FAIR WARNING
I
To give the cure a chance we must have a long quiet time. And we must
secure it now.
For the moment, no doubt, war has gone out of fashion; it pines in the
shade, like the old horsehair covers for sofas, or antimacassars of
lace. Hardly a day can pass, even now, but someone finds out, with a
start and a look of displeasure, that war has been given its chance and
has not done quite so well as it ought to have done. One man will write
to the Press, in dismay, that the meals in the Simplon express are not
what they were in 1910. Another, outward bound by Calais to Cannes, has
found that the hot-water plant in his sleeping-compartment struck
work--and that in a specially cold sector down by the Alps. Thus does
war in the end, knock at the doors of us all: like the roll of the earth
upon its axis, it brings us, if not death or destitution or some ashy
taste in the mouth, at any rate a sense of a fallen temperature in our
bunks. However non-porous our minds, there does slowly filter into us
the thought that when a million of a country's men of working age have
just been killed there may be a plaguey dearth of the man-power needed
to keep in pleasant order the lavatories of its _trains de luxe_. Sad to
think how many tender minds, formed in those Elysian years--Elysian for
anyone who was not poor--before the war, will have to suffer, probably
for many years, these little shocks of realization.
Surely there never was any time in the life of the world when it was so
good, in the way of obvious material comfort, to be alive and fairly
well-to-do as it was before the war. Think of the speed and comfort and
relative cheapness of the Orient Express; of the way you could wander,
unruined, through long æsthetic holidays in Italy and semi-æsthetic,
semi-athletic holidays in the Alps; of the week-end accessibility of
London from Northern England; of the accessibility of public schools for
the sons of the average parson or doctor; of the penny post, crown of
our civilization--torn from us while the abhorred half-penny post for
circulars was yet left; of the Income Tax just large enough to give us a
pleasant sense of grievance patriotically borne, but not to prostrate
us, winter and summer, with two "elbow jolts" or "Mary Ann punches" like
those of the perfected modern prize-fighter.
Many sanguine well-to-do people dreamt, in the August of 1914, that the
war, besides attaining its primary purpose of beating the enemy, would
disarrange none of these blessings; that it would even have as a
by-product a kind of "old-time Merrie England," with the working classes
cured of the thirst for wages and deeply convinced that everyone who was
not one of themselves was a natural ruler over them. For any little
expense to which the war might put us the Germans would pay, and our
troops would return home to dismiss all trade-union officials and to
regard the upper and middle classes thenceforth as a race of heaven-sent
colonels--men to be followed, feared, and loved. Ah, happy vision,
beautiful dream!--like Thackeray's reverie about having a very old and
rich aunt. The dreamer awakes among the snows of the Mont Cenis with a
horrid smell in the corridor and the hot-water pipes out of order. And
so war has gone out of fashion, even among cheery well-to-do-people.
II
But may it not come into fashion again? Do not all the great fashions
move in cycles, like stars? When our wars with Napoleon were just over,
and all the bills still to be paid, and the number of visibly one-legged
men at its provisional maximum, must not many simple minds have thought
that surely man would never idealize any business so beastly and costly
again? And then see what happened. We were all tranquilly feeding, good
as gold, in the deep and pleasant meadows of the long Victorian peace
when from some of the frailest animals in the pasture there rose a
plaintive bleat for war. It was the very lambs that began it. "Shall we
never have carnage?" Stevenson, the consumptive, sighed to a friend.
Henley, the cripple, wrote a longing "Song of the Sword." Out of the
weak came forth violence. Bookish men began to hug the belief that they
had lost their way in life; they felt that they were Neys or Nelsons
_manqués_, or cavalry leaders lost to the world. "If I had been born a
corsair or a pirate," thought Mr. Tappertit, musing among the ninepins,
"I should have been all right." Fragile dons became connoisseurs. _faute
de mieux_, of prize-fighting; they talked, nineteen to the dozen, about
the still, strong man and "straight-flung words and few," adored "naked
force," averred they were not cotton-spinners all, and deplored the
cankers of a quiet world and a long peace. Some of them entered quite
hotly, if not always expertly, into the joys and sorrows of what they
called "Tommies," and chafed at the many rumoured refusals Of British
innkeepers to serve them, little knowing that only by these great acts
of renunciation on the part of licensees has many a gallant private been
saved from falling into that morgue an "officer house," and having his
beer congealed in the glass by the refrigerative company of colonels.
The father and mother of this virilistic movement among the well-read
were Mr. Andrew Lang, the most donnish of wits, and one of the wittiest.
Lang would review a new book in a great many places at once. So, when he
blessed, his blessing would carry as far as the more wholly literal
myrrh and frankincense wafted abroad by the hundred hands of Messrs.
Boot. The fame of Mr. Rider Haggard was one of Lang's major products.
