New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 1, No. 1
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Title: New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 1, No. 1
Author: Various
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEW YORK TIMES CURRENT HISTORY: THE EUROPEAN WAR, VOL 1, NO. 1 ***
THE NEW YORK TIMES
CURRENT HISTORY
A MONTHLY MAGAZINE
THE EUROPEAN WAR
VOLUME I.
From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index
[Illustration]
NEW YORK THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY 1915
Copyright 1914, 1915, By The New York Times Company
CONTENTS
NUMBER I.
WHAT MEN OF LETTERS SAY
Page
COMMON SENSE ABOUT THE WAR 11
_By George Bernard Shaw_
SHAW'S NONSENSE ABOUT BELGIUM 60
_By Arnold Bennett_
BENNETT STATES THE GERMAN CASE 63
_By George Bernard Shaw_
FLAWS IN SHAW'S LOGIC 65
_By Cunninghame Graham_
EDITORIAL COMMENT ON SHAW 66
SHAW EMPTY OF GOOD SENSE 68
_By Christabel Pankhurst_
COMMENT BY READING OF SHAW 73
OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT WILSON 76
_By George Bernard Shaw_
A GERMAN LETTER TO G. BERNARD SHAW 80
_By Herbert Eulenberg_
BRITISH AUTHORS DEFEND ENGLAND'S WAR 82
_With Facsimile Signatures_
THE FOURTH OF AUGUST--EUROPE AT WAR 87
_By H.G. Wells_
IF THE GERMANS RAID ENGLAND 89
_By H.G. Wells_
SIR OLIVER LODGE'S COMMENT 92
WHAT THE GERMAN CONSCRIPT THINKS 93
_By Arnold Bennett_
FELIX ADLER'S COMMENT 95
WHEN PEACE IS SERIOUSLY DESIRED 97
_By Arnold Bennett_
BARRIE AT BAY: WHICH WAS BROWN? 100
_An Interview on the War_
A CREDO FOR KEEPING FAITH 102
_By John Galsworthy_
HARD BLOWS, NOT HARD WORDS 103
_By Jerome K. Jerome_
"AS THEY TESTED OUR FATHERS" 106
_By Rudyard Kipling_
KIPLING AND "THE TRUCE OF THE BEAR" 107
ON THE IMPENDING CRISIS 107
_By Norman Angell_
WHY ENGLAND CAME TO BE IN IT 108
_By Gilbert K. Chesterton_
SOUTH AFRICA'S BOERS AND BRITONS 125
_By H. Rider Haggard_
CAPT. MARK HAGGARD'S DEATH IN BATTLE 128
_By H. Rider Haggard_
AN ANTI-CHRISTIAN WAR 129
_By Robert Bridges_
ENGLISH ARTISTS' PROTEST 130
TO ARMS! 132
_By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle_
CONAN DOYLE ON BRITISH MILITARISM 140
THE NEED OF BEING MERCILESS 144
_By Maurice Maeterlinck_
LETTERS TO DR. NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 146
_By Baron d'Estournelles de Constant_
THE VITAL ENERGIES OF FRANCE 153
_By Henri Bergson_
FRANCE THROUGH ENGLISH EYES 153
_With Rene Bazin's Appreciation_
THE SOLDIER OF 1914 156
_By Rene Doumic_
GERMANY'S CIVILIZED BARBARISM 160
_By Emile Boutroux_
THE GERMAN RELIGION OF DUTY 170
_By Gabriele Reuter_
A LETTER TO GERHART HAUPTMANN 174
_By Romain Rolland_
A REPLY TO ROLLAND 175
_By Gerhart Hauptmann_
ANOTHER REPLY TO ROLLAND 176
_By Karl Wolfskehl_
ARE WE BARBARIANS? 178
_By Gerhart Hauptmann_
TO AMERICANS FROM A GERMAN FRIEND 180
_By Ludwig Fulda_
APPEAL TO THE CIVILIZED WORLD 185
_By Professors of Germany_
APPEAL OF THE GERMAN UNIVERSITIES 187
REPLY TO THE GERMAN PROFESSORS 188
_By British Scholars_
CONCERNING THE GERMAN PROFESSORS 192
_By Frederic Harrison_
THE REPLY FROM FRANCE 194
_By M. Yves Guyot and Prof Bellet_
TO AMERICANS IN GERMANY 198
_By Prof. Adolf von Harnack_
A REPLY TO PROF. HARNACK 201
_By Some British Theologians_
PROF. HARNACK IN REBUTTAL 203
THE CAUSES OF THE WAR 206
_By Theodore Niemeyer_
COMMENT BY DR. MAX WALTER 208
NUMBER II.
WHO BEGAN THE WAR AND WHY?
SPEECHES BY KAISER WILHELM II. 210
THE MIGHTY FATE OF EUROPE 219
_As Interpreted by Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg,
German Imperial Chancellor._
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY'S VERSION OF THE WAR 226
_By Kaiser Frawz Josef and Count Berchtold_
A GERMAN REVIEW OF THE EVIDENCE 228
_Certified by Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, German ex-Colonial
Secretary_
"TRUTH ABOUT GERMANY" 244
_Attested by Thirty-four German Dignitaries_
SPECULATIONS ABOUT PEACE, SEPTEMBER, 1914 273
_Report by James W. Gerard, American Ambassador at Berlin, to
President Wilson._
FIRST WARNINGS OF EUROPE'S PERIL 277
_Speeches by British Ministers_
GREAT BRITAIN'S MOBILIZATION 294
_Measures Taken Throughout the Empire Upon the Outbreak of War_
SUMMONS OF THE NATION TO ARMS 308
_British People Roused by Their Leaders_
TEACHINGS OF GEN. VON BERNHARDI 343
_By Viscount Bryce_
ENTRANCE OF FRANCE INTO THE WAR 350
_By President Poincare and Premier Viviani_
RUSSIA TO HER ENEMY 358
"THE FACTS ABOUT BELGIUM" 365
_Statement Issued by the Belgian Legation at Washington_
BELGO-BRITISH PLOT ALLEGED BY GERMANY 369
_Statement Issued by German Embassy at Washington, Oct. 13._
ATROCITIES OF THE WAR 374
BOMBARDMENT OF RHEIMS CATHEDRAL 392
_Protest Issued to Neutral Powers from French Foreign Office,
Bordeaux, Sept. 21._
THE SOCIALISTS' PART 397
NUMBER III.
WHAT AMERICANS SAY TO EUROPE
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF CIVILIZATION 413
_Argued by James M. Beck_
CRITICS DISPUTE MR. BECK 431
DEFENSE OF THE DUAL ALLIANCE--REPLY 438
_By Dr. Edmund von Mach_
WHAT GLADSTONE SAID ABOUT BELGIUM 448
_By George Louis Beer_
FIGHT TO THE BITTER END 451
_An Interview with Andrew Carnegie_
WOMAN AND WAR--"Shot, Tell His Mother" (Poem) 458
_By W.E.P. French, Captain, U.S. Army_
THE WAY TO PEACE 459
_An Interview with Jacob H. Schiff_
PROF. MATHER ON MR. SCHIFF 464
THE ELIOT-SCHIFF LETTERS 465
_By Jacob H. Schiff and Charles W. Eliot_
LA CATHEDRALE (Poem Translated by Frances C. Fay) 472
_By Edmond Rostand_
PROBABLE CAUSES AND OUTCOME OF THE WAR 473
_Series of Five Letters by Charles W. Eliot,
with Related Correspondence_
THE LORD OF HOSTS (Poem) 501
_By Joseph B. Gilder_
A WAR OF DISHONOR 502
_By David Starr Jordan_
MIGHT OR RIGHT 503
_By John Grier Hibben_
JEANNE D'ARC--1914 (Poem) 506
_By Alma Durant Nicholson_
THE KAISER AND BELGIUM (With controversial letters) 507
_By John W. Burgess_
AMERICA'S PERIL IN JUDGING GERMANY 515
_By William M. Sloane_
POSSIBLE PROFITS FROM WAR 526
_Interview with Franklin H. Giddings_
"TO AMERICANS LEAVING GERMANY" 533
_A German Circular_
GERMAN DECLARATIONS 534
_By Rudolf Eucken and Ernst Haeckel_
THE EUCKEN AND HAECKEL CHARGES 537
_By John Warbeke_
CONCERNING GERMAN CULTURE 541
_By Brander Matthews_
CULTURE VS. KULTUR 543
_By Frank Jewett Mather, Jr._
THE TRESPASS IN BELGIUM 545
_By John Grier Hibben_
APPORTIONING THE BLAME 548
_By Arthur v. Briesen_
PARTING (Poem) 553
_By Louise von Wetter_
FRENCH HATE AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY 554
_By Kuno Francke_
IN DEFENSE OF AUSTRIA 559
_By Baron L. Hengelmuller_
RUSSIAN ATROCITIES 563
_By George Haven Putnam_
"THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE" 565
_Interview with Nicholas Murray Butler_
A NEW WORLD MAP 571
_By Wilhelm Ostwald_
THE VERDICT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 573
_By Newell Dwight Hillis_
TIPPERARY (Poem) 581
_By John B. Kennedy_
AS AMERICA SEES THE WAR 582
_By Harold Begbie_
TO MELOS, POMEGRANATE ISLE (Poem) 587
_By Grace Harriet Macurdy_
WHAT AMERICA CAN DO 588
_By Lord Channing of Wellingborough_
TO A COUSIN GERMAN (Poem) 593
_By Adeline Adams_
WHAT THE ECONOMIC EFFECTS MAY BE 594
_By Irving Fisher_
EFFECTS OF WAR ON AMERICA 600
_By Roland G. Usher_
GERMANY OF THE FUTURE 605
_Interview with M. de Lapredelle_
GERMANY THE AGGRESSOR 609
_By Albert Sauveur_
MILITARISM AND CHRISTIANITY 610
_By Lyman Abbott_
VIGIL (Poem) 612
_By Hortense Flexner_
NIETZSCHE AND GERMAN CULTURE 613
_By Abraham Solomon_
BELGIUM'S BITTER NEED 614
_By Sir Gilbert Parker_
NUMBER IV.
THE WAR AT CLOSE QUARTERS
SIR JOHN FRENCH'S OWN STORY 619
_Famous Dispatches of the
British Commander in Chief to Lord Kitchener_
STORY OF THE "EYE WITNESS" 650
_By Col. E.D. Swinton of the Intelligence
Department of the British General Staff_
THE DAWN OF A NEW DAY (Poem) 678
_By Edward Neville Vose_
THE GERMAN ENTRY INTO BRUSSELS (With Map) 679
_By John Boon_
THE FALL OF ANTWERP 682
_By a Correspondent of The London
Daily Chronicle_
AS THE FRENCH FELL BACK ON PARIS 689
_By G.H. Perris_
THE RETREAT TO PARIS 691
_By Philip Gibbs_
A ZOUAVE'S STORY 704
_By Philip Gibbs_
WHEN WAR BURST ON ARRAS 707
_By a Special Correspondent_
THE BATTLES IN BELGIUM (With Map) 711
_By The Associated Press_
SEEKING WOUNDED ON BATTLE FRONT 714
_By Philip Gibbs_
AT THE KAISER'S HEADQUARTERS 718
_By Cyril Brown of The New York Times_
HOW THE BELGIANS FIGHT 725
_By a Correspondent of The London Daily News_
A VISIT TO THE FIRING LINE IN FRANCE 727
_By a Correspondent of The New York Times_
UNBURIED DEAD STREW LORRAINE (With Map) 729
_By Philip Gibbs_
ALONG THE GERMAN LINES NEAR METZ 731
_By The Associated Press_
THE SLAUGHTER IN ALSACE 736
_By John H. Cox_
RENNENKAMPF ON THE RUSSIAN BORDER 738
_By a Correspondent of The London
Daily Chronicle_
THE FIRST FIGHT AT LODZ (With Map) 740
_By Perceval Gibbon_
THE FIRST INVASION OF SERBIA (With Map) 742
_By a Correspondent of The London Standard_
THE ATTACK ON TSING-TAU 745
_By Jefferson Jones_
THE GERMAN ATTACK ON TAHITI 748
_As Told by Miss Geni La France, an Eyewitness_
THE BLOODLESS CAPTURE OF GERMAN SAMOA 749
_By Malcolm Ross, F.R.G.S._
HOW THE CRESSY SANK 752
_By Edgar Rowan_
GERMAN STORY OF THE HELIGOLAND FIGHT 754
_By a Special Correspondent of The New York Times_
THE SINKING OF THE CRESSY AND THE HOGUE 755
_By the Senior Surviving Officers,
Commander Bertram W.L. Nicholson and
Commander Reginald A. Norton_
THE SINKING OF THE HAWKE 757
_By a Correspondent of The London
Daily Chronicle_
THE EMDEN'S LAST FIGHT 758
_By the Cable Operator at Cocos Islands_
CROWDS SEE THE NIGER SINK 760
_By a Correspondent of The London
Daily Chronicle_
LIEUTENANT WEDDIGEN'S OWN STORY 762
_By Herbert B. Swope and Capt. Lieut. Otto
Weddigen_
THE SOLILOQUY OF AN OLD SOLDIER (Poem) 764
_By O.C.A. Child_
THE EFFECTS OF WAR IN FOUR COUNTRIES 765
_By Irvin S. Cobb_
HOW PARIS DROPPED GAYETY 767
_By Anne Rittenhouse_
PARIS IN OCTOBER 770
_From The London Times_
FRANCE AND ENGLAND AS SEEN IN WAR TIME 772
_Interview with F. Hopkinson Smith_
THE HELPLESS VICTIMS 776
_By Mrs. Nina Larrey Duryee_
A NEW RUSSIA MEETS GERMANY 777
_By Perceval Gibbon_
BELGIAN CITIES GERMANIZED 780
_By Cyril Brown of The New York Times_
THE BELGIAN RUIN 786
_By J.H. Whitehouse, M.P._
THE WOUNDED SERB 788
_From The London Times_
SPY ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND 790
_British Home Office Communication_
CHRONOLOGY OF THE WAR 793
THE MEN OF THE EMDEN (Poem) 816
_By Thomas R. Ybarra_
NUMBER V.
THE NEW RUSSIA SPEAKS
AN APPEAL BY RUSSIAN AUTHORS, ARTISTS AND ACTORS 817
_With Their Signatures_
RUSSIA IN LITERATURE 819
_By British Men of Letters_
RUSSIA AND EUROPE'S WAR 821
_By Paul Vinogradoff_
RUSSIAN APPEAL FOR THE POLES 825
_By A. Konovalov of the Russian Duma_
I AM FOR PEACE (Poem) 826
_By Lurana Sheldon_
UNITED RUSSIA 827
_By Peter Struve_
PRINCE TRUBETSKOI'S APPEAL TO RUSSIANS 830
_To Help the Polish Victims of War_
HOW PROHIBITION CAME TO RUSSIA 831
_An Interview with the Reformer Tchelisheff_
INFLUENCE OF THE WAR UPON RUSSIAN INDUSTRY 834
_By the Russian Ministry of Commerce_
DECLARATION OF THE RUSSIAN INDUSTRIAL INTERESTS 835
A RUSSIAN FINANCIAL AUTHORITY ON THE WAR 836
_By Prof. Migoulin_
PROPOSED INTERNAL LOANS OF RUSSIA 837
(_Prof. Migoulin's Plan_)
HOW RUSSIAN MANUFACTURERS FEEL 838
_Digested from Russkia Vedomosti_
NEW SOURCES OF REVENUE NEEDED 839
_By A. Sokolov_
OUR RUSSIAN ALLY 840
_By Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace_
CONFISCATION OF GERMAN PATENTS 849
_By the Russian Ministry of Commerce_
A RUSSIAN INCOME TAX 850
_Proposed by the Ministry of Finance_
TOOLS OF THE RUSSIAN JUGGERNAUT 851
_By M.J. Bonn_
FATE OF THE JEWS IN POLAND 854
_By Georg Brandes_
COMMERCIAL TREATIES AFTER THE WAR 863
_By P. Maslov_
PHOTOGRAPHIC REVIEW OF THE WAR 865
_48 War Pictures Printed in Rotogravure_
PATRIOTISM AND ENDURANCE 913
_The Pastoral Letter of Cardinal D.J. Mercier,
Archbishop of Malines_
APPEAL TO AMERICA FOR BELGIUM (Poem) 924
_By Thomas Hardy_
WITH THE GERMAN ARMY 925
_By Cyril Brown_
STORY OF THE MAN WHO FIRED ON RHEIMS CATHEDRAL 928
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS'S COMMENT 931
THE GERMAN AIRMEN 932
GERMAN GENERALS TALK OF THE WAR 934
SWIFT REVERSAL TO BARBARISM 939
_By Vance Thompson_
CIVIL LIFE IN BERLIN 943
_From The London Times_
BELGIAN BOY TELLS STORY OF AERSCHOT 945
_From The New York Times_
THE NEUTRALS (Poem) 948
_By Beatrice Barry_
FIFTEEN MINUTES ON THE YSER 949
_From The New York Times_
SEEING NIEUPORT UNDER SHELL FIRE 951
_From The New York Times_
RAID ON SCARBOROUGH SEEN FROM A WINDOW 954
_By Ruth Kauffmann_
HOW THE BARONESS HID HER HUSBAND ON A VESSEL 956
_From The New York Times_
WARSAW SWAMPED WITH REFUGEES 957
_By H.W. Bodkinson_
AFTER THE RUSSIAN ADVANCE IN GALICIA 958
_From The London Times_
OFFICER IN BATTLE HAD LITTLE FEELING 959
_By The Associated Press_
THE BATTLE OF NEW YEAR'S DAY 961
_By Perceval Gibbon_
BASS'S STORY 963
_From The New York Times_
THE WASTE OF GERMAN LIVES 964
_By Perceval Gibbon_
THE FLIGHT INTO SWITZERLAND 966
_By Ethel Therese Hugh_
ONCE FAIR BELGRADE IS A SKELETON CITY 969
_From The New York Times_
LETTERS AND DIARIES 971
_A Group of Soldiers' Letters_
"CHANT OF HATE AGAINST ENGLAND" 984
_How Ernst Lissauer's Lines were
"Sung to Pieces" in Germany_
ANSWERING THE "CHANT OF HATE" 988
_By Beatrice M. Barry_
ENGLAND CAUSED THE WAR 989
_By T. von Bethmann-Hollweg, German
Imperial Chancellor_
A SONG OF THE SIEGE GUN (Poem) 992
_By Katharine Drayton Mayrant Simons, Jr._
WHY ENGLAND FIGHTS GERMANY 993
_By Hilaire Belloc_
AT THE VILLA ACHILLEION, CORFU (Poem) 999
_By H.T. Sudduth_
GERMANY'S STRATEGIC RAILWAYS (With Map) 1000
_By Walter Littlefield_
GLORY OF WAR (Poem) 1004
_By Adeline Adams_
CHRONOLOGY OF THE WAR 1007
NUMBER VI.
THE CALDRON OF THE BALKANS
HOW TURKEY WENT TO WAR 1025
SERBIA AND HER NEIGHBORS 1036
LITTLE MONTENEGRO SPEAKS 1043
BULGARIA'S ATTITUDE 1044
GREECE'S WATCHFUL WAITING 1050
WHERE RUMANIA STANDS IN THE CRISIS 1054
EXIT ALBANIA? 1062
THE WAR IN THE BALKANS 1068
_By A.T. Polyzoides_
THE EUROPEAN WAR AS SEEN BY CARTOONISTS 1073
GERMANY VS. BELGIUM 1101
_Case of the Secret Military Documents
Presented by Both Sides_
THE BIG AND THE GREAT (Poem) 1114
_By William Archer_
"FROM THE BODY OF THIS DEATH" (Poem) 1119
_By Sidney Low_
"A SCRAP OF PAPER" 1120
_By Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg
and Sir Edward Grey_
THE KAISER AT DONCHERY 1125
_By The Associated Press_
HAIL! A HYMN TO BELGIUM (Music by F.H. Cowen) 1126
_By John Galsworthy_
HOLLAND'S FUTURE (With Map) 1128
_By H.G. Wells_
FRENCH OFFICIAL REPORT ON GERMAN ATROCITIES 1133
A FRENCH MAYOR'S PUNISHMENT 1163
_By The Associated Press_
WE WILL FIGHT TO THE END 1164
_By Premier Viviani of France_
_NUITS BLANCHES_ 1166
_By H.S. Haskins_
UNCONQUERED FRANCE 1167
_From the Bulletin Francais_
FOUR MONTHS OF WAR (With Map) 1169
_From the Bulletin des Armees_
LONG LIVE THE ALLIES! 1174
_By Claude Monet_
UNITED STATES FAIR TO ALL 1175
_By William J. Bryan,
American Secretary of State_
THE HOUSE WITH SEALED DOORS (Poem) 1183
_By Edith M. Thomas_
SEIZURES OF AMERICAN CARGOES 1184
_By William J. Bryan,
American Secretary of State_
GERMAN CROWN PRINCE TO AMERICA 1187
_By The Associated Press_
THE OFFICIAL BRITISH EXPLANATION 1188
_By Sir Edward Grey_
ITALY AND THE WAR (With Map) 1192
_By William Roscoe Thayer_
HE HEARD THE BUGLES CALLING (Poem) 1198
_By Carey C.D. Briggs_
GERMAN SOLDIERS WRITE HOME 1199
WAR CORRESPONDENCE 1207
THE BROKEN ROSE (TO KING ALBERT) 1210
_By Annie Vivanti Chartres_
THE HEROIC LANGUAGE (Poem) 1216
_By Alice Meynell_
CHRONOLOGY OF THE WAR 1224
TO HIS MAJESTY KING ALBERT (Poem) 1228
_By William Watson_
[Illustration: GEORGE BERNARD SHAW]
[Illustration: ARNOLD BENNETT. _See Page_ 60]
"Common Sense About the War"
By George Bernard Shaw.
