WAR AND THE FUTURE
Italy, France and Britain at War
by H. G. Wells
Contents
The Passing of the Effigy
The War in Italy (August, 1916)
I. The Isonzo Front
II. The Mountain War
III. Behind the Front
The Western War (September, 1916)
I. Ruins
II. The Grades of War
III. The War Landscape
IV. New Arms for Old Ones
V. Tanks
How People Think About the War
I. Do they Really Think at all?
II. The Yielding Pacifist and the Conscientious Objector
III. The Religious Revival
IV. The Riddle of the British
V. The Social Changes in Progress
VI. The Ending of the War
THE PASSING OF THE EFFIGY
1
One of the minor peculiarities of this unprecedented war is the
Tour of the Front. After some months of suppressed information--
in which even the war correspondent was discouraged to the point
of elimination--it was discovered on both sides that this was a
struggle in which Opinion was playing a larger and more important
part than it had ever done before. This wild spreading weed was
perhaps of decisive importance; the Germans at any rate were
attempting to make it a cultivated flower. There was Opinion
flowering away at home, feeding rankly on rumour; Opinion in
neutral countries; Opinion getting into great tangles of
misunderstanding and incorrect valuation between the Allies. The
confidence and courage of the enemy; the amiability and
assistance of the neutral; the zeal, sacrifice, and serenity of
the home population; all were affected. The German cultivation
of opinion began long before the war; it is still the most
systematic and, because of the psychological ineptitude of the
Germans, it is probably the clumsiest. The French /Maison de
la Presse/ is certainly the best organisation in existence for
making things clear, counteracting hostile suggestion, the
British official organisations are comparatively ineffective; but
what is lacking officially is very largely made up for by the
good will and generous efforts of the English and American press.
An interesting monograph might be written upon these various
attempts of the belligerents to get themselves and their
proceedings explained.
Because there is perceptible in these developments, quite over
and above the desire to influence opinion, a very real effort to
get things explained. It is the most interesting and curious--
one might almost write touching--feature of these organisations
that they do not constitute a positive and defined propaganda
such as the Germans maintain. The German propaganda is simple,
because its ends are simple; assertions of the moral elevation
and loveliness of Germany; of the insuperable excellences of
German Kultur, the Kaiser, and Crown Prince, and so forth; abuse
of the "treacherous" English who allied themselves with the
"degenerate" French and the "barbaric" Russians; nonsense about
"the freedom of the seas"--the emptiest phrase in history--
childish attempts to sow suspicion between the Allies, and still
more childish attempts to induce neutrals and simple-minded
pacifists of allied nationality to save the face of Germany by
initiating peace negotiations. But apart from their steady
record and reminder of German brutalities and German aggression,
the press organisations of the Allies have none of this
definiteness in their task. The aim of the national intelligence
in each of the allied countries is not to exalt one's own nation
and confuse and divide the enemy, but to get a real understanding
with the peoples and spirits of a number of different nations, an
understanding that will increase and become a fruitful and
permanent understanding between the allied peoples. Neither the
English, the Russians, the Italians, nor the French, to name only
the bigger European allies, are concerned in setting up a legend,
as the Germans are concerned in setting up a legend of themselves
to impose upon mankind. They are reality dealers in this war,
and the Germans are effigy mongers. Practically the Allies are
saying each to one another, "Pray come to me and see for yourself
that I am very much the human stuff that you are. Come and see
that I am doing my best--and I think that is not so very bad a
best...." And with that is something else still more subtle,
something rather in the form of, "And please tell me what you
think of me--and all this."
So we have this curious byplay of the war, and one day I find Mr.
Nabokoff, the editor of the /Retch/, and Count Alexy
Tolstoy, that writer of delicate short stories, and Mr.
Chukovsky, the subtle critic, calling in upon me after braving
the wintry seas to see the British fleet; M. Joseph Reinach
follows them presently upon the same errand; and then appear
photographs of Mr. Arnold Bennett wading in the trenches of
Flanders, Mr. Noyes becomes discreetly indiscreet about what he
has seen among the submarines, and Mr. Hugh Walpole catches
things from Mr. Stephen Graham in the Dark Forest of Russia. All
this is quite over and above such writing of facts at first hand
as Mr. Patrick McGill and a dozen other real experiencing
soldiers--not to mention the soldiers' letters Mr. James Milne
has collected, or the unforgettable and immortal /Prisoner of
War/ of Mr. Arthur Green--or such admirable war
correspondents' work as Mr. Philip Gibbs or Mr. Washburne has
done. Some of us writers--I can answer for one--have made our
Tour of the Fronts with a very understandable diffidence. For my
own part I did not want to go. I evaded a suggestion that I
should go in 1915. I travel badly, I speak French and Italian
with incredible atrocity, and am an extreme Pacifist. I hate
soldiering. And also I did not want to write anything "under
instruction". It is largely owing to a certain stiffness in the
composition of General Delme-Radcliffe is resolved that
Italy shall not feel neglected by the refusal of the invitation
from the Commando Supremo by anyone who from the perspective of
Italy may seem to be a representative of British opinion. If
Herbert Spencer had been alive General Radcliffe would have
certainly made him come, travelling-hammock, ear clips and all--
and I am not above confessing that I wish that Herbert Spencer
was alive--for this purpose. I found Udine warm and gay with
memories of Mr. Belloc, Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Sidney Low, Colonel
Repington and Dr. Conan Doyle, and anticipating the arrival of
Mr. Harold Cox. So we pass, mostly in automobiles that bump
tremendously over war roads, a cloud of witnesses each testifying
after his manner. Whatever else has happened, we have all been
photographed with invincible patience and resolution under the
direction of Colonel Barberich in a sunny little court in Udine.
My own manner of testifying must be to tell what I have seen and
what I have thought during this extraordinary experience. It has
been my natural disposition to see this war as something
purposeful and epic, as it is great, as an epoch, as "the War
that will end War"--but of that last, more anon. I do not think
I am alone in this inclination to a dramatic and logical
interpretation. The caricatures in the French shops show
civilisation (and particularly Marianne) in conflict with a huge
and hugely wicked Hindenburg Ogre. Well, I come back from this
tour with something not so simple as that. If I were to be tied
down to one word for my impression of this war, I should say that
this war is /Queer./ It is not like anything in a really
waking world, but like something in a dream. It hasn't exactly
that clearness of light against darkness or of good against ill.
But it has the quality of wholesome instinct struggling under a
nightmare. The world is not really awake. This vague appeal for
explanations to all sorts of people, this desire to exhibit the
business, to get something in the way of elucidation at present
missing, is extraordinarily suggestive of the efforts of the mind
to wake up that will sometimes occur at a deep crisis. My memory
of this tour I have just made is full of puzzled-looking men. I
have seen thousands of /poilus/ sitting about in
cafes, by the roadside, in tents, in trenches, thoughtful.
I have seen Alpini sitting restfully and staring with speculative
eyes across the mountain gulfs towards unseen and unaccountable
enemies. I have seen trainloads of wounded staring out of the
ambulance train windows as we passed. I have seen these dim
intimations of questioning reflection in the strangest
juxtapositions; in Malagasy soldiers resting for a spell among
the big shells they were hoisting into trucks for the front, in a
couple of khaki-clad Maoris sitting upon the step of a horse-van
in Amiens station. It is always the same expression one catches,
rather weary, rather sullen, inturned. The shoulders droop. The
very outline is a note of interrogation. They look up as the
privileged tourist of the front, in the big automobile or the
reserved compartment, with his officer or so in charge, passes--
importantly. One meets a pair of eyes that seems to say:
"Perhaps /you/ understand....
"In which case---...?"
It is a part, I think, of this disposition to investigate what
makes everyone collect "specimens" of the war. Everywhere the
souvenir forces itself upon the attention. The homecoming
permissionaire brings with him invariably a considerable weight
of broken objects, bits of shell, cartridge clips, helmets; it is
a peripatetic museum. It is as if he hoped for a clue. It is
almost impossible, I have found, to escape these pieces in
evidence. I am the least collecting of men, but I have brought
home Italian cartridges, Austrian cartridges, the fuse of an
Austrian shell, a broken Italian bayonet, and a note that is
worth half a franc within the confines of Amiens. But a large
heavy piece of exploded shell that had been thrust very urgently
upon my attention upon the Carso I contrived to lose during the
temporary confusion of our party by the arrival and explosion of
another prospective souvenir in our close proximity. And two
really very large and almost complete specimens of some species
of /Ammonites/ unknown to me, from the hills to the east of
the Adige, partially wrapped in a back number of the /Corriere
della Sera/, that were pressed upon me by a friendly officer,
were unfortunately lost on the line between Verona and Milan
through the gross negligence of a railway porter. But I doubt if
they would have thrown any very conclusive light upon the war.
2
I avow myself an extreme Pacifist. I am against the man who
first takes up the weapon. I carry my pacifism far beyond the
ambiguous little group of British and foreign sentimentalists who
pretend so amusingly to be socialists in the /Labour
Leader/, whose conception of foreign policy is to give Germany
now a peace that would be no more than a breathing time for a
fresh outrage upon civilisation, and who would even make heroes
of the crazy young assassins of the Dublin crime. I do not
understand those people. I do not merely want to stop this war.
I want to nail down war in its coffin. Modern war is an
intolerable thing. It is not a thing to trifle with in this
Urban District Council way, it is a thing to end forever. I have
always hated it, so far that is as my imagination enabled me to
realise it; and now that I have been seeing it, sometimes quite
closely for a full month, I hate it more than ever. I never
imagined a quarter of its waste, its boredom, its futility, its
desolation. It is merely a destructive and dispersive instead of
a constructive and accumulative industrialism. It is a gigantic,
dusty, muddy, weedy, bloodstained silliness. It is the plain
duty of every man to give his life and all that he has if by so
doing he may help to end it. I hate Germany, which has thrust
this experience upon mankind, as I hate some horrible infectious
disease. The new war, the war on the modern level, is her
invention and her crime. I perceive that on our side and in its
broad outlines, this war is nothing more than a gigantic and
heroic effort in sanitary engineering; an effort to remove German
militarism from the life and regions it has invaded, and to bank
it in and discredit and enfeeble it so that never more will it
repeat its present preposterous and horrible efforts. All human
affairs and all great affairs have their reservations and their
complications, but that is the broad outline of the business as
it has impressed itself on my mind and as I find it conceived in
the mind of the average man of the reading class among the allied
peoples, and as I find it understood in the judgment of honest
and intelligent neutral observers.
It is my unshakeable belief that essentially the Allies fight for
a permanent world peace, that primarily they do not make war but
resist war, that has reconciled me to this not very congenial
experience of touring as a spectator all agog to see, through the
war zones. At any rate there was never any risk of my playing
Balaam and blessing the enemy. This war is tragedy and sacrifice
for most of the world, for the Germans it is simply the
catastrophic outcome of fifty years of elaborate intellectual
foolery. Militarism, Welt Politik, and here we are! What else
/could/ have happened, with Michael and his infernal War
Machine in the very centre of Europe, but this tremendous
disaster?
It is a disaster. It may be a necessary disaster; it may teach a
lesson that could be learnt in no other way; but for all that, I
insist, it remains waste, disorder, disaster.
There is a disposition, I know, in myself as well as in others,
to wriggle away from this verity, to find so much good in the
collapse that has come to the mad direction of Europe for the
past half-century as to make it on the whole almost a beneficial
thing. But at most I can find it in no greater good than the
good of a nightmare that awakens the sleeper in a dangerous place
to a realisation of the extreme danger of his sleep. Better had
he been awake--or never there. In Venetia Captain Pirelli, whose
task it was to keep me out of mischief in the war zone, was
insistent upon the way in which all Venetia was being opened up
by the new military roads; there has been scarcely a new road
made in Venetia since Napoleon drove his straight, poplar-
bordered highways through the land. M. Joseph Reinach, who was
my companion upon the French front, was equally impressed by the
stirring up and exchange of ideas in the villages due to the
movement of the war. Charles Lamb's story of the discovery of
roast pork comes into one's head with an effect of repartee.
More than ideas are exchanged in the war zone, and it is doubtful
how far the sanitary precautions of the military authorities
avails against a considerable propaganda of disease. A more
serious argument for the good of war is that it evokes heroic
qualities that it has brought out almost incredible quantities of
courage, devotion, and individual romance that did not show in
the suffocating peace time that preceded the war. The reckless
and beautiful zeal of the women in the British and French
munition factories, for example, the gaiety and fearlessness of
the common soldiers everywhere; these things have always been
there--like champagne sleeping in bottles in a cellar. But was
there any need to throw a bomb into the cellar?
I am reminded of a story, or rather of the idea for a story that
I think I must have read in that curious collection of fantasies
and observations, Hawthorne's /Note Book./ It was to be the
story of a man who found life dull and his circumstances
altogether mediocre. He had loved his wife, but now after all
she seemed to be a very ordinary human being. He had begun life
with high hopes--and life was commonplace. He was to grow
fretful and restless. His discontent was to lead to some action,
some irrevocable action; but upon the nature of that action I do
not think the /Note Book/ was very clear. It was to carry
him in such a manner that he was to forget his wife. Then, when
it was too late, he was to see her at an upper window, stripped
and firelit, a glorious thing of light and loveliness and tragic
intensity....
The elementary tales of the world are very few, and Hawthorne's
story and Lamb's story are, after all, only variations upon the
same theme. But can we poor human beings never realise our
quality without destruction?
3
One of the larger singularities of the great war is its failure
to produce great and imposing personalities, mighty leaders,
Napoleons, Caesars. I would indeed make that the essential
thing in my reckoning of the war. It is a drama without a hero;
without countless incidental heroes no doubt, but no star part.
Even the Germans, with a national predisposition for hero-cults
and living still in an atmosphere of Victorian humbug, can
produce nothing better than that timber image, Hindenburg.
It is not that the war has failed to produce heroes so much as
that it has produced heroism in a torrent. The great man of this
war is the common man. It becomes ridiculous to pick out
particular names. There are too many true stories of splendid
acts in the past two years ever to be properly set down. The
V.C.'s and the palms do but indicate samples. One would need an
encyclopaedia, a row of volumes, of the gloriousness of
human impulses. The acts of the small men in this war dwarf all
the pretensions of the Great Man. Imperatively these
multitudinous heroes forbid the setting up of effigies. When I
was a young man I imitated Swift and posed for cynicism; I will
confess that now at fifty and greatly helped by this war, I have
fallen in love with mankind.
But if I had to pick out a single figure to stand for the finest
quality of the Allies' war, I should I think choose the figure of
General Joffre. He is something new in history. He is
leadership without vulgar ambition. He is the extreme antithesis
to the Imperial boomster of Berlin. He is as it were the
ordinary common sense of men, incarnate. He is the antithesis of
the effigy.
By great good luck I was able to see him. I was delayed in Paris
on my way to Italy, and my friend Captain Millet arranged for a
visit to the French front at Soissons and put me in charge of
Lieutenant de Tessin, whom ii had met in England studying British
social questions long before this war. Afterwards Lieutenant de
Tessin took me to the great hotel--it still proclaims
"/Restaurant/" in big black letters on the garden wall--
which shelters the General Headquarters of France, and here I was
able to see and talk to Generals Pelle and Castelnau as
well as to General Joffre. They are three very remarkable and
very different men. They have at least one thing in common; it
is clear that not one of them has spent ten minutes in all his
life in thinking of himself as a Personage or Great Man. They
all have the effect of being active and able men doing an
extremely complicated and difficult but extremely interesting job
to the very best of their ability. With me they had all one
quality in common. They thought I was interested in what they
were doing, and they were quite prepared to treat me as an
intelligent man of a different sort, and to show me as much as I
could understand....
Let me confess that de Tessin had had to persuade me to go to
Headquarters. Partly that was because I didn't want to use up
even ten minutes of the time of the French commanders, but much
more was it because I have a dread of Personages.
There is something about these encounters with personages--as if
one was dealing with an effigy, with something tremendous put up
to be seen. As one approaches they become remoter; great
unsuspected crevasses are discovered. Across these gulfs one
makes ineffective gestures. They do not meet you, they pose at
you enormously. Sometimes there is something more terrible than
dignity; there is condescension. They are affable. I had but
recently had an encounter with an imported Colonial statesman,
who was being advertised like a soap as the coming saviour of
England. I was curious to meet him. I wanted to talk to him
about all sorts of things that would have been profoundly
interesting, as for example his impressions of the Anglican
bishops. But I met a hoarding. I met a thing like a mask,
something surrounded by touts, that was dully trying--as we say
in London--to "come it" over me. He said he had heard of me. He
had read /Kipps./ I intimated that though I had written
/Kipps/ I had continued to exist--but he did not see the
point of that. I said certain things to him about the difference
in complexity between political life in Great Britain and the
colonies, that he was manifestly totally capable of
understanding. But one could as soon have talked with one of the
statesmen at Madame Tussaud's. An antiquated figure.
The effect of these French commanders upon me was quite different
from my encounter with that last belated adventurer in the effigy
line. I felt indeed that I was a rather idle and flimsy person
coming into the presence of a tremendously compact and busy
person, but I had none of that unpleasant sensation of a
conventional role, of being expected to play the minute
worshipper in the presence of the Great Image. I was so moved by
the common humanity of them all that in each case I broke away
from the discreet interpretations of de Tessin and talked to them
directly in the strange dialect which I have inadvertently made
for myself out of French, a disemvowelled speech of epicene
substantives and verbs of incalculable moods and temperaments,
"/Entente Cordiale./" The talked back as if we had met in a
club. General Pelle pulled my leg very gaily with some
quotations from an article I had written upon the conclusion of
the war. I think he found my accent and my idioms very
refreshing. I had committed myself to a statement that Bloch has
been justified in his theory that under modern conditions the
defensive wins. There were excellent reasons, and General
Pelle pointed them out, for doubting the applicability of
this to the present war.
Both he and General Castelnau were anxious that I should see a
French offensive sector as well as Soissons. Then I should
understand. And since then I have returned from Italy and I have
seen and I do understand. The Allied offensive was winning; that
is to say, it was inflicting far greater losses than it
experienced; it was steadily beating the spirit out of the German
army and shoving it back towards Germany. Only peace can, I
believe, prevent the western war ending in Germany. And it is
the Frenchmen mainly who have worked out how to do it.
But of that I will write later. My present concern is with
General Joffre as the antithesis of the Effigy. The effigy,
"Thou Prince of Peace,
Thou God of War,"
as Mr. Sylvester Viereck called him, prances on a great horse,
wears a Wagnerian cloak, sits on thrones and talks of shining
armour and "unser Gott." All Germany gloats over his Jovian
domesticities; when I was last in Berlin the postcard shops were
full of photographs of a sort of procession of himself and his
sons, all with long straight noses and sidelong eyes. It is all
dreadfully old-fashioned. General Joffre sits in a pleasant
little sitting-room in a very ordinary little villa conveniently
close to Headquarters. He sits among furniture that has no
quality of pose at all, that is neither magnificent nor
ostentatiously simple and hardy. He has dark, rather sleepy eyes
under light eyelashes, eyes that glance shyly and a little
askance at his interlocutor and then, as he talks, away--as if he
did not want to be preoccupied by your attention. He has a
broad, rather broadly modelled face, a soft voice, the sort of
persuasive reasoning voice that many Scotchmen have. I had a
feeling that if he were to talk English he would do so with a
Scotch accent. Perhaps somewhere I have met a Scotchman of his
type. He sat sideways to his table as a man might sit for a
gossip in a cafe.
He is physically a big man, and in my memory he grows bigger and
bigger. He sits now in my memory in a room like the rooms that
any decent people might occupy, like that vague room that is the
background of so many good portraits, a great blue-coated figure
with a soft voice and rather tired eyes, explaining very simply
and clearly the difficulties that this vulgar imperialism of
Germany, seizing upon modern science and modern appliances, has
created for France and the spirit of mankind.
He talked chiefly of the strangeness of this confounded war. It
was exactly like a sanitary engineer speaking of the unexpected
difficulties of some particularly nasty inundation. He made
little stiff horizontal gestures with his hands. First one had
to build a dam and stop the rush of it, so; then one had to
organise the push that would send it back. He explained the
organisation of the push. They had got an organisation now that
was working out most satisfactorily. Had I seen a sector? I had
seen the sector of Soissons. Yes, but that was not now an
offensive sector. I must see an offensive sector; see the whole
method. Lieutenant de Tessin must see that that was arranged....
Neither he nor his two colleagues spoke of the Germans with
either hostility or humanity. Germany for them is manifestly
merely an objectionable Thing. It is not a nation, not a people,
but a nuisance. One has to build up this great counter-thrust
bigger and stronger until they go back. The war must end in
Germany. The French generals have no such delusions about German
science or foresight or capacity as dominates the smart dinner
chatter of England. One knows so well that detestable type of
English folly, and its voice of despair: "They /plan/
everything. They foresee everything." This paralysing
Germanophobia is not common among the French. The war, the
French generals said, might take--well, it certainly looked like
taking longer than the winter. Next summer perhaps. Probably,
if nothing unforeseen occurred, before a full year has passed the
job might be done. Were any surprises in store? They didn't
seem to think it was probable that the Germans had any surprises
in store.... The Germans are not an inventive people; they are
merely a thorough people. One never knew for certain.
Is any greater contrast possible than between so implacable,
patient, reasonable--and above all things /capable/--a being
as General Joffre and the rhetorician of Potsdam, with his talk
of German Might, of Hammer Blows and Hacking Through? Can there
be any doubt of the ultimate issue between them?
There are stories that sound pleasantly true to me about General
Joffre's ambitions after the war. He is tired; then he will be
very tired. He will, he declares, spend his first free summer in
making a tour of the waterways of France in a barge. So I hope
it may be. One imagines him as sitting quietly on the crumpled
remains of the last and tawdriest of Imperial traditions, with a
fishing line in the placid water and a large buff umbrella
overhead, the good ordinary man who does whatever is given to him
to do--as well as he can. The power that has taken the great
effigy of German imperialism by the throat is something very
composite and complex, but if we personify it at all it is
something more like General Joffre than any other single human
figure I can think of or imagine.
If I were to set a frontispiece to a book about this War I would
make General Joffre the frontispiece.
4
As we swung back along the dusty road to Paris at a pace of fifty
miles an hour and upwards, driven by a helmeted driver with an
aquiline profile fit to go upon a coin, whose merits were a
little flawed by a childish and dangerous ambition to run over
every cat he saw upon the road, I talked to de Tessin about this
big blue-coated figure of Joffre, which is not so much a figure
as a great generalisation of certain hitherto rather obscured
French qualities, and of the impression he had made upon me. And
from that I went on to talk about the Super Man, for this
encounter had suddenly crystallised out a set of realisations
that had been for some time latent in my mind.
How much of what follows I said to de Tessin at the time I do not
clearly remember, but this is what I had in mind.
The idea of the superman is an idea that has been developed by
various people ignorant of biology and unaccustomed to biological
ways of thinking. It is an obvious idea that follows in the
course of half an hour or so upon one's realisation of the
significance of Darwinism. If man has evolved from something
different, he must now be evolving onward into something sur-
human. The species in the future will be different from the
species of the past. So far at least our Nietzsches and Shaws
and so on went right.
But being ignorant of the elementary biological proposition that
modification of a species means really a secular change in its
average, they jumped to a conclusion--to which the late Lord
Salisbury also jumped years ago at a very memorable British
Association meeting--that a species is modified by the sudden
appearance of eccentric individuals here and there in the general
mass who interbreed--preferentially. Helped by a streak of antic
egotism in themselves, they conceived of the superman as a
posturing personage, misunderstood by the vulgar, fantastic,
wonderful. But the antic Personage, the thing I have called the
Effigy, is not new but old, the oldest thing in history, the
departing thing. It depends not upon the advance of the species
but upon the uncritical hero-worship of the crowd. You may see
the monster drawn twenty times the size of common men upon the
oldest monuments of Egypt and Assyria. The true superman comes
not as the tremendous personal entry of a star, but in the less
dramatic form of a general increase of goodwill and skill and
common sense. A species rises not by thrusting up peaks but by
the brimming up as a flood does. The coming of the superman
means not an epidemic of personages but the disappearance of the
Personage in the universal ascent. That is the point overlooked
by the megalomaniac school of Nietzsche and Shaw.
And it is the peculiarity of this war, it is the most reassuring
evidence that a great increase in general ability and critical
ability has been going on throughout the last century, that no
isolated great personages have emerged. Never has there been so
much ability, invention, inspiration, leadership; but the very
abundance of good qualities has prevented our focusing upon those
of any one individual. We all play our part in the realisation
of God's sanity in the world, but, as the strange, dramatic end
of Lord Kitchener has served to remind us, there is no single
individual of all the allied nations whose death can materially
affect the great destinies of this war.
In the last few years I have developed a religious belief that
has become now to me as real as any commonplace fact. I think
that mankind is still as it were collectively dreaming and hardly
more awakened to reality than a very young child. It has these
dreams that we express by the flags of nationalities and by
strange loyalties and by irrational creeds and ceremonies, and
its dreams at times become such nightmares as this war. But the
time draws near when mankind will awake and the dreams will fade
away, and then there will be no nationality in all the world but
humanity, and no kind, no emperor, nor leader but the one God of
mankind. This is my faith. I am as certain of this as I was in
1900 that men would presently fly. To me it is as if it must be
so.
So that to me this extraordinary refusal of the allied nations
under conditions that have always hitherto produced a Great Man
to produce anything of the sort, anything that can be used as an
effigy and carried about for the crowd to follow, is a fact of
extreme significance and encouragement. It seems to me that the
twilight of the half gods must have come, that we have reached
the end of the age when men needed a Personal Figure about which
they could rally. The Kaiser is perhaps the last of that long
series of crowned and cloaked and semi-divine personages which
has included Caesar and Alexander and Napoleon the First--
and Third. In the light of the new time we see the emperor-god
for the guy he is. In the August of 1914 he set himself up to be
the paramount Lord of the World, and it will seem to the
historian to come, who will know our dates so well and our
feelings, our fatigues and efforts so little, it will seem a
short period from that day to this, when the great figure already
sways and staggers towards the bonfire.
5
I had the experience of meeting a contemporary king upon this
journey. He was the first king I had ever met. The Potsdam
figure--with perhaps some local exceptions behind the Gold Coast--
is, with its collection of uniforms and its pomps and splendours,
the purest survival of the old tradition of divine monarchy now
that the Emperor at Pekin has followed the Shogun into the
shadows. The modern type of king shows a disposition to intimate
at the outset that he cannot help it, and to justify or at any
rate utilise his exceptional position by sound hard work. It is
an age of working kings, with the manners of private gentlemen.
The King of Italy for example is far more accessible than was the
late Pierpont Morgan or the late Cecil Rhodes, and he seems to
keep a smaller court.
I went to see him from Udine. He occupied a moderate-sized
country villa about half an hour by automobile from headquarters.
I went over with General Radcliffe; we drove through the gates of
the villa past a single sentinel in an ordinary infantry uniform,
up to the door of the house, and the number of guards, servants,
attendants, officials, secretaries, ministers and the like that I
saw in that house were--I counted very carefully--four.
Downstairs were three people, a tall soldier of the bodyguard in
grey; an A.D.C., Captain Moreno, and Col. Matteoli, the minister
of the household. I went upstairs to a drawing-room of much the
same easy and generalised character as the one in which I had met
General Joffre a few days before. I gave my hat to a second
bodyguard, and as I did so a pleasantly smiling man appeared at
the door of the study whom I thought at first must be some
minister in attendance. I did not recognise him instantly
because on the stamps and coins he is always in profile. He
began to talk in excellent English about my journey, and I
replied, and so talking we went into the study from which he had
emerged. Then I realised I was talking to the king.
Addicted as I am to the cinematograph, in which the standard of
study furniture is particularly rich and high, I found something
very cooling and simple and refreshing in the sight of the king's
study furniture. He sat down with me at a little useful writing
table, and after asking me what I had seen in Italy and hearing
what I had seen and what I was to see, he went on talking, very
good talk indeed.
I suppose I did a little exceed the established tradition of
courts by asking several questions and trying to get him to talk
upon certain points as to which I was curious, but I perceived
that he had had to carry on at least so much of the regal
tradition as to control the conversation. He was, however,
entirely un-posed. His talk reminded me somehow of Maurice
Baring's books; it had just the same quick, positive
understanding. And he had just the same detachment from the war
as the French generals. He spoke of it--as one might speak of an
inundation. And of its difficulties and perplexities.
Here on the Adriatic side there were political entanglements that
by comparison made our western after-the-war problems plain
sailing. He talked of the game of spellicans among the Balkan
nationalities. How was that difficulty to be met? In Macedonia
there were Turkish villages that were Christian and Bulgarians
that were Moslem. There were families that changed the
termination of their names from /ski/ to /off/ as
Serbian or Bulgarian prevailed. I remarked that that showed a
certain passion for peace, and that much of the mischief might be
due to the propaganda of the great Powers. I have a prejudice
against that blessed Whig "principle of nationality," but the
King of Italy was not to be drawn into any statement about that.
He left the question with his admission of its extreme complexity.
He went on to talk of the strange contrasts of war, of such
things as the indifference of the birds to gunfire and
desolation. One day on the Carso he had been near the newly
captured Austrian trenches, and suddenly from amidst a scattered
mass of Austrian bodies a quail had risen. that had struck him
as odd, and so too had the sight of a pack of cards and a wine
flask on some newly-made graves. The ordinary life was a very
/obstinate/ thing....
He talked of the courage of modern men. He was astonished at the
quickness with which they came to disregard shrapnel. And they
were so quietly enduring when they were wounded. He had seen a
lot of the wounded, and he had expected much groaning and crying
out. But unless a man is hit in the head and goes mad he does
not groan or scream! They are just brave. If you ask them how
they feel it is always one of two things: either they say quietly
that they are very bad or else they say there is nothing the
matter....
He spoke as if these were mere chance observations, but everyone
tells me that nearly every day the king is at the front and often
under fire. He has taken more risks in a week than the Potsdam
War Lord has taken since the war began. He keeps himself acutely
informed upon every aspect of the war. He was a little inclined
to fatalism, he confessed. There were two stories current of two
families of four sons, in each three had been killed and in each
there was an attempt to put the fourth in a place of comparative
safety. In one case a general took the fourth son in as an
attendant and embarked upon a ship that was immediately
torpedoed; in the other the fourth son was killed by accident
while he was helping to carry dinner in a rest camp. From those
stories we came to the question whether the uneducated Italians
were more superstitious than the uneducated English; the king
thought they were much less so. That struck me as a novel idea.
But then he thought that English rural people believe in witches
and fairies.
I have given enough of this talk to show the quality of this king
of the new dispensation. It was, you see, the sort of easy talk
one might hear from fine-minded people anywhere. When we had
done talking he came to the door of the study with me and shook
hands and went back to his desk--with that gesture of return to
work which is very familiar and sympathetic to a writer, and with
no gesture of regality at all.
Just to complete this impression let me repeat a pleasant story
about this king and our Prince of Wales, who recently visited the
Italian front. The Prince is a source of anxiety on these
visits; he has a very strong and very creditable desire to share
the ordinary risks of war. He is keenly interested, and
unobtrusively bent upon getting as near the fighting as line as
possible. But the King of Italy was firm upon keeping him out of
anything more than the most incidental danger. "We don't want
any historical incidents here," he said. I think that might well
become an historical phrase. For the life of the Effigy is a
series of historical incidents.
6
Manifestly one might continue to multiply portraits of fine
people working upon this great task of breaking and ending the
German aggression, the German legend, the German effigy, and the
effigy business generally; the thesis being that the Allies have
no effigy. One might fill a thick volume with pictures of men up
the scale and down working loyally and devotedly upon the war, to
make this point clear that the essential king and the essential
loyalty of our side is the commonsense of mankind.
