All human affairs are mental affairs; the bright ideas of to-day are the
realities of to-morrow. The real history of mankind is the history of
how ideas have arisen, how they have taken possession of men's minds,
how they have struggled, altered, proliferated, decayed. There is
nothing in this war at all but a conflict of ideas, traditions, and
mental habits. The German Will clothed in conceptions of aggression and
fortified by cynical falsehood, struggles against the fundamental sanity
of the German mind and the confused protest of mankind. So that the most
permanently important thing in the tragic process of this war is the
change of opinion that is going on. What are people making of it? Is it
producing any great common understandings, any fruitful unanimities?
No doubt it is producing enormous quantities of cerebration, but is it
anything more than chaotic and futile cerebration? We are told all
sorts of things in answer to that, things without a scrap of evidence
or probability to support them. It is, we are assured, turning people to
religion, making them moral and thoughtful. It is also, we are assured
with equal confidence, turning them to despair and moral disaster. It
will be followed by (1) a period of moral renascence, and (2) a debauch.
It is going to make the workers (1) more and (2) less obedient and
industrious. It is (1) inuring men to war and (2) filling them with a
passionate resolve never to suffer war again. And so on. I propose now
to ask what is really happening in this matter? How is human opinion
changing? I have opinions of my own and they are bound to colour my
discussion. The reader must allow for that, and as far as possible I
will remind him where necessary to make his allowance.
Now first I would ask, is any really continuous and thorough
mental process going on at all about this war? I mean, is there any
considerable number of people who are seeing it as a whole, taking it in
as a whole, trying to get a general idea of it from which they can form
directing conclusions for the future? Is there any considerable number
of people even trying to do that? At any rate let me point out first
that there is quite an enormous mass of people who--in spite of the fact
that their minds are concentrated on aspects of this war, who are at
present hearing, talking, experiencing little else than the war--are
nevertheless neither doing nor trying to do anything that deserves to
be called thinking about it at all. They may even be suffering quite
terribly by it. But they are no more mastering its causes, reasons,
conditions, and the possibility of its future prevention than a monkey
that has been rescued in a scorching condition from the burning of a
house will have mastered the problem of a fire. It is just happening to
and about them. It may, for anything they have learnt about it, happen
to them again.
A vast majority of people are being swamped by the spectacular side of
the business. It was very largely my fear of being so swamped myself
that made me reluctant to go as a spectator to the front. I knew that my
chances of being hit by a bullet were infinitesimal, but I was extremely
afraid of being hit by some too vivid impression. I was afraid that I
might see some horribly wounded man or some decayed dead body that would
so scar my memory and stamp such horror into me as to reduce me to a
mere useless, gibbering, stop-the-war-at-any-price pacifist. Years ago
my mind was once darkened very badly for some weeks with a kind of fear
and distrust of life through a sudden unexpected encounter one tranquil
evening with a drowned body. But in this journey in Italy and France,
although I have had glimpses of much death and seen many wounded men,
I have had no really horrible impressions at all. That side of the
business has, I think, been overwritten. The thing that haunts me most
is the impression of a prevalent relapse into extreme untidiness, of
a universal discomfort, of fields, and of ruined houses treated
disregardfully.... But that is not what concerns us now in this
discussion. What concerns us now is the fact that this war is producing
spectacular effects so tremendous and incidents so strange, so
remarkable, so vivid, that the mind forgets both causes and consequences
and simply sits down to stare.
For example, there is this business of the Zeppelin raids in England. It
is a supremely silly business; it is the most conclusive demonstration
of the intellectual inferiority of the German to the Western European
that is should ever have happened. There was the clearest _a priori_
case against the gas-bag. I remember the discussions ten or twelve years
ago in which it was established to the satisfaction of every reasonable
man that ultimately the “heavier than air” machine (as we called it
then) must fly better than the gas-bag, and still more conclusively
that no gas-bag was conceivable that could hope to fight and defeat
aeroplanes. Nevertheless the German, with that dull faith of his in mere
“Will,” persisted along his line. He knew instinctively that he could
not produce aviators to meet the Western European; all his social
instincts made him cling to the idea of a great motherly, almost
sow-like bag of wind above him. At an enormous waste of resources
Germany has produced these futile monsters, that drift in the darkness
over England promiscuously dropping bombs on fields and houses. They
are now meeting the fate that was demonstrably certain ten years ago.