I.
"_Let a European war break out--the war, perhaps, between the
Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, which so many journalists
and politicians in England and Germany contemplate with criminal
levity. If the combatants prove to be equally balanced, it may,
after the first battles, smoulder on for thirty years. What will be
the population of London, or Manchester, or Chemnitz, or Bremen, or
Milan, at the end of it_?" ("The Great Society," by Graham Wallas.
June, 1914.)
(_Copyright, 1914, By The New York Times Company._)
The time has now come to pluck up courage and begin to talk and write
soberly about the war. At first the mere horror of it stunned the more
thoughtful of us; and even now only those who are not in actual contact
with or bereaved relation to its heartbreaking wreckage can think sanely
about it, or endure to hear others discuss it coolly. As to the
thoughtless, well, not for a moment dare I suggest that for the first
few weeks they were all scared out of their wits; for I know too well
that the British civilian does not allow his perfect courage to be
questioned; only experienced soldiers and foreigners are allowed the
infirmity of fear. But they certainly were--shall I say a little upset?
They felt in that solemn hour that England was lost if only one single
traitor in their midst let slip the truth about anything in the
universe. It was a perilous time for me. I do not hold my tongue easily;
and my inborn dramatic faculty and professional habit as a playwright
prevent me from taking a one-sided view even when the most probable
result of taking a many-sided one is prompt lynching. Besides, until
Home Rule emerges from its present suspended animation, I shall retain
my Irish capacity for criticising England with something of the
detachment of a foreigner, and perhaps with a certain slightly malicious
taste for taking the conceit out of her. Lord Kitchener made a mistake
the other day in rebuking the Irish volunteers for not rallying faster
to the defense of "their country." They do not regard it as their
country yet. He should have asked them to come forward as usual and help
poor old England through a stiff fight. Then it would have been all
right.
Having thus frankly confessed my bias, which you can allow for as a
rifleman allows for the wind, I give my views for what they are worth.
They will be of some use; because, however blinded I may be by prejudice
or perversity, my prejudices in this matter are not those which blind
the British patriot, and therefore I am fairly sure to see some things
that have not yet struck him.
And first, I do not see this war as one which has welded Governments and
peoples into complete and sympathetic solidarity as against the common
enemy. I see the people of England united in a fierce detestation and
defiance of the views and acts of Prussian Junkerism. And I see the
German people stirred to the depths by a similar antipathy to English
Junkerism, and anger at the apparent treachery and duplicity of the
attack made on them by us in their extremest peril from France and
Russia. I see both nations duped, but alas! not quite unwillingly duped,
by their Junkers and Militarists into wreaking on one another the wrath
they should have spent in destroying Junkerism and Militarism in their
own country. And I see the Junkers and Militarists of England and
Germany jumping at the chance they have longed for in vain for many
years of smashing one another and establishing their own oligarchy as
the dominant military power in the world. No doubt the heroic remedy for
this tragic misunderstanding is that both armies should shoot their
officers and go home to gather in their harvests in the villages and
make a revolution in the towns; and though this is not at present a
practicable solution, it must be frankly mentioned, because it or
something like it is always a possibility in a defeated conscript army
if its commanders push it beyond human endurance when its eyes are
opening to the fact that in murdering its neighbours it is biting off
its nose to vex its face, besides riveting the intolerable yoke of
Militarism and Junkerism more tightly than ever on its own neck. But
there is no chance--or, as our Junkers would put it, no danger--of our
soldiers yielding to such an ecstasy of common sense. They have enlisted
voluntarily; they are not defeated nor likely to be; their
communications are intact and their meals reasonably punctual; they are
as pugnacious as their officers; and in fighting Prussia they are
fighting a more deliberate, conscious, tyrannical, personally insolent,
and dangerous Militarism than their own. Still, even for a voluntary
professional army, that possibility exists, just as for the civilian
there is a limit beyond which taxation, bankruptcy, privation, terror,
and inconvenience cannot be pushed without revolution or a social
dissolution more ruinous than submission to conquest. I mention all
this, not to make myself wantonly disagreeable, but because military
persons, thinking naturally that there is nothing like leather, are now
talking of this war as likely to become a permanent institution like the
Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's, forgetting, I think, that the
rate of consumption maintained by modern military operations is much
greater relatively to the highest possible rate of production
maintainable under the restrictions of war time than it has ever been
before.
*The Day of Judgment.*
The European settlement at the end of the war will be effected, let us
hope, not by a regimental mess of fire-eaters sitting around an up-ended
drum in a vanquished Berlin or Vienna, but by some sort of Congress in
which all the Powers (including, very importantly, the United States of
America) will be represented. Now I foresee a certain danger of our
being taken by surprise at that Congress, and making ourselves
unnecessarily difficult and unreasonable, by presenting ourselves to it
in the character of Injured Innocence. We shall not be accepted in that
character. Such a Congress will most certainly regard us as being, next
to the Prussians (if it makes even that exception), the most quarrelsome
people in the universe. I am quite conscious of the surprise and scandal
this anticipation may cause among my more highminded (_hochnaesig_, the
Germans call it) readers. Let me therefore break it gently by
expatiating for a while on the subject of Junkerism and Militarism
generally, and on the history of the literary propaganda of war between
England and Potsdam which has been going on openly for the last forty
years on both sides. I beg the patience of my readers during this
painful operation. If it becomes unbearable, they can always put the
paper down and relieve themselves by calling the Kaiser Attila and Mr.
Keir Hardie a traitor twenty times or so. Then they will feel, I hope,
refreshed enough to resume. For, after all, abusing the Kaiser or Keir
Hardie or me will not hurt the Germans, whereas a clearer view of the
political situation will certainly help us. Besides, I do not believe
that the trueborn Englishman in his secret soul relishes the pose of
Injured Innocence any more than I do myself. He puts it on only because
he is told that it is respectable.
*Junkers All.*
What is a Junker? Is it a German officer of twenty-three, with offensive
manners, and a habit of cutting down innocent civilians with his sabre?
Sometimes; but not at all exclusively that or anything like that. Let us
resort to the dictionary. I turn to the _Encyclopaedisches Woerterbuch_
of Muret Sanders. Excuse its quaint German-English.
*Junker* = Young nobleman, younker, lording, country squire, country
gentleman, squirearch. *Junkerberrschaft* = squirearchy, landocracy.
*Junkerleben* = life of a country gentleman, (_figuratively_) a jolly
life. *Junkerpartei* = country party. *Junkerwirtschaft* = doings of the
country party.
Thus we see that the Junker is by no means peculiar to Prussia. We may
claim to produce the article in a perfection that may well make Germany
despair of ever surpassing us in that line. Sir Edward Grey is a Junker
from his topmost hair to the tips of his toes; and Sir Edward is a
charming man, incapable of cutting down even an Opposition front
bencher, or of telling a German he intends to have him shot. Lord Cromer
is a Junker. Mr. Winston Churchill is an odd and not disagreeable
compound of Junker and Yankee: his frank anti-German pugnacity is
enormously more popular than the moral babble (Milton's phrase) of his
sanctimonious colleagues. He is a bumptious and jolly Junker, just as
Lord Curzon is an uppish Junker. I need not string out the list. In
these islands the Junker is literally all over the shop.
It is very difficult for anyone who is not either a Junker or a
successful barrister to get into an English Cabinet, no matter which
party is in power, or to avoid resigning when we strike up the drum. The
Foreign Office is a Junker Club. Our governing classes are
overwhelmingly Junker: all who are not Junkers are riff-raff whose only
claim to their position is the possession of ability of some sort:
mostly ability to make money. And, of course, the Kaiser is a Junker,
though less true-blue than the Crown Prince, and much less autocratic
than Sir Edward Grey, who, without consulting us, sends us to war by a
word to an ambassador and pledges all our wealth to his foreign allies
by a stroke of his pen.
*What Is a Militarist?*
Now that we know what a Junker is, let us have a look at the
Militarists. A Militarist is a person who believes that all real power
is the power to kill, and that Providence is on the side of the big
battalions. The most famous Militarist at present, thanks to the zeal
with which we have bought and quoted his book, is General Friedrich von
Bernhardi. But we cannot allow the General to take precedence of our own
writers as a Militarist propagandist. I am old enough to remember the
beginning of the anti-German phase of that very ancient propaganda in
England. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 left Europe very much
taken aback. Up to that date nobody was afraid of Prussia, though
everybody was a little afraid of France; and we were keeping "buffer
States" between ourselves and Russia in the east. Germany had indeed
beaten Denmark; but then Denmark was a little State, and was abandoned
in her hour of need by those who should have helped her, to the great
indignation of Ibsen. Germany had also beaten Austria; but somehow
everybody seems able to beat Austria, though nobody seems able to draw
the moral that defeats do not matter as much as the Militarists think,
Austria being as important as ever. Suddenly Germany beat France right
down into the dust, by the exercise of an organized efficiency in war of
which nobody up to then had any conception. There was not a State in
Europe that did not say to itself: "Good Heavens! what would happen if
she attacked _us_?" We in England thought of our old-fashioned army and
our old-fashioned commander George Ranger (of Cambridge), and our War
Office with its Crimean tradition of imbecility; and we shook in our
shoes. But we were not such fools as to leave it at that. We soon
produced the first page of the Bernhardian literature: an anonymous
booklet entitled _The Battle of Dorking_. It was not the first page of
English Militarist literature: you have only to turn back to the burst
of glorification of war which heralded the silly Crimean campaign
(Tennyson's _Maud_ is a surviving sample) to find paeans to Mars which
would have made Treitschke blush (perhaps they did); but it was the
first page in which it was assumed as a matter of course that Germany
and not France or Russia was England's natural enemy. _The Battle of
Dorking_ had an enormous sale; and the wildest guesses were current as
to its authorship. And its moral was "To arms; or the Germans will
besiege London as they besieged Paris." From that time until the
present, the British propaganda of war with Germany has never ceased.
The lead given by _The Battle of Dorking_ was taken up by articles in
the daily press and the magazines. Later on came the Jingo fever
(anti-Russian, by the way; but let us not mention that just now),
Stead's _Truth About the Navy_, Mr. Spenser Wilkinson, the suppression
of the Channel Tunnel, Mr. Robert Blatchford, Mr. Garvin, Admiral Maxse,
Mr. Newbolt, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, _The National Review_, Lord Roberts,
the Navy League, the imposition of an Imperialist Foreign Secretary on
the Liberal Cabinet, Mr. Wells's _War in the Air_ (well worth re-reading
just now), and the Dreadnoughts. Throughout all these agitations the
enemy, the villain of the piece, the White Peril, was Prussia and her
millions of German conscripts. At first, in _The Battle of Dorking_
phase, the note was mainly defensive. But from the moment when the
Kaiser began to copy our Armada policy by building a big fleet, the
anti-German agitation became openly aggressive; and the cry that the
German fleet or ours must sink, and that a war between England and
Germany was bound to come some day, speedily ceased to be merely a cry
with our Militarists and became an axiom with them. And what our
Militarists said our Junkers echoed; and our Junker diplomatists played
for. The story of how they manoeuvred to hem Germany and Austria in with
an Anglo-Franco-Russian combination will be found told with soldierly
directness and with the proud candor of a man who can see things from
his own side only in the article by Lord Roberts in the current number
of _The Hibbert Journal_ (October, 1914). There you shall see also,
after the usual nonsense about Nietzsche, the vision of "British
administrators bearing the White Man's Burden," of "young men, fresh
from the public schools of Britain, coming eagerly forward to carry on
the high traditions of Imperial Britain in each new dependency which
comes under our care," of "our fitness as an Imperial race," of "a great
task committed to us by Providence," of "the will to conquer that has
never failed us," of our task of "assuming control of one-fifth of the
earth's surface and the care of one in five of all the inhabitants of
the world." Not a suggestion that the inhabitants of the world are
perhaps able to take care of themselves. Not even a passing recollection
when that White Man's Burden is in question that the men outside the
British Empire, and even inside the German Empire, are by no means
exclusively black. Only the _sancta simplicitas_ that glories in "the
proud position of England," the "sympathy, tolerance, prudence and
benevolence of our rule" in the east (as shown, the Kaiser is no doubt
sarcastically remarking, in the Delhi sedition trial), the chivalrous
feeling that it is our highest duty to save the world from the horrible
misfortune of being governed by anybody but those young men fresh from
the public schools of Britain. Change the words Britain and British to
Germany and German, and the Kaiser will sign the article with
enthusiasm. _His_ opinion, _his_ attitude (subject to that merely verbal
change) word for word.
*Six of One: Half-a-Dozen of The Other.*
Now, please observe that I do not say that the agitation was
unreasonable. I myself steadily advocated the formation of a formidable
armament, and ridiculed the notion that, we, who are wasting hundreds of
millions annually on idlers and wasters, could not easily afford double,
treble, quadruple our military and naval expenditure. I advocated the
compulsion of every man to serve his country, both in war and peace. The
idlers and wasters perceiving dimly that I meant the cost to come out of
their pockets and meant to use the admission that riches should not
exempt a man from military service as an illustration of how absurd it
is to allow them to exempt him from civil service, did not embrace my
advocacy with enthusiasm; so I must reaffirm it now lest it should be
supposed that I am condemning those whose proceedings I am describing.
Though often horribly wrong in principle, they were quite right in
practice as far as they went. But they must stand to their guns now that
the guns are going off. They must not pretend that they were harmless
Radical lovers of peace, and that the propaganda of Militarism and of
inevitable war between England and Germany is a Prussian infamy for
which the Kaiser must be severely punished. That is not fair, not true,
not gentlemanly. We began it; and if they met us half-way, as they
certainly did, it is not for us to reproach them. When the German
fire-eaters drank to The Day (of Armageddon) they were drinking to the
day of which our Navy League fire-eaters had first said "It's bound to
come." Therefore, let us have no more nonsense about the Prussian Wolf
and the British Lamb, the Prussian Machiavelli and the English
Evangelist. We cannot shout for years that we are boys of the bulldog
breed, and then suddenly pose as gazelles. No. When Europe and America
come to settle the treaty that will end this business (for America is
concerned in it as much as we are), they will not deal with us as the
lovable and innocent victims of a treacherous tyrant and a savage
soldiery. They will have to consider how these two incorrigibly
pugnacious and inveterately snobbish peoples, who have snarled at one
another for forty years with bristling hair and grinning fangs, and are
now rolling over with their teeth in one another's throats, are to be
tamed into trusty watch-dogs of the peace of the world. I am sorry to
spoil the saintly image with a halo which the British Jingo journalist
sees just now when he looks in the glass; but it must be done if we are
to behave reasonably in the imminent day of reckoning.
And now back to Friedrich von Bernhardi.
*General Von Bernhardi.*
Like many soldier-authors, Friedrich is very readable; and he maintains
the good and formidable part of the Bismarck tradition: that is, he is
not a humbug. He looks facts in the face; he deceives neither himself
nor his readers; and if he were to tell lies--as he would no doubt do as
stoutly as any British, French, or Russian officer if his country's
safety were at stake--he would know that he was telling them. Which last
we think very bad taste on his part, if not downright wickedness.
It is true that he cites Frederick the Great as an exemplary master of
war and of _Weltpolitik_. But his chief praise in this department is
reserved for England. It is from our foreign policy, he says, that he
has learnt what our journalists denounce as "the doctrine of the bully,
of the materialist, of the man with gross ideals: a doctrine of
diabolical evil." He frankly accepts that doctrine from us (as if our
poor, honest muddle-heads had ever formulated anything so intellectual
as a doctrine), and blames us for nothing but for allowing the United
States to achieve their solidarity and become formidable to us when we
might have divided them by backing up the South in the Civil War. He
shows in the clearest way that if Germany does not smash England,
England will smash Germany by springing at her the moment she can catch
her at a disadvantage. In a word he prophesies that we, his great
masters in _Realpolitik_, will do precisely what our Junkers have just
made us do, It is we who have carried out the Bernhardi programme: it is
Germany who has neglected it. He warned Germany to make an alliance with
Italy, Austria, Turkey, and America, before undertaking the subjugation,
first of France, then of England. But a prophet is not without honour
save in his own country; and Germany has allowed herself to be caught
with no ally but Austria between France and Russia, and thereby given
the English Junkers their opportunity. They have seized it with a
punctuality that must flatter Von Bernhardi, even though the compliment
be at the expense of his own country. The Kaiser did not give them
credit for being keener Junkers than his own. It was an unpleasant,
indeed an infuriating surprise. All that a Kaiser could do without
unbearable ignominy to induce them to keep their bulldogs off and give
him fair play with his two redoubtable foes, he did. But they laughed
Frederick the Great's laugh and hurled all our forces at him, as he
might have done to us, on Bernhardian principles, if he had caught us at
the same disadvantage. Officially, the war is Junker-cut-Junker,
militarist-cut-Militarist; and we must fight it out, not
_Heuchler_-cut-Hypocrite, but hammer and tongs.
*Militarist Myopia.*
Unofficially, it is quite another matter. Democracy, even
Social-Democracy, though as hostile to British Junkers as to German
ones, and under no illusion as to the obsolescence and colossal
stupidity of modern war, need not lack enthusiasm for the combat, which
may serve their own ends better than those of their political opponents.
For Bernhardi the Brilliant and our own very dull Militarists are alike
mad: the war will not do any of the things for which they rushed into
it. It is much more likely to do the things they most dread and
deprecate: in fact, it has already swept them into the very kind of
organization they founded an Anti-Socialist League to suppress. To shew
how mad they are, let us suppose the war carries out their western
program to the last item. Suppose France rises from the war victorious,
happy and glorious, with Alsace and Lorraine regained, Rheims cathedral
repaired in the best modern trade style, and a prodigious indemnity in
her pocket! Suppose we tow the German fleet into Portsmouth, and leave
Hohenzollern metaphorically under the heel of Romanoff and actually in a
comfortable villa in Chislehurst, the hero of all its tea parties and
the judge of all its gymkhanas! Well, cry the Militarists, suppose it by
all means: could we desire anything better? Now I happen to have a
somewhat active imagination; and it flatly refuses to stop at this
convenient point. I must go on supposing. Suppose France, with its
military prestige raised once more to the Napoleonic point, spends its
indemnity in building an invincible Armada, stronger and nearer to us
than the German one we are now out to destroy! Suppose Sir Edward Grey
remonstrates, and Monsieur Delcasse replies, "Russia and France have
humbled one Imperial Bully, and are prepared to humble another. I have
not forgotten Fashoda. Stop us if you can; or turn, if you like, for
help to the Germany we have smashed and disarmed!" Of what use will all
this bloodshed be then, with the old situation reproduced in an
aggravated form, the enemy closer to our shores, a raid far more
feasible, the tradition of "natural enmity" to steel the foe, and
Waterloo to be wiped out like Sedan? A child in arms should be able to
see that this idiotic notion of relaxing the military pressure on us by
smashing this or that particular Power is like trying to alter the
pressure of the ocean by dipping up a bucket of water from the North Sea
and pouring it into the Bay of Biscay.
I purposely omit more easterly supposings as to what victorious Russia
might do. But a noble emancipation of Poland and Finland at her own
expense, and of Bosnia and Harzegovina at Austria's, might easily
suggest to our nervous Militarists that a passion for the freedom of
Egypt and India might seize her, and remind her that we were Japan's
ally in the day of Russia's humiliation in Manchuria. So there at once
is your Balance of Power problem in Asia enormously aggravated by
throwing Germany out of the anti-Russian scale and grinding her to
powder. Even in North Africa--but enough is enough. You can _durchhauen_
your way out of the frying pan, but only into the fire. Better take
Nietzsche's brave advice, and make it your point of honour to "live
dangerously." History shews that it is often the way to live long.