There comes into my head as a picture at the other extreme of
this series, a memory of certain trenches I visited on my last
day in France. They were trenches on an offensive front; they
were not those architectural triumphs, those homes from home,
that grow to perfection upon the less active sections of the
great line. They had been first made by men who had run rapidly
forward with spade and rifle, stooping as they ran, who had
dropped into the craters of big shells, who had organised these
chiefly at night and dug the steep ditches sideways to join up
into continuous trenches. Now they were pushing forward saps
into No Man's Land, linking them across, and so continually
creeping nearer to the enemy and a practicable jumping-off place
for an attack. (It has been made since; the village at which I
peeped was in our hands a week later.) These trenches were dug
into a sort of yellowish sandy clay; the dug-outs were mere holes
in the earth that fell in upon the clumsy; hardly any timber had
been got up the line; a storm might flood them at any time a
couple of feet deep and begin to wash the sides. Overnight they
had been "strafed" and there had been a number of casualties;
there were smashed rifles about and a smashed-up machine gun
emplacement, and the men were dog-tired and many of them sleeping
like logs, half buried in -clay. Some slept on the firing steps.
As one went along one became aware ever and again of two or three
pairs of clay-yellow feet sticking out of a clay hole, and
peering down one saw the shapes of men like rudely modelled
earthen images of soldiers, motionless in the cave.
I came round the corner upon a youngster with an intelligent face
and steady eyes sitting up on the firing step, awake and
thinking. We looked at one another. There are moments when mind
leaps to mind. It is natural for the man in the trenches
suddenly confronted by so rare a beast as a middle-aged civilian
with an enquiring expression, to feel oneself something of a
spectacle and something generalised. It is natural for the
civilian to look rather in the vein of saying, "Well, how do you
take it?" As I pushed past him we nodded slightly with an effect
of mutual understanding. And we said with our nods just exactly
what General Joffre had said with his horizontal gestures of the
hand and what the King of Italy conveyed by his friendly manner;
we said to each other that here was the trouble those Germans had
brought upon us and here was the task that had to be done.
Our guide to these trenches was a short, stocky young man, a cob;
with a rifle and a tight belt and projecting skirts and a helmet,
a queer little figure that, had you seen it in a picture a year
or so before the war, you would most certainly have pronounced
Chinese. He belonged to a Northumbrian battalion; it does not
matter exactly which. As we returned from this front line,
trudging along the winding path through the barbed wire tangles
before the smashed and captured German trench that had been taken
a fortnight before, I fell behind my guardian captain and had a
brief conversation wit this individual. He was a lad in the
early twenties, weather-bit and with bloodshot eyes. He was, he
told me, a miner. I asked my stock question in such cases,
whether he would go back to the old work after the war. He said
he would, and then added--with the events of overnight on his
mind: "If A'hm looky."
Followed a little silence. Then I tried my second stock remark
for such cases. One does not talk to soldiers at the front in
this war of Glory or the "Empire on which the sun never sets" or
"the meteor flag of England" or of King and Country or any of
those fine old headline things. On the desolate path that winds
about amidst the shell craters and the fragments and the red-
rusted wire, with the silken shiver of passing shells in the air
and the blue of the lower sky continually breaking out into
eddying white puffs, it is wonderful how tawdry such panoplies of
the effigy appear. We knew that we and our allies are upon a
greater, graver, more fundamental business than that sort of
thing now. We are very near the waking point.
"Well," I said, "it's got to be done."
"Aye," he said, easing the strap of his rifle a little; "it's got
to be done."
THE WAR IN ITALY (AUGUST, 1916)
I. THE ISONZO FRONT
1
My first impressions of the Italian war centre upon Udine. So
far I had had only a visit to Soissons on an exceptionally quiet
day and the sound of a Zeppelin one night in Essex for all my
experience of actual warfare. But my bedroom at the British
mission in Udine roused perhaps extravagant expectations. There
were holes in the plaster ceiling and wall, betraying splintered
laths, holes, that had been caused by a bomb that had burst and
killed several people in the little square outside. Such
excitements seem to be things of the past now in Udine. Udine
keeps itself dark nowadays, and the Austrian sea-planes, which
come raiding the Italian coast country at night very much in the
same aimless, casually malignant way in which the Zeppelins raid
England, apparently because there is nothing else for them to do,
find it easier to locate Venice.
My earlier rides in Venetia began always with the level roads of
the plain, roads frequently edged by watercourses, with plentiful
willows beside the road, vines and fields of Indian corn and
suchlike lush crops. Always quite soon one came to some old
Austrian boundary posts; almost everywhere the Italians are
fighting upon what is technically enemy territory, but nowhere
does it seem a whit less Italian than the plain of Lombardy.
When at last I motored away from Udine to the northern mountain
front I passed through Campo-Formio and saw the white-faced inn
at which Napoleon dismembered the ancient republic of Venice and
bartered away this essential part of Italy into foreign control.
It just gravitates back now--as though there had been no
Napoleon.
And upon the roads and beside them was the enormous equipment of
a modern army advancing. Everywhere I saw new roads being made,
railways pushed up, vast store dumps, hospitals; everywhere the
villages swarmed with grey soldiers; everywhere our automobile
was threading its way and taking astonishing risks among
interminable processions of motor lorries, strings of ambulances
or of mule carts, waggons with timber, waggons with wire, waggons
with men's gear, waggons with casks, waggons discreetly veiled,
columns of infantry, cavalry, batteries /en route./ Every
waggon that goes up full comes back empty, and many wounded were
coming down and prisoners and troops returning to rest. Goritzia
had been taken a week or so before my arrival; the Isonzo had
been crossed and the Austrians driven back across the Carso for
several miles; all the resources of Italy seemed to be crowding
up to make good these gains and gather strength for the next
thrust. The roads under all this traffic remained wonderful;
gangs of men were everywhere repairing the first onset of wear,
and Italy is the most fortunate land in the world for road metal;
her mountains are solid road metal, and in this Venetian plain
you need but to scrape through a yard of soil to find gravel.
One travelled through a choking dust under the blue sky, and
above the steady incessant dusty succession of lorry, lorry,
lorry, lorry that passed one by, one saw, looking up, the tree
tops, house roofs, or the solid Venetian campanile of this or
that wayside village. Once as we were coming out of the great
grey portals of that beautiful old relic of a former school of
fortification, Palmanova, the traffic became suddenly bright
yellow, and for a kilometre or so we were passing nothing but
Sicilian mule carts loaded with hay. These carts seem as strange
among the grey shapes of modern war transport as a Chinese
mandarin in painted silk would be. They are the most individual
of things, all two-wheeled, all bright yellow and the same size
it is true, but upon each there are they gayest of little
paintings, such paintings as one sees in England at times upon an
ice-cream barrow. Sometimes the picture will present a
scriptural subject, sometimes a scene of opera, sometimes a dream
landscape or a trophy of fruits or flowers, and the harness--now
much out of repair--is studded with brass. Again and again I
have passed strings of these gay carts; all Sicily must be swept
of them.
Through the dust I came to Aquileia, which is now an old
cathedral, built upon the remains of a very early basilica,
standing in a space in a scattered village. But across this
dusty space there was carried the head of the upstart Maximinus
who murdered Alexander Severus, and later Aquileia brought Attila
near to despair. Our party alighted; we inspected a very old
mosaic floor which has been uncovered since the Austrian retreat.
The Austrian priests have gone too, and their Italian successors
are already tracing out a score of Roman traces that it was the
Austrian custom to minimise. Captain Pirelli refreshed my
historical memories; it was rather like leaving a card on Gibbon
/en route/ for contemporary history.
By devious routes I went on to certain batteries of big guns
which had played their part in hammering the Austrian left above
Monfalcone across an arm of the Adriatic, and which were now
under orders to shift and move up closer. The battery was the
most unobtrusive of batteries; its one desire seemed to be to
appear a simple piece of woodland in the eye of God and the
aeroplane. I went about the network of railways and paths under
the trees that a modern battery requires, and came presently upon
a great gun that even at the first glance seemed a little less
carefully hidden than its fellows. Then I saw that it was a most
ingenious dummy made of a tree and logs and so forth. It was in
the emplacement of a real gun that had been located; it had its
painted sandbags about it just the same, and it felt itself so
entirely a part of the battery that whenever its companions fired
t burnt a flash and kicked up a dust. It was an excellent
example of the great art of camouflage which this war has
developed.
I went on through the wood to a shady observation post high in a
tree, into which I clambered with my guide. I was able from this
position to get a very good idea of the lie of the Italian
eastern front. I was in the delta of the Isonzo. Directly in
front of me were some marshes and the extreme tip of the Adriatic
Sea, at the head of which was Monfalcone, now in Italian hands.
Behind Monfalcone ran the red ridge of the Carso, of which the
Italians had just captured the eastern half. Behind this again
rose the mountains to the east of the Isonzo which the Austrians
still held. The Isonzo came towards me from out of the
mountains, in a great westward curve. Fifteen or sixteen miles
away where it emerged from the mountains lay the pleasant and
prosperous town of Goritzia, and at the westward point of the
great curve was Sagrado with its broken bridge. The battle of
Goritzia was really not fought at Goritzia at all. What happened
was the brilliant and bloody storming of Mounts Podgora and
Sabotino on the western side of the river above Goritzia, and
simultaneously a crossing at Sagrado below Goritzia and a
magnificent rush up the plateau and across the plateau of the
Carso. Goritzia itself was not organised for defence, and the
Austrians were so surprised by the rapid storm of the mountains
to the north-west of it and of the Carso to the south-east, that
they made no fight in the town itself.
As a consequence when I visited it I found it very little injured--
compared, that is, with such other towns as have been fought
through. Here and there the front of a house has been knocked in
by an Austrian shell, or a lamp-post prostrated. But the road
bridge had suffered a good deal; its iron parapet was twisted
about by shell bursts and interwoven with young trees and big
boughs designed to screen the passer-by from the observation of
the Austrian gunners upon Monte Santo. Here and there were huge
holes through which one could look down upon the blue trickles of
water in the stony river bed far below. The driver of our
automobile displayed what seemed to me an extreme confidence in
the margins of these gaps, but his confidence was justified. At
Sagrado the bridge had been much more completely demolished; no
effort had been made to restore the horizontal roadway, but one
crossed by a sort of timber switchback that followed the ups and
downs of the ruins.
It is not in these places that one must look for the real
destruction of modern war. The real fight on the left of
Goritzia went through the village of Lucinico up the hill of
Podgora. Lucinico is nothing more than a heap of grey stones;
except for a bit of the church wall and the gable end of a house
one cannot even speak of it as ruins. But in one place among the
rubble I saw the splintered top and a leg of a grand piano.
Podgora hill, which was no doubt once neatly terraced and
cultivated, is like a scrap of landscape from some airless,
treeless planet. Still more desolate was the scene upon the
Carso to the right (south) of Goritzia. Both San Martino and
Doberdo are destroyed beyond the limits of ruination. The Carso
itself is a waterless upland with but a few bushy trees; it must
always have been a desolate region, but now it is an
indescribable wilderness of shell craters, smashed-up Austrian
trenches, splintered timber, old iron, rags, and that rusty
thorny vileness of man's invention, worse than all the thorns and
thickets of nature, barbed wire. There are no dead visible; the
wounded have been cleared away; but about the trenches and
particularly near some of the dug-outs there was a faint
repulsive smell....
Yet into this wilderness the Italians are now thrusting a sort of
order. The German is a wonderful worker, they say on the Anglo-
French front that he makes his trenches by way of resting, but I
doubt if he can touch the Italian at certain forms of toil. All
the way up to San Martino and beyond, swarms of workmen were
making one of those carefully graded roads that the Italians make
better than any other people. Other swarms were laying water-
pipes. For upon the Carso there are neither roads nor water, and
before the Italians can thrust farther both must be brought up to
the front.
As we approached San Martino an Austrian aeroplane made its
presence felt overhead by dropping a bomb among the tents of some
workmen, in a little scrubby wood on the hillside near at hand.
One heard the report and turned to see the fragments flying and
the dust. Probably they got someone. And then, after a little
pause, the encampment began to spew out men; here, there and
everywhere they appeared among the tents, running like rabbits at
evening-time, down the hill. Soon after and probably in
connection with this signal, Austrian shells began to come over.
They do not use shrapnel because the rocky soil of Italy makes
that unnecessary. They fire a sort of shell that goes bang and
releases a cloud of smoke overhead, and then drops a parcel of
high explosive that bursts on the ground. The ground leaps into
red dust and smoke. But these things are now to be seen on the
cinema. Forthwith the men working on the road about us begin to
down tools and make for the shelter trenches, a long procession
going at a steady but resolute walk. Then like a blow in the
chest came the bang of a big Italian gun somewhere close at
hand....
Along about four thousand miles of the various fronts this sort
of thing was going on that morning....
2
This Carso front is the practicable offensive front of Italy.
From the left wing on the Isonzo along the Alpine boundary round
to the Swiss boundary there is mountain warfare like nothing else
in the world; it is warfare that pushes the boundary backward,
but it is mountain warfare that will not, for so long a period
that the war will be over first, hold out any hopeful prospects
of offensive movements on a large scale against Austria or
Germany. It is a short distance as the crow flies from Rovereto
to Munich, but not as the big gun travels. The Italians,
therefore, as their contribution to the common effort, are
thrusting rather eastwardly towards the line of the Julian Alps
through Carinthia and Carniola. From my observation post in the
tree near Monfalcone I saw Trieste away along the coast to my
right. It looked scarcely as distant as Folkestone from
Dungeness. The Italian advanced line is indeed scarcely ten
miles from Trieste. But the Italians are not, I think, going to
Trieste just yet. That is not the real game now. They are
playing loyally with the Allies for the complete defeat of the
Central Powers, and that is to be achieved striking home into
Austria. Meanwhile there is no sense in knocking Trieste to
pieces, or using Italians instead of Austrian soldiers to
garrison it.
II. THE MOUNTAIN WAR
1
The mountain warfare of Italy is extraordinarily unlike that upon
any other front. From the Isonzo to the Swiss frontier we are
dealing with high mountains, cut by deep valleys between which
there is usually no practicable lateral communication. Each
advance must have the nature of an unsupported shove along a
narrow channel, until the whole mountain system, that is, is won,
and the attack can begin to deploy in front of the passes.
Geographically Austria has the advantage. She had the gentler
slope of the mountain chains while Italy has the steep side, and
the foresight of old treaties has given her deep bites into what
is naturally Italian territory; she is far nearer the Italian
plain than Italy is near any practicable fighting ground for
large forces; particularly is this the case in the region of the
Adige valley and Lake Garda.
The legitimate war, so to speak, in this region is a
mountaineering war. The typical position is roughly as follows.
The Austrians occupy valley A which opens northward; the Italians
occupy valley B which opens southward. The fight is for the
crest between A and B. The side that wins that crest gains the
power of looking down into, firing into and outflanking the
positions of the enemy valley. In most cases it is the Italians
now who are pressing, and if the reader will examine a map of the
front and compare it with the official reports he will soon
realise that almost everywhere the Italians are up to the head of
the southward valleys and working over the crests so as to press
down upon the Austrian valleys. But in the Trentino the
Austrians are still well over the crest on the southward slopes.
When I was in Italy they still held Roverto.
Now it cannot be said that under modern conditions mountains
favour either the offensive or the defensive. But they certainly
make operations far more deliberate than upon a level. An
engineered road or railway in an Alpine valley is the most
vulnerable of things; its curves and viaducts may be practically
demolished by shell fire or swept by shrapnel, although you hold
the entire valley except for one vantage point. All the
mountains round about a valley must be won before that valley is
safe for the transport of an advance. But on the other hand a
surprise capture of some single mountain crest and the hoisting
of one gun into position there may block the retreat of guns and
material from a great series of positions. Mountain surfaces are
extraordinarily various and subtle. You may understand Picardy
on a map, but mountain warfare is three-dimensional. A struggle
may go on for weeks or months consisting of apparently separate
and incidental skirmishes, and then suddenly a whole valley
organisation may crumble away in retreat or disaster. Italy is
gnawing into the Trentino day by day, and particularly around by
her right wing. At no time I shall be surprised to see a sudden
lunge forward on that front, and hear a tale of guns and
prisoners. This will not mean that she has made a sudden attack,
but that some system of Austrian positions has collapsed under
her continual pressure.
Such briefly is the /idea/ of mountain struggle. Its
realities, I should imagine, are among the strangest and most
picturesque in all this tremendous world conflict. I know
nothing of the war in the east, of course, but there are things
here that must be hard to beat. Happily they will soon get
justice done to them by an abler pen than mine. I hear that
Kipling is to follow me upon this ground; nothing can be imagined
more congenial to his extraordinary power of vivid rendering than
this struggle against cliffs, avalanches, frost and the
Austrian.
To go the Italian round needs, among other things, a good head.
Everywhere it has been necessary to make roads where hitherto
there have been only mule tracks or no tracks at all; the roads
are often still in the making, and the automobile of the war
tourist skirts precipices and takes hairpin bends upon tracks of
loose metal not an inch too broad for the operation, or it floats
for a moment over the dizzy edge while a train of mule transport
blunders by. The unruly imagination of man's heart (which is
"only evil continually") speculates upon what would be the
consequences of one good bump from the wheel of a mule cart.
Down below, the trees that one sees through a wisp of cloud look
far too small and spiky and scattered to hold out much hope for a
fallen man of letters. And at the high positions they are too
used to the vertical life to understand the secret feelings of
the visitor from the horizontal. General Bompinani, whose
writings are well known to all English students of military
matters, showed me the Gibraltar he is making of a great mountain
system east of the Adige.
"Let me show you," he said, and flung himself on to the edge of
the precipice into exactly the position of a lady riding side-
saddle. "You will find it more comfortable to sit down."
But anxious as I am abroad not to discredit my country by
unseemly exhibitions I felt unequal to such gymnastics without a
proper rehearsal at a lower level. I seated myself carefully at
a yard (perhaps it was a couple of yards) from the edge, advanced
on my trousers without dignity to the verge, and so with an
effort thrust my legs over to dangle in the crystalline
air.
"That," proceeded General Bompiani, pointing with a giddy
flourish of his riding whip, "is Monte Tomba."
I swayed and half-extended my hand towards him. But he was still
there--sitting, so to speak, on the half of himself.... I was
astonished that he did not disappear abruptly during his
exposition....
2
The fighting man in the Dolomites has been perhaps the most
wonderful of all these separate campaigns. I went up by
automobile as far as the clambering new road goes up the flanks
of Tofana No. 2; thence for a time by mule along the flank of
Tofana No. 1, and thence on foot to the vestiges of the famous
Castelletto.
The aspect of these mountains is particularly grim and wicked;
they are worn old mountains, they tower overhead in enormous
vertical cliffs of sallow grey, with the square jointings and
occasional clefts and gullies, their summits are toothed and
jagged; the path ascends and passes round the side of the
mountain upon loose screes, which descend steeply to a lower wall
of precipices. In the distance rise other harsh and desolate-
looking mountain masses, with shining occasional scars of old
snow. Far below is a bleak valley of stunted pine trees through
which passes the road of the Dolomites.
As I ascended the upper track two bandages men were coming down
on led mules. It was mid-August, and they were suffering from
frostbite. Across the great gap between the summits a minute
traveller with some provisions was going up by wire to some post
upon the crest. For everywhere upon the icy pinnacles are
observation posts directing the fire of the big guns on the
slopes below, or machine-gun stations, or little garrisons that
sit and wait through the bleak days. Often they have no link
with the world below but a precipitous climb or a "teleferic"
wire. Snow and frost may cut them off absolutely for weeks from
the rest of mankind. The sick and wounded must begin their
journey down to help and comfort in a giddy basket that swings
down to the head of the mule track below.
Originally all these crests were in Austrian hands; they were
stormed by the Alpini under almost incredible conditions. For
fifteen days, for example, they fought their way up these screes
on the flanks of Tofana No. 2 to the ultimate crags, making
perhaps a hundred metres of ascent each day, hiding under rocks
and in holes in the daylight and receiving fresh provisions and
ammunition and advancing by night. They were subjected to rifle
fire, machine-gun fire and bombs of a peculiar sort, big iron
balls of the size of a football filled with explosive that were
just flung down the steep. They dodged flares and star shells.
At one place they went up a chimney that would be far beyond the
climbing powers of any but a very active man. It must have been
like storming the skies. The dead and wounded rolled away often
into inaccessible ravines. Stray skeletons, rags of uniform,
fragments of weapons, will add to the climbing interest of these
gaunt masses for many years to come. In this manner it was that
Tofana No. 2 was taken.
Now the Italians are organising this prize, and I saw winding up
far above me on the steep grey slope a multitudinous string of
little things that looked like black ants, each carrying a small
bright yellow egg. They were mules bringing back balks of
timber....
But one position held out invincibly; this was the Castelletto, a
great natural fortress of rock standing out at an angle of the
mountain in such a position that it commanded the Italian
communications (the Dolomite road) in the valley below, and
rendered all their positions uncomfortable and insecure. This
obnoxious post was practically inaccessible either from above or
below, and it barred the Italians even from looking into the Val
Travenanzes which it defended. It was, in fact, an impregnable
position, and against it was pitted the invincible 5th Group of
the Alpini. It was the old problem of the irresistible force in
conflict with the immovable object. And the outcome has been the
biggest military mine in all history.
The business began in January, 1916, with surveys of the rock in
question. The work of surveying for excavations, never a very
simple one, becomes much more difficult when the site is occupied
by hostile persons with machine guns. In March, as the winter's
snows abated, the boring machinery began to arrive, by mule as
far as possible and then by hand. Altogether about half a
kilometre of gallery had to be made to the mine chamber, and
meanwhile the explosive was coming up load by load and resting
first here, then there, in discreetly chosen positions. There
were at the last thirty-five tons of it in the inner chamber.
And while the boring machines bored and the work went on,
Lieutenant Malvezzi was carefully working out the problem of "il
massimo effetto dirompimento" and deciding exactly how to pack
and explode his little hoard. On the eleventh of July, at 3.30,
as he rejoices to state in his official report, "the mine
responded perfectly both in respect of the calculations made and
of the practical effects," that is to say, the Austrians were
largely missing and the Italians were in possession of the crater
of the Castelletto and looking down the Val Travenanzes from
which they had been barred for so long. Within a month things
had been so tidied up, and secured by further excavations and
sandbags against hostile fire, that even a middle-aged English
writer, extremely fagged and hot and breathless, could enjoy the
same privilege. All this, you must understand, had gone on at a
level to which the ordinary tourist rarely climbs, in a rarefied,
chest-tightening atmosphere, with wisps of clouds floating in the
clear air below and club-huts close at hand....
Among these mountains avalanches are frequent; and they come down
regardless of human strategy. In many cases the trenches cross
avalanche tracks; they and the men in them are periodically swept
away and periodically replaced. They are positions that must be
held; if the Italians will not face such sacrifices, the
Austrians will. Avalanches and frostbite have slain and disabled
their thousands; they have accounted perhaps for as many Italians
in this austere and giddy campaign as the Austrians....
3
It seems to be part of the stern resolve of Fate that this, the
greatest of wars, shall be the least glorious; it is manifestly
being decided not by victories but by blunders. It is indeed a
history of colossal stupidities. Among the most decisive of
these blunders, second only perhaps of the blunder of the Verdun
attack and far outshining the wild raid of the British towards
Bagdad, was the blunder of the Trentino offensive. It does not
need the equipment of a military expert, it demands only quite
ordinary knowledge and average intelligence, to realise the folly
of that Austrian adventure. There is some justification for a
claim that the decisive battle of the war was fought upon the
soil of Italy. There is still more justification for saying that
it might have been.
There was only one good point about the Austrian thrust. No one
could have foretold it. And it did so completely surprise the
Italians as to catch them without any prepared line of positions
in the rear. On the very eve of the big Russian offensive, the
Austrians thrust eighteen divisions hard at the Trentino
frontier. The Italian posts were then in Austrian territory;
they held on the left wing and the right, but they were driven by
the sheer weight of men and guns in the centre; they lost guns
and prisoners because of the difficulty of mountain retreats to
which I have alluded, and the Austrians pouring through reached
not indeed the plain of Venetia, but to the upland valleys
immediately above it, to Asiago and Arsiero. They probably saw
the Venetian plain through gaps in the hills, but they were still
separated from it even at Arsiero by what are mountains to an
English eye, mountains as high as Snowdon. But the Italians of
such beautiful old places and Vicenza, Marostica, and Bassano
could watch the Austrian shells bursting on the last line of
hills above the plain, and I have no doubt they felt extremely
uneasy.
As one motors through these ripe and beautiful towns and through
the rich valleys that link them--it is a smiling land abounding
in old castles and villas, Vicenza is a rich museum of Palladio's
architecture and Bassano is full of irreplaceable painted
buildings--one feels that the things was a narrow escape, but
from the military point of view it was merely an insane escapade.
The Austrians had behind them--and some way behind them--one
little strangulated railway and no good pass road; their right
was held at Pasubio, their left was similarly bent back. In
front of them was between twice and three times their number of
first class troops, with an unlimited equipment. If they had
surmounted that last mountain crest they would have come down to
almost certain destruction in the plain. They could never have
got back. For a time it was said that General Cardona considered
that possibility. From the point of view of purely military
considerations, the Trentino offensive should perhaps have ended
in the capitulation of Vicenza.
I will confess I am glad it did not do so. This tour of the
fronts has made me very sad and weary with a succession of ruins.
I can bear no more ruins unless they are the ruins of Dusseldorf,
Cologne, Berlin, or suchlike modern German city. Anxious as I am
to be a systematic Philistine, to express my preference for
Marinetti over the Florentine British and generally to antagonise
aesthetic prigs, I rejoiced over that sunlit land as one
might rejoice over a child saved from beasts.
On the hills beyond Schio I walked out through the embrasure of a
big gun in a rock gallery, and saw the highest points upon the
hillside to which the Austrian infantry clambered in their futile
last attacks. Below me were the ruins of Arsiero and Velo
d'Astico recovered, and across the broad valley rose Monte Cimone
with the Italian trenches upon its crest and the Austrians a
little below to the north. A very considerable bombardment was
going on and it reverberated finely. (It is only among mountains
that one hears anything that one can call the thunder of guns.
The heaviest bombardments I heard in France sounded merely like
Brock's benefit on a much large scale, and disappointed me
extremely.) As I sat and listened to the uproar and watched the
shells burst on Cimone and far away up the valley over
Castelletto above Pedescala, Captain Pirelli pointed out the
position of the Austrian frontier. I doubt if the English people
realise that the utmost depth to which this great Trentino
offensive, which exhausted Austria, wasted the flower of the
Hungarian army and led directly to the Galician disasters and the
intervention of Rumania, penetrated into Italian territory was
about six miles.
III. BEHIND THE FRONT
1
I have a peculiar affection for Verona and certain things in
Verona. Italians must forgive us English this little streak of
impertinent proprietorship in the beautiful things of their
abundant land. It is quite open to them to revenge themselves by
professing a tenderness for Liverpool or Leeds. It was, for
instance, with a peculiar and personal indignation that I saw
where an Austrian air bomb had killed five-and-thirty people in
the Piazza Erbe. Somehow in that jolly old place, a place that
have very much of the quality of a very pretty and cheerful old
woman, it seemed exceptionally an outrage. And I made a special
pilgrimage to see how it was with that monument of Can Grande,
the equestrian Scaliger with the sidelong grin, for whom I
confess a ridiculous admiration. Can Grande, I rejoice to say,
has retired into a case of brickwork, surmounted by a steep roof
of thick iron plates; no aeroplane exists to carry bombs enough
to smash that covering; there he will smile securely in the
darkness until peace comes again.
All over Venetia the Austrian seaplanes are making the same sort
of idiot raid on lighted places that the Zeppelins have been
making over England. These raids do no effective military work.
What conceivable military advantage can there be in dropping
bombs into a marketing crowd? It is a sort of anti-Teutonic
propaganda by the Central Powers to which they seem to have been
incited by their own evil genius. It is as if they could
convince us that there is an essential malignity in Germans, that
until the German powers are stamped down into the mud they will
continue to do evil things. All of the Allies have borne the
thrusting and boasting of Germany with exemplary patience for
half a century; England gave her Heligoland and stood out of the
way of her colonial expansion, Italy was a happy hunting ground
for her business enterprise, France had come near resignation on
the score of Alsace-Lorraine. And then over and above the great
outrage of the war come these incessant mean-spirited atrocities.
A great and simple wickedness it is possible to forgive; the war
itself, had it been fought greatly by Austria and Germany, would
have made no such deep and enduring breach as these silly, futile
assassinations have down between the Austro-Germans and the rest
of the civilised world. One great misdeed is a thing
understandable and forgivable; what grows upon the consciousness
of the world is the persuasion that here we fight not a national
sin but a national insanity; that we dare not leave the German
the power to attack other nations any more for ever....
Venice has suffered particularly from this ape-like impulse to
hurt and terrorise enemy non-combatants. Venice has indeed
suffered from this war far more than any other town in Italy.
Her trade has largely ceased; she has no visitors. I woke up on
my way to Udine and found my train at Venice with an hour to
spare; after much examining and stamping of my passport I was
allowed outside the station wicket to get coffee in the
refreshment room and a glimpse of a very sad and silent Grand
Canal. There was nothing doing; a black despondent remnant of
the old crowd of gondolas browsed dreamily among against the quay
to stare at me the better. The empty palaces seemed to be
sleeping in the morning sunshine because it was not worth while
to wake up....
2
Except in the case of Venice, the war does not seem as yet to
have made nearly such a mark upon life in Italy as it has in
England or provincial France. People speak of Italy as a poor
country, but that is from a banker's point of view. In some
respects she is the richest country on earth, and in the matter
of staying power I should think she is better off than any other
belligerent. She produces food in abundance everywhere; her
women are agricultural workers, so that the interruption of food
production by the war has been less serious in Italy than in any
other part of Europe. In peace time, she has constantly exported
labour; the Italian worker has been a seasonal emigrant to
America, north and south, to Switzerland, Germany and the south
of France. The cessation of this emigration has given her great
reserves of man power, so that she has carried on her admirable
campaign with less interference with her normal economic life
than any other power. The first person I spoke to upon the
platform at Modane was a British officer engaged in forwarding
Italian potatoes to the British front in France. Afterwards, on
my return, when a little passport irregularity kept me for half a
day in Modane, I went for a walk with him along the winding pass
road that goes down into France. "You see hundreds and hundreds
of new Fiat cars," he remarked, "along here--going up to the
French front."
But there is a return trade. Near Paris I saw scores of
thousands of shells piled high to go to Italy....
I doubt if English people fully realise either the economic
sturdiness or the political courage of their Italian ally. Italy
is not merely fighting a first-class war in first-class fashion
but she is doing a big, dangerous, generous and far-sighted thing
in fighting at all. France and England were obliged to fight;
the necessity was as plain as daylight. The participation of
Italy demanded a remoter wisdom. In the long run she would have
been swallowed up economically and politically by Germany if she
had not fought; but that was not a thing staring her plainly in
the face as the danger, insult and challenge stared France and
England in the face. What did stare her in the face was not
merely a considerable military and political risk, but the
rupture of very close financial and commercial ties. I found
thoughtful men talking everywhere I have been in Italy of two
things, of the Jugo-Slav riddle and of the question of post war
finance. So far as the former matter goes, I think the Italians
are set upon the righteous solution of all such riddles, they are
possessed by an intelligent generosity. They are clearly set
upon deserving Jugo-Slav friendship; they understand the plain
necessity of open and friendly routes towards Roumania. It was
an Italian who set out to explain to me that Fiume must be at
least a free port; it would be wrong and foolish to cut the trade
of Hungary off from the Mediterranean. But the banking puzzle is
a more intricate and puzzling matter altogether than the
possibility of trouble between Italian and Jugo-Slav.
