“Because you are proposing to loosen the grip of a certain narrow and
limited class upon British affairs, and you propose it as though it were
a job as easy as rearranging railway fares or sending a van to Calais.
That is the problem that every decent Englishman is trying to solve
to-day, every man of that Greater Britain which has supplied these five
million volunteers, these magnificent temporary officers and all this
wealth of munitions. And the oligarchy is so invincibly fortified! Do
you think it will let in Frenchmen to share its controls? It will
not even let in Englishmen. It holds the class schools; the class
universities; the examinations for our public services are its class
shibboleths; it is the church, the squirearchy, the permanent army
class, permanent officialdom; it makes every appointment, it is the
fountain of honour; what it does not know is not knowledge, what it
cannot do must not be done. It rules India ignorantly and obstructively;
it will wreck the empire rather than relinquish its ascendancy in
Ireland. It is densely self-satisfied and instinctively monopolistic. It
is on our backs, and with it on our backs we common English must bleed
and blunder to victory.... And you make this proposal!”
3
The antagonistic relations of the Anglican oligarchy with the greater
and greater-spirited Britain that thrust behind it in this war
are probably paralleled very closely in Germany, probably they are
exaggerated in Germany with a bigger military oligarchy and a relatively
lesser civil body under it. This antagonism is the oddest outcome of the
tremendous _de-militarisation_ of war that has been going on. In France
it is probably not so marked because of the greater flexibility and
adaptability of the French culture.
All military people--people, that is, professionally and primarily
military--are inclined to be conservative. For thousands of years the
military tradition has been a tradition of discipline. The conception of
the common soldier has been a mechanically obedient, almost dehumanised
man, of the of officer a highly trained autocrat. In two years all this
has been absolutely reversed. Individual quality, inventive organisation
and industrialism will win this war. And no class is so innocent of
these things as the military caste. Long accustomed as they are to the
importance of moral effect they put a brave face upon the business;
they save their faces astonishingly, but they are no longer guiding and
directing this war, they are being pushed from behind by forces they
never foresaw and cannot control. The aeroplanes and great guns have
bolted with them, the tanks begotten of naval and civilian wits, shove
them to victory in spite of themselves.
Wherever I went behind the British lines the officers were going about
in spurs. These spurs at last got on my nerves. They became symbolical.
They became as grave an insult to the tragedy of the war as if they were
false noses. The British officers go for long automobile rides in spurs.
They walk about the trenches in spurs. Occasionally I would see a horse;
I do not wish to be unfair in this matter, there were riding horses
sometimes within two or three miles of the ultimate front, but they were
rarely used.
I do not say that the horse is entirely obsolescent in this war. In
was nothing is obsolete. In the trenches men fight with sticks. In the
Pasubio battle the other day one of the Alpini silenced a machine gun
by throwing stones. In the West African campaign we have employed troops
armed with bows and arrows, and they have done very valuable work. But
these are exceptional cases. The military use of the horse henceforth
will be such an exceptional case. It is ridiculous for these spurs still
to clink about the modern battlefield. What the gross cost of the spurs
and horses and trappings of the British army amount to, and how many men
are grooming and tending horses who might just as well be ploughing
and milking at home, I cannot guess; it must be a total so enormous as
seriously to affect the balance of the war.
And these spurs and their retention are only the outward and visible
symbol of the obstinate resistance of the Anglican intelligence to
the clear logic of the present situation. It is not only the external
equipment of our leaders that falls behind the times; our political
and administrative services are in the hands of the same desolatingly
inadaptable class. The British are still wearing spurs in Ireland; they
are wearing them in India; and the age of the spur has passed. At the
outset of this war there was an absolute cessation of criticism of the
military and administrative castes; it is becoming a question whether
we may not pay too heavily in blundering and waste, in military and
economic lassitude, in international irritation and the accumulation of
future dangers in Ireland, Egypt, India, and elsewhere, for an apparent
absence of internal friction. These people have no gratitude for tacit
help, no spirit of intelligent service, and no sense of fair play to the
outsider. The latter deficiency indeed they call _esprit de corps_ and
prize it as if it were a noble quality.