*Learning Nothing: Forgetting Everything.*
But let me test the Militarist theory, not by a hypothetical future, but
by the accomplished and irrevocable past. Is it true that nations must
conquer or go under, and that military conquest means prosperity and
power for the victor and annihilation for the vanquished? I have already
alluded in passing to the fact that Austria has been beaten repeatedly:
by France, by Italy, by Germany, almost by everybody who has thought it
worth while to have a whack at her; and yet she is one of the Great
Powers; and her alliance has been sought by invincible Germany. France
was beaten by Germany in 1870 with a completeness that seemed
impossible; yet France has since enlarged her territory whilst Germany
is still pleading in vain for a place in the sun. Russia was beaten by
the Japanese in Manchuria on a scale that made an end forever of the old
notion that the West is the natural military superior of the East; yet
it is the terror of Russia that has driven Germany into her present
desperate onslaught on France; and it is the Russian alliance on which
France and England are depending for their assurance of ultimate
success. We ourselves confess that the military efficiency with which we
have so astonished the Germans is the effect, not of Waterloo and
Inkerman, but of the drubbing we got from the Boers, who we aid probably
have beaten us if we had been anything like their own size. Greece has
lately distinguished herself in war within a few years by a most
disgraceful beating of the Turks. It would be easy to multiply instances
from remoter history: for example, the effect on England's position of
the repeated defeats of our troops by the French under Luxembourg in the
Balance of Power War at the end of the seventeenth century differed
surprisingly little, if at all, from the effect of our subsequent
victories under Marlborough. And the inference from the Militarist
theory that the States which at present count for nothing as military
Powers necessarily count for nothing at all is absurd on the face of it.
Monaco seems to be, on the whole, the most prosperous and comfortable
State in Europe.
In short, Militarism must be classed as one of the most inconsiderately
foolish of the bogus "sciences" which the last half century has produced
in such profusion, and which have the common characteristic of revolting
all sane souls, and being stared out of countenance by the broad facts
of human experience. The only rule of thumb that can be hazarded on the
strength of actual practice is that wars to maintain or upset the
Balance of Power between States, called by inaccurate people Balance of
Power wars, and by accurate people Jealousy of Power wars, never
establish the desired peaceful and secure equilibrium. They may exercise
pugnacity, gratify spite, assuage a wound to national pride, or enhance
or dim a military reputation; but that is all. And the reason is, as I
shall shew very conclusively later on, that there is only one way in
which one nation can really disable another, and that is a way which no
civilized nation dare even discuss.
*Are We Hypocrites?*
And now I proceed from general considerations to the diplomatic history
of the present case, as I must in order to make our moral position
clear. But first, lest I should lose all credit by the startling
incompatibility between the familiar personal character of our statesmen
and the proceedings for which they are officially responsible, I must
say a word about the peculiar psychology of English statesmanship, not
only for the benefit of my English readers (who do not know that it is
peculiar just as they do not know that water has any taste because it is
always in their mouths), but as a plea for a more charitable
construction from the wider world.
We know by report, however unjust it may seem to us, that there is an
opinion abroad, even in the quarters most friendly to us, that our
excellent qualities are marred by an incorrigible hypocrisy. To France
we have always been Perfidious Albion. In Germany, at this moment, that
epithet would be scorned as far too flattering to us. Victor Hugo
explained the relative unpopularity of _Measure for Measure_ among
Shakespeare's plays on the ground that the character of the hypocrite
Angelo was a too faithful dramatization of our national character.
Pecksniff is not considered so exceptional an English gentleman in
America as he is in England.
Now we have not acquired this reputation for nothing. The world has no
greater interest in branding England with this particular vice of
hypocrisy than in branding France with it; yet the world does not cite
Tartuffe as a typical Frenchman as it cites Angelo and Pecksniff as
typical Englishmen. We may protest against it as indignantly as the
Prussian soldiers protest against their equally universal reputation for
ferocity in plunder and pillage, sack and rapine; but there is something
in it. If you judge an English statesman, by his conscious intentions,
his professions, and his personal charm, you will often find him an
amiable, upright, humane, anxiously truthful man. If you judge him, as a
foreigner must, solely on the official acts for which he is responsible,
and which he has to defend in the House of Commons for the sake of his
party, you will often be driven to conclude that this estimable
gentleman is, in point of being an unscrupulous superprig and fool,
worse than Caesar Borgia and General Von Bernhardi rolled into one, and
in foreign affairs a Bismarck in everything except commanding ability,
blunt common sense, and freedom from illusion as to the nature and
object of his own diplomacy. And the permanent officials in whose hands
he is will probably deserve all that and something to spare. Thus you
will get that amazing contrast that confronts us now between the
Machiavellian Sir Edward Grey of the Berlin newspapers and the amiable
and popular Sir Edward Grey we know in England. In England we are all
prepared to face any World Congress and say, "We know that Sir Edward
Grey is an honest English gentleman, who meant well as a true patriot
and friend of peace; we are quite sure that what he did was fair and
right; and we will not listen to any nonsense to the contrary." The
Congress will reply, "We know nothing about Sir Edward Grey except what
he did; and as there is no secret and no question as to what he did, the
whole story being recorded by himself, we must hold England responsible
for his conduct, whilst taking your word for the fact, which has no
importance for us, that his conduct has nothing to do with his
character."
*Our Intellectual Laziness.*
The general truth of the situation is, as I have spent so much of my
life in trying to make the English understand, that we are cursed with a
fatal intellectual laziness, an evil inheritance from the time when our
monopoly of coal and iron made it possible for us to become rich and
powerful without thinking or knowing how; a laziness which is becoming
highly dangerous to us now that our monopoly is gone or superseded by
new sources of mechanical energy. We got rich by pursuing our own
immediate advantage instinctively; that is, with a natural childish
selfishness; and when any question of our justification arose, we found
it easy to silence it with any sort of plausible twaddle (provided it
flattered us, and did not imply any trouble or sacrifice) provided by
our curates at £70 a year, or our journalists at a penny a line, or
commercial moralists with axes to grind. In the end we became fatheaded,
and not only lost all intellectual consciousness of what we were doing,
and with it all power of objective self-criticism, but stacked up a
lumber of pious praises for ourselves which not only satisfied our
corrupted and half atrophied consciences, but gave us a sense that there
is something extraordinarily ungentlemanly and politically dangerous in
bringing these pious phrases to the test of conduct. We carried Luther's
doctrine of Justification by Faith to the insane point of believing that
as long as a man says what we have agreed to accept as the right thing
it does not matter in the least what he actually does. In fact, we do
not clearly see why a man need introduce the subject of morals at all,
unless there is something questionable to be whitewashed. The
unprejudiced foreigner calls this hypocrisy: that is why we call him
prejudiced. But I, who have been a poor man in a poor country,
understand the foreigner better.
Now from the general to the particular. In describing the course of the
diplomatic negotiations by which our Foreign Office achieved its design
of at last settling accounts with Germany at the most favourable moment
from the Militarist point of view, I shall have to exhibit our Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs as behaving almost exactly as we have
accused the Kaiser of behaving. Yet I see him throughout as an honest
gentleman, "perplexed in the extreme," meaning well, revolted at the
last moment by the horror of war, clinging to the hope that in some
vague way he could persuade everybody to be reasonable if they would
only come and talk to him as they did when the big Powers were kept out
of the Balkan war, but hopelessly destitute of a positive policy of any
kind, and therefore unable to resist those who had positive business in
hand. And do not for a moment imagine that I think that the conscious
Sir Edward Grey was Othello, and the subconscious, Iago. I do think that
the Foreign Office, of which Sir Edward is merely the figure head, was
as deliberately and consciously bent on a long deferred Militarist war
with Germany as the Admiralty was; and that is saying a good deal. If
Sir Edward Grey did not know what he wanted, Mr. Winston Churchill was
in no such perplexity. He was not an "ist" of any sort, but a
straightforward holder of the popular opinion that if you are threatened
you should hit out, unless you are afraid to. Had he had the conduct of
the affair he might quite possibly have averted the war (and thereby
greatly disappointed himself and the British public) by simply
frightening the Kaiser. As it was, he had arranged for the co-operation
of the French and British fleets; was spoiling for the fight; and must
have restrained himself with great difficulty from taking off his coat
in public whilst Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey were giving the country
the assurances which were misunderstood to mean that we were not bound
to go to war, and not more likely to do so than usual. But though Sir
Edward did not clear up the misunderstanding, I think he went to war
with the heavy heart of a Junker Liberal (such centaurs exist) and not
with the exultation of a Junker Jingo.
I may now, without more than the irreducible minimum of injustice to Sir
Edward Grey, proceed to tell the story of the diplomatic negotiations as
they will appear to the Congress which, I am assuming, will settle the
terms on which Europe is to live more or less happily ever after.
*Diplomatic History of the War.*
The evidence of how the Junker diplomatists of our Foreign Office let us
in for the war is in the White Paper, Miscellaneous No. 6 (1914),
containing correspondence respecting the European crisis, and since
reissued, with a later White Paper and some extra matter, as a penny
bluebook in miniature. In these much-cited and little-read documents we
see the Junkers of all the nations, the men who have been saying for
years "It's bound to come," and clamouring in England for compulsory
military service and expeditionary forces, momentarily staggered and not
a little frightened by the sudden realization that it has come at last.
They rush round from foreign office to embassy, and from embassy to
palace, twittering "This is awful. Can't you stop it? Won't you be
reasonable? Think of the consequences," etc., etc. One man among them
keeps his head and looks the facts in the face. That man is Sazonoff,
the Russian Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He keeps steadily trying to
make Sir Edward Grey face the inevitable. He says and reiterates, in
effect, "You know very well that you cannot keep out of a European war.
You know you are pledged to fight Germany if Germany attacks France. You
know that your arrangments for the fight are actually made; that already
the British army is commanded by a Franco-British Council of War; that
there is no possible honourable retreat for you. You know that this old
man in Austria, who would have been superannuated years ago if he had
been an exciseman, is resolved to make war on Servia, and sent that
silly forty-eight hours ultimatum when we were all out of town so that
he could begin fighting before we could get back to sit on his head. You
know that he has the Jingo mob of Vienna behind him. You know that if he
makes war, Russia must mobilize. You know that France is bound to come
in with us as you are with France. You know that the moment we mobilize,
Germany, the old man's ally, will have only one desperate chance of
victory, and that is to overwhelm our ally, France, with one superb rush
of her millions, and then sweep back and meet us on the Vistula. You
know that nothing can stop this except Germany remonstrating with
Austria, and insisting on the Servian case being dealt with by an
international tribunal and not by war. You know that Germany dares not
do this, because her alliance with Austria is her defence against the
Franco-Russian alliance, and that she does not want to do it in any
case, because the Kaiser naturally has a strong class prejudice against
the blowing up of Royal personages by irresponsible revolutionists, and
thinks nothing too bad for Servia after the assassination of the
Archduke. There is just one chance of avoiding Armageddon: a slender
one, but worth trying. You averted war in the Algeciras crisis, and
again in the Agadir crisis, by saying you would fight. Try it again. The
Kaiser is stiffnecked because he does not believe you are going to fight
this time. Well, convince him that you are. The odds against him will
then be so terrible that he may not dare to support the Austrian
ultimatum to Servia at such a price. And if Austria is thus forced to
proceed judicially against Servia, we Russians will be satisfied; and
there will be no war."
Sir Edward could not see it. He is a member of a Liberal Government, in
a country where there is no political career for the man who does not
put his party's tenure of office before every other consideration. What
would _The Daily News_ and _The Manchester Guardian_ have said had he,
Bismarck-like, said bluntly: "If war once breaks out, the old score
between England and Prussia will be settled, not by ambassadors' tea
parties and Areopaguses, but by blood and iron?" In vain did Sazonoff
repeat, "But if you are going to fight, as you know you are, why not say
so?" Sir Edward, being Sir Edward and not Winston Churchill or Lloyd
George, could not admit that he was going to fight. He might have
forestalled the dying Pope and his noble Christian "I bless peace" by a
noble, if heathen, "I fight war." Instead, he persuaded us all that he
was under no obligation whatever to fight. He persuaded Germany that he
had not the slightest serious intention of fighting. Sir Owen Seaman
wrote in _Punch_ an amusing and witty No-Intervention poem. Sporting
Liberals offered any odds that there would be no war for England. And
Germany, confident that with Austria's help she could break France with
one hand and Russia with the other if England held aloof, let Austria
throw the match into the magazine.
*The Battery Unmasked.*
Then the Foreign Office, always acting through its amiable and popular
but confused instrument Sir Edward, unmasked the Junker-Militarist
battery. He suddenly announced that England must take a hand in the war,
though he did not yet tell the English people so, it being against the
diplomatic tradition to tell them anything until it is too late for them
to object. But he told the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, caught
in a death trap, pleaded desperately for peace with Great Britain. Would
we promise to spare Germany if Belgium were left untouched? No. Would we
say on what conditions we would spare Germany? No. Not if the Germans
promised not to annex French territory? No. Not even if they promised
not to touch the French colonies? No. Was there no way out? Sir Edward
Grey was frank. He admitted there was just one chance; that Liberal
opinion might not stand the war if the neutrality of Belgium were not
violated. And he provided against that chance by committing England to
the war the day before he let the cat out of the bag in Parliament.
All this is recorded in the language of diplomacy in the White Paper on
or between the lines. That language is not so straightforward as my
language; but at the crucial points it is clear enough. Sazonoff's tone
is politely diplomatic in No. 6; but in No. 17 he lets himself go. "I do
not believe that Germany really wants war; but her attitude is decided
by yours. If you take your stand firmly with France and Russia there
will be no war. If you fail them now, rivers of blood will flow, and you
will in the end be dragged into war." He was precisely right; but he did
not realize that war was exactly what our Junkers wanted. They did not
dare to tell themselves so; and naturally they did not dare to tell him
so. And perhaps his own interest in war was too strong to make him
regret the rejection of his honest advice. To break up the Austrian
Empire and achieve for Russia the Slav Caliphate of South-East Europe
whilst defeating Prussia with the help of France and of Russia's old
enemy and Prussia's old ally England, was a temptation so enormous that
Sazonoff, in resisting it so far as to shew Sir Edward Grey frankly the
only chance of preventing it, proved himself the most genuine
humanitarian in the diplomatic world.
*Number 123.*
The decisive communication between Sir Edward Grey and Prince Lichnowsky
is recorded in the famous No. 123. With the rather childish subsequent
attempt to minimize No. 123 on the ground that the Prince was merely an
amiable nincompoop who did not really represent his fiendish sovereign,
neither I nor any other serious person need be concerned. What is beyond
all controversy is that after that conversation Prince Lichnowsky could
do nothing but tell the Kaiser that the _Entente_, having at last got
his imperial head in chancery, was not going to let him off on any
terms, and that it was now a fight to a finish between the British and
German empires. Then the Kaiser said: "We are Germans. God help us!"
When a crowd of foolish students came cheering for the war under his
windows, he bade them go to the churches and pray. His telegrams to the
Tsar (the omission of which from the penny bluebook is, to say the
least, not chivalrous) were dignified and pathetic. And when the
Germans, taking a line from the poet they call "unser Shakespeare,"
said: "Come the four quarters of the world in arms and we shall shock
them," it was, from the romantic militarist point of view, fine. What
Junker-led men could do they have since done to make that thrasonical
brag good. But there is no getting over the fact that, in Tommy Atkins's
phrase, they had asked for it. Their Junkers, like ours, had drunk to
The Day; and they should not have let us choose it after riling us for
so many years. And that is why Sir Edward had a great surprise when he
at last owned up in Parliament.
*How the Nation Took It.*
The moment he said that we could not "stand aside with our arms folded"
and see our friend and neighbour France "bombarded and battered," the
whole nation rose to applaud him. All the Foreign Office distrust of
public opinion, the concealment of the Anglo-French plan of campaign,
the disguise of the _Entente_ in a quaker's hat, the duping of the
British public and the Kaiser with one and the same prevarication, had
been totally unnecessary and unpopular, like most of these ingenuities
which diplomatists think subtle and Machiavellian. The British Public
had all along been behind Mr. Winston Churchill. It had wanted Sir
Edward to do just what Sazonoff wanted him to do, and what I, in the
columns of _The Daily News_ proposed he should do nine months ago (I
must really be allowed to claim that I am not merely wise after the
event), which was to arm to the teeth regardless of an expense which to
us would have been a mere fleabite, and tell Germany that if she, laid a
finger on France we would unite with France to defeat her, offering her
at the same time as consolation for that threat, the assurance that we
would do as much to France if she wantonly broke the peace in the like
fashion by attacking Germany. No unofficial Englishman worth his salt
wanted to snivel hypocritically about our love of peace and our respect
for treaties and our solemn acceptance of a painful duty, and all the
rest of the nauseous mixture of school-master's twaddle, parish magazine
cant, and cinematograph melodrama with which we were deluged. We were
perfectly ready to knock the Kaiser's head off just to teach him that if
he thought he was going to ride roughshod over Europe, including our new
friends the French, and the plucky little Belgians, he was reckoning
without old England. And in this pugnacious but perfectly
straightforward and human attitude the nation needed no excuses because
the nation honestly did not know that we were taking the Kaiser at a
disadvantage, or that the Franco-Russian alliance had been just as much
a menace to peace as the Austro-German one. But the Foreign Office knew
that very well, and therefore began to manufacture superfluous,
disingenuous, and rather sickening excuses at a great rate. The nation
had a clean conscience, and was really innocent of any aggressive
strategy: the Foreign Office was redhanded, and did not want to be found
out. Hence its sermons.
*Mr. H.G. Wells Hoists the Country's Flag.*
It was Mr. H.G. Wells who at the critical moment spoke with the nation's
voice. When he uttered his electric outburst of wrath against "this
drilling, trampling foolery in the heart of Europe" he gave expression
to the pent-up exasperation of years of smouldering revolt against swank
and domineer, guff and bugaboo, calling itself blood and iron, and
mailed fist, and God and conscience and anything else that sounded
superb. Like Nietzsche, we were "fed up" with the Kaiser's imprisonments
of democratic journalists for _Majestaetsbeleidigung_ (monarch
disparagement), with his ancestors, and his mission, and his gospel of
submission and obedience for poor men, and of authority, tempered by
duelling, for rich men. The world had become sore-headed, and desired
intensely that they who clatter the sword shall perish by the sword.
Nobody cared twopence about treaties: indeed, it was not for us, who had
seen the treaty of Berlin torn up by the brazen seizure of Bosnia and
Herzegovina by Austria in 1909, and taken that lying down, as Russia
did, to talk about the sacredness of treaties, even if the wastepaper
baskets of the Foreign Offices were not full of torn up "scraps of
paper," and a very good thing too; for General von Bernhardi's
assumption that circumstances alter treaties is not a page from
Machiavelli: it is a platitude from the law books. The man in the street
understood little or nothing about Servia or Russia or any of the cards
with which the diplomatists were playing their perpetual game of Beggar
my Neighbour. We were rasped beyond endurance by Prussian Militarism and
its contempt for us and for human happiness and common sense; and we
just rose at it and went for it. We have set out to smash the Kaiser
exactly as we set out to smash the Mahdi. Mr. Wells never mentioned a
treaty. He said, in effect: "There stands the monster all freedom-loving
men hate; and at last we are going to fight it." And the public, bored
by the diplomatists, said: "Now you're talking!" We did not stop to ask
our consciences whether the Prussian assumption that the dominion of the
civilized earth belongs to German culture is really any more bumptious
than the English assumption that the dominion of the sea belongs to
British commerce. And in our island security we were as little able as
ever to realize the terrible military danger of Germany's geographical
position between France and England on her west flank and Russia on her
east: all three leagued for her destruction; and how unreasonable it was
to ask Germany to lose the fraction of a second (much less Sir Maurice
de Runsen's naïve "a few days' delay") in dashing at her Western foe
when she could obtain no pledge as to Western intentions. "We are now in
a state of necessity; and Necessity knows no law," said the Imperial
Chancellor in the Reichstag. "It is a matter of life and death to us,"
said the German Minister for Foreign Affairs to our Ambassador in
Berlin, who had suddenly developed an extraordinary sense of the
sacredness of the Treaty of London, dated 1839, and still, as it
happened, inviolate among the torn fragments of many subsequent and
similar "scraps of paper." Our Ambassador seems to have been of Sir
Maurice's opinion that there could be no such tearing hurry. The Germans
could enter France through the line of forts between Verdun and Toul if
they were really too flustered to wait a few days on the chance of Sir
Edward Grey's persuasive conversation and charming character softening
Russia and bringing Austria to conviction of sin. Thereupon the Imperial
Chancellor, not being quite an angel, asked whether we had counted the
cost of crossing the path of an Empire fighting for its life (for these
Militarist statesmen do really believe that nations can be killed by
cannon shot). That was a threat; and as we cared nothing about Germany's
peril, and wouldn't stand being threatened any more by a Power of which
we now had the inside grip, the fat remained in the fire, blazing more
fiercely than ever. There was only one end possible to such a clash of
high tempers, national egotisms, and reciprocal ignorances.