If they found us unready for them it is merely that we were unable to
imagine so idiotic an enterprise would ever be seriously sustained and
persisted in. We did not believe in the probability of Zeppelin raids
any more than we believed that Germany would force the world into war.
It was a thing too silly to be believed. But they came--to their certain
fate. In the month after I returned from France and Italy, no less than
four of these fatuities were exploded and destroyed within thirty miles
of my Essex home.... There in chosen phrases you have the truth about
these things. But now mark the perversion of thought due to spectacular
effect.
I find over the Essex countryside, which has been for more than a year
and a half a highway for Zeppelins, a new and curious admiration for
them that has arisen out of these very disasters. Previously they were
regarded with dislike and a sort of distrust, as one might regard a
sneaking neighbour who left his footsteps in one's garden at night. But
the Zeppelins of Billericay and Potter's Bar are--heroic things. (The
Cuffley one came down too quickly, and the fourth one which came down
for its crew to surrender is despised.) I have heard people describe the
two former with eyes shining with enthusiasm.
“First,” they say, “you saw a little round red glow that spread. Then
you saw the whole Zeppelin glowing. Oh, it was _beautiful!_ Then it
began to turn over and come down, and it flames and pieces began to
break away. And then down it came, leaving flaming pieces all up the
sky. At last it was a pillar of fire eight thousand feet high....
Everyone said, 'Ooooo!' And then someone pointed out the little
aeroplane lit up by the flare--such a leetle thing up there in
the night! It is the greatest thing I have ever seen. Oh! the most
wonderful--most wonderful!”
There is a feeling that the Germans really must after all be a splendid
people to provide such magnificent pyrotechnics.
Some people in London the other day were pretending to be shocked by an
American who boasted that he had been in “two _bully_ bombardments,”
but he was only saying what everyone feels more or less. We are at
a spectacle that--as a spectacle--our grandchildren will envy. I
understand now better the story of the man who stared at the sparks
raining up from his own house as it burnt in the night and whispered
“_Lovely! Lovely!_”
The spectacular side of the war is really an enormous distraction from
thought. And against thought there also fights the native indolence of
the human mind. The human mind, it seems, was originally developed to
think about the individual; it thinks reluctantly about the species.
It takes refuge from that sort of thing if it possibly can. And so
the second great preventive of clear thinking is the tranquillising
platitude.
The human mind is an instrument very easily fatigued. Only a few
exceptions go on thinking restlessly--to the extreme exasperation of
their neighbours. The normal mind craves for decisions, even wrong or
false decisions rather than none. It clutches at comforting falsehoods.
It loves to be told, “_There_, don't you worry. That'll be all right.
That's _settled._” This war has come as an almost overwhelming challenge
to mankind. To some of us it seems as it if were the Sphynx proffering
the alternative of its riddle or death. Yet the very urgency of this
challenge to think seems to paralyse the critical intelligence of very
many people altogether. They will say, “This war is going to produce
enormous changes in everything.” They will then subside mentally with a
feeling of having covered the whole ground in a thoroughly safe manner.
Or they will adopt an air of critical aloofness. They will say, “How
is it possible to foretell what may happen in this tremendous sea of
change?” And then, with an air of superior modesty, they will go on
doing--whatever they feel inclined to do. Many others, a degree less
simple in their methods, will take some entirely partial aspect, arrive
at some guesswork decision upon that, and then behave as though that met
every question we have to face. Or they will make a sort of admonitory
forecast that is conditional upon the good behaviour of other people.