I write of these things with the simplicity of an angel, but
without an angelic detachment. Here are questions into which one
does not so much rush as get reluctantly pushed. Currency and
banking are dry distasteful questions, but it is clear that they
are too much in the hands of mystery-mongers; it is as much the
duty of anyone who talks and writes of affairs, it is as much the
duty of every sane adult, to bring his possibly poor and
unsuitable wits to bear upon these things, as it is for him to
vote or enlist or pay his taxes. Behind the simple ostensible
spectacle of Italy recovering the unredeemed Italy of the
Trentino and East Venetia, goes on another drama. Has Italy been
sinking into something rather hard to define called "economic
slavery"? Is she or is she not escaping from that magical
servitude? Before this question has been under discussion for a
minute comes a name--for a time I was really quite unable to
decide whether it is the name of the villain in the piece or of
the maligned heroine, or a secret society or a gold mine, or a
pestilence or a delusion--the name of the /Banca Commerciale
Italiana./
Banking in a country undergoing so rapid and vigorous an economic
development as Italy is very different from the banking we simple
English know of at home. Banking in England, like land-owning,
has hitherto been a sort of hold up. There were always
borrowers, there were always tenants, and all that had to be done
was to refuse, obstruct, delay and worry the helpless borrower or
would-be tenant until the maximum of security and profit was
obtained. I have never borrowed but I have built, and I know
something of the extreme hauteur of property of England towards a
man who wants to do anything with land, and with money I gather
the case is just the same. But in Italy, which already possessed
a sunny prosperity of its own upon mediaeval lines, the
banker has had to be suggestive and persuasive, sympathetic and
helpful. These are unaccustomed attitudes for British capital.
The field has been far more attractive to the German banker, who
is less of a proudly impassive usurer and more of a partner, who
demands less than absolute security because he investigates more
industriously and intelligently. This great bank, the Banca
Commerciale Italiana, is a bank of the German type: to begin
with, it was certainly dominated by German directors; it was a
bank of stimulation, and its activities interweave now into the
whole fabric of Italian commercial life. But it has already
liberated itself from German influence, and the bulk of its
capital is Italian. Nevertheless I found discussion ranging
about firstly what the Banca Commerciale essentially /was/,
secondly what it might /become/, thirdly what it might
/do/, and fourthly what, if anything, had to be done to it.
It is a novelty to an English mind to find banking thus mixed up
with politics, but it is not a novelty in Italy. All over
Venetia there are agricultural banks which are said to be
"clerical." I grappled with this mystery. "How are they
clerical?" I asked Captain Pirelli. "Do they lend money on bad
security to clerical voters, and on no terms whatever to anti-
clericals?" He was quite of my way of thinking. "/Pecunia non
olet/," he said; "I have never yet smelt a clerical fifty lira
note."... But on the other hand Italy is very close to Germany;
she wants easy money for development, cheap coal, a market for
various products. The case against the Germans--this case in
which the Banca Commerciale Italiana appears, I am convinced
unjustly, as a suspect--is that they have turned this natural and
proper interchange with Italy into the acquisition of German
power. That they have not been merely easy traders, but
patriotic agents. It is alleged that they used their early
"pull" in Italian banking to favour German enterprises and German
political influence against the development of native Italian
business; that their merchants are not bona-fide individuals, but
members of a nationalist conspiracy to gain economic controls.
The German is a patriotic monomaniac. He is not a man but a
limb, the worshipper of a national effigy, the digit of an
insanely proud and greedy Germania, and here are the natural
consequences.
The case of the individual Italian compactly is this: "We do not
like the Austrians and Germans. These Imperialisms look always
over the Alps. Whatever increases German influence here
threatens Italian life. The German is a German first and a human
being afterwards.... But on the other hand England seems
commercially indifferent to us and France has been economically
hostile..."
"After all," I said presently, after reflection, "in that matter
of /Pecunia non olet/; there used to be fusses about
European loans in China. And one of the favourite themes of
British fiction and drama before the war was the unfortunate
position of the girl who accepted a loan from the wicked man to
pay her debts at bridge."
"Italy," said Captain Pirelli, "isn't a girl. And she hasn't
been playing bridge."
I incline on the whole to his point of view. Money is facile
cosmopolitan stuff. I think that any bank that settles down in
Italy is going to be slowly and steadily naturalised Italian, it
will become more and more Italian until it is wholly Italian. I
would trust Italy to make and keep the Banca Commerciale Italiana
Italian. I believe the Italian brain is a better brain than the
German article. But still I heard people talking of the
implicated organisation as if it were engaged in the most
insidious duplicities. "Wait for only a year or so after the
war," said one English authority to me, "and the mask will be off
and it will be frankly a 'Deutsche Bank' once more." They assure
me that then German enterprises will be favoured again, Italian
and Allied enterprises blockaded and embarrassed, the good
understanding of Italians and English poisoned, entirely through
this organisation....
The reasonable uncommercial man would like to reject all this
last sort of talk as "suspicion mania." So far as the Banca
Commerciale Italiana goes, I at least find that easy enough; I
quote that instance simply because it is a case where suspicion
has been dispelled, but in regard to a score of other business
veins it is not so easy to dispel suspicion. This war has been a
shock to reasonable men the whole world over. They have been
forced to realise that after all a great number of Germans have
been engaged in a crack-brained conspiracy against the non-German
world; that in a great number of cases when one does business
with a German the business does not end with the individual
German. We hated to believe that a business could be tainted by
German partners or German associations. If now we err on the
side of over-suspicion, it is the German's little weakness for
patriotic disingenuousness that is most to blame....
But anyhow I do not think there is much good in a kind of witch-
smelling among Italian enterprises to find the hidden German.
Certain things are necessary for Italian prosperity and Italy
must get them. The Italians want intelligent and helpful
capital. They want a helpful France. They want bituminous coal
for metallurgical purposes. They want cheap shipping. The
French too want metallurgical coal. It is more important for
civilisation, for the general goodwill of the Allies and for
Great Britain that these needs should be supplied than that
individual British money-owners or ship-owners should remain
sluggishly rich by insisting upon high security or high freights.
The control of British coal-mining and shipping is in the
national interests--for international interests--rather than for
the creation of that particularly passive, obstructive, and
wasteful type of wealth, the wealth of the mere profiteer, is as
urgent a necessity for the commercial welfare of France and Italy
and the endurance of the Great Alliance as it is for the well-
being of the common man in Britain.
3
I left my military guide at Verona on Saturday afternoon and
reached Milan in time to dine outside Salvini's in the Galleria
Vittorio Emanuele, with an Italian fellow story-writer. The
place was as full as ever; we had to wait for a table. It is
notable that there were still great numbers of young men not in
uniform in Milan and Turin and Vicenza and Verona; there was no
effect anywhere of a depletion of men. The whole crowded place
was smouldering with excitement. The diners looked about them as
they talked, some talked loudly and seemed to be expressing
sentiments. Newspaper vendors appeared at the intersection of
the arcades, uttering ambiguous cries, and did a brisk business
of flitting white sheets among the little tables.
"To-night," said my companion, "I think we shall declare war upon
Germany. The decision is being made."
I asked intelligently why this had not been done before. I
forget the precise explanation he gave. A young soldier in
uniform, who had been dining at an adjacent table and whom I had
not recognised before as a writer I had met some years previously
in London, suddenly joined in our conversation, with a slightly
different explanation. I had been carrying on a conversation in
slightly ungainly French, but now I relapsed into English.
But indeed the matter of that declaration of war is as plain as
daylight; the Italian national consciousness has not at first
that direct sense of the German danger that exists in the minds
of the three northern Allies. To the Italian the traditional
enemy is Austria, and this war is not primarily a war for any
other end than the emancipation of Italy. Moreover we have to
remember that for years there has been serious commercial
friction between France and Italy, and considerable mutual
elbowing in North Africa. Both Frenchmen and Italians are
resolute to remedy this now, but the restoration of really
friendly and trustful relations is not to be done in a day. It
has been an extraordinary misfortune for Great Britain that
instead of boldly taking over her shipping from its private
owners and using it all, regardless of their profit, in the
interests of herself and her allies, her government has permitted
so much of it as military and naval needs have not requisitioned
to continue to ply for gain, which the government itself has
shared by a tax on war profits. The Anglophobe elements in
Italian public life have made the utmost of this folly or laxity
in relation more particularly to the consequent dearness of coal
in Italy. They have carried on an amazingly effective campaign
in which this British slackness with the individual profiteer, is
represented as if it were the deliberate greed of the British
state. This certainly contributed very much to fortify Italy's
disinclination to slam the door on the German connection.
I did my best to make it clear to my two friends that so far from
England exploiting Italy, I myself suffered in exactly the same
way as any Italian, through the extraordinary liberties of our
shipping interest. "I pay as well as you do," I said; "the
shippers' blockade of Great Britain is more effective than the
submarines'. My food, my coal, my petrol are all restricted in
the sacred name of private property. You see, capital in England
has hitherto been not an exploitation but a hold-up. We are
learning differently now.... And anyhow, Mr. Runciman has been
here and given Italy assurances...."
In the train to Modane this old story recurred again. It is
imperative that English readers should understand clearly how
thoroughly these little matters have been /worked/ by the
enemy.
Some slight civilities led to a conversation that revealed the
Italian lady in the corner as an Irishwoman married to an
Italian, and also brought out the latent English of a very
charming elderly lady opposite to her. She had heard a speech, a
wonderful speech from a railway train, by "the Lord Runciman." He
had said the most beautiful things about Italy.
I did my best to echo these beautiful things.
Then the Irishwoman remarked that Mr. Runciman had not satisfied
everybody. She and her husband had met a minister--I found
afterwards he was one of the members of the late Giolotti
government--who had been talking very loudly and scornfully of
the bargain Italy was making with England. I assured her that
the desire of England was simply to give Italy all that she
needed.
"But," said the husband casually, "Mr. Runciman is a shipowner."
I explained that he was nothing of the sort. It was true that he
came of a shipowning family--and perhaps inherited a slight
tendency to see things from a shipowning point of view--but in
England we did not suspect a man on such a score as that.
"In Italy I think we should," said the husband of the Irish
lady.
4
This incidental discussion is a necessary part of my impression
of Italy at war. The two western allies and Great Britain in
particular have to remember Italy's economic needs, and to
prepare to rescue them from the blind exploitation of private
profit. They have to remember these needs too, because, if they
are left out of the picture, then it becomes impossible to
understand the full measure of the risk Italy has faced in
undertaking this war for an idea. With a Latin lucidity she has
counted every risk, and with a Latin idealism she has taken her
place by the side of those who fight for a liberal civilisation
against a Byzantine imperialism.
As I came out of the brightly lit Galleria Vittorio Emanuele into
the darkened Piazza del Duomo I stopped under the arcade and
stood looking up at the shadowy darkness of that great pinnacled
barn, that marble bride-cake, which is, I suppose, the last
southward fortress of the Franco-English Gothic.
"It was here," said my host, "that we burnt the German stuff."
"What German stuff?"
"Pianos and all sorts of things. From the shops. It is
possible, you know, to buy things too cheaply--and to give too
much for the cheapness."
THE WESTERN WAR (SEPTEMBER, 1916)
I. RUINS
1
If I had to present some particular scene as typical of the
peculiar vileness and mischief wrought by this modern warfare
that Germany has elaborated and thrust upon the world, I do not
think I should choose as my instance any of those great
architectural wrecks that seem most to impress contemporary
writers. I have seen the injuries and ruins of the cathedrals at
Arras and Soissons and the wreckage of the great church at Saint
Eloi, I have visited the Hotel de Ville at Arras and seen
photographs of the present state of the Cloth Hall at Ypres--a
building I knew very well indeed in its days of pride--and I have
not been very deeply moved. I suppose that one is a little
accustomed to Gothic ruins, and that there is always something
monumental about old buildings; it is only a question of degree
whether they are more or less tumble-down. I was far more
desolated by the obliteration of such villages as Fricourt and
Dompierre, and by the horrible state of the fields and gardens
round about them, and my visit to Arras railway station gave me
all the sensations of coming suddenly on a newly murdered body.
Before I visited the recaptured villages in the zone of the
actual fighting, I had an idea that their evacuation was only
temporary, that as soon as the war line moved towards Germany the
people of the devastated villages would return to build their
houses and till their fields again. But I see now that not only
are homes and villages destroyed almost beyond recognition, but
the very fields are destroyed. They are wildernesses of shell
craters; the old worked soil is buried and great slabs of crude
earth have been flung up over it. No ordinary plough will travel
over this frozen sea, let along that everywhere chunks of timber,
horrible tangles of rusting wire, jagged fragments of big shells,
and a great number of unexploded shells are entangled in the
mess. Often this chaos is stained bright yellow by high
explosives, and across it run the twisting trenches and
communication trenches eight, ten, or twelve feet deep. These
will become water pits and mud pits into which beasts will fall.
It is incredible that there should be crops from any of this
region of the push for many years to come. There is no shade
left; the roadside trees are splintered stumps with scarcely the
spirit to put forth a leaf; a few stunted thistles and weeds are
the sole proofs that life may still go on.
The villages of this wide battle region are not ruined; they are
obliterated. It is just possible to trace the roads in them,
because the roads have been cleared and repaired for the passing
of the guns and ammunition. Fricourt is a tangle of German dug-
outs. One dug-out in particular there promises to become a show
place. It must be the masterpiece of some genius for dug-outs;
it is made as if its makers enjoyed the job; it is like the work
of some horrible badger among the vestiges of what were pleasant
human homes. You are taken down a timbered staircase into its
warren of rooms and passages; you are shown the places under the
craters of the great British shells, where the wood splintered
but did not come in. (But the arrival of those shells must have
been a stunning moment.) There are a series of ingenious bolting
shafts set with iron climbing bars. In this place German
officers and soldiers have lived continually for nearly two
years. This war is, indeed, a troglodytic propaganda. You come
up at last at the far end into what was once a cellar of a decent
Frechman's home.
But there are stranger subterranean refuges than that at
Fricourt. At Dompierre the German trenches skirted the cemetery,
and they turned the dead out of their vaults and made lurking
places of the tombs. I walked with M. Joseph Reinach about this
place, picking our way carefully amidst the mud holes and the
wire, and watched the shells bursting away over the receding
battle line to the west. The wreckage of the graves was
Durereqsue. And here would be a fragment of marble angle and
here a split stone with an inscription. Splinters of coffins,
rusty iron crosses and the petals of tin flowers were trampled
into the mud, amidst the universal barbed wire. A little
distance down the slope is a brand new cemetery, with new metal
wreaths and even a few flowers; it is a disciplined array of
uniform wooden crosses, each with its list of soldiers' names.
Unless I am wholly mistaken in France no Germans will ever get a
chance for ever more to desecrate that second cemetery as they
have done its predecessor.
We walked over the mud heaps and litter that had once been houses
towards the centre of Dompierre village, and tried to picture to
ourselves what the place had been. Many things are recognisable
in Dompierre that have altogether vanished at Fricourt; for
instance, there are quire large triangular pieces of the church
wall upstanding at Dompierre. And a mile away perhaps down the
hill on the road towards Amiens, the ruins of the sugar refinery
are very distinct. A sugar refinery is an affair of big iron
receptacles and great flues and pipes and so forth, and iron does
not go down under gun fire as stone or brick does. The whole
fabric wars rust, bent and twisted, gaping with shell holes, that
raggedest display of old iron, but it still kept its general
shape, as a smashed, battered, and sunken ironclad might do at
the bottom of the sea.
There wasn't a dog left of the former life of Dompierre. There
was not even much war traffic that morning on the worn and muddy
road. The guns muttered some miles away to the west, and a lark
sang. But a little way farther on up the road was an
intermediate dressing station, rigged up with wood and
tarpaulins, and orderlies were packing two wounded men into an
ambulance. The men on the stretchers were grey faced, as though
they had been trodden on by some gigantic dirty boot.
As we came back towards where our car waited by the cemetery I
heard the jingle of a horseman coming across the space behind us.
I turned and beheld one of the odd contrasts that seem always to
be happening in this incredible war. This man was, I suppose, a
native officer of some cavalry force from French north Africa.
He was a handsome dark brown Arab, wearing a long yellow-white
robe and a tall cap about which ran a band of sheepskin. He was
riding one of those little fine lean horses with long tails that
I think are Barbary horses, his archaic saddle rose fore and aft
of him, and the turned-up toes of his soft leather boots were
stuck into great silver stirrups. He might have ridden straight
out of the Arabian nights. He passed thoughtfully, picking his
way delicately among the wire and the shell craters, and coming
into the road, broke into a canter and vanished in the direction
of the smashed-up refinery.
2
About such towns as Rheims or Arras or Soissons there is an
effect of waiting stillness like nothing else I have ever
experienced. At Arras the situation is almost incredible to the
civilian mind. The British hold the town, the Germans hold a
northern suburb; at one point near the river the trenches are
just four metres apart. This state of tension has lasted for
long months.
Unless a very big attack is contemplated, I suppose there is no
advantage in an assault; across that narrow interval we should
only get into trenches that might be costly or impossible to
hold, and so it would be for the Germans on our side. But there
is a kind of etiquette observed; loud vulgar talking on either
side of the four-metre gap leads at once to bomb throwing. And
meanwhile on both sides guns of various calibre keep up an
intermittent fire, the German guns register--I think that is the
right term--on the cross of Arras cathedral, the British guns
search lovingly for the German batteries. As one walks about the
silent streets one hears, "/Bang/---Pheeee---woooo" and then far
away "/dump./" One of ours. Then presently back comes
"Pheeee---woooo---/Bang!/" One of theirs.
Amidst these pleasantries, the life of the town goes on. /Le
Lion d'Arras/, an excellent illustrated paper, produces its
valiant sheets, and has done so since the siege began.
The current number of /Le Lion d'Arras/ had to report a
local German success. Overnight they had killed a gendarme.
There is to be a public funeral and much ceremony. It is rare
for anyone now to get killed; everything is so systematised.
You may buy postcards with views of the destruction at various
angles, and send them off with the Arras postmark. The town is
not without a certain business activity. There is, I am told, a
considerable influx of visitors of a special sort; they wear
khaki and lead the troglodytic life. They play cards and gossip
and sleep in the shadows, and may not walk the streets. I had
one glimpse of a dark crowded cellar. Now and then one sees a
British soldier on some special errand; he keeps to the pavement,
mindful of the spying German sausage balloon in the air. The
streets are strangely quite and grass grows between the stones.
The Hotel de Ville and the cathedral are now mostly heaps of
litter, but many streets of the town have suffered very little.
Here and there a house has been crushed and one or two have been
bisected, the front reduced to a heap of splinters and the back
halves of the rooms left so that one sees the bed, the hanging
end of the carpet, the clothes cupboard yawning open, the
pictures still on the wall. In one place a lamp stands on a
chest of drawers, on a shelf of floor cut off completely from the
world below.... Pheeee---woooo---/Bang!/ One would be
irresistibly reminded of a Sunday afternoon in the city of
London, if it were not for those unmeaning explosions.
I went to the station, a dead railway station. A notice-board
requested us to walk around the silent square on the outside
pavement and not across it. The German sausage balloon had not
been up for days; it had probably gone off to the Somme; the
Somme was a terrible vortex just then which was sucking away the
resources of the whole German line; but still discipline is
discipline. The sausage might come peeping up at any moment over
the station roof, and so we skirted the square. Arras was fought
for in the early stages of the war; two lines of sand-bagged
breastworks still run obliquely through the station; one is where
the porters used to put luggage upon cabs and one runs the length
of the platform. The station was a fine one of the modern type,
with a glass roof whose framework still remains, though the glass
powders the floor and is like a fine angular gravel underfoot.
The rails are rails of rust, and cornflowers and mustard and tall
grasses grow amidst the ballast. The waiting-rooms have suffered
from a shell or so, but there are still the sofas of green plush,
askew, a little advertisement hung from the wall, the glass
smashed. The ticket bureau is as if a giant had scattered a
great number of tickets, mostly still done up in bundles, to
Douai, to Valenciennes, to Lens and so on. These tickets are
souvenirs too portable to resist. I gave way to that common
weakness.
I went out and looked up and down the line; two deserted goods
trucks stood as if they sheltered under a footbridge. The grass
poked out through their wheels. The railway signals seemed
uncertain in their intimations; some were up and some were down.
And it was as still and empty as a summer afternoon in Pompeii.
No train has come into Arras for two long years now.
We lunched in a sunny garden with various men who love Arras but
are weary of it, and we disputed about Irish politics. We
discussed the political future of Sir F. E. Smith. We also
disputed whether there was an equivalent in English for
/embusque./ Every now and then a shell came over--an
aimless shell.
A certain liveliness marked our departure from the town.
Possibly the Germans also listen for the rare infrequent
automobile. At any rate, as we were just starting our way back--
it is improper to mention the exact point from which we started--
came "Pheeee---woooo." Quite close. But there was no /Bang!/
One's mind hung expectant and disappointed. It was a dud shell.
And then suddenly I became acutely aware of the personality of
our chauffeur. It was not his business to talk to us, but he
turned his head, showed a sharp profile, wry lips and a bright
excited eye, and remarked, "/That/ was a near one--anyhow."
He then cut a corner over the pavement and very nearly cut it
through a house. He bumped us over a shell hole and began to
toot his horn. At every gateway, alley, and cross road on this
silent and empty streets of Arras and frequently in between, he
tooted punctiliously. (It is not proper to sound motor horns in
Arras.) I cannot imagine what the listening Germans made of it.
We passed the old gates of that city of fear, still tooting
vehemently, and then with shoulders eloquent of his feelings, our
chauffeur abandoned the horn altogether and put his whole soul
into the accelerator....
3
Soissons was in very much the same case as Arras. There was the
same pregnant silence in her streets, the same effect of waiting
for the moment which draws nearer and nearer, when the brooding
German lines away there will be full of the covert activities of
retreat, when the streets of the old town will stir with the
joyous excitement of the conclusive advance.
The organisation of Soissons for defence is perfect. I may not
describe it, but think of whatever would stop and destroy an
attacking party or foil the hostile shell. It is there. Men
have had nothing else to do and nothing else to think of for two
years. I crossed the bridge the English made in the pursuit
after the Marne, and went into the first line trenches and peeped
towards the invisible enemy. To show me exactly where to look a
seventy-five obliged with a shell. In the crypt of the Abbey of
St. Medard near by it--it must provoke the Germans bitterly to
think that all the rest of the building vanished ages ago--the
French boys sleep beside the bones of King Childebert the Second.
They shelter safely in the prison of Louis the Pious. An
ineffective shell from a German seventy-seven burst in the walled
garden close at hand as I came out from those thousand-year-old
memories again.
The cathedral at Soissons had not been nearly so completely
smashed up as the one at Arras; I doubt if it has been very
greatly fired into. There is a peculiar beauty in the one long
vertical strip of blue sky between the broken arches in the chief
gap where the wall has tumbled in. And the people are holding on
in many cases exactly as they are doing in Arras; I do not know
whether it is habit or courage that is most apparent in this
persistence. About the chief place of the town there are ruined
houses, but some invisible hand still keeps the grass of the
little garden within bounds and has put out a bed of begonias.
In Paris I met a charming American writer, the wife of a French
artist, the lady who wrote /My House on the Field of
Honour./ She gave me a queer little anecdote. On account of
some hospital work she had been allowed to visit Soissons--a rare
privilege for a woman--and she stayed the night in a lodging.
The room into which she was shown was like any other French
provincial bedroom, and after her Anglo-Saxon habit she walked
straight to the windows to open them.
They looked exactly like any other French bedroom windows, with
neat, clean white lace curtains across them. The curtains had
been put there, because they were the proper things to put
there.
"Madame," said the hostess, "need not trouble to open the glass.
There is no more glass in Soissons."
But there were curtains nevertheless. There was all the precise
delicacy of the neatly curtained home life of France.
And she told me too of the people at dinner, and how as the
little serving-maid passed about a proud erection of cake and
conserve and cream, came the familiar "Pheeee---woooo---
/Bang!/"
"That must have been the Seminaire," said someone.
As one speaks of the weather or a passing cart.
"It was in the Rue de la Bueire, M'sieur," the little maid
asserted with quiet conviction, poising the trophy of
confectionery for Madame Huard with an unshaking hand.
So stoutly do the roots of French life hold beneath the
tramplings of war.
II. THE GRADES OF WAR
1
Soissons and Arras when I visited them were samples of the
deadlock war; they were like Bloch come true. The living fact
about war so far is that Bloch has not come true--/yet./ I
think in the end he will come true, but not so far as this war is
concerned, and to make that clear it is necessary to trouble the
reader with a little disquisition upon war--omitting as far as
humanly possible all mention of Napoleon's campaigns.
The development of war has depended largely upon two factors.
One of these is invention. New weapons and new methods have
become available, and have modified tactics, strategy, the
relative advantage of offensive and defensive. The other chief
factor in the evolution of the war has been social organisation.
As Machiavelli points out in his /Art of War/, there was
insufficient social stability in Europe to keep a properly
trained and disciplined infantry in the field from the passing of
the Roman legions to the appearance of the Swiss footmen. he
makes it very clear that he considers the fighting of the Middle
Ages, though frequent and bloody, to be a confused, mobbing sort
of affair, and politically and technically unsatisfactory. The
knight was an egotist in armour. Machiavelli does small justice
to the English bowmen. It is interesting to note that
Switzerland, that present island of peace, was regarded by him as
the mother of modern war. Swiss aggression was the curse of the
Milanese. That is a remark by the way; our interest here is to
note that modern war emerges upon history as the sixteenth
century unfolds, as an affair in which the essential factor is
the drilled and trained infantryman. The artillery is developing
as a means of breaking the infantry; cavalry for charging them
when broken, for pursuit and scouting. To this day this triple
division of forces dominates soldiers' minds. The mechanical
development of warfare has consisted largely in the development
of facilities for enabling or hindering the infantry to get to
close quarters. As that has been made easy or difficult the
offensive or the defensive has predominated.
A history of military method for the last few centuries would be
a record of successive alternate steps in which offensive and
defensive contrivances pull ahead, first one and then the other.
Their relative fluctuations are marked by the varying length of
campaigns. From the very outset we have the ditch and the wall;
the fortified place upon a pass or main road, as a check to the
advance. Artillery improves, then fortification improves. The
defensive holds its own for a long period, wars are mainly siege
wars, and for a century before the advent of Napoleon there are
no big successful sweeping invasions, no marches upon the enemy
capital and so on. There were wars of reduction, wars of
annoyance. Napoleon developed the offensive by seizing upon the
enthusiastic infantry of the republic, improving transport and
mobile artillery, using road-making as an aggressive method. In
spite of the successful experiment of Torres Vedras and the
warning of Plevna the offensive remained dominant throughout the
nineteenth century.
But three things were working quietly towards the rehabilitation
of the defensive; firstly the increased range, accuracy and
rapidity of rifle fire, with which we may include the development
of the machine gun; secondly the increasing use of the spade, and
thirdly the invention of barbed wire. By the end of the century
these things had come so far into military theory as to produce
the great essay of Bloch, and to surprise the British military
people, who are not accustomed to read books or talk shop, in the
Boer war. In the thinly populated war region of South Africa the
difficulties of forcing entrenched positions were largely met by
outflanking, the Boers had only a limited amount of barbed wire
and could be held down in their trenches by shrapnel, and even at
the beginning of the present war there can be little doubt that
we and our Allies were still largely unprepared for the full
possibilities of trench warfare, we attempted a war of
manoeuvres, war at about the grade to which war had been
brought in 1898, and it was the Germans who first brought the war
up to date by entrenching upon the Aisne. We had, of course, a
few aeroplanes at that time, but they were used chiefly as a sort
of accessory cavalry for scouting; our artillery was light and
our shell almost wholly shrapnel.
Now the grades of warfare that have been developed since the
present war began, may be regarded as a series of elaborations
and counter elaborations of the problem which begins as a line of
trenches behind wire, containing infantry with rifles and machine
guns. Against this an infantry attack with bayonet, after
shrapnel fails. This we will call Grade A. To this the
offensive replies with improved artillery, and particularly with
high explosive shell instead of shrapnel. By this the wire is
blown away, the trench wrecked and the defender held down as the
attack charges up. This is Grade B. But now appear the dug-out
elaborating the trench and the defensive battery behind the
trench. The defenders, under the preliminary bombardment, get
into the dug-outs with their rifles and machine guns, and emerge
as fresh as paint as the attack comes up. Obviously there is
much scope for invention and contrivance in the dug-out as the
reservoir of counter attacks. Its possibilities have been very
ably exploited by the Germans. Also the defensive batteries
behind, which have of course the exact range of the captured
trench, concentrate on it and destroy the attack at the moment of
victory. The trench falls back to its former holders under this
fire and a counter attack. Check again for the offensive. Even
if it can take, it cannot hold a position under these conditions.
This we will call Grade A2; a revised and improved A. What is
the retort from the opposite side? Obviously to enhance and
extend the range of the preliminary bombardment behind the actual
trench line, to destroy or block, if it can, the dug-outs and
destroy or silence the counter offensive artillery. If it can do
that, it can go on; otherwise Bloch wins.
If fighting went on only at ground level Bloch would win at this
stage, but here it is that the aeroplane comes in. From the
ground it would be practically impossible to locate the enemies'
dug-outs, secondary defences, and batteries. But the aeroplane
takes us immediately into a new grade of warfare, in which the
location of the defender's secondary trenches, guns, and even
machine-gun positions becomes a matter of extreme precision--
provided only that the offensive has secured command of the air
and can send his aeroplanes freely over the defender lines. Then
the preliminary bombardment becomes of a much more extensive
character; the defender's batteries are tackled by the
overpowering fire of guns they are unable to locate and answer;
the secondary dug-outs and strong places are plastered down, a
barrage fire shuts off support from the doomed trenches, the men
in these trenches are held down by a concentrated artillery fire
and the attack goes up at last to hunt them out of the dug-outs
and collect the survivors. Until the attack is comfortably
established in the captured trench, the fire upon the old counter
attack position goes on. This is the grade, Grade B2, to which
modern warfare has attained upon the Somme front. The appearance
of the Tank has only increased the offensive advantage. There at
present warfare rests.
There is, I believe, only one grade higher possible. The success
of B2 depends upon the completeness of the aerial observation.
The invention of an anti-aircraft gun which would be practically
sure of hitting and bringing down an aeroplane at any height
whatever up to 20,000 feet, would restore the defensive and
establish what I should think must be the final grade of war, A3.
But at present nothing of the sort exists and nothing of the sort
is likely to exist for a very long time; at present hitting an
aeroplane by any sort of gun at all is a rare and uncertain
achievement. Such a gun is not impossible and therefore we must
suppose such a gun will some day be constructed, but it will be
of a novel type and character, unlike anything at present in
existence. The grade of fighting that I was privileged to
witness on the Somme, the grade at which a steady successful
offensive is possible, is therefore, I conclude, the grade at
which the present war will end.
2
But now having thus spread out the broad theory of the business,
let me go on to tell some of the actualities of the Somme
offensive. They key fact upon both British and French fronts was
the complete ascendancy of the Allies aeroplanes. It is the
necessary preliminary condition for the method upon which the
great generals of the French army rely in this sanitary task of
shoving the German Thing off the soil of Belgium and France back
into its own land. A man who is frequently throwing out
prophecies is bound to score a few successes, and one that I may
legitimately claim is my early insistence upon that fact that the
equality of the German aviator was likely to be inferior to that
of his French or British rival. The ordinary German has neither
the flexible quality of body, the quickness of nerve, the
temperament, nor the mental habits that make a successful
aviator. This idea was first put into my head by considering the
way in which Germans walk and carry themselves, and by nothing
the difference in nimbleness between the cyclists in the streets
of German and French towns. It was confirmed by a conversation I
had with a German aviator who was also a dramatist, and who came
to see me upon some copyright matter in 1912. He broached the
view that aviation would destroy democracy, because he said only
aristocrats make aviators. (He was a man of good family.) With a
duke or so in my mind I asked him why. Because, he explained, a
man without aristocratic quality in tradition, cannot possibly
endure the "high loneliness" of the air. That sounded rather
like nonsense at the time, and then I reflected that for a
Prussian that might be true. There may be something in the
German composition that does demand association and the support
of pride and training before dangers can be faced. The Germans
are social and methodical, the French and English are by
comparison chaotic and instinctive; perhaps the very readiness
for a conscious orderliness that makes the German so formidable
upon the ground, so thorough and fore-seeking, makes him slow and
unsure in the air. At any rate the experiences of this war have
seemed to carry out this hypothesis. The German aviators will
not as a class stand up to those of the Allies. They are not
nimble in the air. Such champions as they have produced have
been men of one trick; one of their great men, Immelmann--he was
put down by an English boy a month or so ago--had a sort of
hawk's swoop. He would go very high and then come down at his
utmost pace at his antagonist, firing his machine gun at him as
he came. If he missed in this hysterical lunge, he went on
down.... This does not strike the Allied aviator as very
brilliant. A gentleman of that sort can sooner or later be
caught on the rise by going for him over the German
lines.