*Delicate Position of Mr. Asquith.*
It seemed a splendid chance for the Government to place itself at the
head of the nation. But no British Government within my recollection has
ever understood the nation. Mr. Asquith, true to the Gladstonian
tradition (hardly just to Gladstone, by the way) that a Liberal Prime
Minister should know nothing concerning foreign politics and care less,
and calmly insensible to the real nature of the popular explosion, fell
back on 1839, picking up the obvious barrister's point about the
violation of the neutrality of Belgium, and tried the equally obvious
barrister's claptrap about "an infamous proposal" on the jury. He
assured us that nobody could have done more for peace than Sir Edward
Grey, though the rush to smash the Kaiser was the most popular thing Sir
Edward had ever done.
Besides, there was another difficulty. Mr. Asquith himself, though
serenely persuaded that he is a Liberal statesman, is, in effect, very
much what the Kaiser would have been if he had been a Yorkshireman and a
lawyer, instead of being only half English and the other half
Hohenzollern, and an anointed emperor to boot. As far as popular
liberties are concerned, history will make no distinction between Mr.
Asquith and Metternich. He is forced to keep on the safe academic ground
of Belgium by the very obvious consideration that if he began to talk of
the Kaiser's imprisonments of editors and democratic agitators and so
forth, a Homeric laughter, punctuated with cries of, "How about
Denshawai?" "What price Tom Mann?" "Votes for women!" "Been in India
lately?" "Make McKenna Kaiser," "Or dear old Herbert Gladstone," etc.,
etc., would promptly spoil that pose. The plain fact is that, Militarism
apart, Germany is in many ways more democratic in practice than England;
indeed the Kaiser has been openly reviled as a coward by his Junkers
because he falls short of Mr. Asquith in calm indifference to Liberal
principles and blank ignorance of working-class sympathies, opinions,
and interests.
Mr. Asquith had also to distract public attention from the fact that
three official members of his Government, all men of unquestioned and
conspicuous patriotism and intellectual honesty, walked straight out
into private life on the declaration of war. One of them, Mr. John
Burns, did so at an enormous personal sacrifice, and has since
maintained a grim silence far more eloquent than the famous speech
Germany invented for him. It is not generally believed that these three
statesmen were actuated by a passion for the violation of Belgian
neutrality.
On the whole, it was impossible for the Government to seize its grand
chance and put itself at the head of the popular movement that responded
to Sir Edward Grey's declaration: the very simple reason being that the
Government does not represent the nation, and is in its sympathies just
as much a Junker government as the Kaiser's. And so, what the Government
cannot do has to be done by unofficial persons with clean and brilliant
anti-Junker records like Mr. Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Neil Lyons,
and Mr. Jerome K. Jerome. Neither Mr. Asquith nor Sir Edward Grey can
grasp, as these real spokesmen of their time do, the fact that we just
simply want to put an end to Potsdamnation, both at home and abroad.
Both of them probably think Potsdam a very fine and enviable
institution, and want England to out-Potsdam Potsdam and to monopolize
the command of the seas; a monstrous aspiration. We, I take it, want to
guarantee that command of the sea which is the common heritage of
mankind to the tiniest State and the humblest fisherman that depends on
the sea for a livelihood. We want the North Sea to be as safe for
everybody, English or German, as Portland Place.
*The Need for Recrimination.*
And now somebody who would rather I had not said all this (having
probably talked dreadful nonsense about Belgium and so forth for a month
past) is sure to ask: "Why all this recrimination? What is done is done.
Is it not now the duty of every Englishman to sink all differences in
the face of the common peril?" etc., etc. To all such prayers to be
shielded from that terrible thing, the truth, I must reply that history
consists mainly of recrimination, and that I am writing history because
an accurate knowledge of what has occurred is not only indispensable to
any sort of reasonable behaviour on our part in the face of Europe when
the inevitable day of settlement comes, but because it has a practical
bearing on the most perilously urgent and immediate business before us:
the business of the appeal to the nation for recruits and for enormous
sums of money. It has to decide the question whether that appeal shall
be addressed frankly to our love of freedom, and our tradition (none the
less noble and moving because it is so hard to reconcile with the
diplomatic facts) that England is a guardian of the world's liberty, and
not to bad law about an obsolete treaty, and cant about the diabolical
personal disposition of the Kaiser, and the wounded propriety of a
peace-loving England, and all the rest of the slosh and tosh that has
been making John Bull sick for months past. No doubt at first, when we
were all clasping one another's hands very hard and begging one another
not to be afraid, almost anything was excusable. Even the war notes of
Mr. Garvin, which stood out as the notes of a gentleman amid a welter of
scurrilous rubbish and a rather blackguardly _Punch_ cartoon mocking the
agony of Berlin (_Punch_ having turned its non-interventionist coat very
promptly), had sometimes to run: "We know absolutely nothing of what is
happening at the front, except that the heroism of the British troops
will thrill the ages to the last syllable of recorded time," or words to
that effect. But now it is time to pull ourselves together; to feel our
muscle; to realize the value of our strength and pluck; and to tell the
truth unashamed like men of courage and character, not to shirk it like
the official apologists of a Foreign Office plot.
*What Germany Should Have Done.*
And first, as I despise critics who put people in the wrong without
being able to set them right, I shall, before I go any further with my
criticism of our official position, do the Government and the Foreign
Office the service of finding a correct official position for them; for
I admit that the popular position, though sound as far as it goes, is
too crude for official use. This correct official position can be found
only by considering what Germany should have done, and might have done
had she not been, like our own Junkers, so fascinated by the Militarist
craze, and obsessed by the chronic Militarist panic, that she was "in
too great hurry to bid the devil good morning." The matter is simple
enough: she should have entrusted the security of her western frontier
to the public opinion of the west of Europe and to America, and fought
Russia, if attacked, with her rear not otherwise defended. The
Militarist theory is that we, France and England, would have immediately
sprung at her from behind; but that is just how the Militarist theory
gets its votaries into trouble by assuming that Europe is a chess board.
Europe is not a chess board; but a populous continent in which only a
very few people are engaged in military chess; and even those few have
many other things to consider besides capturing their adversary's king.
Not only would it have been impossible for England to have attacked
Germany under such circumstances; but if France had done so England
could not have assisted her, and might even have been compelled by
public opinion to intervene by way of a joint protest from England and
America, or even by arms, on her behalf if she were murderously pressed
on both flanks. Even our Militarists and diplomatists would have had
reasons for such an intervention. An aggressive Franco-Russian hegemony,
if it crushed Germany, would be quite as disagreeable to us as a German
one. Thus Germany would at worst have been fighting Russia and France
with the sympathy of all the other Powers, and a chance of active
assistance from some of them, especially those who share her hostility
to the Russian Government. Had France not attacked her--and though I am
as ignorant of the terms of the Franco-Russian alliance as Sir Edward
Grey is strangely content to be, I cannot see how the French Government
could have justified to its own people a fearfully dangerous attack on
Germany had Russia been the aggressor--Germany would have secured fair
play for her fight with Russia. But even the fight with Russia was not
inevitable. The ultimatum to Servia was the escapade of a dotard: a
worse crime than the assassination that provoked it. There is no reason
to doubt the conclusion in Sir Maurice de Bunsen's despatch (No. 161)
that it could have been got over, and that Russia and Austria would have
thought better of fighting and come to terms. Peace was really on the
cards; and the sane game was to play for it.
*The Achilles Heel of Militarism.*
Instead, Germany flew at France's throat, and by incidentally invading
Belgium gave us the excuse our Militarists wanted to attack her with the
full sympathy of the nation. Why did she do this stupid thing? Not
because of the counsels of General von Bernhardi. On the contrary, he
had warned her expressly against allowing herself to be caught between
Russia and a Franco-British combination until she had formed a
counterbalancing alliance with America, Italy, and Turkey. And he had
most certainly not encouraged her to depend on England sparing her: on
the contrary, he could not sufficiently admire the wily ruthlessness
with which England watches her opportunity and springs at her foe when
the foe is down. (He little knew, poor man, how much he was flattering
our capacity for Realpolitik!) But he had reckoned without his creed's
fatal and fundamental weakness, which is, that as Junker-Militarism
promotes only stupid people and snobs, and suppresses genuine realists
as if they were snakes, it always turns out when a crisis arrives that
"the silly people don't know their own silly business." The Kaiser and
his ministers made an appalling mess of their job. They were inflamed by
Bernhardi; but they did not understand him. They swallowed his flattery,
but did not take in his strategy or his warnings. They knew that when
the moment came to face the Franco-Russian alliance, they were to make a
magnificient dash at France and sweep her pieces off the great chess
board before the Russians had time to mobilize; and then return and
crush Russia, leaving the conquest of England for another day. This was
honestly as much as their heads could hold at one time; and they were
helplessly unable to consider whether the other conditions postulated by
Bernhardi were present, or indeed, in the excitement of their
schoolboyish imaginations, to remember whether he had postulated any at
all. And so they made their dash and put themselves in the wrong at
every point morally, besides making victory humanly impossible for
themselves militarily. That is the nemesis of Militarism: the Militarist
is thrown into a big game which he is too stupid to be able to play
successfully. Philip of Spain tried it 300 years ago; and the ruin he
brought on his empire has lasted to this day. He was so stupid that
though he believed himself to be the chosen instrument of God (as sure a
sign of a hopeless fool in a man who cannot see that every other man is
equally an instrument of that Power as it is a guarantee of wisdom and
goodwill in the man who respects his neighbor as himself) he attempted
to fight Drake on the assumption that a cannon was a weapon that no real
gentleman and good Catholic would condescend to handle. Louis XIV. tried
again two centuries ago, and, being a more frivolous fool, got beaten by
Marlborough and sent his great-grandson from the throne to the
guillotine. Napoleon tried it 100 years ago. He was more dangerous,
because he had prodigious personal ability and technical military skill;
and he started with the magnificent credential of the French Revolution.
All that carried him farther than the Spanish bigot or the French fop;
but he, too, accreted fools and knaves, and ended defeated in St. Helena
after pandering for twenty years to the appetite of idiots for glory and
bloodshed; waging war as "a great game"; and finding in a field strewn
with corpses "un beau spectacle." In short, as strong a magnet to fools
as the others, though so much abler.
*Our Own True Position*.
Now comes the question, in what position did this result of a mad theory
and a hopelessly incompetent application of it on the part of Potsdam
place our own Government? It left us quite clearly in the position of
the responsible policeman of the west. There was nobody else in Europe
strong enough to chain "the mad dog." Belgium and Holland, Norway and
Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland could hardly have been expected to take
that duty on themselves, even if Norway and Sweden had not good reason
to be anti-Russian, and the Dutch capitalists were not half convinced
that their commercial prosperity would be greater under German than
under native rule. It will not be contended that Spain could have done
anything; and as to Italy, it was doubtful whether she did not consider
herself still a member of the Triple Alliance. It was evidently England
or nobody. For England to have refrained, from hurling herself into the
fray, horse, foot, and artillery, was impossible from every point of
view. From the democratic point of view it would have meant an
acceptance of the pretension of which Potsdam, by attacking the French
Republic, had made itself the champion: that is, the pretension of the
Junker class to dispose of the world on Militarist lines at the expense
of the lives and limbs of the masses. From the international Socialist
point of view, it would have been the acceptance of the extreme
nationalist view that the people of other countries are foreigners, and
that it does not concern us if they choose to cut one another's throats.
Our Militarist Junkers cried "If we let Germany conquer France it will
be our turn next." Our romantic Junkers added "and serve us right too:
what man will pity us when the hour strikes for us, if we skulk now?"
Even the wise, who loathe war, and regard it as such a dishonour and
disgrace in itself that all its laurels cannot hide its brand of Cain,
had to admit that police duty is necessary and that war must be made on
such war as the Germans had made by attacking France in an avowed
attempt to substitute a hegemony of cannon for the comity of nations.
There was no alternative. Had the Foreign Office been the International
Socialist Bureau, had Sir Edward Grey been Jaures, had Mr. Ramsay
MacDonald been Prime Minister, had Russia been Germany's ally instead of
ours, the result would still have been the same: we must have drawn the
sword to save France and smash Potsdam as we smashed and always must
smash Philip, Louis, Napoleon, _et hoc genus omne_.
The case for our action is thus as complete as any _casus belli_ is ever
likely to be. In fact its double character as both a democratic and
military (if not Militarist) case makes it too complete; for it enables
our Junkers to claim it entirely for themselves, and to fake it with
pseudo-legal justifications which destroy nine-tenths of our credit, the
military and legal cases being hardly a tenth of the whole: indeed, they
would not by themselves justify the slaughter of a single Pomeranian
grenadier. For instance, take the Militarist view that we must fight
Potsdam because if the Kaiser is victorious, it will be our turn next!
Well: are we not prepared to fight always when our turn comes? Why
should not we also depend on our navy, on the extreme improbability of
Germany, however triumphant, making two such terrible calls on her
people in the same generation as a war involves, on the sympathy of the
defeated, and on the support of American and European public opinion
when our turn comes, if there is nothing at stake now but the difference
between defeat and victory in an otherwise indifferent military
campaign? If the welfare of the world does not suffer any more by an
English than by a German defeat who cares whether we are defeated or
not? As mere competitors in a race of armaments and an Olympic game
conducted with ball cartridge, or as plaintiffs in a technical case of
international law (already decided against us in 1870, by the way, when
Gladstone had to resort to a new treaty made _ad hoc_ and lapsing at the
end of the war) we might as well be beaten as not, for all the harm that
will ensue to anyone but ourselves, or even to ourselves apart from our
national vanity. It is as the special constables of European life that
we are important, and can send our men to the trenches with the
assurance that they are fighting in a worthy cause. In short, the Junker
case is not worth twopence: the Democratic case, the Socialist case, the
International case is worth all it threatens to cost.
*The German Defence to Our Indictment.*
What is the German reply to this case? Or rather, how would the Germans
reply to it if their official Militarist and Kaiserist panjandrums had
the wit to find the effective reply? Undoubtedly they would say that our
Social-Democratic professions are all very fine, but that our conversion
to them is suspiciously sudden and recent. They would remark that it is
a little difficult for a nation in deadly peril to trust its existence
to a foreign public opinion which has not only never been expressed by
the people who really control England's foreign policy, but is flatly
opposed to all their known views and prejudices. They would ask why,
instead of making an _Entente_ with France and Russia and refusing to
give Germany any assurance concerning its object except that we would
not pledge ourselves to remain neutral if the Franco-Russian _Entente_
fell on Germany, we did not say straight out in 1912 (when they put the
question flatly to us), and again last July when Sazonoff urged us so
strongly to shew our hand, that if Germany attacked France we should
fight her, Russia or no Russia (a far less irritating and provocative
attitude), although we knew full well that an attack on France through
Belgium would be part of the German program if the Russian peril became
acute. They would point out that if our own Secretary for Foreign
Affairs openly disclaimed any knowledge of the terms of the
Franco-Russian alliance, it was hard for a German to believe that they
were wholly fit for publication. In short, they would say "If you were
so jolly wise and well intentioned before the event, why did not your
Foreign Minister and your ambassadors in Berlin and Vienna and St.
Petersburg--we beg pardon, Petrograd--invite us to keep the peace and
rely on western public opinion instead of refusing us every pledge
except the hostile one to co-operate with France against us in the North
Sea, and making it only too plain to us that your policy was a Junker
policy as much as ours, and that we had nothing to hope from your
goodwill? What evidence had we that you were playing any other game than
this Militarist chess of our own, which you now so piously renounce, but
which none of you except a handful of Socialists whom you despise and
Syndicalists whom you imprison on Militarist pretexts has opposed for
years past, though it has been all over your Militarist anti-German
platforms and papers and magazines? Are your Social-Democratic
principles sincere, or are they only a dagger you keep up your sleeve to
stab us in the back when our two most formidable foes are trying to
garotte us? If so, where does your moral superiority come in, hypocrites
that you are? If not, why, we repeat, did you not make them known to all
the world, instead of making an ambush for us by your senseless
silence?"
I see no reply to that except a frank confession that we did not know
our own minds; that we came to a knowledge of them only when Germany's
attack on France forced us to make them up at last; that though
doubtless a chronic state of perfect lucidity and long prevision on our
part would have been highly convenient, yet there is a good deal to be
said for the policy of not fording a stream until you come to it; and
that in any case we must entirely decline to admit that we are more
likely than other people to do the wrong thing when circumstances at
last oblige us to think and act. Also that the discussion is idle on the
shewing of the German case itself; for whether the Germans assumed us to
be unscrupulous Militarists or conscientious Democrats they were bound
to come to the same conclusion: namely, that we should attack them if
they attacked France; consequently their assumption that we would not
interfere must have been based on the belief that we are simply
"contemptible," which is the sort of mistake people have to pay for in
this wicked world.
On the whole, we can hector our way in the Prussian manner out of that
discussion well enough, provided we hold our own in the field. But the
Prussian manner hardly satisfies the conscience. True, the fact that our
diplomatists were not able to discover the right course for Germany does
not excuse Germany for being unable to find it for herself. Not that it
was more her business than ours: it was a European question, and should
have been solved by the united counsels of all the ambassadors and
Foreign Offices and chanceries. Indeed it could not have been stably
solved without certain assurances from them. But it was, to say the
least, as much Germany's business as anyone else's, and terribly urgent
for her: "a matter of life and death," the Imperial Chancellor thought.
Still, it is not for us to claim moral superiority to Germany. It was
for us a matter of the life and death of many Englishmen; and these
Englishmen are dead because our diplomatists were as blind as the
Prussians. The war is a failure for secret Junker diplomacy, ours no
less than the enemy's. Those of us who have still to die must be
inspired, not by devotion to the diplomatists, but, like the Socialist
hero of old on the barricade, by the vision of "human solidarity." And
if he purchases victory for that holy cause with his blood, I submit
that we cannot decently allow the Foreign Office to hang up his martyr's
palm over the War Office Mantelpiece.
*The First Penalty of Disingenuousness.*
The Foreign Office, however, can at lease shift its ground, and declare
for the good cause instead of belittling it with quibbling excuses. For
see what the first effect of the nonsense about Belgium has been! It
carried with it the inevitable conclusion that when the last German was
cleared off Belgian soil, peace-loving England, her reluctant work in
this shocking war done, would calmly retire from the conflict, and leave
her Allies to finish the deal with Potsdam. Accordingly, after Mr.
Asquith's oration at the Mansion House, the Allies very properly
insisted on our signing a solemn treaty between the parties that they
must all stand together to the very end. A pitifully thin attempt has
been made to represent that the mistrusted party was France, and that
the Kaiser was trying to buy her off. All one can say to that is that
the people who believe that any French Government dare face the French
people now with anything less than Alsace and Lorraine as the price of
peace, or that an undefeated and indeed masterfully advancing German
Kaiser (as he seemed then) dare offer France such a price, would believe
anything. Of course we had to sign; but if the Prime Minister had not
been prevented by his own past from taking the popular line, we should
not have been suspected of a possible backing-out when the demands of
our sanctimoniousness were satisfied. He would have known that we are
not vindicating a treaty which by accident remains among the fragments
of treaties of Paris, of Prague, of Berlin, of all sorts of places and
dates, as the only European treaty that has hitherto escaped flat
violation: we are supporting the war as a war on war, on military
coercion, on domineering, on bullying, on brute force, on military law,
on caste insolence, on what Mrs. Fawcett called insensable deviltry
(only to find the papers explaining apologetically that she, as a lady,
had of course been alluding to war made by foreigners, not by England).
Some of us, remembering the things we have ourselves said and done, may
doubt whether Satan can cast out Satan; but as the job is not exactly
one for an unfallen angel, we may as well let him have a try.