It becomes more and more imperative that the foreign observer should
distinguish between this narrower, older official Britain and
the greater newer Britain that struggles to free itself from the
entanglement of a system outgrown. There are many Englishmen who would
like to say to the French and Irish and the Italians and India, who
indeed feel every week now a more urgent need of saying, “Have patience
with us.” The Riddle of the British is very largely solved if you will
think of a great modern liberal nation seeking to slough an exceedingly
tough and tight skin....
Nothing is more illuminating and self-educational than to explain one's
home politics to an intelligent foreigner enquirer; it strips off all
the secondary considerations, the allusiveness, the merely tactical
considerations, the allusiveness, the merely tactical considerations.
One sees the forest not as a confusion of trees but as something with
a definite shape and place. I was asked in Italy and in France, “Where
does Lord Northcliffe come into the British system--or Lloyd George?
Who is Mr. Redmond? Why is Lloyd George a Minister, and why does not
Mr. Redmond take office? Isn't there something called an ordnance
department, and why is there a separate ministry of munitions? Can Mr.
Lloyd George remove an incapable general?...”
I found it M. Joseph Reinach particularly penetrating and persistent.
It is an amusing but rather difficult exercise to recall what I tried
to convey to him by way of a theory of Britain. He is by no means an
uncritical listener. I explained that there is an “inner Britain,”
official Britain, which is Anglican or official Presbyterian, which at
the outside in the whole world cannot claim to speak for twenty million
Anglican or Presbyterian communicants, which monopolises official
positions, administration and honours in the entire British empire,
dominates the court, and, typically, is spurred and red-tabbed. (It was
just at this time that the spurs were most on my nerves.)
This inner Britain, I went on to explain, holds tenaciously to its
positions of advantage, from which it is difficult to dislodge it
without upsetting the whole empire, and it insists upon treating
the rest of the four hundred millions who constitute that empire as
outsiders, foreigners, subject races and suspected persons.
“To you,” I said, “it bears itself with an appearance of faintly
hostile, faintly contemptuous apathy. It is still so entirely insular
that it shudders at the thought of the Channel Tunnel. This is the
Britain which irritates and puzzles you so intensely--that you are quite
unable to conceal these feelings from me. Unhappily it is the Britain
you see most of. Well, outside this official Britain is 'Greater
Britain'--the real Britain with which you have to reckon in the
future.” (From this point a faint flavour of mysticism crept into
my dissertation. I found myself talking with something in my voice
curiously reminiscent of those liberal Russians who set themselves to
explain the contrasts and contradictions of “official” Russia and “true”
Russia.) “This Greater Britain,” I asserted, “is in a perpetual conflict
with official Britain, struggling to keep it up to its work, shoving it
towards its ends, endeavouring in spite of its tenacious mischievousness
of the privileged to keep the peace and a common aim with the French and
Irish and Italians and Russians and Indians. It is to that outer Britain
that those Englishmen you found so interesting and sympathetic, Lloyd
George and Lord Northcliffe, for example, belong. It is the Britain of
the great effort, the Britain of the smoking factories and the torrent
of munitions, the Britain of the men and subalterns of the new armies,
the Britain which invents and thinks and achieves, and stands now
between German imperialism and the empire of the world. I do not want to
exaggerate the quality of greater Britain. If the inner set are narrowly
educated, the outer set if often crudely educated. If the inner set is
so close knit as to seem like a conspiracy, the outer set is so
loosely knit as to seem like a noisy confusion. Greater Britain is only
beginning to realise itself and find itself. For all its crudity there
is a giant spirit in it feeling its way towards the light. It has quite
other ambitions for the ending of the war than some haggled treaty of
alliance with France and Italy; some advantage that will invalidate
German competition; it begins to realise newer and wider sympathies,
possibilities of an amalgamation of interests and community of aim that
is utterly beyond the habits of the old oligarchy to conceive, beyond
the scope of that tawdry word 'Empire' to express....”
I descended from my rhetoric to find M. Reinach asking how and when this
greater Britain was likely to become politically effective.