The first phase, then, of the highest grade offensive, the
ultimate development of war regardless of expense, is the
clearance of the air. Such German machines as are up are put
down by fighting aviators. These last fly high; in the clear
blue of the early morning they look exactly like gnats; some
trail a little smoke in the sunshine; they take their machine
guns in pursuit over the German lines, and the German anti-
aircraft guns, the Archibalds, begin to pattern the sky about
them with little balls of black smoke. From below one does not
see men nor feel that men are there; it is as if it were an
affair of midges. Close after the fighting machines come the
photographic aeroplanes, with cameras as long as a man is high,
flying low--at four or five thousand feet that is--over the enemy
trenches. The Archibald leaves these latter alone; it cannot
fire a shell to explode safely so soon after firing; but they are
shot at with rifles and machine guns. They do not mind being
shot at; only the petrol tank and the head and thorax of the
pilot are to be considered vital. They will come back with forty
or fifty bullet holes in the fabric. They will go under this
fire along the length of the German positions exposing plate
after plate; one machine will get a continuous panorama of many
miles and then come back straight to the aerodrome to develop its
plates.
There is no waste of time about the business, the photographs are
developed as rapidly as possible. Within an hour and a half
after the photographs were taken the first prints are going back
into the bureau for the examination of the photographs. Both
British and French air photographs are thoroughly scrutinised and
marked.
An air photograph to an inexperienced eye is not a very
illuminating thing; one makes our roads, blurs of wood, and
rather vague buildings. But the examiner has an eye that has
been in training; he is a picked man; he has at hand yesterday's
photographs and last week's photographs, marked maps and all
sorts of aids and records. If he is a Frenchman he is only too
happy to explain his ideas and methods. Here, he will point out,
is a little difference between the German trench beyond the wood
since yesterday. For a number of reasons he thinks that will be
a new machine gun emplacement; here at the centre of the farm
wall they have been making another. This battery here--isn't it
plain? Well, it's a dummy. The grass in front of it hasn't been
scorched, and there's been no serious wear on the road here for a
week. Presently the Germans will send one or two waggons up and
down that road and instruct them to make figures of eight to
imitate scorching on the grass in front of the gun. We know all
about that. The real wear on the road, compare this and this and
this, ends here at this spot. It turns off into the wood.
There's a sort of track in the trees. Now look where the trees
are just a little displaced! (This lens is rather better for
that.) /That's/ one gun. You see? Here, I will show you
another....
That process goes on two or three miles behind the front line.
Very clean young men in white overalls do it as if it were a
labour of love. And the Germans in the trenches, the German
gunners, /know it is going on./ They know that in the
quickest possible way these observations of the aeroplane that
was over them just now will go to the gunners. The careful
gunner, firing by the map and marking by aeroplane, kite balloon
or direct observation, will be getting onto the located guns and
machine guns in another couple of hours. The French claim that
they have located new batteries, got their /tir de
demolition/ upon them in and destroyed them within five
hours. The British I told of that found it incredible. Every
day the French print special maps showing the guns, sham guns,
trenches, everything of significance behind the German lines,
showing everything that has happened in the last four-and-twenty
hours. It is pitiless. It is indecent. The map-making and
printing goes on in the room next and most convenient to the
examination of the photographs. And, as I say, the German army
knows of this, and knows that it cannot prevent it because of its
aerial weakness. That knowledge is not the last among the forces
that is crumpling up the German resistance upon the Somme.
I visited some French guns during the /tir de
demolition/ phase. I counted nine aeroplanes and
twenty-six kite balloons in the air at the same time. There was
nothing German visible in the air at all.
It is a case of eyes and no eyes.
The French attack resolves itself into a triple system of gun-
fire. First for a day or so, or two or three days, there is
demolition fire to smash up all the exactly located batteries,
organisation, supports, behind the front line enemy trenches;
then comes barrage fire to cut off supplies and reinforcements;
then, before the advance, the hammering down fire, "heads down,"
upon the trenches. When at last this stops and the infantry goes
forward to rout out the trenches and the dug-outs, they go
forward with a minimum of inconvenience. The first wave of
attack fights, destroys, or disarms the surviving Germans and
sends them back across the open to the French trenches. They run
as fast as they can, hands up, and are shepherded farther back.
The French set to work to turn over the captured trenches and
organise themselves against any counter attack that may face the
barrage fire.
That is the formula of the present fighting, which the French
have developed. After an advance there is a pause, while the
guns move up nearer the Germans and fresh aeroplane
reconnaissance goes on. Nowhere on this present offensive has a
German counter attack had more than the most incidental success;
and commonly they have had frightful losses. Then after a few
days of refreshment and accumulation, the Allied attack resumes.
That is the perfected method of the French offensive. I had the
pleasure of learning its broad outlines in good company, in the
company of M. Joseph Reinach and Colonel Carence, the military
writer. Their talk together and with me in the various messes at
which we lunched was for the most part a keen discussion of every
detail and every possibility of the offensive machine; every
French officer's mess seems a little council upon the one supreme
question in France, /how to do it best./ M. Reinach has
made certain suggestions about the co-operation of the French and
British that I will discuss elsewhere, but one great theme was
the constitution of "the ideal battery." For years French
military thought has been acutely attentive to the best number of
guns for effective common action, and has tended rather to the
small battery theory. My two companies were playing with the
idea that the ideal battery was a battery of one big gun, with
its own aeroplane and kite balloon marking for it.
The British seem to be associated with the adventurous self-
reliance needed in the air. The British aeroplanes do not simply
fight the Germans out of the sky; they also make themselves an
abominable nuisance by bombing the enemy trenches. For every
German bomb that is dropped by aeroplane on or behind the British
lines, about twenty go down on the heads of the Germans. British
air bombs upon guns, stores and communications do some of the
work that the French effect by their systematic demolition fire.
And the British aviator has discovered and is rapidly developing
an altogether fresh branch of air activity in the machine-gun
attack at a very low altitude. Originally I believe this was
tried in western Egypt, but now it is being increasingly used
upon the British front in France. An aeroplane which comes down
suddenly, travelling very rapidly, to a few hundred feet, is
quite hard to hit, even if it is not squirting bullets from a
machine gun as it advances. Against infantry in the open this
sort of thing is extremely demoralising. It is a method of
attack still in its infancy, but there are great possibilities
for it in the future, when the bending and cracking German line
gives, as ultimately it must give if this offensive does not
relax. If the Allies persist in their pressure upon the western
front, if there is no relaxation in the supply of munitions from
Britain and no lapse into tactical stupidity, a German retreat
eastward is inevitable.
Now a cavalry pursuit alone may easily come upon disaster,
cavalry can be so easily held up by wire and a few machine guns.
I think the Germans have reckoned on that and on automobiles,
probably only the decay of their /morale/ prevents their
opening their lines now on the chance of the British attempting
some such folly as a big cavalry advance, but I do not think the
Germans have reckoned on the use of machine guns in aeroplanes,
supported by and supporting cavalry or automobiles. At the
present time I should imagine there is no more perplexing
consideration amidst the many perplexities of the German military
intelligence than the new complexion put upon pursuit by these
low level air developments. It may mean that in all sorts of
positions where they had counted confidently on getting away,
they may not be able to get away--from the face of a scientific
advance properly commanding and using modern material in a
dexterous and intelligent manner.
III. THE WAR LANDSCAPE
1
I saw rather more of the British than of the French aviators
because of the vileness of the weather when I visited the latter.
It is quite impossible for me to institute comparisons between
these two services. I should think that the British organisation
I saw would be hard to beat, and that none but the French could
hope to beat it. On the Western front the aviation has been
screwed up to a very much higher level than on the Italian line.
In Italy it has not become, as it has in France, the decisive
factor. The war on the Carso front in Italy--I say nothing of
the mountain warfare, which is a thing in itself--is in fact
still in the stage that I have called B. It is good warfare well
waged, but not such an intensity of warfare. It has not, as one
says of pianos and voices, the same compass.
This is true in spite of the fact that the Italians along of all
the western powers have adopted a type of aeroplane larger and
much more powerful than anything except the big Russian machines.
They are not at all suitable for any present purpose upon the
Italian front, but at a later stage, when the German is retiring
and Archibald no longer searches the air, they would be
invaluable on the western front because of their enormous bomb or
machine gun carrying capacity. "But sufficient for the day is
the swat thereof," as the British public schoolboy says, and no
doubt we shall get them when we have sufficiently felt the need
for them. The big Caproni machines which the Italians possess
are of 300 h.p. and will presently be of 500h.p. One gets up a
gangway into them was one gets into a yacht; they wave a main
deck, a forward machine gun deck and an aft machine gun; one may
walk about in them; in addition to guns and men they carry a very
considerable weight of bombs beneath. They cannot of course
beget up with the speed nor soar to the height of our smaller
aeroplanes; it is as carriers in raids behind a force of fighting
machines that they should find their use.
The British establishment I visited was a very refreshing and
reassuring piece of practical organisation. The air force of
Great Britain has had the good fortune to develop with
considerable freedom from old army tradition; many of its
officers are ex-civil engineers and so forth; Headquarters is a
little shy of technical direction; and all this in a service that
is still necessarily experimental and plastic is to the good.
There is little doubt that, given a release from prejudice, bad
associations and the equestrian tradition, British technical
intelligence and energy can do just as well as the French. Our
problem with our army is not to create intelligence, there is an
abundance of it, but to release it from a dreary social and
official pressure. The air service ransacks the army for men
with technical training and sees that it gets them, there is a
real keenness upon the work, and the men in these great mobile
hangars talk shop readily and clearly.
I have already mentioned and the newspapers have told abundantly
of the pluck, daring, and admirable work of our aviators; what is
still untellable in any detail is the energy and ability of the
constructive and repairing branch upon whose efficiency their
feats depend. Perhaps the most interesting thing I saw in
connection with the air work was the hospital for damaged
machines and the dump to which those hopelessly injured are
taken, in order that they may be disarticulated and all that is
sound in them used for reconstruction. How excellently this work
is being done may be judged from the fact that our offensive in
July started with a certain number of aeroplanes, a number that
would have seemed fantastic in a story a year before the war
began. These aeroplanes were in constant action; they fought,
they were shot down, they had their share of accidents. Not only
did the repair department make good every loss, but after three
weeks of the offensive the army was fighting with fifty more
machines than at the outset. One goes through a vast
Rembrandtesque shed opening upon a great sunny field, in whose
cool shadows rest a number of interesting patients; captured and
slightly damaged German machines, machines of our own with scars
of battle upon them, one or two cases of bad landing. The star
case came over from Peronne. It had come in two days ago.
I examined this machine and I will tell the state it was in, but
I perceive that what I have to tell will read not like a sober
statement of truth but like strained and silly lying. The
machine had had a direct hit from an Archibald shell. The
propeller had been clean blown away; so had the machine gun and
all its fittings. The engines had been stripped naked and a good
deal bent about. The timber stay over the aviator had been
broken, so that it is marvellous the wings of the machine did not
just up at once like the wings of a butterfly. The solitary
aviator had been wounded in the face. He had then come down in a
long glide into the British lines, and made a tolerable
landing....
2
One consequence of the growing importance of the aeroplane in
warfare is the development of a new military art, the art of
camouflage. Camouflage is humbugging disguise, it is making
things--and especially in this connection, military things--seem
not what they are, but something peaceful and rural, something
harmless and quite uninteresting to aeroplane observers. It is
the art of making big guns look like haystacks and tents like
level patches of field.
Also it includes the art of making attractive models of guns,
camps, trenches and the like that are not bona-fide guns, camps,
or trenches at all, so that the aeroplane bomb-dropper and the
aeroplane observer may waste his time and energies and the enemy
gunfire be misdirected. In Italy I saw dummy guns so made as to
deceive the very elect at a distance of a few thousand feet. The
camouflage of concealment aims either at invisibility or
imitation; I have seen a supply train look like a row of
cottages, its smoke-stack a chimney, with the tops of sham
palings running along the back of the engine and creepers painted
up its sides. But that was a flight of the imagination; the
commonest camouflage is merely to conceal. Trees are brought up
and planted near the object to be hidden, it is painted in the
same tones as its background, it is covered with an awning
painted to look like grass or earth. I suppose it is only a
matter of development before a dummy cow or so is put up to chew
the cud on the awning.
But camouflage or no camouflage, the bulk of both the French and
British forces in the new won ground of the great offensive lay
necessarily in the open. Only the big guns and the advanced Red
Cross stations had got into pits and subterranean hiding places.
The advance has been too rapid and continuous for the armies to
make much of a toilette as they halted, and the destruction and
the desolation of the country won afforded few facilities for
easy concealment. Tents, transport, munitions, these all
indicated an army on the march--at the rate of half a mile in a
week or so, to Germany. If the wet and mud of November and
December have for a time delayed that advance, the force behind
has but accumulated for the resumption of the thrust.
3
A journey up from the base to the front trenches shows an
interesting series of phases. One leaves Amiens, in which the
normal life threads its way through crowds of resting men in
khaki and horizon blue, in which staff officers in automobiles
whisk hither and thither, in which there are nurses and even a
few inexplicable ladies in worldly costume, in which restaurants
and cafes are congested and busy, through which there is a
perpetual coming and going of processions of heavy vans to the
railway sidings. One dodges past a monstrous blue-black gun
going up to the British front behind two resolute traction
engines--the three sun-blistered young men in the cart that
trails behind lounge in attitudes of haughty pride that would
shame the ceiling gods of Hampton Court. One passes through
arcades of waiting motor vans, through arcades of waiting motor
vans, through suburbs still more intensely khaki or horizon blue,
and so out upon the great straight poplar-edged road--to the
front. Sometimes one laces through spates of heavy traffic,
sometimes the dusty road is clear ahead, now we pass a vast
aviation camp, now a park of waiting field guns, now an
encampment of cavalry. One turns aside, and abruptly one is in
France--France as one knew it before the war, on a shady
secondary road, past a delightful chateau behind its iron gates,
past a beautiful church, and then suddenly we are in a village
street full of stately Indian soldiers.
It betrays no military secret to say that commonly the rare
tourist to the British offensive passes through Albert, with its
great modern red cathedral smashed to pieces and the great gilt
Madonna and Child that once surmounted the tower now, as everyone
knows, hanging out horizontally in an attitude that irresistibly
suggests an imminent dive upon the passing traveller. One looks
right up under it.
Presently we begin to see German prisoners. The whole lot look
entirely contented, and are guarded by perhaps a couple of men in
khaki. These German prisoners do not attempt to escape, they
have not the slightest desire for any more fighting, they have
done their bit, they say, honour is satisfied; they give
remarkably little trouble. A little way further on perhaps we
pass their cage, a double barbed-wire enclosure with a few tents
and huts within.
A string of covered waggons passes by. I turn and see a number
of men sitting inside and looking almost as cheerful as a
beanfeast in Epping Forest. the make facetious gestures. They
have a subdued sing-song going on. But one of them looks a
little sick, and then I notice not very obtrusive bandages.
"Sitting-up cases," my guide explains.
These are part of the casualties of last night's fight.
The fields on either side are now more evidently in the war zone.
The array of carts, the patches of tents, the coming and going of
men increases. But here are three women harvesting, and
presently in a cornfield are German prisoners working under one
old Frenchman. Then the fields become trampled again. Here is a
village, not so very much knocked about, and passing through it
we go slowly beside a long column of men going up to the front.
We scan their collars for signs of some familiar regiment. These
are new men going up for the first time; there is a sort of
solemn elation in many of their faces.
The men coming down are usually smothered in mud or dust, and
unless there has been a fight they look pretty well done up.
They stoop under their equipment, and some of the youngsters
drag. One pleasant thing about this coming down is the welcome
of the regimental band, which is usually at work as soon as the
men turn off from the high road. I hear several bands on the
British front; they do much to enhance the general cheerfulness.
On one of these days of my tour I had the pleasure of seeing the
---th Blankshires coming down after a fight. As we drew near I
saw that they combined an extreme muddiness with an unusual
elasticity. They all seemed to be looking us in the face instead
of being too fagged to bother. Then I noticed a nice grey helmet
dangling from one youngster's bayonet, in fact his eye directed
me to it. A man behind him had a black German helmet of the type
best known in English illustrations; then two more grey appeared.
The catch of helmets was indeed quite considerable. Then I
perceived on the road bank above and marching parallel with this
column, a double file of still muddier Germans. Either they wore
caps or went bare-headed. There were no helmets among them. We
do not rob our prisoners but--a helmet is a weapon. Anyhow, it
is an irresistible souvenir.
Now and then one sees afar off an ammunition dump, many hundreds
of stacks of shells--without their detonators as yet--being
unloaded from railway trucks, transferred from the broad gauge to
the narrow gauge line, or loaded onto motor trolleys. Now and
then one crosses a railway line. The railway lines run
everywhere behind the British front, the construction follows the
advance day by day. They go up as fast as the guns. One's guide
remarks as the car bumps over the level crossing, "That is one of
Haig's railways." It is an aspect of the Commander-in-Chief that
has much impressed and pleased the men. And at last we begin to
enter the region of the former Allied trenches, we pass the old
German front line, we pass ruined houses, ruined fields, and
thick patches of clustering wooden crosses and boards where the
dead of the opening assaults lie. There are no more reapers now,
there is no more green upon the fields, there is no green
anywhere, scarcely a tree survives by the roadside, but only
overthrown trunks and splintered stumps; the fields are
wildernesses of shell craters and coarse weeds, the very woods
are collections of blasted stems and stripped branches. This
absolutely ravaged and ruined battlefield country extends now
along the front of the Somme offensive for a depth of many miles;
across it the French and British camps and batteries creep
forward, the stores, the dumps, the railways creep forward, in
their untiring, victorious thrust against the German lines.
Overhead hum and roar the aeroplanes, away towards the enemy the
humped, blue sausage-shaped kite balloons brood thoughtfully, and
from this point and that, guns, curiously invisible until they
speak, flash suddenly and strike their one short hammer-blow of
sound.
Then one sees an enemy shell drop among the little patch of trees
on the crest to the right, and kick up a great red-black mass of
smoke and dust. We see it, and then we hear the whine of its
arrival and at last the bang. The Germans are blind now, they
have lost the air, they are firing by guesswork and their
knowledge of the abandoned territory.
"They think they have got divisional headquarters there," someone
remarks.... "They haven't. But they keep on."
In this zone where shells burst the wise automobile stops and
tucks itself away as inconspicuously as possible close up to a
heap of ruins. There is very little traffic on the road now
except for a van or so that hurries up, unloads, and gets back as
soon as possible. Mules and men are taking the stuff the rest of
the journey. We are in a flattened village, all undermined by
dug-outs that were in the original German second line. We report
ourselves to a young troglodyte in one of these, and are given a
guide, and so set out on the last part of the journey to the
ultimate point, across the land of shell craters and barbed wire
litter and old and new trenches. We have all put on British
steel helmets, hard but heavy and inelegant head coverings. I
can write little that is printable about these aesthetic crimes.
The French and German helmets are noble and beautiful things.
These lumpish /pans./..
They ought to be called by the name of the man who designed
them.
Presently we are advised to get into a communication trench. It
is not a very attractive communication trench, and we stick to
our track across the open. Three or four shells shiver overhead,
but we decide they are British shells, going out. We reach a
supporting trench in which men are waiting in a state of nearly
insupportable boredom for the midday stew, the one event of
interest in a day-long vigil. Here we are told imperatively to
come right in at once, and we do.
All communication trenches are tortuous and practically endless.
On an offensive front they have vertical sides of unsupported
earth and occasional soakaways for rain, covered by wooden
gratings, and they go on and on and on. At rare intervals they
branch, and a notice board says "To Regent Street," or "To Oxford
Street," or some such lie. It is all just trench. For a time
you talk, but talking in single file soon palls. You cease to
talk, and trudge. A great number of telephone wires come into
the trench and cross and recross it. You cannot keep clear of
them. Your helmet pings against them and they try to remove it.
Sometimes you have to stop and crawl under wires. Then you
wonder what the trench is like in really wet weather. You hear a
shell burst at no great distance. You pass two pages of /The
Strand Magazine./ Perhaps thirty yards on you pass a
cigarette end. After these sensational incidents the trench
quiets down again and continues to wind endlessly--just a sandy,
extremely narrow vertical walled trench. A giant crack.
At last you reach the front line trench. On an offensive sector
it has none of the architectural interest of first line trenches
at such places as Soissons or Arras. It was made a week or so
ago by joining up shell craters, and if all goes well we move
into the German trench along by the line of scraggy trees, at
which we peep discreetly, to-morrow night. We can peep
discreetly because just at present our guns are putting shrapnel
over the enemy at the rate of about three shells a minute, the
puffs follow each other up and down the line, and no Germans are
staring out to see us.
The Germans "strafed" this trench overnight, and the men are
tired and sleepy. Our guns away behind us are doing their best
now to give them a rest by strafing the Germans. One or two men
are in each forward sap keeping a look out; the rest sleep, a
motionless sleep, in the earthy shelter pits that have been
scooped out. One officer sits by a telephone under an earth-
covered tarpaulin, and a weary man is doing the toilet of a
machine gun. We go on to a shallow trench in which we must
stoop, and which has been badly knocked about.... Here we have
to stop. The road to Berlin is not opened up beyond this point.
My companion on this excursion is a man I have admired for years
and never met until I came out to see the war, a fellow writer.
He is a journalist let loose. Two-thirds of the junior British
officers I met on this journey were really not "army men" at all.
One finds that the apparent subaltern is really a musician, or a
musical critic, or an Egyptologist, or a solicitor, or a cloth
manufacturer, or a writer. At the outbreak of the war my guide
dyed his hair to conceal its tell-tale silver, and having been
laughed to scorn by the ordinary recruiting people, enlisted in
the sportsmen's battalion. He was wounded, and then the
authorities discovered that he was likely to be of more use with
a commission and drew him, in spite of considerable resistance,
out of the firing line. To which he always returns whenever he
can get a visitor to take with him as an excuse. He now stood
up, fairly high and clear, explaining casually that the Germans
were no longer firing, and showed me the points of interest.
I had come right up to No Man's Land at last. It was under my
chin. The skyline, the last skyline before the British could
look down on Bapaume, showed a mangy wood and a ruined village,
crouching under repeated gobbings of British shrapnel. "They've
got a battery just there, and we're making it uncomfortable." No
Man's Land itself is a weedy space broken up by shell craters,
with very little barbed wire in front of us and very little in
front of the Germans. "They've got snipers in most of the
craters, and you see them at twilight hopping about from one to
the other." We have very little wire because we don't mean to
stay for very long in this trench, but the Germans have very
little wire because they have not been able to get it up yet.
They never will get it up now....
I had been led to believe that No Man's Land was littered with
the unburied dead, but I saw nothing of the sort at this place.
There had been no German counter attack since our men came up
here. But at one point as we went along the trench there was a
dull stench. "Germans, I think," said my guide, though I did not
see how he could tell.
He looked at his watch and remarked reluctantly, "If you start at
once, you may just do it."
I wanted to catch the Boulogne boat. It was then just past one
in the afternoon. We met the stew as we returned along the
communication trench, and it smelt very good indeed.... We
hurried across the great spaces of rusty desolation upon which
every now and again a German shell was bursting....
That night I was in my flat in London. I had finished reading
the accumulated letters of some weeks, and I was just going
comfortably to bed.
IV. NEW ARMS FOR OLD ONES
1
Such are the landscapes and method of modern war. It is more
difficult in its nature from war as it was waged in the
nineteenth century than that was from the nature of the phalanx
or the legion. The nucleus fact--when I talked to General Joffre
he was very insistent upon this point--is still as ever the
ordinary fighting man, but all the accessories and conditions of
his personal encounter with the fighting man of the other side
have been revolutionised in a quarter of a century. The fighting
together in a close disciplined order, shoulder to shoulder,
which has held good for thousands of years as the best and most
successful fighting, has been destroyed; the idea of
/breaking/ infantry formation as the chief offensive
operation has disappeared, the cavalry charge and the cavalry
pursuit are as obsolete as the cross-bow. The modern fighting
man is as individualised as a half back or a centre forward in a
football team. Personal fighting has become "scrapping" again,
an individual adventure with knife, club, bomb, revolver or
bayonet. In this war we are working out things instead of
thinking them out, and these enormous changes are still but
imperfectly apprehended. The trained and specialised military
man probably apprehends them as feebly as anyone.
This is a thing that I want to state as emphatically as possible.
It is the pith of the lesson I have learnt at the front. The
whole method of war has been so altered in the past five and
twenty years as to make it a new and different process
altogether. Much the larger part of this alteration has only
become effective in the last two years. Everyone is a beginner
at this new game; everyone is experimenting and learning.
The idea has been put admirably by /Punch./ That excellent
picture of the old-fashioned sergeant who complains to his
officer of the new recruit; "'E's all right in the trenches, Sir;
'e's all right at a scrap; but 'e won't never make a soldier," is
the quintessence of everything I am saying here. And were there
not the very gravest doubts about General Smuts in British
military circles because he had "had no military training"? A
Canadian expressed the new view very neatly on being asked, in
consequence of a deficient salute, whether he wanted to be a
soldier, by saying, "Not I! I want to be a fighter!"
The professional officer of the old dispensation was a man
specialised in relation to one of the established "arms." He was
an infantryman, a cavalryman, a gunner or an engineer. It will
be interesting to trace the changes that have happened to all
these arms.
Before this war began speculative writers had argued that
infantry drill in close formation had now no fighting value
whatever, that it was no doubt extremely necessary for the
handling, packing, forwarding and distribution of men, but that
the ideal infantry fighter was now a highly individualised and
self-reliant man put into a pit with a machine gun, and supported
by a string of other men bringing him up supplies and ready to
assist him in any forward rush that might be necessary.
The opening phases of the war seemed to contradict this. It did
not at first suit the German game to fight on this most modern
theory, and isolated individual action is uncongenial to the
ordinary German temperament and opposed to the organised social
tendencies of German life. To this day the Germans attack only
in close order; they are unable to produce a real modern infantry
for aggressive purposes, and it is a matter of astonishment to
military minds on the English side that our hastily trained new
armies should turn out to be just as good at the new fighting as
the most "seasoned troops." But there is no reason whatever why
they should not be. "Leading," in the sense of going ahead of
the men and making them move about mechanically at the word of
command, has ceased. On the British side our magnificent new
subalterns and our equally magnificent new non-commissioned
officers play the part of captains of football teams; they talk
their men individually into an understanding of the job before
them; they criticise style and performance. On the French side
things have gone even farther. Every man in certain attacks has
been given a large scale map of the ground over which he has to
go, and has had his own individual job clearly marked and
explained to him. All the Allied infantrymen tend to become
specialised, as bombers, as machine-gun men, and so on. The
unspecialised common soldier, the infantryman who has stood and
marched and moved in ranks and ranks, the "serried lines of men,"
who are the main substance of every battle story for the last
three thousand years, are as obsolete as the dodo. The rifle and
bayonet very probably are becoming obsolete too. Knives and
clubs and revolvers serve better in the trenches. The krees and
the Roman sword would be as useful. The fine flourish of the
bayonet is only possible in the rare infrequent open. Even the
Zulu assegai would serve as well.
The two operations of the infantry attack now are the rush and
the "scrap." These come after the artillery preparation. Against
the rush, the machine gun is pitted. The machine gun becomes
lighter and more and more controllable by one man; as it does so
the days of the rifle draw to a close. Against the machine gun
we are now directing the "Tank," which goes ahead and puts out
the machine gun as soon as it begins to sting the infantry rush.
We are also using the swooping aeroplane with a machine gun.
Both these devices are of British origin, and they promise very
well.
After the rush and the scrap comes the organisation of the
captured trench. "Digging in" completes the cycle of modern
infantry fighting. You may consider this the first or the last
phase of an infantry operation. It is probably at present the
least worked-out part of the entire cycle. Here lies the sole
German superiority; they bunch and crowd in the rush, they are
inferior at the scrap, but they do dig like moles. The weakness
of the British is their failure to settle down. they like the
rush and the scrap; they press on too far, they get outflanked
and lost "in the blue"; they are not naturally clever at the
excavating part of the work, and they are not as yet well trained
in making dug-outs and shelter-pits rapidly and intelligently.
they display most of the faults that were supposed to be most
distinctively French before this war came to revolutionise all
our conceptions of French character.
2
Now the operations of this modern infantry, which unlike any
preceding infantry in the history of war does not fight in
disciplined formations but as highly individualised specialists,
are determined almost completely by the artillery preparation.
Artillery is now the most essential instrument of war. You may
still get along with rather bad infantry; you may still hold out
even after the loss of the aerial ascendancy, but so soon as your
guns fail you approach defeat. The backbone process of the whole
art of war is the manufacture in overwhelming quantities, the
carriage and delivery of shell upon the vulnerable points of the
enemy's positions. That is, so to speak, the essential blow.
Even the infantryman is now hardly more than the residuary
legatee after the guns have taken their toll.
I have now followed nearly every phase in the life history of a
shell from the moment when it is a segment of steel bar just cut
off, to the moment when it is no more than a few dispersed and
rusting rags and fragments of steel--pressed upon the stray
visitor to the battlefield as souvenirs. All good factories are
intensely interesting places to visit, but a good munition
factory is romantically satisfactory. It is as nearly free from
the antagonism of employer and employed as any factory can be.
The busy sheds I visited near Paris struck me as being the most
living and active things in the entire war machine. Everywhere
else I saw fitful activity, or men waiting. I have seen more men
sitting about and standing about, more bored inactivity, during
my tour than I have ever seen before in my life. Even the front
line trenches seem to slumber; the Angel of Death drowses over
them, and moves in his sleep to crush out men's lives. The
gunfire has an indolent intermittence. But the munition
factories grind on night and day, grinding against the factories
in Central Europe, grinding out the slow and costly and necessary
victory that should end aggressive warfare in the world for ever.
It would be very interesting if one could arrange a meeting
between any typical Allied munition maker on the one hand, and
the Kaiser and Hindenburg, those two dominant effigies of the
German nationalists' dream of "world might." Or failing that, Mr.
Dyson might draw the encounter. You imagine these two heroic
figures got up for the interview, very magnificent in shining
helms and flowing cloaks, decorations, splendid swords, spurs.
"Here," one would say, "is the power that has held you. You were
bolstered up very loyally by the Krupp firm and so forth, you
piled up shell, guns, war material, you hoped to snatch your
victory before the industrialisation and invention of the world
could turn upon you. But you failed. You were not rapid enough.
The battle of the Marne was your misfortune. And Ypres. You
lost some chances at Ypres. Two can play at destructive
industrialism, and now we out-gun you. We are piling up
munitions now faster than you. The essentials of this Game of
the War Lord are idiotically simple, but it was not of our
choosing. It is now merely a question of months before you make
your inevitable admission. This is no war to any great
commander's glory. This gentleman in the bowler hat is the
victor, Sire; not you. Assisted, Sire, by these disrespectful-
looking factory girls in overalls."
For example, there is M. Citroen. Before the war I understand he
made automobiles; after the war he wants to turn to and make
automobiles again. For the duration of the war he makes shell.
He has been temporarily diverted from constructive to destructive
industrialism. He did me the honours of his factory. He is a
compact, active man in dark clothes and a bowler hat, with a
pencil and notebook conveniently at hand. He talked to me in
carefully easy French, and watched my face with an intelligent
eye through his pince-nez for the signs of comprehension. Then
he went on to the next point.