Mr. Haggard was really a man of some mettle. By persons fitted to judge
he was believed to have at his fingers' ends all the best of what is
known and thought by mankind about turnips and other crops with which
they may honourably and usefully rotate. But it was for turning his back
upon these humdrum sustainers of life and writing, in a rich Corinthian
style, accounts of fancy "slaughters grim and great," that his flame
lived and spread aloft, as Milton says, in the pure eyes and perfect
witness of Lang. Another nursling of Lang's was the wittier Kipling,
then a studious youth exuding Border ballads and Bret Harte from every
pore, but certified to carry about him, on paper, the proper smell of
blood and tobacco.
Deep answered unto deep. In Germany, too, the pibrochs of the professors
were rending the skies, and poets of C4 medical grade were tearing the
mask from the hideous face of peace. The din throughout the bookish
parts of Central and Western Europe suggested to an irreverent mind a
stage with a quaint figure of some short-sighted pedagogue of tradition
coming upon it, round-shouldered, curly-toed, print-fed, physically
inept, to play the part of the war-horse in Job, swallowing the ground
with fierceness and rage, and "saying among the trumpets 'Ha, ha!'" You
may see it all as a joke. Or as something rather more than a joke, in
its effects. Mr. Yeats suggested that an all-seeing eye might perceive
the Trojan War to have come because of a tune that a boy had once piped
in Thessaly. What if all our millions of men had to be killed because
some academic Struwwelpeter, fifty years since, took on himself to pipe
up "Take the nasty peace away!" and kick the shins of Concord, his most
kindly nurse?
III
If he did, it was natural. All Struwwelpeters are natural. All
heirs-apparent are said to take the opposite side to their fathers still
on the throne. And those learned men were heirs to the age of the
Crystal Palace, the age of the first "Locksley Hall," with its
"parliament of man" and "federation of the world," the age that laid a
railway line along the city moat of Amiens and opened capacious Hôtels
de la Paix throughout Latin Europe, the age when passports withered and
Baedeker was more and more, the age that in one of its supreme moments
of ecstasy founded the London International College, an English public
school (now naturally dead) in which the boys were to pass some of their
terms among the heathen in Germany or France.
The cause of peace, like all triumphant causes, good as they may be, had
made many second-rate friends. It had become safe, and even sound, for
the worldly to follow. The dullards, the people who live by phrases
alone, the scribes who write by rote and not with authority--most of
these had drifted into its service. It had become a provocation, a
challenge, vexing those "discoursing wits" who "count it," Bacon says,
"a bondage to fix a belief." A rebound had to come. And those
arch-rebounders were men of the teaching and writing trades, wherein the
newest fashions in thought are most eagerly canvassed, and any
inveterate acquiescence in mere common sense afflicts many bosoms with
the fear of lagging yards and yards behind the foremost files of time;
perhaps--that keenest agony--of having nothing piquant or startling to
say, no little bombs handy for conversational purposes. "I sat down,"
the deserving young author says in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, "and,
finding that the best things remained to be said on the wrong side, I
resolved to write a book that should be wholly new. I therefore dressed
up three paradoxes with some ingenuity. They were false, indeed, but
they were new. The jewels of truth have been so often imported by others
that nothing was left for me to import but some splendid things that, at
a distance, looked every bit as well." "Peace on earth, good-will
towards men," "Blessed are the peacemakers"--these and the like might be
jewels; but they were demoded; they were old tags; they were clichés of
bourgeois morality; they were _vieux jeu_, like the garnets with which,
in _She Stoops to Conquer_, the young woman of fashion declined to be
pacified when her heart cried out for the diamonds.
IV
Then the Church itself must needs take a hand--or that part of the
Church which ever cocks an eye at the latest fashions in public opinion,
the "blessed fellows," like Poins, that "think as every man thinks" and
help to swell every passing shout into a roar. I find among old papers a
letter written in Queen Victoria's reign by an unfashionable curmudgeon
whose thought would not keep to the roadway like theirs. "I see," this
rude ironist writes, "that 'the Church's duty in regard to war' is to be
discussed at the Church Congress. That is right. For a year the heads of
our Church have been telling us what war is and does--that it is a
school of character, that it sobers men, cleans them, strengthens them,
knits their hearts, makes them brave, patient, humble, tender, prone to
self-sacrifice. Watered by 'war's red rain,' one bishop tells us, virtue
grows; a cannonade, he points out, is an 'oratorio'--almost a form of
worship. True; and to the Church men look for help to save their souls
from starving for lack of this good school, this kindly rain, this
sacred music. Congresses are apt to lose themselves in wastes of words.
This one must not--surely cannot--so straight is the way to the goal. It
has simply to draft and submit a new Collect for 'war in our time,' and
to call for the reverent but firm emendation, in the spirit of the best
modern thought, of those passages in Bible and Prayer-book by which even
the truest of Christians and the best of men have at times been blinded
to the duty of seeking war and ensuing it.