*The Blank Cheque.*
In the meantime behold us again hopelessly outwitted by Eastern
diplomacy as a direct consequence of this ill-starred outburst of
hypocrisy about treaties! Everybody has said over and over again that
this war is the most tremendous war ever waged. Nobody has said that
this new treaty is the most tremendous blank cheque we have ever been
forced to sign by our Parliamentary party trick of striking moral
attitudes. It is true that Mr. J.A. Hobson realised the situation at
once, and was allowed to utter a little croak in a corner; but where was
the trumpet note of warning that should have rung throughout the whole
Press? Just consider what the blank cheque means. France's draft on it
may stop at the cost of recovering Alsace and Lorraine. We shall have to
be content with a few scraps of German colony and the heavy-weight
championship. But Russia? When will she say "Hold! Enough!" Suppose she
wants not only Poland, but Baltic Prussia? Suppose she wants
Constantinople as her port of access to the unfrozen seas, in addition
to the dismemberment of Austria? Suppose she has the brilliant idea of
annexing all Prussia, for which there is really something to be said by
ethnographical map-makers, Militarist madmen, and Pan-Slavist
megalomaniacs? It may be a reasonable order; but it is a large one; and
the fact that we should have been committed to it without the knowledge
of Parliament, without discussion, without warning, without any sort of
appeal to public opinion or democratic sanction, by a stroke of Sir
Edward Grey's pen within five weeks of his having committed us in the
same fashion to an appalling European war, shews how completely the
Foreign Office has thrown away all pretence of being any less absolute
than the Kaiser himself. It simply offers _carte blanche_ to the armies
of the Allies without a word to the nation until the cheque is signed.
The only limit there is to the obligation is the certainty that the
cheque will be dishonoured the moment the draft on it becomes too heavy.
And that may furnish a virtuous pretext for another war between the
Allies themselves. In any case no treaty can save each Ally from the
brute necessity of surrendering and paying up if beaten, whether the
defeat is shared by the others or not. Did I not say that the sooner we
made up our minds to the terms of the treaty of peace, so that we might
know what we were fighting for, and how far we were bound to go, the
better? Instead of which we sign a ridiculous "scrap of paper" to save
ourselves the intolerable fatigue of thought.
*Belgium Crucified Between the European Powers.*
And now, before I leave the subject of Belgium, what have we done for
Belgium? Have we saved her soil from invasion? Were we at her side with
half a million men when the avalanche fell on her? Or were we safe in
our own country praising her heroism in paragraphs which all contrived
to convey an idea that the Belgian soldier is about four feet high, but
immensely plucky for his size? Alas, when the Belgian soldier cried:
"Where are the English?" the reply was "a mass of concrete as large as a
big room," blown into the air by a German siege gun, falling back and
crushing him into the earth we had not succeeded in saving from the
worst of the horrors of war. We have not protected Belgium: Belgium has
protected us at the cost of being conquered by Germany. It is now our
sacred duty to drive the Germans out of Belgium. Meanwhile we might at
least rescue her refugees by a generous grant of public money from the
caprices of private charity. We need not press our offer to lend her
money: German capitalists will do that for her with the greatest
pleasure when the war is over. I think the Government realizes that now;
for I note the after-thought that a loan from us need not bear interest.
Now that we begin to see where we really are, what practical morals can
we draw?
*Unpreparedness the Price of Secrecy.*
First, that our autocratic foreign policy, in which the Secretary for
Foreign Affairs is always a Junker, and makes war and concludes war
without consulting the nation, or confiding in it, or even refraining
from deceiving it as to his intentions, leads inevitably to a disastrous
combination of war and unpreparedness for war. Wars are planned which
require huge expeditionary armies trained and equipped for war. But as
such preparation could not be concealed from the public, it is simply
deferred until the war is actually declared and begun, at the most
frightful risk of such an annihilation of our little peace army as we
escaped by the skin of our teeth at Mons and Cambrai. The military
experts tell us that it takes four months to make an infantry and six to
make a cavalry soldier. And our way of getting an army able to fight the
German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army,
and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us
into wholesale enlistment, voluntary or (better still from the Junker
point of view) compulsory. It seems to me that a nation which tolerates
such insensate methods and outrageous risks must shortly perish from
sheer lunacy. And it is all pure superstition: the retaining of the
methods of Edward the First in the reign of George the Fifth. I
therefore suggest that the first lesson of the war is that the Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs be reduced to the level of a simple Prime
Minister, or even of a constitutional monarch, powerless to fire a
single shot or sign a treaty without the authority of the House of
Commons, all diplomatic business being conducted in a blaze of
publicity, and the present regulation which exacts the qualification of
a private income of at least £400 a year for a position in the
Diplomatic Service replaced by a new regulation that at least half the
staff shall consist of persons who have never dined out at the houses of
hosts of higher rank than unfashionable solicitors or doctors.
In these recommendations I am not forgetting that an effective check on
diplomacy is not easy to devise, and that high personal character and
class disinterestedness (the latter at present unattainable) on the part
of our diplomatists will be as vital as ever. I well know that diplomacy
is carried on at present not only by official correspondence meant for
possible publication and subject to an inspection which is in some
degree a responsible inspection, but by private letters which the King
himself has no right to read. I know that even in the United States,
where treaties and declarations of war must be made by Parliament, it is
nevertheless possible for the President to bring about a situation in
which Congress, like our House of Commons in the present instance, has
no alternative but to declare war. But though complete security is
impracticable, it does not follow that no precautions should be taken,
or that a democratic tradition is no safer than a feudal tradition. A
far graver doubt is raised by the susceptibility of the masses to war
fever, and the appalling danger of a daily deluge of cheap newspapers
written by nameless men and women whose scandalously low payment is a
guarantee of their ignorance and their servility to the financial
department, controlled by a moneyed class which not only curries favour
with the military caste for social reasons, but has large direct
interests in war as a method of raising the price of money, the only
commodity the moneyed class has to sell. But I am quite unable to see
that our Junkers are less susceptible to the influence of the Press than
the people educated by public elementary schools. On the contrary, our
Democrats are more fool-proof than our Plutocrats; and the ravings our
Junkers send to the papers for nothing in war time would be dear at a
halfpenny a line. Plutocracy makes for war because it offers prizes to
Plutocrats: Socialism makes for peace because the interests it serves
are international. So, as the Socialist side is the democratic side, we
had better democratize our diplomacy if we desire peace.
II.
*RECRUITING.*
And now as to the question of recruiting. This is pressing, because it
is not enough for the Allies to win: we and not Russia must be the
decisive factor in the victory, or Germany will not be fairly beaten,
and we shall be only rescued _proteges_ of Russia instead of the
saviours of Western Europe. We must have the best army in Europe; and we
shall not get it under existing arrangements. We are passing out of the
first phase of the war fever, in which men flock to the colours by
instinct, by romantic desire for adventure, by the determination not, as
Wagner put it, "to let their lives be governed by fear of the end," by
simple destitution through unemployment, by rancour and pugnacity
excited by the inventions of the Press, by a sense of duty inculcated in
platform orations which would not stand half an hour's discussion, by
the incitements and taunts of elderly non-combatants and maidens with a
taste for mischief, and by the verses of poets jumping at the cheapest
chance in their underpaid profession. The difficulty begins when all the
men susceptible to these inducements are enlisted, and we have to draw
on the solid, sceptical, sensible residuum who know the value of their
lives and services and liberties, and will not give them except on
substantial and honourable conditions. These Ironsides know that it is
one thing to fight for your country, and quite another to let your wife
and children starve to save our rich idlers from a rise in the supertax.
They also know that it is one thing to wipe out the Prussian drill
sergeant and snob officer as the enemies of manhood and honour, and
another to let that sacred mission be made an excuse for subjecting us
to exactly the same tyranny in England. They have not forgotten the "On
the knee" episode, nor the floggings in our military prisons, nor the
scandalous imprisonment of Tom Mann, nor the warnings as to military law
and barrack life contained even in Robert Blatchford's testimony that
the army made a man of him.
*What the Labour Party Owes to the Army.*
And here is where the Labour Party should come in. The Labour Party's
business is to abolish the Militarist soldier, who is only a quaint
survival of the King's footman (himself a still quainter survival of the
medieval baron's retainer), and substitute for him a trained combatant
with full civil rights, receiving the Trade Union rate of wages proper
to a skilled worker at a dangerous trade. It must co-operate with the
Trade Unions in fixing this moral minimum wage for the citizen soldier,
and in obtaining for him a guarantee that the wage shall continue until
he obtains civil employment on standard terms at the conclusion of the
war. It must make impossible the scandal of a monstrously rich peer (his
riches, the automatic result of ground land-landlordism, having "no
damned nonsense of merit about them") proclaiming the official weekly
allowance for the child of the British soldier in the trenches. That
allowance is eighteenpence, being less than one third of the standard
allowance for an illegitimate child under an affiliation order. And the
Labour Party must deprive the German bullet of its present double effect
in killing an Englishman in France and simultaneously reducing his
widow's subsistence from a guinea a week to five shillings. Until this
is done we are simply provoking Providence to destroy us.
I wish I could say that it is hardly necessary to add that Trade
Unionism must be instituted in the Army, so that there shall be
accredited secretaries in the field to act as a competent medium of
communication between the men on service and the political
representatives of their class at the War Office (for I shall propose
this representative innovation presently). It will shock our colonels;
but I know of no bodies of men for whom repeated and violent shocking is
more needed and more likely to prove salutary than the regimental masses
of the British army. One rather pleasant shock in store for them is the
discovery that an officer and a gentleman, whose sole professional
interest is the honour and welfare of his country, and who is bound to
the mystical equality of life-and-death duty for all alike, will get on
much more easily with a Trade Union secretary than a commercial employer
whose aim is simply private profit and who regards every penny added to
the wages of his employees as a penny taken off his own income. Howbeit,
whether the colonels like it or not--that is, whether they have become
accustomed to it or not--it has to come, and its protection from Junker
prejudice is another duty of the Labour Party. The Party as a purely
political body must demand that the defender of his country shall retain
his full civil rights unimpaired; that, the unnecessary, mischievous,
dishonourable and tyrannical slave code called military law, which at
its most savagely stern point produced only Wellington's complaint that
"it is impossible to get a command obeyed in the British Army," be
carted away to the rubbish heap of exploded superstitions; and that if
Englishmen are not to be allowed to serve their country in the field as
freely as they do in the numerous civil industries in which neglect and
indiscipline are as dangerous as they are in war, their leaders and
Parliamentary representatives will not recommend them to serve at all.
In wartime these things may not matter: discipline either goes by the
board or keeps itself under the pressure of the enemy's cannon; and
bullying sergeants and insolent officers have something else to do than
to provoke men they dislike into striking them and then reporting them
for two years' hard labour without trial by jury. In battle such
officers are between two fires. But soldiers are not always, or even
often, at war; and the dishonour of abdicating dearly-bought rights and
liberties is a stain both on war and peace. Now is the time to get rid
of that stain. If any officer cannot command men without it, as
civilians and police inspectors do, that officer has mistaken his
profession and had better come home.
*Obsolete Tests in the Army.*
Another matter needs to be dealt with at the same time. There are
immense numbers of atheists in this country; and though most of them,
like the Kaiser, regard themselves as devout Christians, the best are
intellectually honest enough to object to profess beliefs they do not
hold, especially in the solemn act of dedicating themselves to death in
the service of their country. Army form E 501 A (September, 1912)
secured to these the
[Illustration: JOHN GALSWORTHY. (_Photo by E.O. Hoppe_.) _See Page_
102]
[Illustration: RUDYARD KIPLING _(Photo by E.O. Hoppe_.) _See Page_ 106]
benefit of the Bradlaugh Affirmation Act of 1888, as the enlisting
soldier said simply "I, So and So, do make Oath, &c." But recruits are
now confronted with another form (E 501, June, 1914) running "I, So and
So, swear by Almighty God, &c." On September 1st, at Lord Kitchener's
call, a civil servant obtained leave to enlist and had the oath put to
him, in this form by the attesting officer. He offered to swear in the
1912 form. This was refused; and we accordingly lost a recruit of just
that sturdily conscientious temper which has made the most formidable
soldiers known to history. I am bound to add, however, that the
attesting officer, on being told that the oath would be a blasphemous
farce to the conscience of the recruit, made no difficulty about that,
and was quite willing to accept him if he, on his part, would oblige by
professing what he did not believe. Thus a Ghoorka's religious
conscience is respected: an Englishman's is insulted and outraged.
But, indeed, all these oaths are obstructive and useless superstitions.
No recruit will hesitate to pledge his word of honour to fight to the
death for his country or for a cause with which he sympathizes; and that
is all we require. There is no need to drag in Almighty God and no need
to drag in the King. Many an Irishman, many a colonial Republican, many
an American volunteer who would fight against the Prussian monarchy
shoulder to shoulder with the French Republicans with a will, would
rather not pretend to do it out of devotion to the British throne. To
vanquish Prussia in this war we need the active aid or the sympathy of
every Republican in the world. America, for instance, sympathizes with
England, but classes the King with the Kaiser as an obsolete
institution. Besides, even from the courtly point of view the situation
is a delicate one. Why emphasize the fact that, formally speaking, the
war is between two grandsons of Albert the Good, that thoroughbred
German whose London monument is so much grander than Cromwell's?
The Labour Party should also set its face firmly against the abandonment
of Red Cross work and finance, or the support of soldiers' families, or
the patrolling of the streets, to amateurs who regard the war as a
wholesome patriotic exercise, or as the latest amusement in the way of
charity bazaars, or as a fountain of self-righteousness. Civil
volunteering is needed urgently enough: one of the difficulties of war
is that it creates in certain departments a demand so abnormal that no
peace establishment can cope with it. But the volunteers should be
disciplined and paid: we are not so poor that we need spunge on anyone.
And in hospital and medical service war ought not at present to cost
more than peace would if the victims of our commercial system were
properly tended, and our Public Health service adequately extended and
manned. We should therefore treat our Red Cross department as if it were
destined to become a permanent service. No charity and no amateur
anarchy and incompetence should be tolerated. As to allowing that
admirable detective agency for the defence of the West End against
begging letter writers, the Charity Organization Society to touch the
soldier's home, the very suggestion is an outrage. The C.O.S., the Poor
Law, and the charitable amateur, whether of the patronizing or prying or
gushing variety, must be kept as far from the army and its folk as if
they were German spies. The business of our fashionable amateurs is to
pay Income Tax and Supertax. This time they will have to pay through the
nose, vigorously wrung for that purpose by the House of Commons; so they
had better set their own houses in order and leave the business of the
war to be officially and responsibly dealt with and paid for at full
standard rates.
*Wanted: Labour Representation in the War Office.*
But parliamentary activity is not sufficient. There must be a more
direct contact between representative Labour and the Army, because
Parliament can only remedy grievances, and that not before years of
delay and agitation elapse. Even then the grievances are not dealt with
on their merits; for under our party system, which is the most
abominable engine for the perversion and final destruction of all
political conscience ever devized by man, the House of Commons never
votes on any question but whether the Government shall remain in office
or give the Opposition a turn, no matter what the pretext for the
division may be. Only in such emergencies as the present, when the
Government is forced to beg the Labour members to help them to recruit,
is there a chance of making reasonable conditions for the soldier.
*The Four Inoculations.*
It is therefore necessary that the War Office should have working class
representatives on all committees and councils which issue notices to
the public. There is at present, it would seem, not a single person in
authority there who has the faintest notion of what the immense majority
of possible British recruits are thinking about. The results have been
beyond description ludicrous and dangerous. Every proclamation is
urgently worded so as to reassure recruits with £5,000 a year and repel
recruits with a pound a week. On the very day when the popular Lord
Kitchener, dropping even the _et rex meus_ of Wolsey, frankly asked the
nation for 100,000 men for his army, and when it was a matter of life
and death that every encouragement should be held out to working men to
enlist, the War Office decided that this was the psychological moment to
remind everybody that soldiers on active service often die of typhoid
fever, and to press inoculation on the recruits pending the officially
longed-for hour when Sir Almroth Wright's demand for compulsion can be
complied with. I say nothing here about the efficacy of inoculation.
Efficacious or not, Sir Almroth Wright himself bases his demand for
compulsion on the ground that it is hopeless to expect the whole army to
submit to it voluntarily. That being so, it seems to me that when men
are hesitating on the threshold of the recruiting station, only a German
spy or our War Office (always worth ten thousand men to our enemies)
would seize that moment to catch the nervous postulant by the sleeve and
say, "Have you thought of the danger of dysentery?" The fact that the
working class forced the Government, very much against its doctor-ridden
will, to abolish compulsory vaccination, shews the extent to which its
households loathe and dread these vaccines (so called, but totally
unconnected with cows or Jenner) which, as they are continually reminded
by energetic anti-inoculation propagandists in largely circulated
journals and pamphlets, not to mention ghastly photographs of disfigured
children, sometimes produce worse effects than the diseases they are
supposed to prevent. Indifferent or careless recruits are easily induced
to submit to inoculation by little privileges during the ensuing
indisposition or by small money bribes; and careful ones are
proselytized by Sir Almroth's statistics; but on the whole both
inoculation and amateur medical statistics are regarded with suspicion
by the poor; and the fact that revaccination is compulsory in the
regular army, and that the moral pressure applied to secure both typhoid
inoculation and vaccination both in the regular army and the
Territorials is such as only a few stalwarts are able to resist, is
deeply resented. At present the inoculation mania has reached the pitch
of proposing no less than four separate inoculations: revaccination,
typhoid, cholera, and--Sir Almroth's last staggerer--inoculation against
wounds! When the War Office and its medical advisers have been
successfully inoculated against political lunacy, it will be time enough
to discuss such extravagances. Meanwhile, the sooner the War Office
issues a proclamation that no recruit will be either compelled or
importuned to submit to any sort of inoculation whatever against his
will, the better for the recruiting, and the worse for the enemy.
*The War Office Bait of Starvation.*
But this blunder was a joke compared to the next exploit of the War
Office. It suddenly began to placard the country with frantic assurances
to its five-thousand-a-year friends that they would be "discharged with
all possible speed THE MINUTE THE WAR IS OVER." Only considerations of
space restrained them, I presume, from adding "LAWN TENNIS, SHOOTING,
AND ALL THE DELIGHTS OF FASHIONABLE LIFE CAN BE RESUMED IMMEDIATELY ON
THE FIRING OF THE LAST SHOT." Now what does this mean to the wage
worker? Simply that the moment he is no longer wanted in the trenches he
will be flung back into the labour market to sink or swim without an
hour's respite. If we had had a Labour representative or two to help in
drawing up these silly placards--I am almost tempted to say if we had
had any human being of any class with half the brains of a rabbit
there--the placards would have contained a solemn promise that no single
man should be discharged at the conclusion of the war, save at his own
request, until a job had been found for him in civil life. I ask the
heavens, with a shudder, do these class-blinded people in authority
really intend to take a million men out of their employment; turn them
into soldiers; and then at one blow hurl them back, utterly unprovided
for, into the streets?
But a War Office capable of placarding Lord Roberts's declaration that
the men who are enlisting are doing "what all able-bodied men in the
kingdom should do" is clearly ignorant enough for anything. I do not
blame Lord Roberts for his oratorical flourish: we have all said things
just as absurd on the platform in moments of enthusiasm. But the
officials who reproduced it in cold blood would have us believe that
soldiers live on air; that ammunition drops from heaven like manna; and
that an army could hold the field for twenty-four hours without the
support of a still more numerous body of civilians working hard to
support it. Sane men gasp at such placards and ask angrily, "What sort
of fools do you take us for?" I have in my hand a copy of _The Torquay
Times_ containing a hospitable invitation to soldiers' wives to call at
the War Office, Whitehall, S.W., if they desire "assistance and
explanation of their case." The return fare from Torquay to London is
thirty shillings and sixpence third class; but the War Office no doubt
assumes that all soldiers' wives keep motor cars. Still, let us be just
even to the War Office. It did _not_ ask the soldiers' wives for forms
of authorization to pay the separation allowance to their bankers every
six months. It actually offered the money monthly!
*Delusive Promises.*
The middle and upper classes are nearly as bad as the War Office. They
talk of keeping every man's place open for him until the end of the war.
Obviously this is flatly impossible. Some places can be kept, and no
doubt are being kept. Some functions are suspended by the war and cannot
be resumed until the troops return to civil life and resume them.
Employers are so hardened to the daily commercial necessity for
discharging men without a thought as to what is to become of them that
they are quite ready to undertake to sack the replacers when the troops
come back. Also the return of peace may be followed by a revival of
trade in which employment may not be hard to find, even by discharged
soldiers, who are always passed over in the labour market in favour of
civilians, as those well know who have the task of trying to find places
for them. But these considerations do not justify an attempt to persuade
recruits that they can go off soldiering for months--they are told by
Lord Kitchener that it will probably be for years--and then come back
and walk to their benches or into their offices and pick up their work
as if they had left only the night before. The very people who are
promising this are raising the cry "business as usual" in the same
breath. How can business be carried on as usual, or carried on at all,
on unoccupied office stools and at counters with no men behind them?
Such rubbish is an insult to the recruit's intelligence. These promises
of keeping places open were made to the men who enlisted for South
Africa, and were of course broken, as a promise to supply green cheese
by quarrying the moon would have been broken. New employees must be
found to do the work of the men who are in the field; and these new ones
will not all be thrown into the street when the war is over to make room
for discharged soldiers, even if a good many of these soldiers are not
disqualified by their new training and habits for their old employment.