He took me through every stage of his process. In his office he
showed me the general story. Here were photographs of certain
vacant fields and old sheds--"this place"--he indicated the
altered prospect from the window--"at the outbreak of the war."
He showed me a plan of the first undertaking. "Now we have
rather over nine thousand workpeople."
He showed me a little row of specimens. "These we make for
Italy. These go to Russia. These are the Rumanian pattern."
Thence to the first stage, the chopping up of the iron bars, the
furnace, the punching out of the first shape of the shell; all
this is men's work. I had seen this sort of thing before in
peace ironworks, but I saw it again with the same astonishment,
the absolute precision of movement on the part of the half-naked
sweating men, the calculated efficiency of each worker, the
apparent heedlessness, the real certitude, with which the blazing
hot cylinder is put here, dropped there, rolls to its next
appointed spot, is chopped up and handed on, the swift passage to
the cooling crude, pinkish-purple shell shape. Down a long line
one sees in perspective a practical symmetry, of furnace and
machine group and the shells marching on from this first series
of phases to undergo the long succession of operations, machine
after machine, across the great width of the shed in which eighty
per cent of the workers are women. There is a thick dust of
sounds in the air, a rumble of shafting, sudden thuddings,
clankings, and M. Citroen has to raise his voice. He points out
where he has made little changes in procedures, cut out some
wasteful movement.... He has an idea and makes a note in the
ever-ready notebook.
There is a beauty about all these women, there is extraordinary
grace in their finely adjusted movements. I have come from an
after-lunch coffee upon the boulevards and from watching the ugly
fashion of our time; it is a relief to be reminded that most
women can after all be beautiful--if only they would not "dress."
these women wear simple overalls and caps. In the cap is a
rosette. Each shed has its own colour of rosette.
"There is much esprit de corps here," says M. Citroen.
"And also," he adds, showing obverse as well as reverse of the
world's problem of employment and discipline, "we can see at once
if a woman is not in her proper shed."
Across the great sheds under the shafting--how fine it must look
at night!--the shells march, are shaped, cut, fitted with copper
bands, calibrated, polished, varnished....
Then we go on to another system of machines in which lead is
reduced to plastic ribbons and cut into shrapnel bullets as the
sweetstuff makers pull out and cut up sweetstuff. And thence
into a warren of hot underground passages in which run the power
cables. There is not a cable in the place that is not
immediately accessible to the electricians. We visit the dynamos
and a vast organisation of switchboards....
These things are more familiar to M. Citroen than they are to me.
He wants me to understand, but he does not realise that I would
like a little leisure to wonder. What is interesting him just
now, because it is the newest thing, is his method of paying his
workers. He lifts a hand gravely: "I said, what we must do is
abolish altogether the counting of change."
At a certain hour, he explained, came pay-time. The people had
done; it was to his interest and their that they should get out
of the works as quickly as possible and rest and amuse
themselves. He watched them standing in queues at the wickets
while inside someone counted; so many francs, so many centimes.
It bored him to see this useless, tiresome waiting. It is
abolished. Now at the end of each week the worker goes to a
window under the initial of his name, and is handed a card on
which these items have been entered:
Balance from last week.
So many hours at so much.
Premiums.
The total is so many francs, so many centimes. This is divided
into the nearest round number, 100, 120, 80 francs as the case
may be, and a balance of the odd francs and centimes. The latter
is carried forward to the next week's account. At the bottom of
the card is a tear-off coupon with a stamp, coloured to indicate
the round sum, green, let us say, for 100, blue for 130 francs.
This is taken to a wicket marked 100 or 130 as the case may be,
and there stands a cashier with his money in piles of 100 or 130
francs counted ready to hand; he sweeps in the coupon, sweeps out
the cash. "/Next!/"
I became interested in the worker's side of this organisation. I
insist on seeing the entrances, the clothes-changing places, the
lavatories, and so forth of the organisation. As we go about we
pass a string of electric trolleys steered by important-looking
girls, and loaded with shell, finished as far as these works are
concerned and on their way to the railway siding. We visit the
hospital, for these works demand a medical staff. It is not only
that men and women faint or fall ill, but there are accidents,
burns, crushings, and the like. The war casualties begin already
here, and they fall chiefly among the women. I saw a wounded
woman with a bandaged face sitting very quietly in the corner.
The women here face danger, perhaps not quite such obvious danger
as the women who, at the next stage in the shell's career, make
and pack the explosives in their silk casing, but quite
considerable risk. And they work with a real enthusiasm. They
know they are fighting the Bloches as well as any men. Certain
of them wear Russian decorations. The women of this particular
factory have been thanked by the Tsar, and a number of
decorations were sent by him for distribution among them.
3
The shell factory and the explosives shed stand level with the
drill yard as the real first stage in one of the two essential
/punches/ in modern war. When one meets the shell again it
is being unloaded from the railway truck into an ammunition dump.
And here the work of control is much more the work of a good
traffic manager than of the old-fashioned soldier.
The dump I best remember I visited on a wet and windy day. Over
a great space of ground the sidings of the rail-head spread, the
normal gauge rail-head spread out like a fan and interdigitated
with the narrow gauge lines that go up practically to the guns.
And also at the sides camions were loading, and an officer from
the Midi in charge of one of these was being dramatically
indignant at five minutes' delay. Between these two sets of
lines, shells were piled of all sizes, I should think some
hundreds of thousands of shells altogether, wet and shining in
the rain. French reservists, soldiers from Madagascar, and some
Senegalese were busy at different points loading and unloading
the precious freights. A little way from me were despondent-
looking German prisoners handling timber. All this dump was no
more than an eddy as it were in the path of the shell from its
birth from the steel bars near Paris to the accomplishment of its
destiny in the destruction or capture of more Germans.
And next the visitor meets the shell coming up upon a little
trolley to the gun. He sees the gunners, as drilled and precise
as the men he saw at the forges, swing out the breech block and
run the shell, which has met and combined with its detonators and
various other industrial products since it left the main dump,
into the gun. The breech closes like a safe door, and hides the
shell from the visitor. It is "good-bye." He receives
exaggerated warning of the danger to his ears, stuffs his fingers
into them, and opens his mouth as instructed, hears a loud but by
no means deafening report, and sees a spit of flame near the
breech. Regulations of a severe character prevent his watching
from an aeroplane the delivery of the goods upon the customers
opposite.
I have already described the method of locating enemy guns and so
forth by photography. Many of the men at this work are like
dentists rather than soldiers; they are busy in carefully lit
rooms, they wear white overalls, they have clean hands and
laboratory manners. The only really romantic figure in the whole
of this process, the only figure that has anything of the old
soldierly swagger about him still, is the aviator. And, as one
friend remarked to me when I visited the work of the British
flying corps, "The real essential strength of this arm is the
organisation of its repairs. Here is one of the repair vans
through which our machine guns go. It is a motor workshop on
wheels. But at any time all this park, everything, can pack up
and move forward like Barnum and Bailey's Circus. The machine
guns come through this shop in rotation; they go out again,
cleaned, repaired, made new again. Since we got all that working
we have heard nothing of a machine gun jamming in any air fight
at all."...
The rest of the career of the shell after it has left the gun one
must imagine chiefly from the incoming shell from the enemy. You
see suddenly a flying up of earth and stones and anything else
that is movable in the neighbourhood of the shell-burst, the
instantaneous unfolding of a dark cloud of dust and reddish
smoke, which comes very quickly to a certain size and then begins
slowly to fray out and blow away. Then, after seeing the cloud
of the burst you hear the hiss of the shell's approach, and
finally you are hit by the sound of the explosion. This is the
climax and end of the life history of any shell that is not a dud
shell. Afterwards the battered fuse may serve as some
journalist's paper-weight. The rest is scrap iron.
Such is, so to speak, the primary process of modern warfare. I
will not draw the obvious pacifist moral of the intense folly of
human concentration upon such a process. The Germans willed it.
We Allies have but obeyed the German will for warfare because we
could not do otherwise, we have taken up this simple game of
shell delivery, and we are teaching them that we can play it
better, in the hope that so we and the world may be freed from
the German will-to-power and all its humiliating and disgusting
consequences henceforth for ever. Europe now is no more than a
household engaged in holding up and if possible overpowering a
monomaniac member.
4
Now the whole of this process of the making and delivery of a
shell, which is the main process of modern warfare, is one that
can be far better conducted by a man accustomed to industrial
organisation or transit work than by the old type of soldier.
This is a thing that cannot be too plainly stated or too often
repeated. Germany nearly won this way because of her
tremendously modern industrial resources; but she blundered into
it and she is losing it because she has too many men in military
uniform and because their tradition and interests were to
powerful with her. All the state and glories of soldiering, the
bright uniforms, the feathers and spurs, the flags, the march-
past, the disciplined massed advance, the charge; all these are
as needless and obsolete now in war as the masks and shields of
an old-time Chinese brave. Liberal-minded people talk of the
coming dangers of militarism in the face of events that prove
conclusively that professional militarism is already as dead as
Julius Caesar. What is coming is not so much the conversion
of men into soldiers as the socialisation of the economic
organisation of the country with a view to both national and
international necessities. We do not want to turn a chemist or a
photographer into a little figure like a lead soldier, moving
mechanically at the word of command, but we do want to make his
chemistry or photography swiftly available if the national
organisation is called upon to fight.
We have discovered that the modern economic organisation is in
itself a fighting machine. It is so much so that it is capable
of taking on and defeating quite easily any merely warrior people
that is so rash as to pit itself against it. Within the last
sixteen years methods of fighting have been elaborated that have
made war an absolutely hopeless adventure for any barbaric or non-
industrialised people. In the rush of larger events few people
have realised the significance of the rapid squashing of the
Senussi in western Egypt, and the collapse of De Wet's rebellion
in South Africa. Both these struggles would have been long,
tedious and uncertain even in A.D. 1900. This time they have
been, so to speak, child's play.
Occasionally into the writer's study there come to hand drifting
fragments of the American literature upon the question of
"preparedness," and American papers discussing the Mexican
situation. In none of these is there evident any clear
realisation of the fundamental revolution that has occurred in
military methods during the last two years. It looks as if a
Mexican war, for example, was thought of as an affair of rather
imperfectly trained young men with rifles and horses and old-
fashioned things like that. A Mexican war on that level might be
as tedious as the South African war. But if the United States
preferred to go into Mexican affairs with what I may perhaps call
a 1916 autumn outfit instead of the small 1900 outfit she seems
to possess at present, there is no reason why America should not
clear up any and every Mexican guerilla force she wanted to in a
few weeks.
To do that she would need a plant of a few hundred aeroplanes,
for the most part armed with machine guns, and the motor repair
vans and so forth needed to go with the aeroplanes; she would
need a comparatively small army of infantry armed with machine
guns, with motor transport, and a few small land ironclads. Such
a force could locate, overtake, destroy and disperse any possible
force that a country in the present industrial condition of
Mexico could put into the field. No sort of entrenchment or
fortification possible in Mexico could stand against it. It
could go from one end of the country to the other without serious
loss, and hunt down and capture anyone it wished....
The practical political consequence of the present development of
warfare, of the complete revolution in the conditions of warfare
since this century began, is to make war absolutely hopeless for
any peoples not able either to manufacture or procure the very
complicated appliances and munitions now needed for its
prosecution. Countries like Mexico, Bulgaria, Serbia,
Afghanistan or Abyssinia are no more capable of going to war
without the connivance and help of manufacturing states than
horses are capable of flying. And this makes possible such a
complete control of war by the few great states which are at the
necessary level of industrial development as not the most Utopian
of us have hitherto dared to imagine.
5
Infantrymen with automobile transport, plentiful machine guns,
Tanks and such-like accessories; that is the first Arm in modern
war. The factory hand and all the material of the shell route
from the factory to the gun constitute the second Arm. Thirdly
comes the artillery, the guns and the photographic aeroplanes
working with the guns. Next I suppose we must count sappers and
miners as a fourth Arm of greatly increased importance. The
fifth and last combatant Arm is the modern substitute for
cavalry; and that also is essentially a force of aeroplanes
supported by automobiles. Several of the French leaders with
whom I talked seemed to be convinced that the horse is absolutely
done with in modern warfare. There is nothing, they declared,
that cavalry ever did that cannot now be done better by
aeroplane.
This is something to break the hearts of the Prussian junkers and
of old-fashioned British army people. The hunt across the
English countryside, the preservation of the fox as a sacred
animal, the race meeting, the stimulation of betting in all
classes of the public; all these things depend ultimately upon
the proposition that the "breed of horses" is of vital importance
to the military strength of Great Britain. But if the arguments
of these able French soldiers are sound, the cult of the horse
ceases to be of any more value to England than the elegant
activities of the Toxophilite Society. Moreover, there has been
a colossal buying of horses for the British army, a tremendous
organisation for the purchase and supply of fodder, then
employment of tens of thousands of men as grooms, minders and the
like, who would otherwise have been in the munition factories or
the trenches.
To what possible use can cavalry be put? Can it be used in
attack? Not against trenches; that is better done by infantrymen
following up gunfire. Can it be used against broken infantry in
the open? Not if the enemy has one or two machine guns covering
their retreat. Against expose infantry the swooping aeroplane
with a machine gun is far more deadly and more difficult to hit.
Behind it your infantry can follow to receive surrenders; in most
circumstances they can come up on cycles if it is a case of
getting up quickly across a wide space. Similarly for pursuit
the use of wire and use of the machine gun have abolished the
possibility of a pouring cavalry charge. The swooping aeroplane
does everything that cavalry can do in the way of disorganising
the enemy, and far more than it can do in the way of silencing
machine guns. It can capture guns in retreat much more easily by
bombing traction engines and coming down low and shooting horses
and men. An ideal modern pursuit would be an advance of guns,
automobiles full of infantry, motor cyclists and cyclists, behind
a high screen of observation aeroplanes and a low screen of
bombing and fighting aeroplanes. Cavalry /might/ advance
across fields and so forth, but only as a very accessory part of
the general advance....
And what else is there for the cavalry to do?
It may be argued that horses can go over country that is
impossible for automobiles. That is to ignore altogether what
has been done in this war by such devices as caterpillar wheels.
So far from cavalry being able to negotiate country where
machines would stick and fail, mechanism can now ride over places
where any horse would flounder.
I submit these considerations to the horse-lover. They are not
my original observations; they have been put to me and they have
convinced me. Except perhaps as a parent of transport mules I
see no further part henceforth for the horse to play in war.
6
The form and texture of the coming warfare--if there is still
warfare to come--are not yet to be seen in their completeness
upon the modern battlefield. One swallow does not make a summer,
nor a handful of aeroplanes, a "Tank" or so, a few acres of shell
craters, and a village here and there, pounded out of
recognition, do more than foreshadow the spectacle of modernised
war on land. War by these developments has become the monopoly
of the five great industrial powers; it is their alternative to
end or evolve it, and if they continue to disagree, then it must
needs become a spectacle of majestic horror such as no man can
yet conceive. It has been wise of Mr. Pennell therefore, who has
recently been drawing his impressions of the war upon stone, to
make his pictures not upon the battlefield, but among the huge
industrial apparatus that is thrusting behind and thrusting up
through the war of the gentlemen in spurs. He gives us the
splendours and immensities of forge and gun pit, furnace and mine
shaft. He shows you how great they are and how terrible. Among
them go the little figures of men, robbed of all dominance,
robbed of all individual quality. He leaves it for you to draw
the obvious conclusion that presently, if we cannot contrive to
put an end to war, blacknessess like these, enormities and flares
and towering threats, will follow in the track of the Tanks and
come trampling over the bickering confusion of mankind.
There is something very striking in these insignificant and
incidental men that Mr. Pennell shows us. Nowhere does a man
dominate in all these wonderful pictures. You may argue perhaps
that that is untrue to the essential realities; all this array of
machine and workshop, all this marshalled power and purpose, has
been the creation of inventor and business organiser. But are we
not a little too free with that word "/creation/"? Falstaff
was a "creation" perhaps, or the Sistine sibyls; there we have
indubitably an end conceived and sought and achieved; but did
these inventors and business organisers do more than heed certain
unavoidable imperatives? Seeking coal they were obliged to mine
in a certain way; seeking steel they had to do this and this and
not that and that; seeking profit they had to obey the imperative
of the economy. So little did they plan their ends that most of
these manufacturers speak with a kind of astonishment of the
deadly use to which their works are put. They find themselves
making the new war as a man might wake out of some drugged
condition to find himself strangling his mother.
So that Mr. Pennell's sketchy and transient human figures seem
altogether right to me. He sees these forges, workshops, cranes
and the like, as inhuman and as wonderful as cliffs or great
caves or icebergs or the stars. They are a new aspect of the
logic of physical necessity that made all these older things, and
he seizes upon the majesty and beauty of their dimensions with an
entire impartiality. And they are as impartial. Through all
these lithographs runs one present motif, the motif of the
supreme effort of western civilisation to save itself and the
world from the dominance of the reactionary German Imperialism of
modern science. The pictures are arranged to shape out the life
of a shell, from the mine to the great gun; nothing remains of
their history to show except the ammunition dump, the gun in
action and the shell-burst. Upon this theme all these great
appearances are strung to-day. But to-morrow they may be strung
upon some other and nobler purpose. These gigantic beings of
which the engineer is the master and slave, are neither
benevolent nor malignant. To-day they produce destruction, they
are the slaves of the spur; to-morrow we hope they will bridge
and carry and house and help again.
For that peace we struggle against the dull inflexibility of the
German Will-to-Power.
V. TANKS
1
It is the British who have produced the "land ironclad" since I
returned from France, and used it apparently with very good
effect. I felt no little chagrin at not seeing them there,
because I have a peculiar interest in these contrivances. It
would be more than human not to claim a little in this matter. I
described one in a story in /The Strand Magazine/ in 1903,
and my story could stand in parallel columns beside the first
account of these monsters in action given by Mr. Beach Thomas or
Mr. Philip Gibbs. My friend M. Joseph Reinach has successfully
passed off long extracts from my story as descriptions of the
Tanks upon British officers who had just seen them. The
filiation was indeed quite traceable. They were my grandchildren--
I felt a little like King Lear when first I read about them. Yet
let me state at once that I was certainly not their prime
originator. I took up an idea, manipulated it slightly, and
handed it on. The idea was suggested to me by the contrivances
of a certain Mr. Diplock, whose "ped-rail" notion, the notion of
a wheel that was something more than a wheel, a wheel that would
take locomotives up hill-sides and over ploughed fields, was
public property nearly twenty years ago. Possibly there were
others before Diplock. To the Ped-rail also Commander Murray
Sueter, one of the many experimentalists upon the early tanks,
admits his indebtedness, and it would seem that Mr. Diplock was
actually concerned in the earlier stage of the tanks.
Since my return I have been able to see the Tank at home, through
the courtesy of the Ministry of Munitions. They have progressed
far beyond any recognisable resemblance to the initiatives of Mr.
Diplock; they have approximated rather to the American
caterpillar. As I suspected when first I heard of these devices,
the War Office and the old army people had practically nothing to
do with their development. They took to it very reluctantly--as
they have taken to every novelty in this war. One brilliant
general scrawled over an early proposal the entirely
characteristic comment that it was a pity the inventor could not
use his imagination to better purpose. (That foolish British
trick of sneering at "imagination" has cost us hundreds of
thousands of useless casualties and may yet lose us the war.)
Tanks were first mooted at the front about a year and a half ago;
Mr. Winston Churchill was then asking questions about their
practicability; he filled many simple souls with terror; they
thought him a most dangerous lunatic. The actual making of the
Tanks arose as an irregular side development of the armoured-car
branch of the Royal Naval Air Service work. The names most
closely associated with the work are (I quote a reply of Dr.
Macnamara's in the House of Commons) Mr. d'Eyncourt, the Director
of Naval Construction, Mr. W. O. Tritton, Lieut. Wilson,
R.N.A.S., Mr. Bussell, Lieut. Stern, R.N.A.S., who is now Colonel
Stern, Captain Symes, and Mr. F. Skeens. There are many other
claims too numerous to mention in detail.
But however much the Tanks may disconcert the gallant Colonel
Newcomes who throw an air of restraint over our victorious front,
there can be no doubt that they are an important as well as a
novel development of the modern offensive. Of course neither the
Tanks nor their very obvious next developments going to wrest the
decisive pre-eminence from the aeroplane. The aeroplane remains
now more than ever the instrument of victory upon the western
front. Aerial ascendancy, properly utilised, is victory. But
the mobile armoured big gun and the Tank as a machine-gun
silencer must enormously facilitate an advance against the
blinded enemy. Neither of them can advance against properly
aimed big gun fire. That has to be disposed of before they make
their entrance. It remains the function of the aeroplane to
locate the hostile big guns and to direct the /tir de
demolition/ upon them before the advance begins--
possibly even to bomb them out. But hitherto, after the
destruction of driving back of the defender's big guns has been
effected, the dug-out and the machine gun have still inflicted
heavy losses upon the advancing infantry until the fight is won.
So soon as the big guns are out, the tanks will advance,
destroying machine guns, completing the destruction of the wire,
and holding prisoners immobile. Then the infantry will follow to
gather in the sheaves. Multitudinously produced and--I write it
with a defiant eye on Colonel Newcome--/properly handled/,
these land ironclads are going to do very great things in
shortening the war, in pursuit, in breaking up the retreating
enemy. Given the air ascendancy, and I am utterly unable to
imagine any way of conclusively stopping or even greatly delaying
an offensive thus equipped.
2
The young of even the most horrible beasts have something piquant
and engaging about them, and so I suppose it is in the way of
things that the land ironclad which opens a new and more dreadful
and destructive phase in the human folly of warfare, should
appear first as if it were a joke. Never has any such thing so
completely masked its wickedness under an appearance of genial
silliness. The Tank is a creature to which one naturally flings
a pet name; the five or six I was shown wandering, rooting and
climbing over obstacles, round a large field near X, were as
amusing and disarming as a little of lively young pigs.
At first the War Office prevented the publication of any pictures
or descriptions of these contrivances except abroad; then
abruptly the embargo was relaxed, and the press was flooded with
photographs. The reader will be familiar now with their
appearance. They resemble large slugs with an underside a little
like the flattened rockers of a rocking-horse, slugs between 20
and 40 feet long. They are like flat-sided slugs, slugs of
spirit, who raise an enquiring snout, like the snout of a
dogfish, into the air. They crawl upon their bellies in a way
that would be tedious to describe to the general reader and
unnecessary to describe to the enquiring specialists. They go
over the ground with the sliding speed of active snails. Behind
them trail two wheels, supporting a flimsy tail, wheels that
strike one as incongruous as if a monster began kangaroo and
ended doll's perambulator. (These wheels annoy me.) They are not
steely monsters; they are painted with drab and unassuming
colours that are fashionable in modern warfare, so that the
armour seems rather like the integument of a rhinoceros. At the
sides of the head project armoured checks, and from above these
stick out guns that look like stalked eyes. That is the general
appearance of the contemporary tank.
It slides on the ground; the silly little wheels that so detract
from the genial bestiality of its appearance dandle and bump
behind it. It swings about its axis. It comes to an obstacle, a
low wall let us say, or a heap of bricks, and sets to work to
climb it with its snout. It rears over the obstacle, it raises
its straining belly, it overhangs more and more, and at last
topples forward; it sways upon the heap and then goes plunging
downwards, sticking out the weak counterpoise of its wheeled
tail. If it comes to a house or a tree or a wall or such-like
obstruction it rams against it so as to bring all its weight to
bear upon it--it weighs /some/ tons--and then climbs over
the debris. I saw it, and incredulous soldiers of experience
watched it at the same time, cross trenches and wallow amazingly
through muddy exaggerations of small holes. Then I repeated the
tour inside.
Again the Tank is like a slug. The slug, as every biological
student knows, is unexpectedly complicated inside. The Tank is
as crowded with inward parts as a battleship. It is filled with
engines, guns and ammunition, and in the interstices men.
"You will smash your hat," said Colonel Stern. "No; keep it on,
or else you will smash your head."
Only Mr. C. R. W. Nevinson could do justice to the interior of a
Tank. You see a hand gripping something; you see the eyes and
forehead of an engineer's face; you perceive that an overall
bluishness beyond the engine is the back of another man. "Don't
hold that," says someone; "it is too hot. Hold on to that." The
engines roar, so loudly that I doubt whether one could hear guns
without; the floor begins to slope and slopes until one seems to
be at forty-five degrees or thereabouts; then the whole concern
swings up and sways and slants the other way. You have crossed a
bank. You heel sideways. Through the door which has been left
open you see the little group of engineers, staff officers and
naval men receding and falling away behind you. You straighten
up and go up hill. You halt and begin to rotate. Through the
open door, the green field, with its red walls, rows of worksheds
and forests of chimneys in the background, begins a steady
processional movement. The group of engineers and officers and
naval men appears at the other side of the door and farther off.
Then comes a sprint down hill. You descend and stretch your
legs.
About the field other Tanks are doing their stunts. One is
struggling in an apoplectic way in the mud pit with a cheek half
buried. It noses its way out and on with an air of animal
relief.
They are like jokes by Heath Robinson. One forgets that these
things have already saved the lives of many hundreds of our
soldiers and smashed and defeated thousands of Germans.
Said one soldier to me: "In the old attacks you used to see the
British dead lying outside the machine-gun emplacements like
birds outside a butt with a good shot inside. /Now/, these
things walk through."
3
I saw other things that day at X. The Tank is only a beginning
in a new phase of warfare. Of these other things I may only
write in the most general terms.
But though Tanks and their collaterals are being made upon a very
considerable scale in X, already I realised as I walked through
gigantic forges as high and marvellous as cathedrals, and from
workshed to workshed where gun carriages, ammunition carts and a
hundred such things were flowing into existence with the swelling
abundance of a river that flows out of a gorge, that as the
demand for the new developments grows clear and strong, the
resources of Britain are capable still of a tremendous response.
/If only we do not rob these great factories and works of their
men./
Upon this question certain things need to be said very plainly.
The decisive factor in the sort of war we are now waging is
production and right use of mechanical material; victory in this
war depends now upon three things: the aeroplane, the gun, and
the Tank developments. These--and not crowds of men--are the
prime necessity for a successful offensive. Every man we draw
from munition making to the ranks brings our western condition
nearer to the military condition of Russia. In these things we
may be easily misled by military "experts" We have to remember
that the military "expert" is a man who learnt his business
before 1914, and that the business of war has been absolutely
revolutionised since 1914; the military expert is a man trained
to think of war as essentially an affair of cavalry, infantry in
formation, and field guns, whereas cavalry is entirely obsolete,
infantry no longer fights in formation, and the methods of
gunnery have been entirely changed. The military man I observe
still runs about the world in spurs, he travels in trains in
spurs, he walks in spurs, he thinks in terms of spurs. He has
still to discover that it is about as ridiculous as if he were to
carry a crossbow. I take it these spurs are only the outward and
visible sign of an inward obsolescence. The disposition of the
military "expert" is still to think too little of machinery and
to demand too much of the men. Behind our front at the time of
my visit there were, for example, many thousands of cavalry, men
tending horses, men engaged in transporting bulky fodder for
horses and the like. These men were doing about as much in this
war as if they had been at Timbuctoo. Every man who is taken
from munition making at X to spur-worshipping in khaki, is a dead
loss to the military efficiency of the country. Every man that
is needed or is likely to be needed for the actual operations of
modern warfare can be got by combing out the cavalry, the brewing
and distilling industries, the theatres and music halls, and the
like unproductive occupations. The under-staffing of munition
works, the diminution of their efficiency by the use of aged and
female labour, is the straight course to failure in this war.
In X, in the forges and machine shops, I saw already too large a
proportion of boys and grey heads.
War is a thing that changes very rapidly, and we have in the
Tanks only the first of a great series of offensive developments.
They are bound to be improved, at a great pace. The method of
using them will change very rapidly. Any added invention will
necessitate the scrapping of old types and the production of the
new patterns in quantity. It is of supreme necessity to the
Allies if they are to win this war outright that the lead in
inventions and enterprise which the British have won over the
Germans in this matter should be retained. It is our game now to
press the advantage for all it is worth. We have to keep ahead
to win. We cannot do so unless we have unstinted men and
unstinted material to produce each new development as its use is
realised.
Given that much, the Tank will enormously enhance the advantage
of the new offensive method on the French front; the method that
is of gun demolition after aerial photography, followed by an
advance; it is a huge addition to our prospect of decisive
victory. What does it do? It solves two problems. The existing
Tank affords a means of advancing against machine-gun fire and of
destroying wire and machine guns without much risk of loss, so
soon as the big guns have done their duty by the enemy guns. And
also behind the Tank itself, it is useless to conceal, lies the
possibility of bringing up big guns and big gun ammunition,
across nearly any sort of country, as fast as the advance can
press forward. Hitherto every advance has paid a heavy toll to
the machine gun, and every advance has had to halt after a couple
of miles or so while the big guns (taking five or six days for
the job) toiled up to the new positions.
4
It is impossible to restrain a note of sharp urgency from what
one has to say about these developments. The Tanks remove the
last technical difficulties in our way to decisive victory and a
permanent peace; they also afford a reason for straining every
nerve to bring about a decision and peace soon. At the risk of
seeming an imaginative alarmist I would like to point out the
reasons these things disclose for hurrying this war to a decision
and doing our utmost to arrange the world's affairs so as to make
another war improbable. Already these serio-comic Tanks,
weighing something over twenty tons or so, have gone slithering
around and sliding over dead and wounded men. That is not an
incident for sensitive minds to dwell upon, but it is a mere
little child's play anticipation of what the big land ironclads
/that are bound to come if there is no world pacification/,
are going to do.
What lies behind the Tank depends upon this fact; there is no
definable upward limit of mass. Upon that I would lay all the
stress possible, because everything turns upon that.
You cannot make a land ironclad so big and heavy but that you
cannot make a caterpillar track wide enough and strong enough to
carry it forward. Tanks are quite possible that will carry
twenty-inch or twenty-five inch guns, besides minor armament.
Such Tanks may be undesirable; the production may exceed the
industrial resources of any empire to produce; but there is no
inherent impossibility in such things. There are not even the
same limitations as to draught and docking accommodation that
sets bounds to the size of battleships. It follows, therefore,
as a necessary deduction that if the world's affairs are so left
at the end of the war that the race of armaments continues, that
Tank will develop steadily into a tremendous instrument of
warfare, driven by engines of scores of thousands of horse-power,
tracking on a track scores of hundreds of yards wide and weighing
hundreds or thousands of tons. Nothing but a world agreement not
to do so can prevent this logical development of the land
ironclad. Such a structure will make wheel-ruts scores of feet
deep; it will plough up, devastate and destroy the country it
passes over altogether.
For my own part I never imagined the land ironclad idea would get
loose into war. I thought that the military intelligence was
essentially unimaginative and that such an aggressive military
power as Germany, dominated by military people, would never
produce anything of the sort. I thought that this war would be
fought out without Tanks and that then war would come to an end.
For of course it is mere stupidity that makes people doubt the
ultimate ending of war. I have been so far justified in these
expectations of mine, that it is not from military sources that
these things have come. They have been thrust upon the soldiers
from without. But now that they are loose, now that they are in
war, we have to face their full possibilities, to use our
advantage in them and press on to the end of the war. In support
of a photo-aero directed artillery, even our present Tanks can be
used to complete an invisible offensive. We shall not so much
push as ram. It is doubtful if the Germans can get anything of
the sort into action before six months are out. We ought to get
the war on to German soil before the Tanks have grown to more
than three or four times their present size. Then it will not
matter so much how much bigger they grow. It will be the German
landscape that will suffer.