"Still, man's moral nature cannot, I admit, live by war alone. Nor do I
say, with some, that peace is wholly bad. Even amid the horrors of peace
you will find little shoots of character fed by the gentle and timely
rains of plague and famine, tempest and fire; simple lessons of patience
and courage conned in the schools of typhus, gout, and stone; not
oratorios, perhaps, but homely anthems and rude hymns played on knife
and gun, in the long winter nights. Far from me to 'sin our mercies' or
to call mere twilight dark. Yet dark it may become. For remember that
even these poor makeshift schools of character, these second-bests,
these halting substitutes for war--remember that the efficiency of every
one of them, be it hunger, accident, ignorance, sickness or pain, is
menaced by the intolerable strain of its struggle with secular doctors,
plumbers, inventors, school-masters, and policemen. Every year thousands
who would in nobler days have been braced and steeled by manly tussles
with smallpox or diphtheria are robbed of that blessing by the great
changes made in our drains. Every year thousands of women and children
must go their way bereft of the rich spiritual experience of the widow
and the orphan. I try not to despond, but when I think of all that
Latimer owed to the fire, Regulus to a spiked barrel, Socrates to
prison, and Job to destitution and disease--when I think of these things
and then think of how many of my poor fellow creatures in our modern
world are robbed daily of the priceless discipline of danger, want, and
torture, then I ask myself--I cannot help asking myself--whether we are
not walking into a very slough of moral and spiritual squalor.
"Once more, I am no alarmist. As long as we have wars to stay our souls
upon, the moral evil will not be grave; and, to do the Ministry justice,
I see no risk of their drifting into any long or serious peace. But weak
or vicious men may come after them, and it is now, in the time of our
strength, of quickened insight and deepened devotion, that we must take
thought for the leaner years when there may be no killing of multitudes
of Englishmen, no breaking up of English homes, no chastening blows to
English trade, no making, by thousands, of English widows, orphans, and
cripples--when the school may be shut and the rain a drought and the
oratorio dumb."
But what did a few unfashionable curmudgeons count for, against so many
gifted divines?
V
And yet all mortal things are subject to decay, even reactions, even
decay itself, and there comes a time when the dead Ophelia may justly be
said to be not decomposing, but recomposing successfully as violets and
so forth. Heirs-apparent grow up into kings and have little heirs of
their own who, hearkening to nature's benevolent law, become stout
counter-reactionists in their turn. So now the pre-war virilists, the
literary braves who felt that they had supped too full of peace, have
died in their beds, or lost voice, like the cuckoos in June, and a
different breed find voice and pipe up. These are the kind, the numerous
kind, whose youth has supped quite full enough of war. For them Bellona
has not the mystical charm, as of grapes out of reach, that she had for
the Henleys and Stevensons. All the veiled-mistress business is off.
Battles have no aureoles now in the sight of young men as they had for
the British prelate who wrote that old poem about the "red rain." The
men of the counter-reaction have gone to the school and sat the oratorio
out and taken a course of the waters, after the worthy prelate's
prescription. They have seen trenches full of gassed men, and the queue
of their friends at the brothel-door in Bethune. At the heart of the
magical rose was seated an earwig.
Presently all the complaisant part of our Press may jump to the fact
that the game of idealizing war is now, in its turn, a back number. Then
we may hear such a thudding or patter of feet as Carlyle describes when
Louis XV was seen to be dead and the Court bolted off, _ventre à terre_,
along the corridors of Versailles, to kiss the hand of Louis XVI. And
then will come the season of danger. Woe unto Peace, or anyone else,
when all men speak well of her, even the base. When Lord Robert Cecil
and Mr. Clynes and Sir Hubert Gough stand up for the peace which
ex-soldiers desire, it is all right. But what if Tadpoe and Taper stood
up for it? What if all the vendors of supposedly popular stuff, all the
timid gregarious repeaters of current banalities, all the largest
circulations in the solar system were on the side of peace, as well as
her old bodyguard of game disregarders of fashion and whimsical
stickers-up for Christianity, chivalry, or sportsmanship?
We must remember that, in the course of nature, the proportion of former
combatants among us must steadily decline. And war hath no fury like a
non-combatant. Can you not already forehear, in the far distance, beyond
the peace period now likely to come, the still, small voice of some
Henley or Lang of later days beginning to pipe up again with Ancient
Pistol's ancient suggestion: "What? Shall we have incision? Shall we
imbrue?" And then a sudden _furore_, a war-dance, a beating of tom-toms.
And so the whole cycle revolving again. "Seest thou not, I say, what a
deformed thief this fashion is? How giddily a' turns about all the hot
bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty? Sometimes fashioning them
like Pharaoh's soldiers in the reechy painting, sometimes like god Bel's
priests in the old church window; sometimes like the shaven Hercules in
the smirched worm-eaten tapestry?" Anything to be in the fashion.
There is only one thing for it. There must still be five or six million
ex-soldiers. They are the most determined peace party that ever existed
in Britain. Let them clap the only darbies they have--the Covenant of
the League of Nations--on to the wrists of all future poets, romancers,
and sages. The future is said to be only the past entered by another
door. We must beware in good time of those boys, and fiery elderly men,
piping in Thessaly.
* * * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
Typographical errors were silently corrected.
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a
predominant form was found in this book.