“Unless the Trade Unions are more reasonable,” they will say. Or,
“Unless the shipping interest is grappled with and controlled.” Or,
“Unless England wakes up.” And with that they seem to wash their hands
of further responsibility for the future.
One delightful form of put-off is the sage remark, “Let us finish the
war first, and then let us ask what is going to happen after it.” One
likes to think of the beautiful blank day after the signing of the peace
when these wise minds swing round to pick up their deferred problems....
I submit that a man has not done his duty by himself as a rational
creature unless he has formed an idea of what is going on, as one
complicated process, until he has formed an idea sufficiently definite
for him to make it the basis of a further idea, which is his own
relationship to that process. He must have some notion of what the
process is going to do to him, and some notion of what he means to do,
if he can, to the process. That is to say, he must not only have an idea
how the process is going, but also an idea of how he wants it to go. It
seems so natural and necessary for a human brain to do this that it is
hard to suppose that everyone has not more or less attempted it. But
few people, in Great Britain at any rate, have the habit of frank
expression, and when people do not seem to have made out any of these
things for themselves there is a considerable element of secretiveness
and inexpressiveness to be allowed for before we decide that they have
not in some sort of fashion done so. Still, after all allowances have
been made, there remains a vast amount of jerry-built and ready-made
borrowed stuff in most of people's philosophies of the war. The systems
of authentic opinion in this world of thought about the war are like
comparatively rare thin veins of living mentality in a vast world of
dead repetitions and echoed suggestions. And that being the case, it is
quite possible that history after the war, like history before the war,
will not be so much a display of human will and purpose as a resultant
of human vacillations, obstructions, and inadvertences. We shall still
be in a drama of blind forces following the line of least resistance.
One of the people who is often spoken of as if he were doing an enormous
amount of concentrated thinking is “the man in the trenches.” We are
told--by gentlemen writing for the most part at home--of the most
extraordinary things that are going on in those devoted brains, how they
are getting new views about the duties of labour, religion, morality,
monarchy, and any other notions that the gentleman at home happens to
fancy and wished to push. Now that is not at all the impression of the
khaki mentality I have reluctantly accepted as correct. For the most
part the man in khaki is up against a round of tedious immediate duties
that forbid consecutive thought; he is usually rather crowded and not
very comfortable. He is bored.
The real horror of modern war, when all is said and done, is the
boredom. To get killed our wounded may be unpleasant, but it is at
any rate interesting; the real tragedy is in the desolated fields, the
desolated houses, the desolated hours and days, the bored and desolated
minds that hang behind the melee and just outside the melee. The
peculiar beastliness of the German crime is the way the German war cant
and its consequences have seized upon and paralysed the mental movement
of Western Europe. Before 1914 war was theoretically unpopular in every
European country; we thought of it as something tragic and dreadful.
Now everyone knows by experience that it is something utterly dirty and
detestable. We thought it was the Nemean lion, and we have found it
is the Augean stable. But being bored by war and hating war is quite
unproductive _unless you are thinking about its nature and causes
so thoroughly that you will presently be able to take hold of it and
control it and end it._ It is no good for everyone to say unanimously,
“We will have no more war,” unless you have thought out how to avoid it,
and mean to bring that end about. It is as if everyone said, “We will
have no more catarrh,” or “no more flies,” or “no more east wind.” And
my point is that the immense sorrows at home in every European country
and the vast boredom of the combatants are probably not really producing
any effective remedial mental action at all, and will not do so unless
we get much more thoroughly to work upon the thinking-out process.
In such talks as I could get with men close up to the front I found
beyond this great boredom and attempts at distraction only very
specialised talk about changes in the future. Men were keen upon
questions of army promotion, of the future of conscription, of the
future of the temporary officer, upon the education of boys in relation
to army needs. But the war itself was bearing them all upon its way,
as unquestioned and uncontrolled as if it were the planet on which they
lived.