After one has seen the actual Tanks it is not very difficult to
close one's eyes and figure the sort of Tank that may be arguing
with Germany in a few months' time about the restoration of
Belgium and Serbia and France, the restoration of the sunken
tonnage, the penalties of the various Zeppelin and submarine
murders, the freedom of seas and land alike from piracy, the
evacuation of all Poland including Posen and Cracow, and the
guarantees for the future peace of Europe. The machine will be
perhaps as big as a destroyer and more heavily armed and
equipped. It will swim over and through the soil at a pace of
ten or twelve miles an hour. In front of it will be corn, land,
neat woods, orchards, pasture, gardens, villages and towns. It
will advance upon its belly with a swaying motion, devouring the
ground beneath it. Behind it masses of soil and rock, lumps of
turf, splintered wood, bits of houses, occasional streaks of red,
will drop from its track, and it will leave a wake, six or seven
times as wide as a high road, from which all soil, all
cultivation, all semblance to cultivated or cultivatable land
will have disappeared. It will not even be a track of soil. It
will be a track of subsoil laid bare. It will be a flayed strip
of nature. In the course of its fighting the monster may have to
turnabout. It will then halt and spin slowly round, grinding out
an arena of desolation with a diameter equal to its length. If
it has to retreat and advance again these streaks and holes of
destruction will increase and multiply. Behind the fighting line
these monsters will manoeuvre to and fro, destroying the
land for all ordinary agricultural purposes for ages to come.
The first imaginative account of the land ironclad that was ever
written concluded with the words, "They are the /reductio ad
absurdum/ of war." They are, and it is to the engineers, the
ironmasters, the workers and the inventive talent of Great
Britain and France that we must look to ensure that it is in
Germany, the great teacher of war, that this demonstration of
war's ultimate absurdity is completed.
For forty years Frankenstein Germany invoked war, turned every
development of material and social science to aggressive ends,
and at last when she felt the time was ripe she let loose the new
monster that she had made of war to cow the spirit of mankind.
She set the thing trampling through Belgium. She cannot grumble
if at last it comes home, stranger and more dreadful even than
she made it, trampling the German towns and fields with German
blood upon it and its eyes towards Berlin.
This logical development of the Tank idea may seem a gloomy
prospect for mankind. But it is open to question whether the
tremendous development of warfare that has gone on in the last
two years does after all open a prospect of unmitigated gloom.
There has been a good deal of cheap and despondent sneering
recently at the phrase, "The war that will end war." It is still
possible to maintain that that may be a correct description of
this war. It has to be remembered that war, as the aeroplane and
the Tank have made it, has already become an impossible luxury
for any barbaric or uncivilised people. War on the grade that
has been achieved on the Somme predicates an immense
industrialism behind it. Of all the States in the world only
four can certainly be said to be fully capable of sustaining war
at the level to which it has now been brought upon the western
front. These are Britain, France, Germany, and the United States
of America. Less certainly equal to the effort are Italy, Japan,
Russia, and Austria. These eight powers are the only powers
/capable of warfare under modern conditions./ Five are
already Allies and one is incurably pacific. There is no other
power or people in the world that can go to war now without the
consent and connivance of these great powers. If we consider
their alliances, we may count it that the matter rests now
between two groups of Allies and one neutral power. So that
while on the one hand the development of modern warfare of which
the Tank is the present symbol opens a prospect of limitless
senseless destruction, it opens on the other hand a prospect of
organised world control. This Tank development must ultimately
bring the need of a real permanent settlement within the compass
of the meanest of diplomatic intelligences. A peace that will
restore competitive armaments has now become a less desirable
prospect for everyone than a continuation of the war. Things
were bad enough before, when the land forces were still in a
primitive phase of infantry, cavalry and artillery, and when the
only real race to develop monsters and destructors was for sea
power. But the race for sea power before 1914 was mere child's
play to the breeding of engineering monstrosities for land
warfare that must now follow any indeterminate peace settlement.
I am no blind believer in the wisdom of mankind, but I cannot
believe that men are so insensate and headstrong as to miss the
plain omens of the present situation.
So that after all the cheerful amusement the sight of a Tank
causes may not be so very unreasonable. These things may be no
more than one of those penetrating flashes of wit that will
sometimes light up and dispel the contentions of an angry man.
If they are not that, then they are the grimmest jest that ever
set men grinning. Wait and see, if you do not believe me.
HOW PEOPLE THINK ABOUT THE WAR
I. DO THEY REALLY THINK AT ALL?
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.
II. THE YIELDING PACIFIST AND THE CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR
1
Among the minor topics that people are talking about behind the
western fronts is the psychology of the Yielding Pacifist and the
Conscientious Objector. Of course, we are all pacifists
nowadays; I know of no one who does not want not only to end this
war but to put an end to war altogether, except those blood-red
terrors Count Reventlow, Mr. Leo Maxse--how he does it on a
vegetarian dietary I cannot imagine!--and our wild-eyed
desperados of /The Morning Post./ But most of the people I
meet, and most of the people I met on my journey, are pacifists
like myself who want to /make/ peace by beating the armed
man until he gives in and admits the error of his ways, disarming
him and reorganising the world for the forcible suppression of
military adventures in the future. They want belligerency put
into the same category as burglary, as a matter of forcible
suppression. The Yielding Pacifist who will accept any sort of
peace, and the Conscientious Objector who will not fight at all,
are not of that opinion.
Both Italy and France produce parallel types to those latter, but
it would seem that in each case England displays the finer
developments. The Latin mind is directer than the English, and
its standards--shall I say?--more primitive; it gets more
directly to the fact that here are men who will not fight. And
it is less charitable. I was asked quite a number of times for
the English equivalent of an /embusque./ "We don't
generalise," I said, "we treat each case on its merits!"
One interlocutor near Udine was exercised by our Italian Red
Cross work.
"Here," he said, "are sixty or seventy young Englishmen, all fit
for military service.... Of course they go under fire, but it is
not like being junior officers in the trenches. Not one of them
has been killed or wounded."
He reflected. "One, I think, has been decorated," he said....
My French and Italian are only for very rough common jobs; when
it came to explaining the Conscientious Objector sympathetically
they broke down badly. I had to construct long parenthetical
explanations of our antiquated legislative methods to show how it
was that the "conscientious objector" had been so badly defined.
The foreigner does not understand the importance of vague
definition in British life. "Practically, of course, we offered
to exempt anyone who conscientiously objected to fight or serve.
Then the Pacifist and German people started a campaign to enrol
objectors. Of course every shirker, every coward and slacker in
the country decided at once to be a conscientious objector.
Anyone but a British legislator could have foreseen that. Then
we started Tribunals to wrangle with the objectors about their
/bona fides./ Then the Pacifists and the Pro-Germans issued
little leaflets and started correspondence courses to teach
people exactly how to lie to the Tribunals. Trouble about
freedom of the pamphleteer followed. I had to admit--it has been
rather a sloppy business. "The people who made the law knew
their own minds, but we English are not an expressive people."
These are not easy things to say in Elementary (and slightly
Decayed) French or in Elementary and Corrupt Italian.
"But why do people support the sham conscientious objector and
issue leaflets to help him--when there is so much big work
clamouring to be done?"
"That," I said, "is the Whig tradition."
When they pressed me further, I said: "I am really the
questioner. I am visiting /your/ country, and you have to
tell /me/ things. It is not right that I should do all the
telling. Tell me all about Romain Rolland."
And so I pressed them about the official socialists in Italy and
the Socialist minority in France until I got the question out of
the net of national comparisons and upon a broader footing. In
several conversations we began to work out in general terms the
psychology of those people who were against the war. But usually
we could not get to that; my interlocutors would insist upon
telling me just what they would like to do or just what they
would like to see done to stop-the-war pacifists and
conscientious objectors; pleasant rather than fruitful
imaginative exercises from which I could effect no more than
platitudinous uplifts.
But the general drift of such talks as did seem to penetrate the
question was this, that among these stop-the-war people there are
really three types. First there is a type of person who hates
violence and the infliction of pain under any circumstances, and
who have a mystical belief in the rightness (and usually the
efficacy) of non-resistance. These are generally Christians, and
then their cardinal text is the instruction to "turn the other
cheek." Often they are Quakers. If they are consistent they are
vegetarians and wear /Lederlos/ boots. They do not desire
police protection for their goods. They stand aloof from all the
force and conflict of life. They have always done so. This is
an understandable and respectable type. It has numerous Hindu
equivalents. It is a type that finds little difficulty about
exemptions--provided the individual has not been too recently
converted to his present habits. But it is not the prevalent
type in stop-the-war circles. Such genuine ascetics do not
number more than a thousand or so, all three of our western
allied countries. The mass of the stop-the-war people is made up
quite other elements.
2
In the complex structure of the modern community there are two
groups or strata or pockets in which the impulse of social
obligation, the gregarious sense of a common welfare, is at its
lowest; one of these is the class of the Resentful Employee, the
class of people who, without explanation, adequate preparation or
any chance, have been shoved at an early age into uncongenial
work and never given a chance to escape, and the other is the
class of people with small fixed incomes or with small salaries
earnt by routine work, or half independent people practising some
minor artistic or literary craft, who have led uneventful,
irresponsible lives from their youth up, and never came at any
point into relations of service to the state. This latter class
was more difficult to define than the former--because it is more
various within itself. My French friends wanted to talk of the
"Psychology of the Rentier." I was for such untranslatable
phrases as the "Genteel Whig," or the "Donnish Liberal." But I
lit up an Italian--he is a Milanese manufacturer--with "these
Florentine English who would keep Italy in a glass case." "I
know," he said. Before I go on to expand this congenial theme,
let me deal first with the Resentful Employee, who is a much more
considerable, and to me a much more sympathetic, figure in
European affairs. I began life myself as a Resentful Employee.
By the extremest good luck I have got my mind and spirit out of
the distortions of that cramping beginning, but I can still
recall even the anger of those old days.
He becomes an employee between thirteen and fifteen; he is made
to do work he does not like for no other purpose that he can see
except the profit and glory of a fortunate person called his
employer, behind whom stand church and state blessing and
upholding the relationship. He is not allowed to feel that he
has any share whatever in the employer's business, or that any
end is served but the employer's profit. He cannot see that the
employer acknowledges any duty to the state. Neither church nor
state seems to insist that the employer has any public function.
At no point does the employee come into a clear relationship of
mutual obligation with the state. There does not seem to be any
way out for the employee from a life spent in this subordinate,
toilsome relationship. He feels put upon and cheated out of
life. He is without honour. If he is a person of ability or
stubborn temper he struggles out of his position; if he is a
kindly and generous person he blames his "luck" and does his work
and lives his life as cheerfully as possible--and so live the
bulk of our amazing European workers; if he is a being of great
magnanimity he is content to serve for the ultimate good of the
race; if he has imagination, he says, "Things will not always be
like this," and becomes a socialist or a guild socialist, and
tries to educate the employer to a sense of reciprocal duty; but
if he is too human for any of these things, then he begins to
despise and hate the employer and the system that made him. He
wants to hurt them. Upon that hate it is easy to trade.
A certain section of what is called the Socialist press and the
Socialist literature in Europe is no doubt great-minded; it seeks
to carve a better world out of the present. But much of it is
socialist only in name. Its spirit is Anarchistic. Its real
burthen is not construction but grievance; it tells the bitter
tale of the employee, it feeds and organises his malice, it
schemes annoyance and injury for the hated employer. The state
and the order of the world is confounded with the capitalist.
Before the war the popular so-called socialist press reeked with
the cant of rebellion, the cant of any sort of rebellion. "I'm a
rebel," was the silly boast of the young disciple. "Spoil
something, set fire to something," was held to be the proper text
for any girl or lad of spirit. And this blind discontent carried
on into the war. While on the one hand a great rush of men
poured into the army saying, "Thank God! we can serve our
country at last instead of some beastly profiteer," a sourer
remnant, blind to the greater issues of the war, clung to the
reasonless proposition, "the state is only for the Capitalist.
This war is got up by Capitalists. Whatever has to be done--
/we are rebels./"
Such a typical paper as the British /Labour Leader/, for
example, may be read in vain, number after number, for any sound
and sincere constructive proposal. It is a prolonged scream of
extreme individualism, a monotonous repetition of incoherent
discontent with authority, with direction, with union, with the
European effort. It wants to do nothing. It just wants effort
to stop--even at the price of German victory. If the whole
fabric of society in western Europe were to be handed over to
those pseudo-socialists to-morrow, to be administered for the
common good, they would fly the task in terror. They would make
excuses and refuse the undertaking. They do not want the world
to go right. The very idea of the world going right does not
exist in their minds. They are embodied discontent and hatred,
making trouble, and that is all they are. They want to be
"rebels"--to be admired as "rebels".
That is the true psychology of the Resentful Employee. He is a
de-socialised man. His sense of the State has been destroyed.
The Resentful Employees are the outcome of our social injustices.
They are the failures of our social ad educational systems. We
may regret their pitiful degradation, we may exonerate them from
blame; none the less they are a pitiful crew. I have seen the
hardship of the trenches, the gay and gallant wounded. I do a
little understand what our soldiers, officers and men alike, have
endured and done. And though I know I ought to allow for all
that I have stated, I cannot regard these conscientious objectors
with anything but contempt. Into my house there pours a dismal
literature rehearsing the hardships of these men who set
themselves up to be martyrs for liberty; So and So, brave hero,
has been sworn at--positively sworn at by a corporal; a nasty
rough man came into the cell of So and So and dropped several
h's; So and So, refusing to undress and wash, has been undressed
and washed, and soap was rubbed into his eyes--perhaps purposely;
the food and accommodation are not of the best class; the doctors
in attendance seem hasty; So and So was put into a damp bed and
has got a nasty cold. Then I recall a jolly vanload of wounded
men I saw out there....
But after all, we must be just. A church and state that
permitted these people to be thrust into dreary employment in
their early 'teens, without hope or pride, deserves such citizens
as these. The marvel is that there are so few. There are a poor
thousand or so of these hopeless, resentment-poisoned creatures
in Great Britain. Against five willing millions. The Allied
countries, I submit, have not got nearly all the conscientious
objectors they deserve.
3
If the Resentful Employee provides the emotional impulse of the
resisting pacifist, whose horizon is bounded by his one
passionate desire that the particular social system that has
treated him so ill should collapse and give in, and its leaders
and rulers be humiliated and destroyed, the intellectual
direction of a mischievous pacifism comes from an entirely
different class.
The Genteel Whig, though he differs very widely in almost every
other respect from the Resentful Employee, has this much in
common, that he has never been drawn into the whirl of collective
life in any real and assimilative fashion. This is what is the
matter with both of them. He is a little loose, shy, independent
person. Except for eating and drinking--in moderation, he has
never done anything real from the day he was born. He has
frequently not even faced the common challenge of matrimony.
Still more frequently is he childless, or the daring parent of
one particular child. He has never traded nor manufactured. He
has drawn his dividends or his salary with an entire
unconsciousness of any obligations to policemen or navy for these
punctual payments. Probably he has never ventured even to
reinvest his little legacy. He is acutely aware of possessing an
exceptionally fine intelligence, but he is entirely unconscious
of a fundamental unreality. Nothing has ever occurred to him to
make him ask why the mass of men were either not possessed of his
security or discontented with it. The impulses that took his
school friends out upon all sorts of odd feats and adventures
struck him as needless. As he grew up he turned with an equal
distrust from passion or ambition. His friends went out after
love, after adventure, after power, after knowledge, after this
or that desire, and became men. But he noted merely that they
became fleshly, that effort strained them, that they were
sometimes angry or violent or heated. He could not but feel that
theirs were vulgar experiences, and he sought some finer exercise
for his exceptional quality. He pursued art or philosophy or
literature upon their more esoteric levels, and realised more and
more the general vulgarity and coarseness of the world about him,
and his own detachment. The vulgarity and crudity of the things
nearest him impressed him most; the dreadful insincerity of the
Press, the meretriciousness of success, the loudness of the rich,
the baseness of common people in his own land. The world
overseas had by comparison a certain glamour. Except that when
you said "United States" to him he would draw the air sharply
between his teeth and beg you not to...
Nobody took him by the collar and shook him.
If our world had considered the advice of William James and
insisted upon national service from everyone, national service in
the drains or the nationalised mines or the nationalised deep-sea
fisheries if not in the army or navy, we should not have had any
such men. If it had insisted that wealth and property are no
more than a trust for the public benefit, we should have had no
genteel indispensables. These discords in our national unanimity
are the direct consequence of our bad social organisation. We
permit the profiteer and the usurer; they evoke the response of
the Reluctant Employee, and the inheritor of their wealth becomes
the Genteel Whig.
But that is by the way. It was of course natural and inevitable
that the German onslaught upon Belgium and civilisation generally
should strike these recluse minds not as a monstrous ugly
wickedness to be resisted and overcome at any cost, but merely as
a nerve-racking experience. Guns were going off on both sides.
The Genteel Whig was chiefly conscious of a repulsive vast
excitement all about him, in which many people did inelegant and
irrational things. They waved flags--nasty little flags. This
child of the ages, this last fruit of the gigantic and tragic
tree of life, could no more than stick its fingers in its ears as
say, "Oh, please, do /all/ stop!" and then as the strain
grew intenser and intenser set itself with feeble pawings now to
clamber "Au-dessus de la Melee," and now to--in some
weak way--stop the conflict. ("Au-dessus de la
Melee"--as the man said when they asked him where he
was when the bull gored his sister.) The efforts to stop the
conflict at any price, even at the price of entire submission to
the German Will, grew more urgent as the necessity that everyone
should help against the German Thing grew more manifest.
Of all the strange freaks of distressed thinking that this war
has produced, the freaks of the Genteel Whig have been among the
most remarkable. With an air of profound wisdom he returns
perpetually to his proposition that there are faults on both
sides. To say that is his conception of impartiality. I suppose
that if a bull gored his sister he would say that there were
faults on both sides; his sister ought not to have strayed into
the field, she was wearing a red hat of a highly provocative
type; she ought to have been a cow and then everything would have
been different. In the face of the history of the last forty
years, the Genteel Whig struggles persistently to minimise the
German outrage upon civilisation and to find excuses for Germany.
He does this, not because he has any real passion for falsehood,
but because by training, circumstance, and disposition he is
passionately averse from action with the vulgar majority and from
self-sacrifice in a common cause, and because he finds in the
justification of Germany and, failing that, in the blackening of
the Allies to an equal blackness, one line of defence against the
wave of impulse that threatens to submerge his private self. But
when at last that line is forced he is driven back upon others
equally extraordinary. You can often find simultaneously in the
same Pacifist paper, and sometimes even in the utterances of the
same writer, two entirely incompatible statements. The first is
that Germany is so invincible that it is useless to prolong the
war since no effort of the Allies is likely to produce any
material improvement in their position, and the second is that
Germany is so thoroughly beaten that she is now ready to abandon
militarism and make terms and compensations entirely acceptable
to the countries she has forced into war. And when finally facts
are produced to establish the truth that Germany, though still
largely wicked and impenitent, is being slowly and conclusively
beaten by the sanity, courage and persistence of the Allied
common men, then the Genteel Whig retorts with his last defensive
absurdity. He invents a national psychology for Germany.
Germany, he invents, loves us and wants to be our dearest friend.
Germany has always loved us. The Germans are a loving, unenvious
people. They have been a little mislead--but nice people do not
insist upon that fact. But beware of beating Germany, beware of
humiliating Germany; then indeed trouble will come. Germany will
begin to dislike us. She will plan a revenge. Turning aside
from her erstwhile innocent career, she may even think of hate.
What are our obligations to France, Italy, Serbia and Russia,
what is the happiness of a few thousands of the Herero, a few
millions of the Belgians--whose numbers moreover are constantly
diminishing--when we might weigh them against the danger, the
most terrible danger, of incurring /permanent German
hostility?.../
A Frenchman I talked to knew better than that. "What will happen
to Germany," I asked, "if we are able to do so to her and so;
would she take to dreams of a /Revanche?/"
"She will take to Anglomania," he said, and added after a flash
of reflection, "In the long run it will be the worse for you."
III. THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL
1
One of the indisputable things about the war, so far as Britain
and France go--and I have reason to believe that on a lesser
scale things are similar in Italy--is that it has produced a very
great volume of religious thought and feeling. About Russia in
these matters we hear but little at the present time, but one
guesses at parallelism. People habitually religious have been
stirred to new depths of reality and sincerity, and people are
thinking of religion who never thought of religion before. But
as I have already pointed out, thinking and feeling about a
matter is of no permanent value unless something is /thought
out/, unless there is a change of boundary or relationship,
and it an altogether different question to ask whether any
definite change is resulting from this universal ferment. If it
is not doing so, then the sleeper merely dreams a dream that he
will forget again....
Now in no sort of general popular mental activity is there so
much froth and waste as in religious excitements. This has been
the case in all periods of religious revival. The number who are
rather impressed, who for a few days or weeks take to reading
their Bibles or going to a new place of worship or praying or
fasting or being kind and unselfish, is always enormous in
relation to the people whose lives are permanently changed. The
effort needed if a contemporary is to blow off the froth, is
always very considerable.
Among the froth that I would blow off is I think most of the
tremendous efforts being made in England by the Anglican church
to attract favourable attention to itself /apropos/
of the war. I came back from my visit to the Somme battlefields
to find the sylvan peace of Essex invaded by a number of ladies
in blue dresses adorned with large white crosses, who, regardless
of the present shortage of nurses, were visiting every home in
the place on some mission of invitation whose details remained
obscure. So far as I was able to elucidate this project, it was
in the nature of a magic incantation; a satisfactory end of the
war was to be brought about by convergent prayer and religious
assiduities. The mission was shy of dealing with me personally,
although as a lapsed communicant I should have thought myself a
particularly hopeful field for Anglican effort, and it came to my
wife and myself merely for our permission and countenance in an
appeal to our domestic servants. My wife consulted the
household; it seemed very anxious to escape from that appeal, and
as I respect Christianity sufficiently to detest the
identification of its services with magic processes, the mission
retired--civilly repulsed. But the incident aroused an uneasy
curiosity in my mind with regard to the general trend of Anglican
teaching and Anglican activities at the present time. The trend
of my enquiries is to discover the church much more incoherent
and much less religious--in any decent sense of the word--than I
had supposed it to be.
Organisation is the life of material and the death of mental and
spiritual processes. There could be no more melancholy
exemplification of this than the spectacle of the Anglican and
Catholic churches at the present time, one using the tragic
stresses of war mainly for pew-rent touting, and the other
paralysed by its Austrian and South German political connections
from any clear utterance upon the moral issues of the war.
Through the opening phases of the war the Established Church of
England was inconspicuous; this is no longer the case, but it may
be doubted whether the change is altogether to its advantage. To
me this is a very great disappointment. I have always had a very
high opinion of the intellectual values of the leading divines of
both the Anglican and Catholic communions. The self-styled
Intelligentsia of Great Britain is all too prone to sneer at
their equipment; but I do not see how any impartial person can
deny that Father Bernard Vaughn is in mental energy, vigour of
expression, richness of thought and variety of information fully
the equal of such an influential lay publicist as Mr. Horatio
Bottomley. One might search for a long time among prominent
laymen to find the equal of the Bishop of London. Nevertheless
it is impossible to conceal the impression of tawdriness that
this latter gentleman's work as head of the National Mission has
left upon my mind. Attired in khaki he has recently been
preaching in the open air to the people of London upon Tower
Hill, Piccadilly, and other conspicuous places. Obsessed as I am
by the humanities, and impressed as I have always been by the
inferiority of material to moral facts, I would willingly have
exchanged the sight of two burning Zeppelins for this spectacle
of ecclesiastical fervour. But as it is, I am obliged to trust
to newspaper reports and the descriptions of hearers and eye-
witnesses. They leave to me but little doubt of the regrettable
superficiality of the bishop's utterances.
We have a multitude of people chastened by losses, ennobled by a
common effort, needing support in that effort, perplexed by the
reality of evil and cruelty, questioning and seeking after God.
What does the National Mission offer? On Tower Hill the bishop
seems to have been chiefly busy with a wrangling demonstration
that ten thousand a year is none too big a salary for a man
subject to such demands and expenses as his see involves. So far
from making anything out of his see he was, he declared, two
thousand a year to the bad. Some day, when the church has
studied efficiency, I suppose that bishops will have the leisure
to learn something about the general state of opinion and
education in their dioceses. The Bishop of London was evidently
unaware of the almost automatic response of the sharp socialists
among his hearers. Their first enquiry would be to learn how he
came by that mysterious extra two thousand a year with which he
supplemented his stipend. How did he earn /that?/ And if he
didn't earn it---! And secondly, they would probably have
pointed out to him that his standard of housing, clothing, diet
and entertaining was probably a little higher than theirs. It is
really no proof of virtuous purity that a man's expenditure
exceeds his income. And finally some other of his hearers were
left unsatisfied by his silence with regard to the current
proposal to pool all clerical stipends for the common purposes of
the church. It is a reasonable proposal, and if bishops must
dispute about stipends instead of preaching the kingdom of God,
then they are bound to face it. The sooner they do so, the more
graceful will the act be. From these personal apologetics the
bishop took up the question of the exemption, at the request of
the bishops, of the clergy from military service. It is one of
our contrasts with French conditions--and it is all to the
disadvantage of the British churches.
In his Piccadilly contribution to the National Mission of
Repentance and Hope the bishop did not talk politics but sex. He
gave his hearers the sort of stuff that is handed out so freely
by the Cinema Theatres, White Slave Traffic talk, denunciations
of "Night Hawks"--whatever "Night Hawks" may be--and so on. One
this or another occasion the bishop--he boasts that he himself is
a healthy bachelor--lavished his eloquence upon the Fall in the
Birth Rate, and the duty of all married people, from paupers
upward, to have children persistently. Now sex, like diet, is a
department of conduct and a very important department, but /it
isn't religion!/ The world is distressed by international
disorder, by the monstrous tragedy of war; these little hot talks
about indulgence and begetting have about as much to do with the
vast issues that concern us as, let us say, a discussion of the
wickedness of eating very new and indigestible bread. It is
talking round and about the essential issue. It is fogging the
essential issue, which is the forgotten and neglected kingship of
God. The sin that is stirring the souls of men is the sin of
this war. It is the sin of national egotism and the devotion of
men to loyalties, ambitions, sects, churches, feuds, aggressions,
and divisions that are an outrage upon God's universal
kingdom.
2
The common clergy of France, sharing the military obligations and
the food and privations of their fellow parishioners, contrast
very vividly with the home-staying types of the ministries of the
various British churches. I met and talked to several. Near
Frise there were some barge gunboats--they have since taken their
place in the fighting, but then they were a surprise--and the men
had been very anxious to have their craft visited and seen. The
priest who came after our party to see if he could still arrange
that, had been decorated for gallantry. Of course the English
too have their gallant chaplains, but they are men of the officer
caste, they are just young officers with peculiar collars; not
men among men, as are the French priests.
There can be no doubt that the behaviour of the French priests in
this war has enormously diminished anti-clerical bitterness in
France. There can be no doubt that France is far more a
religious country than it was before the war. But if you ask
whether that means any return to the church, any reinstatement of
the church, the answer is a doubtful one. Religion and the
simple priest are stronger in France to-day; the church, I think,
is weaker.
I trench on no theological discussion when I record the
unfavourable impression made upon all western Europe by the
failure of the Holy Father to pronounce definitely upon the
rights and wrongs of the war. The church has abrogated its right
of moral judgement. Such at least seemed to be the opinion of
the Frenchmen with whom I discussed a remarkable interview with
Cardinal Gasparri that I found one morning in /Le Journal./
It was not the sort of interview to win the hearts of men who
were ready to give their lives to set right what they believe to
be the greatest outrage that has ever been inflicted upon
Christendom, that is to say the forty-three years of military
preparation and of diplomacy by threats that culminated in the
ultimatum to Serbia, the invasion of Belgium and the murder of
the Vise villagers. It was adorned with a large portrait
of "Benoit XV.," looking grave and discouraging over his
spectacles, and the headlines insisted it was "/La
Pensee du Pape./" Cross-heads sufficiently indicated
the general tone. One read:
/"Le Saint Siege impartial...
Au-dessus de la bataille...."/
The good Cardinal would have made a good lawyer. He had as
little to say about God and the general righteousness of things
as the Bishop of London. But he got in some smug reminders of
the severance of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Perhaps
now France will be wiser. He pointed out that the Holy See in
its Consistorial Allocution of January 22nd, 1915, invited the
belligerents to observe the rules of war. Could anything more be
done than that? Oh!--in the general issue of the war, if you
want a judgement on the war as a whole, how is it possible that
the Vatican to decide? Surely the French know that excellent
principle of justice, /Audiatur et altera pars/, and how
under existing circumstances can the Vatican do that...? The
Vatican is cut off from communication with Austria and Germany.
The Vatican has been deprived of its temporal power and local
independence (another neat point)....
So France is bowed out. When peace is restored, the Vatican will
perhaps be able to enquire if there was a big German army in
1914, if German diplomacy was aggressive from 1875 onward, if
Belgium was invaded unrighteously, if (Catholic) Austria forced
the pace upon (non-Catholic) Russia. But now--now the Holy See
must remain as impartial as an unbought mascot in a shop
window....
The next column of /Le Journal/ contained an account of the
Armenian massacres; the blood of the Armenian cries out past the
Holy Father to heaven; but then Armenians are after all heretics,
and here again the principle of /Audiatur et altera pars/
comes in. Communications are not open with the Turks. Moreover,
Armenians, like Serbs, are worse than infidels; they are
heretics. Perhaps God is punishing them....
/Audiatur et altera pars/, and the Vatican has not forgotten
the infidelity and disrespect of both France and Italy in the
past. These are the things, it seems, that really matter to the
Vatican. Cardinal Gasparri's portrait, in the same issue of
/Le Journal/, displays a countenance of serene contentment,
a sort of incarnate "Told-you-so."
So the Vatican lifts its pontifical skirts and shakes the dust of
western Europe off its feet.
It is the most astounding renunciation in history.
Indubitably the Christian church took a wide stride from the
kingship of God when it placed a golden throne for the unbaptised
Constantine in the midst of its most sacred deliberations at
Nicaea. But it seems to me that this abandonment of moral
judgments in the present case by the Holy See is an almost wider
step from the church's allegiance to God....
3
Thought about the great questions of life, thought and reasoned
direction, this is what the multitude demands mutely and weakly,
and what the organised churches are failing to give. They have
not the courage of their creeds. Either their creeds are
intellectual flummery or they are the solution to the riddles
with which the world is struggling. But the churches make no
mention of their creeds. They chatter about sex and the magic
effect of church attendance and simple faith. If simple faith is
enough, the churches and their differences are an imposture. Men
are stirred to the deepest questions about life and God, and the
Anglican church, for example, obliges--as I have described.
It is necessary to struggle against the unfavourable impression
made by these things. They must not blind us to the deeper
movement that is in progress in a quite considerable number of
minds in England and France alike towards the realisation of the
kingdom of God.
What I conceive to be the reality of the religious revival is to
be found in quarters remote from the religious professionals.
Let me give but one instance of several that occur to me. I met
soon after my return from France a man who has stirred my
curiosity for years, Mr. David Lubin, the prime mover in the
organisation of the International Institute of Agriculture in
Rome. It is a movement that has always appealed to my
imagination. The idea is to establish and keep up to date a
record of the food supplies in the world with a view to the
ultimate world control of food supply and distribution. When its
machinery has developed sufficiently to a control in the
interests of civilisation of many other staples besides
foodstuffs. It is in fact the suggestion and beginning of the
economic world peace and the economic world state, just as the
Hague Tribunal is the first faint sketch of a legal world state.
The King of Italy has met Mr. Lubin's idea with open hands. (It
was because of this profoundly interesting experiment that in a
not very widely known book of mine, /The World Set Free/
(May, 1914), in which I represented a world state as arising out
of Armageddon, I made the first world conference meet at Brissago
in Italian Switzerland under the presidency of the King of
Italy.) So that when I found I could meet Mr. Lubin I did so very
gladly. We lunched together in a pretty little room high over
Knightsbridge, and talked through an afternoon.
He is a man rather after the type of Gladstone; he could be made
to look like Gladstone in a caricature, and he has that
compelling quality of intense intellectual excitement which was
one of the great factors in the personal effectiveness of
Gladstone. He is a Jew, but until I had talked to him for some
time that fact did not occur to me. He is in very ill health, he
has some weakness of the heart that grips him and holds him at
times white and silent.