I repeat, there is only one assurance that can be given to the recruits
without grossly and transparently deluding them; and that is that they
shall not be discharged, except at their own request, until civil
employment is available for them.
*Funking Controversy.*
This is not the only instance of the way in which, under the first scare
of the war, we shut our eyes and opened our mouths to every folly. For
example, there was a cry for the suspension of all controversy in the
face of the national danger. Now the only way to suspend controversial
questions during a period of intense activity in the very departments in
which the controversy has arisen is to allow them all to be begged.
Perhaps I should not object if they were all begged in favour of my own
side, as, for instance, the question of Socialism was begged in favour
of Socialism when the Government took control of the railways; bought up
all the raw sugar; regulated prices; guaranteed the banks; suspended the
operation of private contracts; and did all the things it had been
declaring utterly and eternally Utopian and imposible when Socialists
advocated them. But it is now proposed to suspend all popular liberties
and constitutional safeguards; to muzzle the Press, and actually to have
no contests at bye-elections! This is more than a little too much. We
have submitted to have our letters, our telegrams, our newspapers
censored, our dividends delayed, our trains cut off, our horses and even
our houses commandeered, our streets darkened, our restaurants closed,
and ourselves shot dead on the public highways if we were slow to
realize that some excited person bawling in the distance was a sentry
challenging us. But that we are to be politically gagged and enslaved as
well; that the able-bodied soldier in the trenches, who depends on the
able-minded civilian at home to guard the liberties of his country and
protect him from carelesness or abuse of power by the authorities whom
he must blindly and dumbly obey, is to be betrayed the moment his back
is turned to his fellow-citizens and his face to the foe, is not
patriotism: it is the paralysis of mortal funk: it is the worst kind of
cowardice in the face of the enemy. Let us hear no more of it, but
contest our elections like men, and regain the ancient political
prestige of England at home as our expeditionary force has regained it
abroad.
The Labour Party, then, need have no hesitation in raising all the
standing controversies between Democracy and Junkerism in their acutest
form, and taking advantage of the war emergency to press them to a
series of parliamentary victories for Labour, whether in negotiations
with the Government whips, in divisions on the floor of the House, or in
strenuously contested bye-elections. No doubt our Junkers will try to
disarm their opponents by representing that it would be in the last
degree unfair, un-English, and ungentlemanly on the part of the Labour
members to seize any tactical advantage in parliamentary warfare, and
most treacherous and unpatriotic to attack their country (meaning the
Junker Party) when it is at war. Some Labour members will be easily
enough gulled in this way: it would be laughable, if the consequences
were not so tragic, to see how our parliamentary beginners from the
working class succumb to the charm of the Junker appeal. The Junkers
themselves are not to be coaxed in this manner: it is no use offering
tracts to a missionary, as the poor Kaiser found when he tried it on.
The Labour Party will soon learn the value of these polite
demonstrations that it is always its duty not to hamper the governing
classes in their very difficult and delicate and dangerous task of
safeguarding the interests of this great empire: in short, to let itself
be gammoned by elegant phrases and by adroit practisings on its personal
good-nature, its inveterate proletarian sentimentality, and its secret
misgivings as to the correctness of its manners. The Junkers have
already taken the fullest advantage of the war to paralyze democracy. If
the Labour members do not take a vigorous counter-offensive, and fight
every parliamentary trench to the last division, the Labour Movement
will be rushed back as precipitately as General von Kluck rushed the
Allies back from Namur to the gates of Paris. In truth, the importance
of the war to the immense majority of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans
lies in the possibility that when Junkers fall out common men may come
by their own.
*III.*
*THE TERMS OF PEACE.*
*Natural Limits to Duration of the War.*
So much for the recruiting. Now for the terms of peace. It is time to
take that subject in hand; for Lord Kitchener's notion that we are going
to settle down to years of war as we did a century ago is soldierly, but
not sensible. It is, of course, physically possible for us to continue
for twenty years digging trenches and shelling German troops and shoving
German armies back when they are not shoving us, whilst old women pull
turnips and tend goats in the fire zones across which soldiers run to
shelter. But we cannot afford to withdraw a million male adults who have
passed a strictish health test from the work of parentage for several
years unless we intend to breed our next generation from parents with
short sight, varicose veins, rotten teeth, and deranged internal organs.
Soldiers do not think of these things: "theirs not to reason why: theirs
but to do and die"; but sensible civilians have to. And even soldiers
know that you cannot make ammunition as fast as you can burn it, nor
produce men and horses as instantaneously as you can kill them by
machinery. It would be well, indeed, if our papers, instead of writing
of ten-inch shells, would speak of £1,000 shells, and regimental bands
occasionally finish the National Anthem and the Brabançonne and the
Marseillaise with the old strain, "That's the way the money goes: Pop
goes the Ten Inch." It is easy to rebuke Mr. Norman Angell and Herr
Bloch for their sordid references to the cost of war; and Mr. H.G. Wells
is profoundly right in pointing out that the fact that war does not pay
commercially is greatly to its credit, as no high human activity ever
does pay commercially. But modern war does not even pay its way. Already
our men have "pumped lead" into retreating Germans who had no lead left
to pump back again; and sooner or later, if we go on indefinitely, we
shall have to finish the job with our fists, and congratulate ourselves
that both Georges Carpentier and Bombardier Wells are on our side. This
war will stop when Germany throws up the sponge, which will happen long
before she is utterly exhausted, but not before we ourselves shall be
glad enough of a rest. Nations are like bees: they cannot kill except at
the cost of their own lives.
The question of terms will raise a fierce controversy. At the extremes
of our public opinion we have two temperaments, first, our gentlemen,
our sportsmen, our daredevils, our _preux chevaliers_. To these the
notion of reviling your enemy when he is up; kicking him when he is
knocked down by somebody else; and gouging out his eyes, cutting out his
tongue, hewing off his right arm, and stealing all his money, is
abhorrent and cowardly. These gallants say, "It is not enough that we
can fight Germany to-day. We can fight her any day and every day. Let
her come again and again and yet again. We will fight her one to three;
and if she comes on ten to one, as she did at Mons, we will mill on the
retreat, and drive her back again when we have worn her down to our
weight. If her fleet will not come out to fight us because we have too
many ships, we will send all the odds in our favour back to Portsmouth
and fight ship to ship in the North Sea, and let the bravest and best
win." That is how gallant fighters talk, and how Drake is popularly
(though erroneously) supposed to have tackled the Armada.
*The Ignoble Attitude of Cruel Panic.*
But we are not all _preux chevaliers._ We have at the other extremity
the people who are craving for loot and vengeance, who clamour for the
humiliation and torture of the enemy, who rave against the village
burnings and shootings by the Prussians in one column and exult in the
same proceedings by the Russians in another, who demand that German
prisoners of war shall be treated as criminals, who depict our Indian
troops as savage cutthroats because they like to think of their enemies
being mauled in the spirit of the Indian Mutiny, who shriek that the
Kaiser must be sent to Devil's Island because St. Helena is too good for
him, and who declare that Germany must be so maimed and trodden into the
dust that she will not be able to raise her head again for a century.
Let us call these people by their own favourite name, Huns, even at the
risk of being unjust to the real Huns. And let us send as many of them
to the trenches as we can possibly induce to go, in the hope that they
may presently join the lists of the missing. Still, as they rather cling
to our soil, they will have to be reckoned with when the settlement
comes. But they will not count for much then. Most of them will be
heartily ashamed of what they said in those first three or four weeks of
blue funk (I am too timid myself not to make allowances for that most
distressing and universal, but fortunately transient effect of war); and
most of those who are not will be ashamed to bear malice publicly.
*The Commercial Attitude.*
Far more weighty in the matter will be the intermediate sections. First,
our commercial main body, which thinks that chivalry is not business,
and that rancour is childish, but cannot see why we should not make the
Germans pay damages and supply us with some capital to set the City
going again, forgetting that when France did that after 1871 for Berlin,
Berlin was set going so effectually that it went headlong to a colossal
financial smash, whilst the French peasant who had provided the capital
from his old stocking throve soberly on the interest at the expense of
less vital classes. Unfortunately Germany has set the example of this
kind of looting. Prussian generals, like Napoleon's marshals, have
always been shameless brigands, keeping up the seventeenth and
eighteenth century tradition of making cities bribe them to refrain from
sack and pillage and even billeting, and being quite incapable of the
magnificence of the great Condé (or was it Turenne?), who refused a
payment offered by a city on the ground that he had not intended to
march through it. Blucher's fury when Wellington would not allow him to
plunder Paris, and his exclamation when he saw London "What a city to
loot!" is still regarded as fair soldiering; and the blackmail levied
recently by the Prussian generals on the Belgian and French towns they
have occupied must, I suppose, be let pass as ransom, not as ordinary
criminal looting. But if the penalty of looting be thus spared, the
Germans can hardly complain if they are themselves held to ransom when
the fortunes of war go against them. Liège and Lille and Antwerp and the
rest must be paid their money back with interest; and there will be a
big builder's bill at Rheims. But we should ourselves refrain strictly
from blackmail. We should sell neither our blood nor our mercy. If we
sell either we are as much brigands as Blucher.
*Vindictive Damages.*
And we must not let ourselves be tempted to soil our hands under pretext
of vindictive damages. The man who thinks that all the money in Germany
could pay for the life of a single British drummer boy ought to be shot
merely as an expression of the feeling that he is unfit to live. We
stake our blood as the Germans stake theirs; and in that _ganz
besonderes Saft_ alone should we [missing text]r accept payment. We had
better **[missing text]y to the Kaiser at the end of the **[missing
text] "Scoundrel: you can never replace **[missing text] Louvain
library, nor the sculpture of Rheims; and it follows logically that you
shall empty your pockets into ours." Much better say: "God forgive us
all!" If we cannot rise to this, and must soil our hands with plunder,
at least let us call it plunder, and not profane our language and our
souls by giving it fine names.
*Our Annihilationists.*
Then we shall have the Militarists, who will want to have Germany "bled
to the white," dismembered and maimed, so that she may never do it
again. Well, that is quite simple, if you are Militarist enough to do
it. Loading Germany with debt will not do it. Towing her fleet into
Portsmouth or sinking it will not do it. Annexing provinces and colonies
will not do it. The effective method is far shorter and more practical.
What has made Germany formidable in this war? Obviously her
overwhelmingly superior numbers. That was how she rushed us back almost
to the gates of Paris. The organization, the readiness, the sixteen-inch
howitzer helped; but it was the multitudinous _Kanonenfutter_ that
nearly snowed us under. The British soldier at Cambrai and Le Cateau
killed and killed until his rifle was too hot to hold and his hand was
paralyzed with slayer's cramp; but still they came and came.
*Why Not Kill the German Women?*
Well, there is no obscurity about that problem. Those Germans who took
but an instant to kill had taken the travail of a woman for
three-quarters of a year to breed, and eighteen years to ripen for the
slaughter. All we have to do is to kill, say, 75 per cent, of all the
women in Germany under 60. Then we may leave Germany her fleet and her
money, and say "Much good may they do you." Why not, if you are really
going in to be what you, never having read "this Neech they talk of,"
call a Nietzschean Superman? War is not an affair of sentiment. Some of
our newspapers complain that the Germans kill the wounded and fire on
field hospitals and Red Cross Ambulances. These same newspapers fill
their columns with exultant accounts of how our wounded think nothing of
modern bullet wounds and hope to be back at the front in a week, which I
take to be the most direct incitement to the Germans to kill the wounded
that could be devized. It is no use being virtuously indignant: "stone
dead hath no fellow" is an English proverb, not a German one. Even the
killing of prisoners is an Agincourt tradition. Now it is not more
cowardly to kill a woman than to kill a wounded man. And there is only
one reason why it is a greater crime to kill a woman than a man, and why
women have to be spared and protected when men are exposed and
sacrificed. That reason is that the destruction of the women is the
destruction of the community. Men are comparatively of no account: kill
90 per cent, of the German men, and the remaining 10 per cent. can
repeople her. But kill the women, and _Delenda est Carthago_. Now this
is exactly what our Militarists want to happen to Germany. Therefore the
objection to killing women becomes in this case the reason for doing it.
Why not? No reply is possible from the Militarist, disable-your-enemy
point of view. If disablement is your will, there is your way, and the
only effectual way. We really must not call the Kaiser and Von Bernhardi
disciples of the mythical Neech when they have either overlooked or
shrunk from such a glaring "biological necessity." A pair of puling
pious sentimentalists if you like. But Supermen! Nonsense. O, my brother
journalists, if you revile the Prussians, call them sheep led by snobs,
call them beggars on horseback, call them sausage eaters, depict them in
the good old English fashion in spectacles and comforter, seedy overcoat
buttoned over paunchy figure, playing the contrabass tuba in a street
band; but do not flatter them with the heroic title of Superman, and
hold up as magnificent villainies worthy of Milton's Lucifer these
common crimes of violence and raid and lust that any drunken blackguard
can commit when the police are away, and that no mere multiplication can
dignify. As to Nietzsche, with his Polish hatred of Prussia (who
heartily reciprocated the sentiment), when did he ever tell the Germans
to allow themselves to be driven like sheep to the slaughter in millions
by mischievous dolts who, being for the most part incapable of reading
ten sentences of a philosophic treatise without falling asleep, allow
journalists as illiterate as themselves to persuade them that he got his
great reputation by writing a cheap gospel for bullies? Strictly between
ourselves, we also are an illiterate people; but we may at least hold
our tongues about matters we don't understand, and not say in the face
of Europe that the English believe that the composer of Parsifal was a
Militarist Prussian (he was an exiled revolutionist); that Nietzsche was
a diciple of Wagner (Nietzsche preferred the music of Bizet, a
Frenchman); and that the Kaiser is a disciple of Nietzsche, who would
have laughed his childish pietism to scorn.
*The Simple Answer.*
Nietzsche would certainly have agreed that we must kill the German women
if we mean business when we talk of destroying Germany. But he would
also have answered my Why not?, which is more than any consistent
Militarist can. Indeed, it needs no philosopher to give the answer. The
first ordinary anti-Militarist human person you meet will tell you that
it would be too horrible; that life would be unbearable if people did
such things. And he would be quite right; so please let us hear no more
of kicking your enemy when he is down so that he may be unable to rise
for a whole century. We may be unable to resist the temptation to loot
Germany more or less if we conquer her. We are already actively engaged
in piracy against her, stealing her ships and selling them in our prize
courts, instead of honestly detaining them until the war is over and
keeping a strict account of them. When gentlemen rise in the House of
Commons and say that they owe Germans money and do not intend to pay it,
one must face the fact that there will be a strong popular demand for
plunder. War, after all, is simply a letting loose of organized murder,
theft, and piracy on a foe; and I have no doubt the average Englishman
will say to me what Falstaff said to Pistol concerning his share in the
price of the stolen fan: "Reason, you rogue, reason: do you think I'll
endanger my soul _gratis_?" To which I reply, "If you can't resist the
booty, take it frankly, and know yourself for half patriot, half
brigand; but don't talk nonsense about disablement. Cromwell tried it in
Ireland. He had better have tried Home Rule. And what Cromwell could not
do to Ireland we cannot do to Germany."
*The Sensible People.*
Finally we come to the only body of opinion in which there is any hope
of civilization: the opinion of the people who are bent, not on
gallantry nor revenge nor plunder nor pride nor panic nor glory nor any
of the invidiousnesses of patriotism, but on the problem of how to so
redraw the map of Europe and reform its political constitutions that
this abominable crime and atrocious nuisance, a European war, shall not
easily occur again. The map is very important; for the open sores which
have at last suppurated and burst after having made the world uneasy for
years, were produced by altering the colour of Alsace and Lorraine and
of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the map. And the new map must be settled,
not by conquest, but by consent of the people immediately concerned. One
of the broken treaties of Europe which has been mentioned less
frequently of late than the Belgian treaty is the treaty of Prague, by
which a plebiscite was to have been taken on the subject of the
nationality of Schleswig and Holstein. That plebiscite has never been
taken. It may have to be taken, with other plebiscites, before this war
is settled.
*German Unity Inviolable.*
But here let me warn those who are hoping for a disintegrated Germany
like that which Thackeray ridiculed, that their hopes are vain. The
southern Germans, the, friendliest, most easy-going people in the world
(as far as I know the world) dislike the Prussians far more heartily
than we do; but they know that they are respected and strong and big as
part of United Germany, and that they were weak and despised and petty
as separate kingdoms. Germany will hold together. No doubt the Germans
may reasonably say to the Prussian drill sergeant and his master
Hohenzollern, "A nice mess you have made of your job after all we have
endured from you because we believed you could make us invincible. We
thought that if you were hard masters you were at any rate good
grenadiers; but here are these piffling little Belgians and these
Russians who were beaten by the Japanese, and these English who made
such a poor show against a handful of Boer farmers, fighting and
organizing just as well as you. So, as the French and English are
organized as a republic and an extremely limited monarchy, we will try
how that sort of constitution will suit us." But they will not break up:
on the contrary, they are much more likely to extend the German
community by incorporating German Austria. And as this would raise the
question whether Hohenzollern or Hapsburg should rule the roost, the
simplest solution would be to get rid of them both, and take the sooner
or later inevitable step into the democratic republican form of
Government to which Europe is visibly tending, though "this king
business," as my American correspondents call it, has certain
conveniences when it is limited and combined with an aristocracy also
limited by primogeniture and politically controlled by a commonalty into
which all but the eldest brothers in the aristocratic families fall,
thus making the German segregation of the _adel_ class impossible. Such
a monarchy, especially when the monarch is a woman, as in Holland today,
and in England under Victoria, is a fairly acceptable working substitute
for a formal republic in old civilizations with inveterate monarchical
traditions, absurd as it is in new and essentially democratic States. At
any rate, it is conceivable that the western allies might demand the
introduction of some such political constitution in Germany and Austria
as a guarantee; for though the demand would not please Russia, some of
Russia's demands will not please us; and there must be some give and
take in the business.
*Limits of Constitutional Interference.*
Let us consider this possibility for a moment. First, it must be firmly
postulated that civilized nations cannot have their political
constitutions imposed on them from without if the object of the
arrangement is peace and stability. If a victorious Germany were to
attempt to impose the Prussian constitution on France and England, they
would submit to it just as Ireland submitted to Dublin Castle, which, to
say the least, would not be a millennial settlement. Profoundly as we
are convinced that our Government of India is far better than any native
Indian government could be (the assumption that "natives" could govern
at all being made for the sake of argument with due reluctance), it is
quite certain that until it becomes as voluntary as the parliamentary
government of Australia, and has been modified accordingly, it will
remain an artificial, precarious, and continually threatening political
structure. Nevertheless, we need not go to the opposite extreme and
conclude that a political constitution must fit a country so accurately
that it must be home-made to measure. Europe has a stock of ready-made
constitutions, both Monarchical and Republican, which will fit any
western European nation comfortably enough. We are at present
considerably bothered by the number of Germans who, though their own
country and constitution is less than a day's journey away, settle here
and marry Englishwomen without feeling that our constitution is
unbearable. Englishmen are never tired of declaring that "they do things
better abroad" (as a matter of fact they often do), and that the ways of
Prussia are smarter than the ways of Paddington. It is therefore quite
possible that a reach-me-down constitution proposed, not by the
conquerors, but by an international congress with no interest to serve
but the interests of peace, might prove acceptable enough to a nation
thoroughly disgusted with its tyrants.
*Physician: Heal Thyself.*
Now a congress which undertook the Liberalization of Germany would
certainly not stop there. If we invite a congress to press for a
democratization of the German constitution, we must consent to the
democratization of our own. If we send the Kaiser to St. Helena (or
whatever the title of the Chiselhurst villa may be) we must send Sir
Edward Grey there, too. For if on the morrow of the peace we may all
begin to plot and plan one another's destruction over again in the
secrecy of our Foreign Office, so that in spite of Parliament and free
democratic institutions the Foreign Secretary may at any moment step
down from the Foreign Office to the House of Commons and say, "I
arranged yesterday with the ambassador from Cocagne that England is to
join his country in fighting Brobdingnag; so vote me a couple of hundred
millions, and off with you to the trenches," we shall be just where we
were before as far as any likelihood of putting an end to war is
concerned. The congress will certainly ask us to pledge ourselves that
if we shake the mailed fist at all we shall shake it publicly, and that
though we may keep our sword ready (let me interject in passing that
disarmament is all nonsense: nobody is going to disarm after this
experience) it shall be drawn by the representatives of the nation, and
not by Junker diplomatists who despise and distrust the nation, and have
planned war behind its back for years. Indeed they will probably demur
to its being drawn even by the representative of the nation until the
occasion has been submitted to the judgment of the representatives of
the world, or such beginnings of a world representative body as may be
possible. That is the true _Weltpolitik_.
