women and children, _we_ knew--at least we thought we knew--that
that was the kind of thing which Englishmen could not do. In all
the hates and stupidities, the dirt and heartbreaks of the war,
there was just this light on the horizon: that there were certain
things to which we at least could never fall, in the name of
victory or patriotism, or any other of the deadly masked words that
are "the unjust stewards of men's ideas."
'And then we did it. We, too, sank _Lusitanias_. We, too, for some
cold political end, plunged the unarmed, the weak, the helpless,
the children, the suffering women, to agonising death and torture.
Without a tremor. Not alone in the bombing of cities, which we did
so much better than the enemy. For this we had the usual excuse. It
was war.
'But after the War, when the fighting was finished, the enemy was
disarmed, his submarines surrendered, his aeroplanes destroyed, his
soldiers dispersed; months afterwards, we kept a weapon which was
for use first and mainly against the children, the weak, the sick,
the old, the women, the mothers, the decrepit: starvation and
disease. Our papers told us--our patriotic papers--how well it was
succeeding. Correspondents wrote complacently, sometimes
exultingly, of how thin and pinched were all the children, even
those well into teens; how stunted, how defective, the next
generation would be; and how the younger children, those of seven
and eight, looked like children of three and four; and how those
beneath this age simply did not live. Either they were born dead,
or if they were born alive--what was there to give them? Milk? An
unheard-of luxury. And nothing to wrap them in; even in hospitals
the new-born children were wrapped in newspapers, the lucky ones in
bits of sacking. The mothers were most fortunate when the children
were born dead. In an insane asylum a mother wails: "If only I did
not hear the cry of the children for food all day long, all day
long!" To "bring Germany to reason" we had, you see, to drive
mothers out of their reason.
'"It would have been more merciful," said Bob Smillie, "to turn the
machine-guns on those children." Put this question to yourself,
patriot Englishmen: "Was the sinking of the _Lusitania_ as cruel,
as prolonged, as mean, as merciless a death as this?" And we--you
and I--do it every day, every night.
'Here is the _Times_ of May 21, half a year after the cessation of
war, telling the Germans that they do not know how much more severe
we can still make the "domestic results" of starvation, if we
really put our mind to it. To the blockade we shall add the
"horrors of invasion." The invasion of a country already disarmed
is to be marked--when we do it--by horror.
'But the purpose! That justifies it! What purpose? To obtain the
signature to the Treaty of Peace. Many Englishmen--not Pacifists,
not sentimentalists, not conscientious objectors, or other vermin
of that kind, but Bishops, Judges, Members of the House of Lords,
great public educators. Tory editors--have declared that this
Treaty is a monstrous injustice. Some Englishmen at least think so.
But if the Germans say so, that becomes a crime which we shall know
how to punish. "The enemy have been reminded already" says the
_Times_, proud organ of British respectability, of Conservatism, of
distinguished editors and ennobled proprietors, "that the machinery
of the blockade can again be put into force at a few hours' notice
... the intention of the Allies to take military action if
necessary.... Rejection of the Peace terms now offered them, will
assuredly lead to fresh chastisement."
'But will not Mr Lloyd George be able to bring back _signatures_?
Will he not have made Peace--permanent Peace? Shall we not have
destroyed this Prussian philosophy of frightfulness, force, and
hate? Shall we not have proved to the world that a State without
military power can trust to the good faith and humanity of its
neighbours? Can we not, then, celebrate victory with light hearts,
honour our dead and glorify our arms? Have we not served faithfully
those ideals of right and justice, mercy and chivalry, for which a
whole generation of youth went through hell and gave their lives?'