At first we talked of his Institute and its work. Then we came
to shipping and transport. Whenever one talks now of human
affairs one comes presently to shipping and transport generally.
In Paris, in Italy, when I returned to England, everywhere I
found "cost of carriage" was being discovered to be a question of
fundamental importance. Yet transport, railroads and shipping,
these vitally important services in the world's affairs, are
nearly everywhere in private hands and run for profit. In the
case of shipping they are run for profit on such antiquated lines
that freights vary from day to day and from hour to hour. It
makes the business of food supply a gamble. And it need not be a
gamble.
But that is by the way in the present discussion. As we talked,
the prospect broadened out from a prospect of the growing and
distribution of food to a general view of the world becoming one
economic community.
I talked of various people I had been meeting in the previous few
weeks. "So many of us," I said, "seem to be drifting away from
the ideas of nationalism and faction and policy, towards
something else which is larger. It is an idea of a right way of
doing things for human purposes, independently of these limited
and localised references. Take such things as international
hygiene for example, take /this/ movement. We are feeling
our way towards a bigger rule."
"The rule of Righteousness," said Mr. Lubin.
I told him that I had been coming more and more to the idea--not
as a sentimentality or a metaphor, but as the ruling and
directing idea, the structural idea, of all one's political and
social activities--of the whole world as one state and community
and of God as the King of that state.
"But /I/ say that," cried Mr. Lubin, "I have put my name to that. And--it is /here!/"
He struggled up, seized an Old Testament that lay upon a side
table. He stood over it and rapped its cover. "It is
/here/," he said, looking more like Gladstone than ever, "in
the Prophets."
4
That is all I mean to tell at present of that conversation.
We talked of religion for two hours. Mr. Lubin sees things in
terms of Israel and I do not. For all that we see things very
much after the same fashion. That talk was only one of a number
of talks about religion that I have had with hard and practical
men who want to get the world straighter than it is, and who
perceive that they must have a leadership and reference outside
themselves. That is why I assert so confidently that there is a
real deep religious movement afoot in the world. But not one of
those conversations could have gone on, it would have ceased
instantly, if anyone bearing the uniform and brand of any
organised religious body, any clergyman, priest, mollah, of
suchlike advocate of the ten thousand patented religions in the
world, had come in. He would have brought in his sectarian
spites, his propaganda of church-going, his persecution of the
heretic and the illegitimate, his ecclesiastical politics, his
taboos, and his doctrinal touchiness.... That is why, though I
perceive there is a great wave of religious revival in the world
to-day, I doubt whether it bodes well for the professional
religions....
The other day I was talking to an eminent Anglican among various
other people and someone with an eye to him propounded this
remarkable view.
"There are four stages between belief and utter unbelief. There
are those who believe in God, those who doubt like Huxley the
Agnostic, those who deny him like the Atheists but who do at
least keep his place vacant, and lastly those who have set up a
Church in his place. That is the last outrage of unbelief."
IV. THE RIDDLE OF THE BRITISH
All the French people I met in France seemed to be thinking and
talking about the English. The English bring their own
atmosphere with them; to begin with they are not so talkative,
and I did not find among them anything like the same vigour of
examination, the same resolve to understand the Anglo-French
reaction, that I found among the French. In intellectual
processes I will confess that my sympathies are undisguisedly
with the French; the English will never think nor talk clearly
until the get clerical "Greek" and sham "humanities" out of their
public schools and sincere study and genuine humanities in; our
disingenuous Anglican compromise is like a cold in the English
head, and the higher education in England is a training in
evasion. This is an always lamentable state of affairs, but just
now it is particularly lamentable because quite tremendous
opportunities for the good of mankind turn on the possibility of
a thorough and entirely frank mutual understanding between
French, Italians, and English. For years there has been a
considerable amount of systematic study in France of English
thought and English developments. Upon almost any question of
current English opinion and upon most current English social
questions, the best studies are in French. But there has been
little or no reciprocal activity. The English in France seem to
confine their French studies to /La Vie Parisienne./ It is
what they have been led to expect of French literature.
There can be no doubt in any reasonable mind that this war is
binding France and England very closely together. They dare not
quarrel for the next fifty years. They are bound to play a
central part in the World League for the Preservation of Peace
that must follow this struggle. There is no question of their
practical union. It is a thing that must be. But it is
remarkable that while the French mind is agog to apprehend every
fact and detail it can about the British, to make the wisest and
fullest use of our binding necessities, that strange English
"incuria"--to use the new slang--attains to its most monumental
in this matter.
So there is not much to say about how the British think about the
French. They do not think. They feel. At the outbreak of the
war, when the performance of France seemed doubtful, there was an
enormous feeling for France in Great Britain; it was like the
formless feeling one has for a brother. It was as if Britain had
discovered a new instinct. If France had crumpled up like paper,
the English would have fought on passionately to restore her.
That is ancient history now. Now the English still feel
fraternal and fraternally proud; but in a mute way they are
dazzled. Since the German attack on Verdun began, the French
have achieved a crescendo. None of us could have imagined it.
It did not seem possible to very many of us at the end of 1915
that either France or Germany could hold on for another year.
There was much secret anxiety for France. It has given place now
to unstinted confidence and admiration. In their astonishment
the British are apt to forget the impressive magnitude of their
own effort, the millions of soldiers, the innumerable guns, the
endless torrent of supplies that pour into France to avenge the
little army of Mons. It seems natural to us that we should so
exert ourselves under the circumstances. I suppose it is
wonderful, but, as a sample Englishman, I do not feel that it is
at all wonderful. I did not feel it wonderful even when I saw
the British aeroplanes lording it in the air over Martinpuich,
and not a German to be seen. Since Michael would have it so,
there, at last, they were.
There was a good deal of doubt in France about the vigour of the
British effort, until the Somme offensive. All that had been
dispelled in August when I reached Paris. There was not the
shadow of a doubt remaining anywhere of the power and loyalty of
the British. These preliminary assurances have to be made,
because it is in the nature of the French mind to criticise, and
it must not be supposed that criticisms of detail and method
affect the fraternity and complete mutual confidence which is the
stuff of the Anglo-French relationship.
2
Now first the French have been enormously astonished by the
quality of the ordinary British soldiers in our new armies. One
Colonial colonel said something almost incredible to me--almost
incredible as coming as from a Frenchman; it was a matter to
solemn for any compliments or polite exaggerations; he said in
tones of wonder and conviction, "/They are as good as
ours./" It was his acme of all possible praise.
That means any sort of British soldier. Unless he is assisted by
a kilt the ordinary Frenchman is unable to distinguish between
one sort of British soldier and another. He cannot tell--let the
ardent nationalist mark the fact!--a Cockney from an Irishman or
the Cardiff from the Essex note. He finds them all extravagantly
and unquenchably cheerful and with a generosity--"like good
children." There his praise is a little tinged by doubt. The
British are reckless--recklessness in battle a Frenchman can
understand, but they are also reckless about to-morrow's bread
and whether the tent is safe against a hurricane in the night.
He is struck too by the fact that they are much more vocal than
the French troops, and that they seem to have a passion for bad
lugubrious songs. There he smiles and shrugs his shoulders, and
indeed what else can any of us do in the presence of that
mystery? At any rate the legend of the "phlegmatic" Englishman
has been scattered to the four winds of heaven by the guns of the
western front. The men are cool in action, it is true; but for
the rest they are, by the French standards, quicksilver.
But I will not expand further upon the general impression made by
the English in France. Philippe Millet's /En Liaison avec les
Anglais/ gives in a series of delightful pictures portraits of
British types from the French angle. There can be little doubt
that the British quality, genial naive, plucky and generous, has
won for itself a real affection in France wherever it has had a
chance to display itself....
But when it comes to British methods then the polite Frenchman's
difficulties begin. Translating hints into statements and
guessing at reservations, I would say that the French fall very
short of admiration of the way in which our higher officers set
about their work, they are disagreeably impressed by a general
want of sedulousness and close method in our leading. They think
we economise brains and waste blood. They are shocked at the way
in which obviously incompetent or inefficient men of the old army
class are retained in their positions even after serious
failures, and they were profoundly moved by the bad staff work
and needlessly heavy losses of our opening attacks in July. They
were ready to condone the blunderings and flounderings of the
1915 offensive as the necessary penalties of an "amateur" army,
they had had to learn their own lesson in Champagne, but they
were surprised to find how much the British had still to learn in
July, 1916. The British officers excuse themselves because, they
plead, they are still amateurs. "That is no reason," says the
Frenchman, "why they should be amateurish."
No Frenchman said as much as this to me, but their meaning was as
plain as daylight. I tackled one of my guides on this matter; I
said that it was the plain duty of the French military people to
criticise British military methods sharply if they thought they
were wrong. "It is not easy," he said. "Many British officers
do not think they have anything to learn. And English people do
not like being told things. What could we do? We could hardly
send a French officer or so to your headquarters in a tutorial
capacity. You have to do things in your own way." When I tried
to draw General Castelnau into this dangerous question by
suggesting that we might borrow a French general or so, he would
say only, "There is only one way to learn war, and that is to
make war." When it was too late, in the lift, I thought of the
answer to that. There is only one way to make war, and that is
by the sacrifice of incapables and the rapid promotion of able
men. If old and tried types fail now, new types must be sought.
But to do that we want a standard of efficiency. We want a
conception of intellectual quality in performance that is still
lacking....
M. Joseph Reinach, in whose company I visited the French part of
the Somme front, was full of a scheme, which he has since
published, for the breaking up and recomposition of the French
and British armies into a series of composite armies which would
blend the magnificent British manhood and material with French
science and military experience. He pointed out the endless
advantages of such an arrangement; the stimulus of emulation, the
promotion of intimate fraternal feeling between the peoples of
the two countries. "At present," he said, "no Frenchman ever
sees an Englishman except at Amiens or on the Somme. Many of
them still have no idea of what the English are doing...."
"Have I ever told you the story of compulsory Greek at Oxford and
Cambridge?" I asked abruptly.
"What has that to do with it?"
"Or how two undistinguished civil service commissioners can hold
up the scientific education of our entire administrative class?"
M. Reinach protested further.
"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.
V. THE SOCIAL CHANGES IN PROGRESS
1
"Nothing will be the same after the war." This is one of the
consoling platitudes with which people cover over voids of
thought. They utter it with an air of round-eyed profundity.
But to ask in reply, "Then how will things be different?" is in
many cases to rouse great resentment. It is almost as rude as
saying, "Was that thought of yours really a thought?"
Let us in this chapter confine ourselves to the social-economic
processes that are going on. So far as I am able to distinguish
among the things that are being said in these matters, they may
be classified out into groups that centre upon several typical
questions. There is the question of "How to pay for the war?"
There is the question of the behaviour of labour after the war.
"Will there be a Labour Truce or a violent labour struggle?"
There is the question of the reconstruction of European industry
after the war in the face of an America in a state of monetary
and economic repletion through non-intervention. My present
purpose in this chapter is a critical one; it is not to solve
problems but to set out various currents of thought that are
flowing through the general mind. Which current is likely to
seize upon and carry human affairs with it, is not for our
present speculation.
There seem to be two distinct ways of answering the first of the
questions I have noted. They do not necessarily contradict each
other. Of course the war is being largely paid for immediately
out of the accumulated private wealth of the past. We are buying
off the "hold-up" of the private owner upon the material and
resources we need, and paying in paper money and war loans. This
is not in itself an impoverishment of the community. The wealth
of individuals is not the wealth of nations; the two things may
easily be contradictory when the rich man's wealth consists of
land or natural resources or franchises or privileges the use of
which he reluctantly yields for high prices. The conversion of
held-up land and material into workable and actively used
material in exchange for national debt may be indeed a positive
increase in the wealth of the community. And what is happening
in all the belligerent countries is the taking over of more and
more of the realities of wealth from private hands and, in
exchange, the contracting of great masses of debt to private
people. The nett tendency is towards the disappearance of a
reality holding class and the destruction of realities in
warfare, and the appearance of a vast /rentier/ class in its
place. At the end of the war much material will be destroyed for
evermore, transit, food production and industry will be
everywhere enormously socialised, and the country will be liable
to pay every year in interest, a sum of money exceeding the
entire national expenditure before the war. From the point of
view of the state, and disregarding material and moral damages,
that annual interest is the annual instalment of the price to be
paid for the war.
Now the interesting question arises whether these great
belligerent states may go bankrupt, and if so to what extent.
States may go bankrupt to the private creditor without
repudiating their debts or seeming to pay less to him. They can
go bankrupt either by a depreciation of their currency or--
without touching the gold standard--through a rise in prices. In
the end both these things work out to the same end; the creditor
gets so many loaves or pairs of boots or workman's hours of
labour for his pound /less/ than he would have got under the
previous conditions. One may imagine this process of price (and
of course wages) increase going on to a limitless extent. Many
people are inclined to look to such an increase in prices as a
certain outcome of the war, and just so far as it goes, just so
far will the burthen of the /rentier/ class, their call, tat
is, for goods and services, be lightened. This expectation is
very generally entertained, and I can see little reason against
it. The intensely stupid or dishonest "labour" press, however,
which in the interests of the common enemy misrepresents
socialism and seeks to misguide labour in Great Britain, ignores
these considerations, and positively holds out this prospect of
rising prices as an alarming one to the more credulous and
ignorant of its readers.
But now comes the second way of meeting the after-the-war
obligations. This second way is by increasing the wealth of the
state and by increasing the national production to such an extent
that the payment of the /rentier/ class will not be an
overwhelming burthen. Rising prices bilk the creditor.
Increased production will check the rise in prices and get him a
real payment. The outlook for the national creditor seems to be
that he will be partly bilked and partly paid; how far he will be
bilked and how far depends almost entirely upon this possible
increase in production; and there is consequently a very keen and
quite unprecedented desire very widely diffused among intelligent
and active people, holding War Loan scrip and the like, in all
the belligerent countries, to see bold and hopeful schemes for
state enrichment pushed forward. The movement towards socialism
is receiving an impulse from a new and unexpected quarter, there
is now a /rentier/ socialism, and it is interesting to note
that while the London /Times/ is full of schemes of great
state enterprises, for the exploitation of Colonial state lands,
for the state purchase and wholesaling of food and many natural
products, and for the syndication of shipping and the great
staple industries into vast trusts into which not only the
British but the French and Italian governments may enter as
partners, the so-called socialist press of Great Britain is
chiefly busy about the draughts in the cell of Mr. Fenner
Brockway and the refusal of Private Scott Duckers to put on his
khaki trousers. /The New Statesman/ and the Fabian Society,
however, display a wider intelligence.
There is a great variety of suggestions for this increase of
public wealth and production. Many of them have an extreme
reasonableness. The extent to which they will be adopted
depends, no doubt, very largely upon the politician and permanent
official, and both these classes are prone to panic in the
presence of reality. In spite of its own interests in
restraining a rise in prices, the old official "salariat" is
likely to be obstructive to any such innovations. It is the
resistance of spurs and red tabs to military innovations over
again. This is the resistance of quills and red tape. On the
other hand the organisation of Britain for war has "officialised"
a number of industrial leaders, and created a large body of
temporary and adventurous officials. They may want to carry on
into peace production the great new factories the war has
created. At the end of the war, for example, every belligerent
country will be in urgent need of cheap automobiles for farmers,
tradesmen, and industrial purposes generally, America is now
producing such automobiles at a price of eighty pounds. But
Europe will be heavily in debt to America, her industries will be
disorganised, and there will therefore be no sort of return
payment possible for these hundreds of thousands of automobiles.
A country that is neither creditor nor producer cannot be an
importer. Consequently though those cheap tin cars may be
stacked as high as the Washington Monument in America, they will
never come to Europe. On the other hand the great shell
factories of Europe will be standing idle and ready, their staffs
disciplined and available, for conversion to the new task. The
imperative common sense of the position seems to be that the
European governments should set themselves straight away to out-
Ford Ford, and provide their own people with cheap road
transport.
But here comes in the question whether this common-sense course
is inevitable. Suppose the mental energy left in Europe after
the war is insufficient for such a constructive feat as this.
There will certainly be the obstruction of official pedantry, the
hold-up of this vested interest and that, the greedy desire of
"private enterprise" to exploit the occasion upon rather more
costly and less productive lines, the general distrust felt by
ignorant and unimaginative people of a new way of doing things.
The process after all may not get done in the obviously wise way.
This will not mean that Europe will buy American cars. It will
be quite unable to buy American cars. It will be unable to make
anything that America will not be able to make more cheaply for
itself. But it will mean that Europe will go on without cheap
cars, that is to say it will go on a more sluggishly and clumsily
and wastefully at a lower economic level. Hampered transport
means hampered production of other things, and in increasing
inability to buy abroad. And so we go down and down.
It does not follow that because a course is the manifestly right
and advantageous course for the community that it will be taken.
I am reminded of this by a special basket in my study here, into
which I pitch letters, circulars, pamphlets and so forth as they
come to hand from a gentleman named Gattie, and his friends Mr.
Adrian Ross, Mr. Roy Horniman, Mr. Henry Murray and others. His
particular project is the construction of a Railway Clearing
House for London. It is an absolutely admirable scheme. It
would cut down the heavy traffic in the streets of London to
about one-third; it would enable us to run the goods traffic of
England with less than half the number of railway trucks we now
employ; it would turn over enormous areas of valuable land from
their present use as railway goods yards and sidings; it would
save time in the transit of goods and labour in their handling.
It is a quite beautifully worked out scheme. For the last eight
or ten years this group of devoted fanatics has been pressing
this undertaking upon an indifferent country with increasing
vehemence and astonishment at that indifference. The point is
that its adoption, though it would be of general benefit, would
be of no particular benefit to any leading man or highly placed
official. On the other hand it would upset all sorts of
individuals who are in a position to obstruct it quietly--and
they do so. Meaning no evil. I dip my hand in the accumulation
and extract a leaflet by the all too zealous Mr. Murray. In it
he denounces various public officials by name as he cheats and
scoundrels, and invites a prosecution for libel.
In that fashion nothing will ever get done. There is no
prosecution, but for all that I do not agree with Mr. Murray
about the men he names. These gentlemen are just comfortable
gentlemen, own brothers to these old generals of ours who will
not take off their spurs. They are probably quite charming
people except that they know nothing of that Fear of God which
searches by heart. Why should they bother?
So many of these after-the-war problems bring one back to the
question of how far the war has put the Fear of God into the
hearts of responsible men. There is really no other reason in
existence that I can imagine why they should ask themselves the
question, "Have I done my best?" and that still more important
question, "Am I doing my best now?" And so while I hear plenty
of talk about the great reorganisations that are to come after
the war, while there is the stir of doubt among the
/rentiers/ whether, after all, they will get paid, while the
unavoidable stresses and sacrifices of the war are making many
people question the rightfulness of much that they did as a
matter of course, and of much that they took for granted, I
perceive there is also something dull and not very articulate in
this European world, something resistant and inert, that is like
the obstinate rolling over of a heavy sleeper after he has been
called upon to get up. "Just a little longer.... Just for
/my/ time."
One thought alone seems to make these more intractable people
anxious. I thrust it in as my last stimulant when everything
else has failed. "There will be /frightful/ trouble with
labour after the war," I say.
They try to persuade themselves that military discipline is
breaking in labour....
2
What does British labour think of the outlook after the war?
As a distinctive thing British labour does not think. "Class-
conscious labour," as the Marxists put it, scarcely exists in
Britain. The only convincing case I ever met was a bath-chairman
of literary habits Eastbourne. The only people who are, as a
class, class-conscious in the British community are the Anglican
gentry and their fringe of the genteel. Everybody else is
"respectable." The mass of British workers find their thinking
in the ordinary halfpenny papers or in /John Bull./ The so-
called labour papers are perhaps less representative of British
Labour than any other section of the press; the /Labour
Leader/, for example, is the organ of such people as Bertrand
Russell, Vernon Lee, Morel, academic /rentiers/ who know
about as much as of the labour side of industrialism as they do
of cock-fighting. All the British peoples are racially willing
and good-tempered people, quite ready to be led by those they
imagine to be abler than themselves. They make the most cheerful
and generous soldiers in the whole world, without insisting upon
that democratic respect which the Frenchman exacts. They do not
criticise and they do not trouble themselves much about the
general plan of operations, so long as they have confidence in
the quality and good will of their leading. But British soldiers
will of their loading. But British soldiers will hiss a general
when they think he is selfish, unfeeling, or a muff. And the
socialist propaganda has imported ideas of public service into
private employment. Labour in Britain has been growing
increasingly impatient of bad or selfish industrial leadership.
Labour trouble in Great Britain turns wholly upon the idea
crystallised in the one word "profiteer." Legislation and
regulation of hours of labour, high wages, nothing will keep
labour quiet in Great Britain if labour thinks it is being
exploited for private gain.
Labour feels very suspicious of private gain. For that suspicion
a certain rather common type of employer is mainly to blame.
Labour believes that employers is mainly to blame. Labour
believes that employers as a class cheat workmen as a class, plan
to cheat them of their full share in the common output, and drive
hard bargains. It believes that private employers are equally
ready to sacrifice the welfare of the nation and the welfare of
the workers for mere personal advantage. It has a traditional
experience to support these suspicions.
In no department of morals have ideas changed so completely
during the last eight years as in relation to "profits". Eighty
years ago everyone believed in the divine right of property to do
what it pleased its advantages, a doctrine more disastrous
socially than the divine right of kings. There was no such sense
of the immorality of "holding up" as pervades the public
conscience to-day. The worker was expected not only to work, but
to be grateful for employment. The property owner held his
property and handed it out for use and development or not, just
as he thought fit. These ideas are not altogether extinct today.
Only a few days ago I met a magnificent old lady of seventy nine
or eighty, who discoursed upon the wickedness of her gardener in
demanding another shilling a week because of war prices.
She was a valiant and handsome personage. A face that had still
a healthy natural pinkness looked out from under blond curls, and
an elegant and carefully tended hand tossed back some fine old
lace to gesticulate more freely. She had previously charmed her
hearers by sweeping aside certain rumours that were drifting
about.
"Germans invade /Us!/" she cried. "Who'd /let/ 'em,
I'd like to know? Who'd /let/ 'em?"
And then she reverted to her grievance about the gardener.
"I told him that after the war he'd be glad enough to get
anything. Grateful! They'll all be coming back after the war--
all of 'em, glad enough to get anything. Asking for another
shilling indeed!"
Everyone who heard her looked shocked. But that was the tone of
everyone of importance in the dark years that followed the
Napoleonic wars. That is just one survivor of the old tradition.
Another is Blight the solicitor, who goes about bewailing the
fact that we writers are "holding out false hopes of higher
agricultural wages after the war." But these are both
exceptions. They are held to be remarkable people even by their
own class. The mass of property owners and influential people in
Europe to-day no more believe in the sacred right of property to
hold up development and dictate terms than do the more
intelligent workers. The ideas of collective ends and of the
fiduciary nature of property, had been soaking through the
European community for years before the war. The necessity for
sudden and even violent co-operations and submersions of
individuality in a common purpose, is rapidly crystallising out
these ideas into clear proposals.
War is an evil thing, but most people who will not learn from
reason must have an ugly teacher. This war has brought home to
everyone the supremacy of the public need over every sort of
individual claim.
One of the most remarkable things in the British war press is the
amount of space given to the discussion of labour developments
after the war. This in its completeness peculiar to the British
situation. Nothing on the same scale is perceptible in the press
of the Latin allies. A great movement on the part of capitalists
and business organisers is manifest to assure the worker of a
change of heart and a will to change method. Labour is
suspicious, not foolishly but wisely suspicious. But labour is
considering it.
"National industrial syndication," say the business organisers.
"Guild socialism," say the workers.
There is also a considerable amount of talking and writing about
"profit-sharing" and about giving the workers a share in the
business direction. Neither of these ideas appeals to the
shrewder heads among the workers. So far as direction goes their
disposition is to ask the captain to command the ship. So far as
profits go, they think the captain has no more right than the
cabin boy to speculative gains; he should do his work for his pay
whether it is profitable or unprofitable work. There is little
balm for labour discontent in these schemes for making the worker
also an infinitesimal profiteer.
During my journey in Italy and France I met several men who were
keenly interested in business organisation. Just before I
started my friend N, who has been the chief partner in the
building up of a very big and very extensively advertised
American business, came to see me on his way back to America. He
is as interested in his work as a scientific specialist, and as
ready to talk about it to any intelligent and interested hearer.
He was particularly keen upon the question of continuity in the
business, when it behoves the older generation to let in the
younger to responsible management and to efface themselves. He
was a man of five-and-forty. Incidentally he mentioned that he
had never taken anything for his private life out of the great
business he had built up but a salary, "a good salary," and that
now he was gong to grant himself a pension. "I shan't interfere
any more. I shall come right away and live in Europe for a year
so as not to be tempted to interfere. The boys have got to run
it some day, and they had better get their experience while
they're young and capable of learning by it. I did."
I like N's ideas. "Practically," I said, "you've been a public
official. You've treated your business like a public service."
That was his idea.
"Would you mind if it was a public service?"
He reflected, and some disagreeable memory darkened his face.
"Under the politicians?" he said.
I took the train of thought N had set going abroad with me next
day. I had the good luck to meet men who were interesting
industrially. Captain Pirelli, my guide in Italy, has a name
familiar to every motorist; his name goes wherever cars go, spelt
with a big long capital P. Lieutenant de Tessin's name will
recall one of the most interesting experiments in profit-sharing
to the student of social science. I tried over N's problem on
both of them. I found in both their minds just the same attitude
as he takes up towards his business. They think any businesses
that are worthy of respect, the sorts of businesses that interest
them, are public functions. Money-lenders and speculators,
merchants and gambling gentlefolk may think in terms of profit;
capable business directors certainly do nothing of the sort.
I met a British officer in France who is also a landowner. I got
him to talk about his administrative work upon his property. He
was very keen upon new methods. He said he tried to do his duty
by his land.
"How much land?" I asked.
"Just over nine thousand acres," he said.
"But you could manage forty or fifty thousand with little more
trouble."
"If I had it. In some ways it would be easier."
"What a waste!" I said. "Of course you ought not to /own/
these acres; what you ought to be is the agricultural controller
of just as big an estate of the public lands as you could manage--
with a suitable salary."
He reflected upon that idea. He said he did not get much of a
salary out of his land as it was, and made a regrettable allusion
to Mr. Lloyd George. "When a man tries to do his duty by his
land," he said...
But here running through the thoughts of the Englishman and the
Italian and the Frenchman and the American alike one finds just
the same idea of a kind of officialdom in ownership. It is an
idea that pervades our thought and public discussion to-day
everywhere, and it is an idea that is scarcely traceable at all
in the thought of the early half of the nineteenth century. The
idea of service and responsibility in property has increased and
is increasing, the conception of "hold-up," the usurer's
conception of his right to be bought out of the way, fades. And
the process has been enormously enhanced by the various big-scale
experiments in temporary socialism that have been forced upon the
belligerent powers. Men of the most individualistic quality are
being educated up to the possibilities of concerted collective
action. My friend and fellow-student Y, inventor and business
organiser, who used to make the best steam omnibuses in the
world, and who is now making all sorts of things for the army,
would go pink with suspicious anger at the mere words "inspector"
or "socialism" three or four years ago. He does not do so now.
A great proportion of this sort of man, this energetic directive
sort of man in England, is thinking socialism to-day. They may
not be saying socialism, but they are thinking it. When labour
begins to realise what is adrift it will be divided between two
things: between appreciative co-operation, for which guild
socialism in particular has prepared its mind, and traditional
suspicion. I will not over to guess here which will prevail.
3
The impression I have of the present mental process in the
European communities is that while the official class and the
/rentier/ class is thinking very poorly and inadequately and
with a merely obstructive disposition; while the churches are
merely wasting their energies in futile self-advertisement; while
the labour mass is suspicious and disposed to make terms for
itself rather than come into any large schemes of reconstruction
that will abolish profit as a primary aim in economic life, there
is still a very considerable movement towards such a
reconstruction. Nothing is so misleading as a careless analogy.
In the dead years that followed the Napoleonic wars, which are
often quoted as a precedent for expectation now, the spirit of
collective service was near its minimum; it was never so strong
and never so manifestly spreading and increasing as it is to-day.
But service to what?
I have my own very strong preconceptions here, and since my
temperament is sanguine they necessarily colour my view. I
believe that this impulse to collective service can satisfy
itself only under the formula that mankind is one state of which
God is the undying king, and that the service of men's collective
needs is the true worship of God. But eagerly as I would grasp
at any evidence that this idea is being developed and taken up by
the general consciousness, I am quite unable to persuade myself
that anything of the sort is going on. I do perceive a search
for large forms into which the prevalent impulse to devotion can
be thrown. But the organised religious bodies, with their creeds
and badges and their instinct for self-preservation at any cost,
stand between men and their spiritual growth in just the same way
the forestallers stand between men and food. Their activities at
present are an almost intolerable nuisance. One cannot say "God"
but some tout is instantly seeking to pluck one into his
particular cave of flummery and orthodoxy. What a rational man
means by God is just God. The more you define and argue about
God the more he remains the same simple thing. Judaism,
Christianity, Islam, modern Hindu religious thought, all agree in
declaring that there is one God, master and leader of all
mankind, in unending conflict with cruelty, disorder, folly and
waste. To my mind, it follows immediately that there can be no
king, no government of any sort, which is not either a
subordinate or a rebel government, a local usurpation, in the
kingdom of God. But no organised religious body has ever had the
courage and honesty to insist upon this. They all pander to
nationalism and to powers and princes. They exists so to pander.
Every organised religion in the world exists only to exploit and
divert and waste the religious impulse in man.
This conviction that the world kingdom of God is the only true
method of human service, is so clear and final in my own mind, it
seems so inevitably the conviction to which all right-thinking
men must ultimately come, that I feel almost like a looker-on at
a game of blind-man's bluff as I watch the discussion of
synthetic political ideas. The blind man thrusts his seeking
hands into the oddest corners, he clutches at chairs and
curtains, but at last he must surely find and hold and feel over
and guess the name of the plainly visible quarry.
Some of the French and Italian people I talked to said they were
fighting for "Civilisation." That is one name for the kingdom of
God, and I have heard English people use it too. But much of the
contemporary thought of England stills wanders with its back to
the light. Most of it is pawing over jerry-built, secondary
things. I have before me a little book, the joint work of Dr.
Grey and Mr. Turner, of an ex-public schoolmaster and a
manufacturer, called /Eclipse or Empire?/ (The title
/World Might or Downfall?/ had already been secured in
another quarter.) It is a book that has been enormously
advertised; it has been almost impossible to escape its column-
long advertisements; it is billed upon the hoardings, and it is
on the whole a very able and right-spirited book. It calls for
more and better education, for more scientific methods, for less
class suspicion and more social explicitness and understanding,
for a franker and fairer treatment of labour. But why does it
call for these things? Does it call for them because they are
right? Because in accomplishing them one serves God?
Not at all. But because otherwise this strange sprawling empire
of ours will drop back into a secondary place in the world.
These two writers really seem to think that the slack workman,
the slacker wealthy man, the negligent official, the conservative
schoolmaster, the greedy usurer, the comfortable obstructive,
confronted with this alternative, terrified at this idea of
something or other called the Empire being "eclipsed," eager for
the continuance of this undefined glory over their fellow-
creatures called "Empire," will perceive the error of their ways
and become energetic, devoted, capable. They think an ideal of
that sort is going to change the daily lives of men.... I
sympathise with their purpose, and I deplore their conception of
motives. If men will not give themselves for righteousness, they
will not give themselves for a geographical score. If they will
not work well for the hatred of bad work, they will not work well
for the hatred of Germans. This "Empire" idea has been cadging
about the British empire, trying to collect enthusiasm and
devotion, since the days of Disraeli. It is, I submit, too big
for the mean-spirited, and too tawdry and limited for the fine
and generous. It leaves out the French and the Italians and the
Belgians and all our blood brotherhood of allies. It has no
compelling force in it. We British are not naturally
Imperialist; we are something greater--or something less. For
two years and a half now we have been fighting against
Imperialism in its most extravagant form. It is a poor incentive
to right living to propose to parody the devil we fight against.