*The Hegemony of Peace.*
For the main business of the settlement, if it is to have any serious
business at all, must be the establishment of a Hegemony of Peace, as
desired by all who are really capable of high civilization, and
formulated by me in the daily Press in a vain attempt to avert this
mischief whilst it was brewing. Nobody took the smallest public notice
of me; so I made a lady in a play say "Not bloody likely," and instantly
became famous beyond the Kaiser, beyond the Tsar, beyond Sir Edward
Grey, beyond Shakespeare and Homer and President Wilson, the papers
occupying themselves with me for a whole week just as they are now
occupying themselves with the war, and one paper actually devoting a
special edition to a single word in my play, which is more than it has
done for the Treaty of London (1839). I concluded then that this was a
country which really could not be taken seriously. But the habits of a
lifetime are not so easily broken; and I am not afraid to produce
another dead silence by renewing my good advice, as I can easily recover
my popularity by putting still more shocking expressions into my next
play, especially now that events have shewn that I was right on the
point of foreign policy.
*East Is East; and West Is West.*
I repeat, then, that there should be a definite understanding that
whatever may happen or not happen further east, England, France, and
Germany solemnly pledge themselves to maintain the internal peace of the
west of Europe, and renounce absolutely all alliances and engagements
that bind them to join any Power outside the combination in military
operations, whether offensive or defensive, against one inside it. We
must get rid of the monstrous situation that produced the present war.
France made an alliance with Russia as a defence against Germany.
Germany made an alliance with Austria as a defence against Russia.
England joined the Franco-Russian alliance as a defence against Germany
and Austria. The result was that Germany became involved in a quarrel
between Austria and Russia. Having no quarrel with France, and only a
second-hand quarrel with Russia, she was, nevertheless, forced to attack
France in order to disable her before she could strike Germany from
behind when Germany was fighting France's ally, Russia. And this attack
on France forced England to come to the rescue of England's ally,
France. Not one of the three nations (as distinguished from their tiny
Junker-Militarist cliques) wanted to fight; for England had nothing to
gain and Germany had everything to lose, whilst France had given up hope
of her Alsace-Lorraine _revanche_, and would certainly not have hazarded
a war for it. Yet because Russia, who has a great deal to gain by
victory and nothing except military prestige to lose by defeat, had a
quarrel with Austria over Servia, she has been able to set all three
western friends and neighbours shedding "rivers of blood" from one
another's throats; an outrageous absurdity. Fifty years ago the notion
of England helping Russia and Japan to destroy Germany would have seemed
as suicidal as Canada helping the Apaches to destroy the United States
of America; and though we now think much better of the Japanese (and
also, by the way, of the Apaches), that does not make us any the more
patient with the man who burns down his own street because he admires
the domestic architecture of Yokohama, especially when the fire
presently spreads to the cathedral of Rheims. It is bad enough that we
should have betrayed oriental Persia to oriental Russia as we did (and
get nothing for our pains but what we deserved); but when it comes to
sacrificing occidental Germany to her as well, we are sharpening a knife
for our own occidental throat. The Russian Government is the open enemy
of every liberty we boast of. Charles I.'s unsuccessful attempt to
arrest five members of the House of Commons for disagreeing with him is
ancient history here: it occurred 272 years ago; but the Tsar's
successful attempt to arrest thirty members of the Duma and to punish
them as dangerous criminals is a fact of to-day. Under Russian
government people whose worst crime is to find _The Daily News_ a
congenial newspaper are hanged, flogged, or sent to Siberia as a matter
of daily routine; so that before 1906 even the articles in _The Times_
on such events as the assassinations of Bobrikoff and the Grand Duke
were simply polite paraphrases of "Serve him right." It may be asked why
our newspapers have since ceased to report examples of Russia's
disregard of the political principles we are supposed to stand for. The
answer is simple. It was in 1906 that we began to lend Russia money, and
Russia began to advertise in _The Times_. Since then she has been
welcome to flog and hang her H.G. Wellses and Lloyd Georges by the dozen
without a word of remonstrance from our plutocratic Press, provided the
interest is paid punctually. Russia has been embraced in the large
charity of cosmopolitan capital, the only charity that does not begin at
home.
*The Russian Russians and Their Prussian Tsars.*
And here I must save my face with my personal friends who are either
Russians or discoverers of the soul of the Russian people. I hereby
declare to Sasha Kropotkin and Cunninghame Graham that my heart is with
their Russia, the Russia of Tolstoy and Turgenieff and Dostoieffsky, of
Gorki and Tchekoff, of the Moscow Art Theatre and the Drury Lane Ballet,
of Peter Kropotkin and all the great humanitarians, great artists, and
charming people whom their very North German Tsars exile and imprison
and flog and generally do what in them lies to suppress and abolish. For
the sake of Russian Russia, I am prepared to strain every point in
Prussian Russia's favour. I grant that the Nihilists, much as we loved
them, were futile romantic people who could have done nothing if
Alexander II. had abdicated and offered them the task of governing
Russia instead of persecuting them and being finally blown to bits by
them. I grant that the manners of the Fins to the Russians are described
as insufferable both by the Swedes and the Russians, and that we never
listened to the Russian side of that story. I am ready to grant Gilbert
Murray's plea that the recent rate of democratic advance has been
greater in Russia than anywhere else in Europe, though it does remind me
a little of the bygone days when the Socialists, scoring 20 votes at one
general election and forty at the next, were able to demonstrate that
their gain of 100 per cent. was immensely in excess of the wretched two
or three per cent. that was the best the Unionists or Liberals could
shew. I am willing to forget how short a time it is since Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman said: "The Duma is dead: long live the Duma!" and
since we refused to allow the Tsar to land in England when his ship was
within gangway's length of our shore, on which occasion I myself held up
the Anglo-Russian agreement for the partition of Persia to the
execration of a crowd in Trafalgar Square, whilst our Metropolitan
Police snatched the _l'sarbeleidigend_ English newspapers from the
sellers and tore them up precisely in the Cossack manner. I have an
enormous relish for the art of Russia; I perceive a spirit in Russia
which is the natural antidote to Potsdamnation; and I like most of the
Russians I know quite unaffectedly. I could find it in my heart to
reproach the Kaiser for making war on the Russia of these delightful
people, just as I like to think that at this very moment good Germans
may be asking him how he can bring himself to discharge shrapnel at the
England of Bernard Shaw and Cunninghame Graham. History may not forgive
him for it; but the practical point at the moment is that he does it,
and no doubt attributes the perfidy of England to the popularity of our
works. And as we have to take the Kaiser as we find him, and not as the
Hohenzollern legend glorifies him, I have to take the Tsar as I find
him. When we fight the Kaiser we are not fighting Bach and Wagner and
Strauss, to whom we have just joyfully surrendered without a blow at the
battle of Queen's Hall, but all the forces in Germany that made things
hard for Wagner and Strauss. And when we fight for the Tsar we are not
fighting for Tolstoy and Gorki, but for the forces that Tolstoy
thundered against all his life and that would have destroyed him had he
not been himself a highly connected Junker as well as a revolutionary
Christian. And if I doubt whether the Tsar would feel comfortable as a
member of a Democratic League of Peace, I am not doubting the good
intent of Kropotkin: I am facing the record of Kropotkin's imperial
jailer, and standing on the proud fact that England is the only country
in Europe, not excepting even France, in which Kropotkin has been
allowed to live a free man, and had his birthday celebrated by public
meetings all over the country, and his articles welcomed by the leading
review. In point of fact, it is largely on Kropotkin's account that I
regard the Tsar as a gentleman of slightly different views to President
Wilson, and hate the infamous tyranny of which he is the figurehead as I
hate the devil. And I know that practically all our disinterested and
thoughtful supporters of the war feel deeply uneasy about the Russian
alliance. At all events, I should be trifling grossly with the facts of
the situation if I pretended that the most absolute autocracy in Europe,
commanding an inexhaustible army in an invincible country with a
dominion stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, may not, if it
achieves a military success against the most dreaded military Power in
Europe, be stirred to ambitions far more formidable to western liberty
and human welfare than those of which Germany is now finding out the
vanity after worrying herself and everyone else with them for forty
years. When all is said that can be said for Russia, the fact remains
that a forcibly Russianized German province would be just such another
open sore in Europe as Alsace-Lorraine, Poland, Macedonia or Ireland. It
is useless to dream of guarantees: if Russia undertook to govern
democratically she would not be able to redeem her promise: she would do
better with primitive Communism. Her city populations may be as capable
of Democracy as our own (it is, alas! not saying much); but the
overwhelming mass of peasants to whom the Tsar is a personal God will
for a long time to come make his bureaucracy irresistible. As against
Russian civilization German and Austrian civilization is our
civilization: there is no getting over that. A constitutional kingship
of Poland and a sort of Caliphate of the Slavs in remapped southeastern
Europe, with that access to warm sea water which is Russia's common
human right, valid against all Balances of Power and Keys to India and
the like, must be her reward for her share in the war, even if we have
to nationalize Constantinople to secure it to her. But it cannot be too
frankly said at the outset that any attempt to settle Europe on the
basis of the present hemming in of a consolidated Germany and German
Austria by a hostile combination of Russia and the extreme states
against it, would go to pieces by its own inherent absurdity, just as it
has already exploded most destructively by its own instability. Until
Russia becomes a federation of several separate democratic States, and
the Tsar is either promoted to the honourable position of hereditary
President or else totally abolished, the eastern boundary of the League
of Peace must be the eastern boundary of Swedish, German, and Italian
civilization; and Poland must stand between it and the quite different
and for the moment unassimilable, civilization of Russia, whose
friendship we could not really keep on any other terms, as a closer
alliance would embarrass her as much as it would embarrass us.
Meanwhile, we must trust to the march of Democracy to de-Russianize
Berlin and de-Prussianize Petrograd, and to put the nagaikas of the
Cossacks and the riding-whips with which Junker officers slash German
privates, and the forty tolerated homosexual brothels of Berlin, and all
the other psychopathic symptoms of overfeeding and inculcated insolence
and sham virility in their proper place, which I take to be the dustbin.
*Driving Capital Out of the Country*.
But I must here warn everyone concerned that the most formidable
opposition to the break-up of these unnatural alliances between east and
west, between Democracy and Autocracy, between the twentieth century and
the Dark Ages, will not come from the Balancers of Power. They are not
really Balance of Power alliances: in fact, they are tending to an
enormous overbalance of power in favor of the east as against the west
and in favor of Militarist Autocracy as against Democracy. They are at
root absolutely unpatriotic, even absolutely conscienceless products of
commercial finance; and the Balance of Power theories are only the
attempts of our diplomats to put a public spirited face on the
operations of private cupidity. This is not the first time nor the
second that I have had to urge that the greatest danger to us in the
sphere of foreign politics is the tendency of capital to run away from
civilization: the one running downhill to hell as naturally as the other
struggles uphill to the Celestial City. The Englishman is allowed to
produce the subsistence of himself and his family only on condition that
he produces the subsistence of the capitalist and his retainers as well;
and lo! he finds more and more that these retainers are not Englishmen,
but Russians, South Americans, Kaffirs, Persians, or yellow or black
barbarians armed for his destruction (not to mention Prussians and
Austrians), and that the treaties made by our diplomatists have less and
less to do with the security of the nation or the balance of power or
any other public business, and more and more with capitalist
opportunities of making big dividends out of slavish labour. For
instance, the Anglo-Russian agreement is not a national treaty: it is
the memorandum of a commercial agreement settling what parts of Persia
are to be exploited by the Russian and English capitalists respectively;
the capitalists, always against State interference for the benefit of
the people, being very strongly in favor of it for coercing strikers at
home and keeping foreign rivals off their grass abroad. And the absurd
part of it is that when the State has thus arranged for our capitalists
to exploit certain parts of Persia, and for their sakes to protect the
parliamentary liberties of the part left to Russia, they discovered
that, after all, the most profitable game was to lend Russia the money
to exploit with, and to facilitate the operation by allowing her to
destroy the Persian parliament in the face of our own exhortation to it
to keep the flag flying, which we accordingly did without a blush. The
French capitalists had dragged France into an alliance with Russia long
before this; but the French Republic had the excuse of the German peril
and the need for an anti-German ally. Her natural ally for that purpose
was England; but as there was no market in England for her money, her
plutocrats drove her into the alliance with Russia as well; and it is
that alliance and not the alliance with England that has terrified
Germany into flying at her throat and plunging Europe into a frightful
war. The natural alliance with England twice averted war: in the
Moroccan crises of Algeciras and Agadir, when Sir Edward Grey said
boldly that we should defend France, and took the first steps towards a
joint military and naval control of the French and English forces. Why
he shrank from that firm position last July and thereby led Germany to
count so fatally on our neutrality I do not pretend to know; it suffices
for my argument that we were able to hold the balance between France and
Germany, but failed to hold it between Germany and Russia, and that it
was the placing of Russian loans in France and England that brought
Russia into our western affairs. It would have paid us ten times over to
have made Russia a present of all we and France have lent her
(indemnifying, of course, the holders of the stock through an addition
to the income tax) rather than pay the price of a European war. But what
is the use of crying for spilt milk? I am merely explaining why, when
French money went to Russia, the French papers discovered that the
Russians were a most interesting people and their Government--properly
understood--a surprisingly Liberal Government; and why, when English
money went to Russia, the English press suddenly developed leanings
towards the Greek Church, and deplored the unofficial execution of
Stolypin as deeply as it had rejoiced in the like fate of Bobrikoff. The
upshot of it all is that western civilization is at present busy
committing suicide by machinery, and importing hordes of Asiatics and
Africans to help in the throat cutting, not for the benefit of the silly
capitalists, who are being ruined wholesale, but to break up the
Austrian Empire for the benefit of Russia and the Slavs of eastern
Europe, which may be a very desirable thing, but which could and should
be done by the eastern Powers among themselves, without tearing Belgium
and Germany and France and England to pieces in the process.
*The Red Flag and the Black.*
Will you now at last believe, O stupid British, German, and French
patriots, what the Socialists have been telling you for so many years:
that your Union Jacks and tricolours and Imperial Eagles ("where the
carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered") are only toys to keep
you amused, and that there are only two real flags in the world
henceforth: the red flag of Democratic Socialism and the black flag of
Capitalism, the flag of God and the flag of Mammon? What earthly or
heavenly good is done when Tom Fool shoots Hans Narr? The plain fact is
that if we leave our capital to be dealt with according to the
selfishness of the private man he will send it where wages are low and
workers enslaved and docile: that is, as many thousand miles as possible
from the Trade Unions and Trade Union rates and parliamentary Labour
Parties of civilization; and Germany, at his sordid behest, will plunge
the world into war for the sake of disgracing herself with a few rubber
plantations, poetically described by her orators and journalists as "a
place in the sun." When you do what the Socialists tell you by keeping
your capital jealously under national control and reserving your
shrapnel for the wasters who not only shirk their share of the
industrial service of their country, but intend that their children and
children's children shall be idle wasters like themselves, you will find
that not a farthing of our capital will go abroad as long as there is a
British slum to be cleared and rebuilt, or a hungry, ragged, and
ignorant British child to be fed, clothed, and educated.
*A League of Peace*.
But in the west I see no insuperable obstacle to a Treaty of Peace in
the largest sense. This war has smoothed the way to it, if I may use the
word smoothing to describe a process conduced with so little courtesy
and so much shrapnel. Germany has now learned--and the lesson was
apparently needed, obvious as it would have been to a sanely governed
nation--that when it comes to shoving and shooting, Germany instantly
loses all the advantages of her high civilization, because France and
England, cultured or uncultured, can shove and shoot as well or beter
than she, whilst as to slashing and stabbing, their half barbarous Turco
and Ghoorka slaves can cut the Prussian Guard to bits, in spite of the
unquestionable superiority of Wagner's music to theirs. Then take
France. She does not dream that she could fight Germany and England
single-handed. And England could not fight France and Germany without a
sacrifice as ruinous as it would be senseless. We therefore have the
necessary primary conditions for a League of Peace between the three
countries; for if one of them break it, the other two can make her
sorry, under which circumstances she will probably not break it. The
present war, if it end in the reconquest of Alsace and Lorraine by the
French, will make such a League much more stable; not that France can
acquire by mere conquest any right to hold either province against its
will (which could be ascertained by plebiscite), but because the honors
of war as between France and Germany would then be easy, France having
regained her laurels and taught Germany to respect her, without
obliterating the record of Germany's triumph in 1870. And if the war
should further result in the political reconstruction of the German
Empire as a democratic Commonwealth, and the conquest by the English
people of democratic control of English foreign policy, the combination
would be immensely eased and strengthened, besides being brought into
harmony with American public feeling, which is important to the security
and prestige of the League.
*The Case of the Smaller States.*
Already the war has greatly added to the value of one of the factors
upon which the League of Peace will depend. The smaller States: Holland,
Belgium, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian Powers, would have joined it
any time these 40 years, had it existed, for the sake of its protection,
and thereby made the Protestant north of Mr. Houston Chamberlain's dream
as much a reality as any such dream is ever likely to be. But after the
fight put up by Belgium the other day, the small States will be able to
come in with the certainty of being treated with considerable respect as
military factors; for Belgium can now claim to have saved Europe
single-handed. Germany has been very unpleasantly reminded of the fact
that though a big man may be able to beat a little one, yet if the
little one fights for all he is worth he may leave the victor very sorry
he broke the peace. Even as between the big Powers, victory has not, as
far as the fighting has yet gone, been always with the biggest
battalions. With a couple of millions less men, the Kaiser might have
taken more care of them and made a better job of it.
At the same time I hold no brief for small States as such, and most
vehemently deny that we are in any way bound to knight errantry on their
behalf as against big ones. They are mostly either incorrigibly
bellicose themselves, like Montenegro, or standing temptations to the
big Powers, like Bosnia and Herzegovina. They multiply frontiers, which
are nuisances, and languages, which have made confusion since the
building of Babel. The striking contrast between the United States of
North America and the disunited States of South America in this respect
is, from the Pacifist point of view, very much in favor of the northern
unity. The only objection to large political units is that they make
extremely dangerous autocracies. But as groups of federated democracies
they are the best neighbours in the world. A federal democratic Russia
would be as safe a colleague as America: a federal democratic Germany
would be as pleasant company as Switzerland. Let us, I beg, hear no more
of little States as British Dulcineas.
*The Claims of Belgium.*
As to the special case of Belgium, its claims in the settlement are
simple and indeed single. If we conclude a peace without clearing the
Germans completely out of Belgium, we shall be either beaten or
dishonoured. And such indemnity as a money payment can effect for
Belgium is due not only by Germany, but by Britain, France, and Russia
as well. Belgium has been crushed between the Alliance and the Entente:
it was these two menaces to the peace of Europe that produced
Armageddon; and as Belgium's heroic resistance served the Entente
against the Alliance, the obligation to make good the remediable damage
is even more binding on the Entente.
But there is another and more pressing matter arising out of the
conquest of Belgium.
*The Belgian Refugees and the Problem of Unemployment.*
As I write these lines the descent on our shores of an army of refugees
from captured Antwerp and threatened Ostend has forced the President of
the Local Government Board to make a desperate appeal to all and sundry
to form representative committees to deal with the prevention and relief
of distress: in other words to save the refugees from starving to death.
Now the Board of Trade has already drawn attention to a memorandum of
the Local Government Board as to the propriety of providing employment
for refugees. And instantly and inevitably the condition had to be laid
down that if the Committees find employment for anyone, they shall refer
the case to the local Labour Exchange in order that "any steps taken to
assist refugees to find employment shall not be such as to endanger the
employment of British workpeople." In other words, the starving Belgians
have fled from the Germans only to compete for crust with starving
Englishmen. As long as there is an unemployed Englishman in the
country--and there are a good many, especially in the cotton
industry--how is it possible to give a job to a Belgian without
depriving an Englishman of it? Why, instead of making impossible
conditions, and helplessly asking private citizens to do something for
pity's sake, will not the Government face the fact that the refugee
question is simply an intensification of the normal unemployed question,
the only difference being that we are accustomed to leave our own people
to starve when they are common persons with whom the governing classes
do not associate, whereas the Belgians have rendered us such a
tremendous service in the war, and our statesmen have so loudly
protested that the integrity of Belgium is dearer to England than her
own heart's blood, that we cannot with any decency treat the destitute
Belgians as if they were mere British riffraff. Yet when we attempt to
provide for the Belgians by finding work for them the Board of Trade has
to point out that by doing so we are taking the bread out of the mouths
of our own people. Hence we arrive at the remarkable situation of
starving Britons and Belgians looking hungrily through barbed wire
fences at flourishing communities of jolly and well fed German prisoners
of war (whose friendly hat wavings to me and my fellow passengers as I
rush through Newbury Racecourse Station in the Great Western Express I
hereby acknowledge publicly with all possible good feeling). I therefore
for the present strongly recommend all Belgians who have made up their
minds to flee to England, to pick up German uniforms on the battle
fields and surrender to the British in the character of Uhlans. Their
subsistence will then be secure until the war is over, as we dare not
illtreat our prisoners lest the Germans should retaliate upon the
British soldiers in their hands, even if we were all spiteful enough to
desire to do it, as some of our baser sort have not been ashamed to
propose.
But the women and children, and the too young and the too old, cannot
resort to this expedient. And though theoretically our own unemployed
could be dressed in British uniforms and sent abroad with instructions
to take refuge in neutral territory and be "interned" or to surrender to
the first Uhlan patrol they met, yet it would be difficult to reduce
this theory to practice, though the possibility is worth mentioning as a
reduction to absurdity of the situation. As a matter of common sense "we
should at once place all destitute Belgian refugees on the footing of
prisoners of war, except that we need not post sentries to shoot them if
they try to escape, nor surround them with barbed wire. Indeed these
precautions are necessary in the case of the Germans rather to save
their sense of honour whilst remaining here than to defeat any very
strong longing on their part to return to the trenches.
In a reasonable state of society there would be another difference. The
Belgians would offer to work so as not to be a burden to us; whilst the
German prisoner would say--as he actually does, by the way--"No: I am
not here by my own will: if you open the door I shall go home and take
myself off your hands; so I am in no way bound to work for you." As it
is, our Trade Unions are up in arms at the slightest hint of either
Belgian or German labour being employed when there is no shortage of
English labour!"
*The Minority Report*.
All this exasperating anomaly and deadlock and breakdown would disappear
if we had a proper system of provision for our own unemployed civilians
(there are no unemployed soldiers: we do not discharge them between the
battles). The Belgians would have found an organization of unemployment
ready for them, and would have been provided for with our own
unemployed, not as refugees, but simply as unemployed. How to do that
need not be explained here. The problem was worked out by one of the
hardest bits of thinking yet done in the Socialist movement, and set
forth in the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws
and the Relief of Distress, 1909. Our helplessness in the present
emergency shews how very unwise we were to shelve that report.
Unluckily, what with the wounded vanity of the majority of the
Commission, who had been played off the stage by Mrs. Sidney Webb; the
folly of the younger journalists of the advanced guard, who had just
then rediscovered Herbert Spencer's mare's nest of "the servile State,"
and revolted with all the petulant anarchism of the literary profession
against the ideal Interfering Female as typified in their heated
imaginations by poor Mrs. Sidney Webb, who became the Aunt Sally of our
young artists in stale anti-bureaucratic invective; and, above all, the
mulishly silent refusal of our governing classes to see why the
unemployed should not be simply left to starve, as they had always been
(the Poor Law being worse than useless for so large a purpose), nothing
was done; and there is consequently no machinery ready for dealing with
the refugees. That is why we must treat them for the moment simply as
unguarded prisoners of war.
*The General Strike Against War.*
But if the problem of unemployment among our own people becomes acute,
we shall have to fall back on the Minority Report proposals or else run
the risk of a revolt against the war. We have already counted on the
chances of that revolt hampering Germany, just as Germany counted on the
chances of its hampering Russia, The notion that the working classes can
stop a war by a general international strike is never mentioned during
the first rally to the national flag at the outbreak of a war; but it is
there all the time, ready to break out again if the supplies of food and
glory run short. Its gravity lies in its impracticability. If it were
practicable, every sane man would advocate it. As it is, it might easily
mean that British troops would be coercing British strikers at home when
they should be fighting Potsdam abroad, thus producing a disastrous and
detestable division of popular feeling in the face of the enemy.
*The Disarmament Delusion.*
Objections to the Western Pacifist settlement will come from several
quarters, including the Pacifist quarters. Some of the best disposed
parties will stumble over the old delusion of disarmament. They think it
is the gun that matters. They are wrong: the gun matters very much when
war breaks out; but what makes both war and the gun is the man behind
them. And if that man really means the peace of the world to be kept, he
will take care to have a gun to keep it with. The League of Peace must
have a first-rate armament, or the League of War will very soon make
mincemeat of it. The notion that the men of evil intent are to have all
the weapons will not work. Theoretically, all our armaments should be
pooled. But as we, the British Empire, will most certainly not pool our
defenses with anyone, and as we have not the very smallest intention of
disarming, and will go on building gun for gun and ship for ship in step
with even our dearest friends if we see the least risk of our being left
in a position of inferiority, we cannot with any countenance demand that
other Powers shall do what we will not do ourselves. Our business is not
to disable ourselves or anyone else, but to organize a balance of
military power against war, whether made by ourselves or any other
Power; and this can be done only by a combination of armed and fanatical
Pacifists of all nations, not by a crowd of non-combatants wielding
deprecations, remonstrances, and Christmas cards.
*America's Example: War at a Year's Notice.*
How far it will be possible to take these national armaments out of
national control remains to be seen. Already America, who is as deeply
demoralized by Capitalism as we are, though much less tainted with
Militarism now that Colonel Roosevelt has lost his front seat, has
pledged herself to several European States not to go to war with them
until the matter under dispute has been in the hands of an international
tribunal for a year. Now there is no military force on earth, nor likely
to be, strong enough to prevent America from treating these agreements
as Germany has just treated the 1839 Treaty guaranteeing the neutrality
of Belgium. Therefore the Militarists declare that the agreements are
not worth the scraps of paper they are written on. They always will
footle in this way. They might as well say that because there are crimes
which men can commit with legal impunity in spite of our haphazard
criminal codes, men always do commit them. No doubt nations will do what
it is to their interest to do. But because there is in every nation a
set of noisy moral imbeciles who cannot see that nations have an
overwhelming interest in creating and maintaining a tradition of
international good faith, and honouring their promissory notes as
scrupulously as the moral imbeciles pay their silly gambling debts and
fight their foolish duels, we are not, I presume, going to discard every
international guarantee except the howitzer. Why, the very Prussian
Militarists themselves are reviling us for doing what their own
Militarist preachers assumed as a matter of course that we should do:
that is, attack Prussia without regard to the interests of European
civilization when we caught her at a disadvantage between France and
Russia. But we should have been ashamed to do that if she had not, by
assuming that there was no such thing as shame (_alias_ conscience),
terrified herself into attacking France and Belgium, when, of course, we
were immediately ashamed not to defend them. This idiotic ignoring of
the highest energies of the human soul, without the strenuous pressure
of which the fabric of civilization--German civilization perhaps most of
all--could not hold together for a single day, should really be treated
in the asylums of Europe, not on battlefields.
I conclude that we might all very well make a beginning by pledging
ourselves as America has done to The Hague tribunal not to take up arms
in any cause that has been less than a year under arbitration, and to
treat any western Power refusing this pledge as an unpopular and
suspicious member of the European club. To break such a pledge would be
an act of brigandage; and the need for suppressing brigandage cannot be
regarded as an open question.
*The Security Will o' the Wisp.*
It will be observed that I propose no guarantee of absolute security.
Not being a sufferer from _delirium tremens_ I can live without it.
Security is no doubt the Militarists' most seductive bait to catch the
coward's vote. But their method makes security impossible, They
undertook to secure the English in Egypt from an imaginary Islam rising
by the Denshawai Horror, as a result of which nobody has ventured to
suggest that we should trust the Egyptian army in this conflict, though
India, having learnt from Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald that
there are really anti-Militarists in England who regard Indians as
fellow creatures, is actually rallying to us against the Prussian
Junkers, who are, in Indian eyes, indistinguishable from the
Anglo-Indians who call Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald
traitors, and whose panicstricken denial of even a decent pretence of
justice in the sedition trials is particularly unfortunate just now. We
must always take risks; and we should never trade on the terror of
death, nor forget that this wretchedest of all the trades is none the
less craven because it can so easily be gilt with romance and heroism
and solemn national duty and patriotism and the like by persons whose
superficial literary and oratorical talent covers an abyss of
Godforsaken folly.
*The Only Real World Danger.*
The one danger before us that nothing can avert but a general raising of
human character through the deliberate cultivation and endowment of
democratic virtue without consideration of property and class, is the
danger created by inventing weapons capable of destroying civilization
faster than we produce men who can be trusted to use them wisely. At
present we are handling them like children. Now children are very
pretty, very lovable, very affectionate creatures (sometimes); and a
child can make nitroglycerine or chloride of nitrogen as well as a man
if it is taught to do so. We have sense enough not to teach it; but we
do teach the grown-up children. We actually accompany that dangerous
technical training with solemn moral lessons in which the most
destructive use of these forces at the command of kings and capitalists
is inculcated as heroism, patriotism, glory and all the rest of it. It
is all very well to fire cannons at the Kaiser for doing this; but we do
it ourselves. It is therefore undeniably possible that a diabolical
rhythm may be set up in which civilization will rise periodically to the
point at which explosives powerful enough to destroy it are discovered,
and will then be shattered and thrown back to a fresh start with a few
starving and ruined survivors. H.G. Wells and Anatole France have
pre-figured that result in fiction; and I cannot deny the strength of
its probability; for if England and Germany can find no better way of
celebrating their arrival at the highest point of civilization yet
attained than setting out to blow one another to fragments with
fulminates, it would seem that the peace of the neutral States is the
result, not of their being more civilized, but less heavily armed. And
when we see that the effect of the enterprise is not to redouble civil
vigilance and stimulate the most alert and jealous political criticism,
but on the contrary to produce an assumption that every constitutional
safeguard must be suspended until the war is over, and that every silly
tyrannical expedient such as censorship of the press, martial law, and
the like, will begin to work good instead of evil the moment men take to
murdering one another, it must be admitted that the prospect is not too
hopeful. Our only consolation is that civilization has survived very
destructive wars before, mostly because they have produced effects not
only unintended but violently objected to by the people who made them.
In 1870, for instance, Napoleon III. can hardly have intended his own
overthrow and return to exile in England; nor did Bismarck aim at the
restoration of French Republicanism and the formation of an
Anglo-Franco-Russian alliance against Prussia. Several good things may
come out of the present war if it leaves anybody alive to enjoy them.
*The Church and the War.*
And now, where in our society is the organ whose function it should be
to keep us constantly in mind that, as Lassalle said, "the sword is
never right," and to shudder with him at the fact that "the Lie is a
European Power"? In no previous war have we struck that top note of keen
irony, the closing of the Stock Exchange and not of the Church. The
pagans were more logical: they closed the Temple of Peace when they drew
the sword. We turn our Temples of Peace promptly into temples of war,
and exhibit our parsons as the most pugnacious characters in the
community. I venture to affirm that the sense of scandal given by this
is far deeper and more general than the Church thinks, especially among
the working classes, who are apt either to take religion seriously or
else to repudiate it and criticize it closely. When a bishop at the
first shot abandons the worship of Christ and rallies his flock around
the altar of Mars, he may be acting patriotically, necessarily,
manfully, rightly; but that does not justify him in pretending that
there has been no change, and that Christ is, in effect, Mars. The
straightforward course, and the one that would serve the Church best in
the long run, would be to close our professedly Christian Churches the
moment war is declared by us, and reopen them only on the signing of the
treaty of peace. No doubt to many of us the privation thus imposed would
be far worse than the privation of small change, of horses and motor
cars, of express trains, and all the other prosaic inconveniences of
war. But would it be worse than the privation of faith, and the horror
of the soul, wrought by the spectacle of nations praying to their common
Father to assist them in sabring and bayonetting and blowing one another
to pieces with explosives that are also corrosives, and of the Church
organizing this monstrous paradox instead of protesting against it?
Would it make less atheists or more? Atheism is not a simple homogeneous
phenomenon. There is the youthful atheism with which every able modern
mind begins: an atheism that clears the soul of superstitions and
terrors and servilities and base compliances and hypocrisies, and lets
in the light of heaven. And there is the atheism of despair and
pessimism: the sullen cry with which so many of us at this moment,
looking on blinded deafened maimed wrecks that were once able-bodied
admirable lovable men, and on priests blessing war, and newspapers and
statesmen and exempt old men hounding young men on to it, are saying "I
know now there is no God." What has the Church in its present attitude
to set against this crushed acceptance of darkness except the quaint but
awful fact that there are cruder people on whom horrifying calamities
have just the opposite effect, because they seem the work of some power
so overwhelming in its malignity that it must be worshipped because it
is mighty? Let the Church beware how it plays to that gallery. If all
the Churches of Europe closed their doors until the drums ceased rolling
they would act as a most powerful reminder that though the glory of war
is a famous and ancient glory, it is not the final glory of God.
But as I know quite well that the Churches are not going to do anything
of the kind, I must not close on a note which might to some readers
imply that I hope, as some highly respected friends of mine do, to build
a pacific civilization on the ruins of the vast ecclesiastical
organizations which have never yet been able to utter the truth, because
they have had to speak to the poor according to their ignorance and
credulity, and to the rich according to their power. When I read that
the icon of the Russian peasant is a religious force that will prevail
over the materialism of Helmholtz and Haeckel, I have to contain myself
as best I can in the face of an assumption by a modern educated European
which implies that the Irish peasants who tied scraps of rag to the
trees over their holy wells and paid for masses to shorten the stay of
their dead relatives in purgatory, were more enlightened than their
countryman Tyndall, the Lucretian materialist, and to ask whether the
Russian peasant may not find his religious opinions somewhat neutralized
by his alliance with the countries of Paul Bert and Combes, of Darwin
and Almroth Wright. If we are to keep up any decent show of talking
sense on this point we must begin by recognizing that the lines of
battle in this war cut right across all the political and sectarian
lines in Europe, except the line between our Socialist future and our
Commercialist past. Materialist France, metaphysical Germany,
muddle-headed English, Byzantine Russia may form what military
combinations they please: the one thing they cannot form is a Crusade;
and all attempts to represent this war as anything higher or more
significant philosophically or politically or religiously for our
Junkers and our Tommies than a quite simple primitive contest of the
pugnacity that bullies and the pugnacity that will not be bullied are
foredoomed to the derision of history. However far-reaching the
consequences of the war may be, we in England are fighting to shew the
Prussians that they shall not trample on us nor on our neighbors if we
can help it, and that if they are fools enough to make their fighting
efficiency the test of civilization, we can play that game as
destructively as they. That is simple, and the truth, and by far the
jolliest and most inspiring ground to recruit on. It stirs the blood and
stiffens the back as effectively and quickly as hypocrisy and cant and
humbug sour and trouble and discourage. But it will not carry us farther
than the end of the fight. We cannot go on fighting forever, or even for
very long, whatever Lord Kitchener may think; and win, lose, or tie, the
parties, when the fight is over, must fall back on their civil wisdom
and political foresight for a settlement of the terms on which we are to
live happily together ever after. The practicable conditions of a stable
comity of nations cannot be established by the bayonet, which settles
nothing but the hash of those who rely on it. They are to found, as I
have already explained, in the substitution for our present Militarist
kingdoms of a system of democratic units delimited by community of
language, religion, and habit; grouped in federations of united States
when their extent makes them politically unwieldy; and held against war
by the bond of international Socialism, the only ground upon which the
identity of interest between all workers never becomes obscured.
*The Death of Jaures.*
By far the greatest calamity wrought by the war has been the death of
Jaurès, who was worth more to France and to Europe than ten army corps
and a hundred Archdukes. I once proposed a press law that might have
saved him. It was that every article printed in a newspaper should bear
not only the name and address of the writer, but the sum paid him for
the contribution. If the wretched dupe who assassinated Jaurès had known
that the trashy articles on the Three Years Law he had been reading were
not the voice of France in peril, but the ignorant scribbling of some
poor devil at his wits' end to earn three francs, he would hardly have
thrown away his own life to take that of the greatest statesman his
country has produced since Mirabeau. It is hardly too much to say that
this ghastly murder and the appalling war that almost eclipsed its
horror, is the revenge of the sweated journalist on a society so silly
that though it will not allow a man to stuff its teeth without
ascertained qualifications for the task, it allows anyone, no matter how
poor, how ignorant, how untrained, how imbecile, to stuff its brains
without even taking the trouble to ask his name. When we interfere with
him and his sweaters at all, we interfere by way of appointing a
censorship to prevent him from telling, not lies, however mischievous
and dangerous to our own people abroad, but the truth. To be a liar and
a brewer of bad blood is to be a privileged person under our censorship,
which, so far, has proceeded by no discoverable rule except that of
concealing from us everything that the Germans must know lest the
Germans should find it out.
*Socialism Alone Keeps Its Head.*
Socialism has lost its leader on the Continent; but it is solid and
representative on the main point; it loathes war; and it sees clearly
that war is always waged by working men who have no quarrel, but on the
contrary a supreme common interest. It steadily resists the dangerous
export of capital by pressing the need for uncommercial employment of
capital at home: the only practicable alternative. It knows that war, on
its romantic side, is "the sport of kings": and it concludes that we had
better get rid of kings unless they can kill their tedium with more
democratic amusements. It notes the fact that though the newspapers
shout at us that these battles on fronts a hundred miles long, where the
slain outnumber the total forces engaged in older campaigns, are the
greatest battles known to history, such machine-carnages bore us so
horribly that we are ashamed of our ingratitude to our soldiers in not
being able to feel about them as about comparatively trumpery scraps
like Waterloo or even Inkerman and Balaclava. It never forgets that as
long as higher education, culture, foreign travel, knowledge of the
world: in short, the qualification for comprehension of foreign affairs
and intelligent voting, is confined to one small class, leaving the
masses in poverty, narrowness, and ignorance, and being itself
artificially cut off at their expense from the salutary pressure of the
common burden which alone keeps men unspoilt and sane, so long will that
small class be forced to obtain the support of the masses for its wars
by flattering proclamations of the national virtues and indignant
denunciations of the villanies of the enemy, with, if necessary, a
stiffening of deliberate falsehood and a strenuous persecution of any
attempt at inconvenient truthtelling. Here there is no question of the
Junker being a monster. You must rule ignoramuses according to their
ignorance. The priest must work bogus miracles for them; the man of
science must offer them magical cures and prophylactics; the barrister
must win their verdict by sophistries, false pathos, and appeals to
their prejudices; the army and navy must dazzle them with pageants and
bands and thundering salvos and romantic tales; the king must cut
himself off from humanity and become an idol. There is no escape whilst
such classes exist. Mahomet, the boldest prophet that ever threw down
the gage of the singleness and supremacy of God to a fierce tribe of
warriors who worshipped stones as devotedly as we worship dukes and
millionaires, could not govern them by religious truth, and was forced
to fall back on revolting descriptions of hell and the day of judgment,
invented by him for the purpose. What else could he do if his people
were not to be abandoned to their own destruction? If it is an axiom of
diplomacy that the people must not be told the truth, that is not in the
least because, for example, Sir Edward Grey has a personal taste for
mendacity; it is a necessity imposed by the fact that the people are
incapable of the truth. In the end, lying becomes a reflex action with
diplomatists; and we cannot even issue a penny bluebook without
beginning it with the quite unprovoked statement that "no crime has ever
aroused deeper or more general horror throughout Europe" than the
assassination of the Archduke. The real tragedy was that the violent
death of a fellow creature should have aroused so little.
*Divided Against Ourselves*.
This state of things would be bad enough if the governing classes really
sought the welfare of the governed, and were deceiving them for their
own good. But they are doing nothing of the sort. They are using their
power secondarily, no doubt, to uphold the country in which they have so
powerful and comfortable a position; but primarily their object is to
maintain that position by the organized legal robbery of the poor; and
to that end they would join hands with the German Junkers as against the
working class in Germany and England as readily as Bismarck joined hands
with Thiers to suppress the Commune of Paris. And even if this were not
so, nothing would persuade the working classes that those who sweat them
ruthlessly in commercial enterprise are any more considerate in public
affairs, especially when there is any question of war, by which much
money can be made for rich people who deal in the things most wanted and
most highly paid for in war time: to wit, armaments and money. The
direct interest of our military caste in war accounts for a good deal;
but at least it involves personal risk and hardship and bereavement to
the members of that caste. But the capitalist who has shares in
explosives and cannons and soldiers' boots runs no risk and suffers no
hardship; whilst as to the investor pure and simple, all that happens to
him is that he finds the unearned income obtainable on Government
security larger than ever. Victory to the capitalists of Europe means
that they can not only impose on the enemy a huge indemnity, but lend
him the money to pay it with whilst the working classes produce and pay
both principal and interest.
As long as we have that state of things, we shall have wars and secret
and mendacious diplomacy. And this is one of many overwhelming reasons
for building the State on equality of income, because without it
equality of status and general culture is impossible. Democracy without
equality is a delusion more dangerous than frank oligarchy an
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