The blind man must lunge again.
For when the right answer is seized it answers not only the
question why men should work for their fellow-men but also why
nation should cease to arm and plan and contrive against nation.
The social problem is only the international problem in retail,
the international problem is only the social one in gross.
My bias rules me altogether here. I see men in social, in
economic and in international affairs alike, eager to put an end
to conflict, inexpressibly weary of conflict and the waste and
pain and death it involves. But to end conflict one must abandon
aggressive or uncordial pretensions. Labour is sick at the idea
of more strikes and struggles after the war, industrialism is
sick of competition and anxious for service, everybody is sick of
war. But how can they end any of these clashes except by the
definition and recognition of a common end which will establish a
standard for the trial of every conceivable issue, to which, that
is, every other issue can be subordinated; and what common end
can there be in all the world except this idea of the world
kingdom of God? What is the good of orienting one's devotion to
a firm, or to class solidarity, or /La Republique
Francais/, or Poland, or Albania, or such love and
loyalty as people profess for King George or King Albert or the
Duc d'Orleans--it puzzles me why--or any such intermediate object
of self-abandonment? We need a standard so universal that the
platelayer may say to the barrister or the duchess, or the Red
Indian to the Limehouse sailor, or the Anzac soldier to the Sinn
Feiner or the Chinaman, "What are we two doing for it?" And to
fill the place of that "it," no other idea is great enough or
commanding enough, but only the world kingdom of God.
However long he may have to hunt, the blind man who is seeking
service and an end to bickerings will come to that at last,
because of all the thousand other things he may clutch at,
nothing else can satisfy his manifest need.
VI. THE ENDING OF THE WAR
1
About the end of the war there are two chief ways of thinking,
there is a simpler sort of mind which desires merely a date, and
a more complex kind which wants particulars. To the former class
belong most of the men out at the front. They are so bored by
this war that they would welcome any peace that did not
definitely admit defeat--and examine the particulars later. The
"tone" of the German army, to judge by its captured letters, is
even lower. It would welcome peace in any form. Never in the
whole history of the world has a war been so universally
unpopular as this war.
The mind of the soldier is obsessed by a vision of home-coming
for good, so vivid and alluring that it blots out nearly every
other consideration. The visions of people at home are of plenty
instead of privation, lights up, and the cessation of a hundred
tiresome restrictions. And it is natural therefore that a writer
rather given to guesses and forecasts should be asked very
frequently to guess how long the war has still to run.
All such forecasting is the very wildest of shooting. There are
the chances of war to put one out, and of a war that changes far
faster than the military intelligence. I have made various
forecasts. At the outset I thought that military Germany would
fight at about the 1899 level, would be lavish with cavalry and
great attacks, that it would be reluctant to entrench, and that
the French and British had learnt the lesson of the Boer war
better than the Germans. I trusted to the melodramatic instinct
of the Kaiser. I trusted to the quickened intelligence of the
British military caste. The first rush seemed to bear me out,
and I opened my paper day by day expecting to read of the British
and French entrenched and the Germans beating themselves to death
against wire and trenches. In those days I wrote of the French
being over the Rhine before 1915. But it was the Germans who
entrenched first.
Since then I have made some other attempts. I did not prophesy
at all in 1915, so far as I can remember. If I had I should
certainly have backed the Gallipoli attempt to win. It was the
right thing to do, and it was done abominably. It should have
given us Constantinople and brought Bulgaria to our side; it gave
us a tragic history of administrative indolence and negligence,
and wasted bravery and devotion. I was very hopeful of the
western offensive in 1915; and in 1916 I counted still on our
continuing push. I believe we were very near something like
decision this last September, but some archaic dream of doing it
with cavalry dashed these hopes. The "Tanks" arrived to late to
do their proper work, and their method of use is being worked out
very slowly.... I still believe in the western push, if only we
push it for all we are worth. If only we push it with our
brains, with our available and still unorganised brains; if only
we realise that the art of modern war is to invent and invent and
invent. Hitherto I have always hoped and looked for decision, a
complete victory that would enable the Allies to dictate peace.
But such an expectation is largely conditioned by these delicate
questions of adaptability that my tour of the front has made very
urgent in my mind. A spiteful German American writer has said
that the British would rather kill twenty thousand of their men
than break one general. Even a grain of truth in such a remark
is a very valid reasoning for lengthening one's estimate of the
duration of the war.
There can be no doubt that the Western allies are playing a
winning game upon the western front, and that this is the front
of decision now. It is not in doubt that they are beating the
Germans and shoving them back. The uncertain factor is the rate
at which they are shoving them back. If they can presently get
to so rapid an advance as to bring the average rate since July
1st up to two or three miles a day, then we shall still see the
Allies dictating terms. But if the shove drags on at its present
pace of less than a mile and four thousand prisoners a week over
the limited Somme front only, if nothing is attempted elsewhere
to increase the area of pressure, [*This was written originally
before the French offensive at Verdun.] then the intolerable
stress and boredom of the war will bring about a peace long
before the Germans are decisively crushed. But the war,
universally detested, may go on into 1918 or 1919. Food riots,
famine, and general disorganisation will come before 1920, if it
does. The Allies have a winning game before them, but they seem
unable to discover and promote the military genius needed to
harvest an unquestionable victory. In the long run this may not
be an unmixed evil. Victory, complete and dramatic, may be
bought too dearly. We need not triumphs out of this war but the
peace of the world.
This war is altogether unlike any previous war, and its ending,
like its development, will follow a course of its own. For a
time people's minds ran into the old grooves, the Germans were
going /nach Paris/ and /nach London/; Lord Curzon
filled our minds with a pleasant image of the Bombay Lancers
riding down /Unter den Linden./ But the Versailles
precedent of a council of victors dictating terms to the
vanquished is not now so evidently in men's minds. The utmost
the Allies talk upon now is to say, "We must end the war on
German soil." The Germans talk frankly of "holding out." I have
guessed that the western offensive will be chiefly on German soil
by next June; it is a mere guess, and I admit it is quite
conceivable that the "push" may still be grinding out its daily
tale of wounded and prisoners in 1918 far from that goal.
None of the combatants expected such a war as this, and the
consequence is that the world at large has no idea how to get out
of it. The war may stay with us like a schoolboy caller, because
it does not know how to go. The Italians said as much to me.
"Suppose we get to Innsbruck and Laibach and Trieste," they said,
"it isn't an end!" Lord Northcliffe, I am told, came away from
Italy with the conviction that the war would last six years.
There is the clearest evidence that nearly everyone is anxious to
get out of the war now. Nobody at all, except perhaps a few
people who may be called to account, and a handful of greedy
profit-seekers, wants to keep it going. Quietly perhaps and
unobtrusively, everyone I know is now trying to find the way out
of the war, and I am convinced that the same is the case in
Germany. That is what makes the Peace-at-any-price campaign so
exasperating. It is like being chased by clamorous geese across
a common in the direction in which you want to go. But how are
we to get out--with any credit--in such a way as to prevent a
subsequent collapse into another war as frightful?
At present three programmes are before the world of the way in
which the war can be ended. The first of these assumes a
complete predominance of our Allies. It has been stated in
general terms by Mr. Asquith. Evacuation, reparation, due
punishment of those responsible for the war, and guarantees that
nothing of the sort shall happen again. There is as yet no
mention of the nature of these guarantees. Just exactly what is
to happen to Poland, Austria, and the Turkish Empire does not
appear in this prospectus. The German Chancellor is equally
elusive. The Kaiser has stampeded the peace-at-any-price people
of Great Britain by proclaiming that Germany wants peace. We
knew that. But what sort of peace? It would seem that we are
promised vaguely evacuation and reparation on the western
frontier, and in addition there are to be guarantees--but it is
quite evident that they are altogether different guarantees from
Mr. Asquith's--that nothing of the sort is ever to happen again.
The programme of the British and their Allies seems to
contemplate something like a forcible disarmament and military
occupation of Belgium, the desertion of Serbia and Russia, and
the surrender to Germany of every facility for a later and more
successful German offensive in the west. But it is clear that on
these terms as stated the war must go on to the definite defeat
of one side or the other, or a European chaos. They are
irreconcilable sets of terms.
Yet it is hard to say how they can be modified on either side, if
the war is to be decided only between the belligerents and by
standards of national interest only, without reference to any
other considerations. Our Allies would be insane to leave the
Hohenzollern at the end of the war with a knife in his hand,
after the display he has made of his quality. To surrender his
knife means for the Hohenzollern the abandonment of his dreams,
the repudiation of the entire education and training of Germany
for half a century. When we realise the fatality of this
antagonism, we realise how it is that, in this present
anticipation of hell, the weary, wasted and tormented nations
must still sustain their monstrous dreary struggle. And that is
why this thought that possible there may be a side way out, a
sort of turning over of the present endlessly hopeless game into
a new and different and manageable game through the introduction
of some external factor, creeps and spreads as I find it creeping
and spreading.
That is what the finer intelligences of America are beginning to
realise, and why men in Europe continually turn their eyes to
America, with a surmise, with a doubt.
A point of departure for very much thinking in this matter is the
recent speech of President Wilson that heralded the present
discussion. All Europe was impressed by the truth, and by
President Wilson's recognition of the truth, that from any other
great war after this America will be unable to abstain. Can
America come into this dispute at the end to insist upon
something better than a new diplomatic patchwork, and so obviate
the later completer Armageddon? Is there, above the claims and
passions of Germany, France, Britain, and the rest of them, a
conceivable right thing to do for all mankind, that it might also
be in the interest of America to support? Is there a Third Party
solution, so to speak, which may possibly be the way out from
this war?
And further I would go on to ask, is not this present exchange of
Notes, appealing to the common sense of the world, really the
beginning, and the proper beginning, of the unprecedented Peace
Negotiations to end this unprecedented war? And, I submit, the
longer this open discussion goes on before the doors close upon
the secret peace congress the better for mankind.
2
Let me sketch out here what I conceive to be the essentials of a
world settlement. Some of the items are the mere commonplaces of
everyone who discusses this question; some are less frequently
insisted upon. I have been joining up one thing to another,
suggestions I have heard from this man and that, and I believe
that it is really possible to state a solution that will be
acceptable to the bulk of reasonable men all about the world.
Directly we put the panic-massacres of Dinant and Louvain, the
crime of the /Lusitania/ and so on into the category of
symptoms rather than essentials, outrages that call for special
punishments and reparations, but that do not enter further into
the ultimate settlement, we can begin to conceive a possible
world treaty. Let me state the broad outlines of this
pacification. The outlines depend one upon the other; each is a
condition of the other. It is upon these lines that the
thoughtful, as distinguished from the merely the combative
people, seem to be drifting everywhere.
In the first place, it is agreed that there would have to be an
identical treaty between all the great powers of the world
binding them to certain things. It would have to provide:---
That the few great industrial states capable of producing modern
war equipment should take over and control completely the
manufacture of all munitions of war in the world. And that they
should absolutely close the supply of such material to all the
other states in the world. This is a far easier task than many
people suppose. War has now been so developed on its mechanical
side that the question of its continuance or abolition rests now
entirely upon four or five great powers.
Next comes the League of Peace idea; that there should be an
International Tribunal for the discussion and settlement of
international disputes. That the dominating powers should
maintain land and sea forces only up to a limit agreed upon and
for internal police use only or for the purpose of enforcing the
decisions of the Tribunal. That they should all be bound to
attack and suppress any power amongst them which increases its
war equipment beyond its defined limits.
That much has already been broached in several quarters. But so
far is not enough. It ignores the chief processes of that
economic war that aids and abets and is inseparably a part of
modern international conflicts. If we are to go as far as we
have already stated in the matter of international controls, then
we must go further and provide that the International Tribunal
should have power to consider and set aside all tariffs and
localised privileges that seem grossly unfair or seriously
irritating between the various states of the world. It should
have power to pass or revise all new tariff, quarantine, alien
exclusion, or the like legislation affecting international
relations. Moreover, it should take over and extend the work of
the International Bureau of Agriculture at Rome with a view to
the control of all staple products. It should administer the sea
law of the world, and control and standardise freights in the
common interests of mankind. Without these provisions it would
be merely preventing the use of certain weapons; it would be
doing nothing to prevent countries strangling or suffocating each
other by commercial warfare. It would not abolish war.
Now upon this issue people do not seem to me to be yet thinking
very clearly. It is the exception to find anyone among the peace
talkers who really grasps how inseparably the necessity for free
access for everyone to natural products, to coal and tropical
products, e.g. free shipping at non-discriminating tariffs, and
the recognition by a Tribunal of the principle of common welfare
in trade matters, is bound up with the ideal of a permanent world
peace. But any peace that does not provide for these things will
be merely laying down of the sword in order to take up the
cudgel. And a "peace" that did not rehabilitate industrial
Belgium, Poland, and the north of France would call imperatively
for the imposition upon the Allies of a system of tariffs in the
interests of these countries, and for a bitter economic "war
after the war" against Germany. That restoration is, of course,
an implicit condition to any attempt to set up an economic peace
in the world.
These things being arranged for the future, it would be further
necessary to set up an International Boundary Commission, subject
to certain defining conditions agreed upon by the belligerents,
to re-draw the map of Europe, Asia, and Africa. This war does
afford an occasion such as the world may never have again of
tracing out the "natural map" of mankind, the map that will
secure the maximum of homogeneity and the minimum of racial and
economic freedom. All idealistic people hope for a restored
Poland. But it is a childish thing to dream of a contented
Poland with Posen still under the Prussian heel, with Cracow cut
off, and without a Baltic port. These claims of Poland to
completeness have a higher sanction than the mere give and take
of belligerents in congress.
Moreover this International Tribunal, if it was indeed to prevent
war, would need also to have power to intervene in the affairs of
any country or region in a state of open and manifest disorder,
for the protection of foreign travellers and of persons and
interests localised in that country but foreign to it.
Such an agreement as I have here sketched out would at once lift
international politics out of the bloody and hopeless squalor of
the present conflict. It is, I venture to assert, the peace of
the reasonable man in any country whatever. But it needs the
attention of such a disengaged people as the American people to
work it out and supply it with--weight. It needs putting before
the world with some sort of authority greater than its mere
entire reasonableness. Otherwise it will not come before the
minds of ordinary men with the effect of a practicable
proposition. I do not see any such plant springing from the
European battlefields. It is America's supreme opportunity. And
yet it is the common sense of the situation, and the solution
that must satisfy a rational German as completely as a rational
Frenchman or Englishman. It has nothing against it but the
prejudice against new and entirely novel things.
3
In throwing out the suggestion that America should ultimately
undertake the responsibility of proposing a world peace
settlement, I admit that I run counter to a great deal of
European feeling. Nowhere in Europe now do people seem to be in
love with the United States. But feeling is a colour that
passes. And the question is above matters of feeling. Whether
the belligerents dislike Americans or the Americans dislike the
belligerents is an incidental matter. The main question is of
the duty of a great and fortunate nation towards the rest of the
world and the future of mankind.
I do not know how far Americans are aware of the trend of feeling
in Europe at the present time. Both France and Great Britain
have a sense of righteousness in this war such as no nation, no
people, has ever felt in war before. We know we are fighting to
save all the world from the rule of force and the unquestioned
supremacy of the military idea. Few Frenchmen or Englishmen can
imagine the war presenting itself to an American intelligence
under any other guise. At the invasion of Belgium we were
astonished that America did nothing. At the sinking of the
/Lusitania/ all Europe looked to America. The British mind
contemplates the spectacle of American destroyers acting as
bottleholders to German submarines with a dazzled astonishment.
"Manila," we gasp. In England we find excuses for America in our
own past. In '64 we betrayed Denmark; in '70 we deserted France.
The French have not these memories. They do not understand the
damning temptations of those who feel they are "/au-dessus de
la melee./" They believe they had some share in
the independence of America, that there is a sacred cause in
republicanism, that there are grounds for a peculiar sympathy
between France and the United States in republican institutions.
They do not realise that Germany and America have a common
experience in recent industrial development, and a common belief
in the "degeneracy" of all nations with a lower rate of trade
expansion. They do not realise how a political campaign with the
slogan of "Peace and a Full Dinner-Pail" looks in the middle
west, what an honest, simple, rational appeal it makes there.
Atmospheres alter values. In Europe, strung up to tragic and
majestic issues, to Europe gripping a gigantic evil in a death
struggle, that would seem an inscription worthy of a pigsty. A
child in Europe would know now that the context is, "until the
bacon-buyer calls," and it is difficult to realise that adult
citizens in America may be incapable of realising that obvious
context.
I set these things down plainly. There is a very strong
disposition in all the European countries to believe America
fundamentally indifferent to the rights and wrongs of the
European struggle; sentimentally interested perhaps, but
fundamentally indifferent. President Wilson is regarded as a
mere academic sentimentalist by a great number of Europeans.
There is a very widespread disposition to treat America lightly
and contemptuously, to believe that America, as one man put it to
me recently, "hasn't the heart to do anything great or the guts
to do anything wicked." There is a strong undercurrent of
hostility therefore to the idea of America having any voice
whatever in the final settlement after the war. It is not for a
British writer to analyse the appearance that have thus affected
American world prestige. I am telling what I have observed.
Let me relate two trivial anecdotes.
X came to my hotel in Paris one day to take me to see a certain
munitions organisation. He took from his pocket a picture
postcard that had been sent him by a well-meaning American
acquaintance from America. It bore a portrait of General
Lafayette, and under it was printed the words, "General
Lafayette, /Colonel in the United States army./"
"Oh! These Americans!" said X with a gesture.
And as I returned to Paris from the French front, our train
stopped at some intermediate station alongside of another train
of wounded men. Exactly opposite our compartment was a car. It
arrested our conversation. It was, as it were, an ambulance
/de grand luxe/; it was a thing of very light, bright wood
and very golden decorations; at one end of it was painted very
large and fair the Stars and Stripes, and at the other fair-sized
letters of gold proclaimed--I am sure the lady will not resent
this added gleam of publicity--"Presented by Mrs. William
Vanderbilt."
My companions were French writers and French military men, and
they were discussing with very keen interest that persistent
question, "the ideal battery." But that ambulance sent a shaft
of light into our carriage, and we stared together.
Then Colonel Z pointed with two fingers and remarked to us,
without any excess of admiration:
"/America!/"
Then he shrugged his shoulders and pulled down the corners of his
mouth.
We felt there was nothing more to add to that, and after a little
pause the previous question was resumed.
I state these things in order to make it clear that America will
start at a disadvantage when she starts upon the mission of
salvage and reconciliation which is, I believe, her proper
role in this world conflict. One would have to be blind
and deaf on this side to be ignorant of European persuasion of
America's triviality. I would not like to be an American
travelling in Europe now, and those I meet here and there have
some of the air of men who at any moment may be dunned for a
debt. They explode without provocation into excuses and
expostulations.
And I will further confess that when Viscount Grey answered the
intimations of President Wilson and ex-President Taft of an
American initiative to found a World League for Peace, by asking
if America was prepared to back that idea with force, he spoke
the doubts of all thoughtful European men. No one but an
American deeply versed in the idiosyncrasies of the American
population can answer that question, or tell us how far the
delusion of world isolation which has prevailed in America for
several generations has been dispelled. But if the answer to
Lord Grey is "Yes," then I think history will emerge with a
complete justification of the obstinate maintenance of neutrality
by America. It is the end that reveals a motive. It is our
ultimate act that sometimes teaches us our original intention.
No one can judge the United States yet. Were you neutral because
you are too mean and cowardly, or too stupidly selfish, or
because you had in view an end too great to be sacrificed to a
moment of indignant pride and a force in reserve too precious to
dispel? That is the still open question for America.
Every country is a mixture of many strands. There is a Base
America, there is a Dull America, there is an Ideal and Heroic
America. And I am convinced that at present Europe underrates
and misjudges the possibilities of the latter.
All about the world to-day goes a certain freemasonry of thought.
It is an impalpable and hardly conscious union of intention. It
thinks not in terms of national but human experience; it falls
into directions and channels of thinking that lead inevitably to
the idea of a world-state under the rule of one righteousness.
In no part of the world is this modern type of mind so abundantly
developed, less impeded by antiquated and perverse political and
religious forms, and nearer the sources of political and
administrative power, than in America. It does not seem to
matter what thousand other things America may happen to be,
seeing that it is also that. And so, just as I cling to the
belief, in spite of hundreds of adverse phenomena, that the
religious and social stir of these times must ultimately go far
to unify mankind under the kingship of God, so do I cling also to
the persuasion that there are intellectual forces among the
rational elements in the belligerent centres, among the other
neutrals and in America, that will co-operate in enabling the
United States to play that role of the Unimpassioned Third
Party, which becomes more and more necessary to a generally
satisfactory ending of the war.
4
The idea that the settlement of this war must be what one might
call an unimpassioned settlement or, if you will, a scientific
settlement or a judicial and not a treaty settlement, a
settlement, that is, based upon some conception of what is right
and necessary rather than upon the relative success or failure of
either set of belligerents to make its Will the standard of
decision, is one that, in a great variety of forms and partial
developments, I find gaining ground in the most different
circles. The war was an adventure, it was the German adventure
under the Hohenzollern tradition, to dominate the world. It was
to be the last of the Conquests. It has failed. Without calling
upon the reserve strength of America the civilised world has
defeated it, and the war continues now partly upon the issue
whether it shall be made for ever impossible, and partly because
Germany has no organ but its Hohenzollern organisation through
which it can admit its failure and develop its latent readiness
for a new understanding on lines of mutual toleration. For that
purpose nothing more reluctant could be devised than Hohenzollern
imperialism. But the attention of every new combatant--it is not
only Germany now--has been concentrated upon military
necessities; every nation is a clenched nation, with its powers
of action centred in its own administration, bound by many
strategic threats and declarations, and dominated by the idea of
getting and securing advantages. It is inevitable that a
settlement made in a conference of belligerents alone will be
shortsighted, harsh, limited by merely incidental necessities,
and obsessed by the idea of hostilities and rivalries continuing
perennially; it will be a trading of advantages for subsequent
attacks. It will be a settlement altogether different in effect
as well as in spirit from a world settlement made primarily to
establish a new phase in the history of mankind.
Let me take three instances of the impossibility of complete
victory /on either side/ giving a solution satisfactory to
the conscience and intelligence of reasonable men.
The first--on which I will not expatiate, for everyone knows of
its peculiar difficulty--is Poland.
The second is a little one, but one that has taken hold of my
imagination. In the settlement of boundaries preceding this war
the boundary between Serbia and north-eastern Albania was drawn
with an extraordinary disregard of the elementary needs of the
Albanians of that region. It ran along the foot of the mountains
which form their summer pastures and their refuge from attack,
and it cut their mountains off from their winter pastures and
market towns. Their whole economic life was cut to pieces and
existence rendered intolerable for them. Now an intelligent
Third Party settling Europe would certainly restore these market
towns, Ipek, Jakova, and Prisrend, to Albania. But the Albanians
have no standing in this war; theirs is the happy lot that might
have fallen to Belgium had she not resisted; the war goes to and
fro through Albania; and when the settlement comes, it is highly
improbable that the slightest notice will be taken of Albania's
plight in the region. In which case these particular Albanians
will either be driven into exile to America or they will be
goaded to revolt, which will be followed no doubt by the punitive
procedure usual in the Balkan peninsula.
For my third instance I would step from a matter as small as
three market towns and the grazing of a few thousand head of
sheep to a matter as big as the world. What is going to happen
to the shipping of the world after this war? The Germans, with
that combination of cunning and stupidity which baffles the rest
of mankind, have set themselves to destroy the mercantile marine
not merely of Britain and France but of Norway and Sweden,
Holland, and all the neutral countries. The German papers openly
boast that they are building up a big mercantile marine that will
start out to take up the world's overseas trade directly peace is
declared. Every such boast receives careful attention in the
British press. We have heard a very great deal about the German
will-to-power in this war, but there is something very much older
and tougher and less blatant and conspicuous, the British will.
In the British papers there has appeared and gained a permanent
footing this phrase, "ton for ton." This means that Britain will
go on fighting until she has exacted and taken over from Germany
the exact equivalent of all the British shipping Germany has
submarined. People do not realise that a time may come when
Germany will be glad and eager to give Russia, France and Italy
all that they require of her, when Great Britain may be quite
content to let her allies make an advantageous peace and herself
still go on fighting Germany. She does not intend to let that
furtively created German mercantile marine ship or coal or exist
upon the high seas--so long as it can be used as an economic
weapon against her. Neither Britain nor France nor Italy can
tolerate anything of the sort.
It has been the peculiar boast of Great Britain that her shipping
has been unpatriotic. She has been the impartial carrier of the
whole world. Her shippers may have served their own profit; they
have never served hers. The fluctuations of freight charges may
have been a universal nuisance, but they have certainly not been
an aggressive national conspiracy. It is Britain's case against
any German ascendancy at sea, an entirely convincing case, that
such an ascendancy would be used ruthlessly for the advancement
of German world power. The long-standing freedom of the seas
vanishes at the German touch. So beyond the present war there
opens the agreeable prospect of a mercantile struggle, a bitter
freight war and a war of Navigation Acts for the ultimate control
in the interests of Germany or of the Anti-German allies, of the
world's trade.
Now how in any of these three cases can the bargaining and
trickery of diplomatists and the advantage-hunting of the
belligerents produce any stable and generally beneficial
solution? What all the neutrals want, what every rational and
far-sighted man in the belligerent countries wants, what the
common sense of the whole world demands, is neither the
"ascendancy" of Germany nor the "ascendancy" of Great Britain nor
the "ascendancy" of any state or people or interest in the
shipping of the world. The plain right thing is a world shipping
control, as impartial as the Postal Union. What right and reason
and the welfare of coming generations demand in Poland is a
unified and autonomous Poland, with Cracow, Danzig, and Posen
brought into the same Polish-speaking ring-fence with Warsaw.
What everyone who has looked into the Albanian question desires
is that the Albanians shall pasture their flocks and market their
sheepskins in peace, free of Serbian control. In every country
at present at war, the desire of the majority of people is for a
non-contentious solution that will neither crystallise a triumph
nor propitiate an enemy, but which will embody the economic and
ethnological and geographical common sense of the matter. But
while the formulae of national belligerence are easy,
familiar, blatant, and instantly present, the gentler, greater
formulae of that wider and newer world pacifism has still to
be generally understood. It is so much easier to hate and
suspect than negotiate generously and patiently; it is so much
harder to think than to let go in a shrill storm of hostility.
The rational pacifist is hampered not only by belligerency, but
by a sort of malignant extreme pacifism as impatient and silly as
the extremest patriotism.
5
I sketch out these ideas of a world pacification from a third-
party standpoint, because I find them crystallising out in men's
minds. I note how men discuss the suggestion that America may
play a large part in such a permanent world pacification. There
I end my account rendered. These things are as much a part of my
impression of the war as a shell-burst on the Carso or the yellow
trenches at Martinpuich. But I do not know how opinion is going
in America, and I am quite unable to estimate the power of these
new ideas I set down, relative to the blind forces of instinct
and tradition that move the mass of mankind. On the whole I
believe more in the reason-guided will-power of men than I did in
the early half of 1914. If I am doubtful whether after all this
war will "end war," I think on the other hand it has had such an
effect of demonstration that it may start a process of thought
and conviction, it may sow the world with organisations and
educational movements considerable enough to grapple with an
either arrest or prevent the next great war catastrophe. I am by
no means sure even now that this is not the last great war in the
experience of men. I still believe it may be.
The most dangerous thing in the business so far is concerned is
the wide disregard of the fact that national economic fighting is
bound to cause war, and the almost universal ignorance of the
necessity of subjecting shipping and overseas and international
trade to some kind of international control. These two things,
restraint of trade and advantage of shipping, are the chief
material causes of anger between modern states. But they would
not be in themselves dangerous things if it were not for the
exaggerated delusions of kind and difference, and the crack-
brained "loyalties" arising out of these, that seem still to rule
men's minds. Years ago I came to the conviction that much of the
evil in human life was due to the inherent vicious disposition of
the human mind to intensify classification.[*See my "First and
Last Things," Book I. and my "Modern Utopia," Chapter X.] I do
not know how it will strike the reader, but to me this war, this
slaughter of eight or nine million people, is due almost entirely
to this little, almost universal lack of clear-headedness; I
believe that the share of wickedness in making war is quite
secondary to the share of this universal shallow silliness of
outlook. These effigies of emperors and kings and statesmen that
lead men into war, these legends of nationality and glory, would
collapse before our universal derision, if they were not stuffed
tight and full with the unthinking folly of the common man.
There is in all of us an indolent capacity for suffering evil and
dangerous things, that I contemplate each year of my life with a
deepening incredulity. I perceive we suffer them; I record the
futile protests of the intelligence. It seems to me incredible
that men should not rise up out of this muddy, bloody, wasteful
mess of a world war, with a resolution to end for ever the shams,
the prejudices, the pretences and habits that have impoverished
their lives, slaughtered our sons, and wasted the world, a
resolution so powerful and sustained that nothing could withstand
it.
But it is not apparent that any such will arises. Does it appear
at all? I find it hard to answer that question because my own
answer varies with my mood. There are moods when it seems to me
that nothing of the sort is happening. This war has written its
warning in letters of blood and flame and anguish in the skies of
mankind for two years and a half. When I look for the collective
response to that warning, I see a multitude of little chaps
crawling about their private ends like mites in an old cheese.
The kings are still in their places, not a royal prince has been
killed in this otherwise universal slaughter; when the fatuous
portraits of the monarchs flash upon the screen the widows and
orphans still break into loyal song. The ten thousand religions
of mankind are still ten thousand religions, all busy at keeping
men apart and hostile. I see scarcely a measurable step made
anywhere towards that world kingdom of God, which is, I assert,
the manifest solution, the only formula that can bring peace to
all mankind. Mankind as a whole seems to have learnt nothing and
forgotten nothing in thirty months of war.
And then on the other hand I am aware of much quiet talking.
This book tells of how I set out to see the war, and it is
largely conversation.... Perhaps men have always expected
miracles to happen; if one had always lived in the night and only
heard tell of the day, I suppose one would have expected dawn to
come as a vivid flash of light. I suppose one would still think
it was night long after the things about one had crept out of the
darkness into visibility. In comparison with all previous wars
there has been much more thinking and much more discussion. If
most of the talk seems to be futile, if it seems as if everyone
were talking and nobody doing, it does not follow that things are
not quietly slipping and sliding out of their old adjustments
amidst the babble and because of the babble. Multitudes of men
must be struggling with new ideas. It is reasonable to argue
that there must be reconsideration, there must be time, before
these millions of mental efforts can develop into a new
collective purpose and really /show/--in consequences.
But that they will do so is my hope always and, on the whole,
except in moods of depression and impatience, my belief. When
one has travelled to a conviction so great as mine it is
difficult to doubt that other men faced by the same universal
facts will not come to the same conclusion. I believe that only
through a complete simplification o religion to its fundamental
idea, to a world-wide realisation of God as the king of the heart
and of all mankind, setting aside monarchy and national egotism
altogether, can mankind come to any certain happiness and
security. The precedent of Islam helps my faith in the creative
inspiration of such a renascence of religion. The Sikh, the
Moslem, the Puritan have shown that men can fight better for a
Divine Idea than for any flag or monarch in the world. It seems
to me that illusions fade and effigies lose credit everywhere.
It is a very wonderful thing to me that China is now a
republic.... I take myself to be very nearly an average man,
abnormal only by reason of a certain mental rapidity. I conceive
myself to be thinking as the world thinks, and if I find no great
facts, I find a hundred little indications to reassure me that
God comes. Even those who have neither the imagination nor the
faith to apprehend God as a reality will, I think, realise
presently that the Kingdom of God over a world-wide system of
republican states, is the only possible formula under which we
may hope to unify and save mankind.