CHAPTER XIVHATRED
Itis, I fear, true that national hatreds are in the main created and kept alive by the educated and upper classes. Working men and women throughout the world, absorbed as they are in daily toil and often preoccupied about the next meal, have no leisure for the cultivation of abstract sentiments. With a greater simplicity of outlook they take people and things as they find them and do not theorise about their faults. The scholastic attitude as regards hatred is an ironical commentary on some of the byways into which education is apt to stray. Professors—German professors in particular—are notorious for their bloodthirstiness. The ordinary fighting soldier, who has been over the top half a dozen times, is a man of peace compared with certain ferocious persons of academic distinction. The brandishing of quills has apparently a more permanently disturbing effect on character than the hurling of hand grenades. The man in the trench has, after all, a certain tie of fellowship with the man in the trench opposite. They are linked together by a common sense of duty fulfilled and of horrors equally endured. Each knows that the other is a man very much like himself, sick with the misery and dirt of the whole business, whose heart in all probability is yearning just in the same way for a wife, and home, and child. Men under thesecircumstances do not give themselves up to abstract hatreds.
But among civilians, a man or woman’s gift of warlike talk is often in inverse ratio to any sort of personal capacity to shoulder the responsibilities of battle. Women are always apt to be more bitter than men because their measure of personal sacrifice in the war has been invariably less. They have seen their loved ones perish and the light of happiness quenched in their own lives. It is not easy for them to think steadily of the great ideals for which men died, and to realise that bitterness breeds a spirit which makes the fulfilment of such ends impossible. The case of the professors is even worse. In Germany the subservience of high academic authorities to the most abominable doctrines of the militarists was a grave and sinister feature in the history of the years preceding the war. The beating of tom-toms by men presumably of education goes a long way to justify the jibe of the “New Ignorance” applied to education by Mr. James Stephens. Education left to itself is just a force, and if it throws off the right sort of moral controls, becomes, as the whole history of latter-day Germany proves, a very dangerous force. Probably in Germany to-day there is no class more bitter, no class more full of hatred and the desire for revenge, than that of the professors. But a similar attitude may often be found among well-to-do people of all races, people who, whether or not they have been educated in the real sense of the term, have had the opportunities and advantages which spring from worldly status and prosperity.
No side of the Occupation has been more interesting than the points of contact it has provided between theEnglish and the Germans. Social intercourse on the upper levels is non-existent. Germany and England were at war when the Rhineland was occupied, and the relations then inevitable between conqueror and conquered have remained unaltered. Many of the English families now living in Cologne can hardly be conscious that they are in a foreign country. The English military community lives a life apart. At hardly any point, except in the shops, do they come in contact with the Germans. The large majority of English people, men and women alike, do not speak the language, and few make any effort to learn it.
It is not easy to say what impressions of Germany and the Germans many of these people will bring away. Opinion on the subject varies considerably, and the views expressed are as wide asunder as the poles. Some people admit frankly that their judgment and outlook have been modified considerably by all they have seen and heard. Others brought a stock-in-trade of prejudices from England and have guarded it jealously from any contact with facts. If an Occupation following on a war has any moral value, it is that necessarily it brings the enemies of yesterday in touch, and so helps to break down a certain amount of prejudice and to soften bitter feeling. Thus the way is paved to the resumption, sooner or later, of normal relations. It is easy to hate the abstract entity Germany. It is less easy to hate individual Germans who may prove on acquaintance to be estimable people. Little of this modifying influence has made itself felt on the Occupation. Many women, and some officers, declare that the behaviour of the Boche is rude and insolent; that he jostles English women in the streets, and is generally lying and dishonest in all his ways. Circumstantial storiesare related in this sense. It has been stated in my presence that a certain lady could not use the trams owing to the gross incivility of the conductors. I am left wondering how far people who have these experiences provoke them by trailing their coats. Obviously, English women who talk loudly in a tram about “the beastly Boche” may find themselves in trouble with their fellow-passengers, the German ignorance of foreign languages not being as great as their own.
Speaking for myself, I have never received one rude or uncivil word from man, woman, or child during the year I spent in Germany. I went about sometimes wearing the official arm-band, and therefore obviously English; sometimes not. I have never noticed the smallest difference in the behaviour of the people on the pavements or in the street cars. Tram conductors I have found almost without exception a polite and efficient body of men. All great cities contain a proportion of gross and undesirable people. Cologne is no exception to this rule, but the particular elements are not more conspicuous here than elsewhere. So far from hostility, I have received much courtesy and consideration from Germans with whom I came into casual touch. I am not denying the reality of other people’s contrary experiences. I can only state my own. Temperament is a mirror which deflects the passage of facts, and some of the English in Cologne have arrived at fixed judgments about Germany before setting foot in the country. If they find the inhabitants civil they at once call them servile, if they show spirit they denounce them as insolent. In Cologne drawing-rooms English women will sometimes discuss the Germans much in the spirit of the Mohammedans who sat in acircle and spat at a ham. I have never been able to understand on what grounds they founded that extreme view. Upper-class Germany has vanished from the Occupied Areas, and no one regrets their disappearance. But as regards the humbler classes with whom we of the Occupation come in touch, the working-men and country-folks, the shopkeepers, small business people and minor bureaucracy, I have no hesitation in saying that they are, generally speaking, hard-working civil people, correct in their attitude and bearing. Reasonable people should find no difficulty in maintaining the superficial amenities of life with them, even under the abnormal conditions which have thrown us together.
However varied the views among the officer class, the rank and file of the Army have settled down to friendly relations with the Germans—too friendly many people think. Men who have never understood the French temperament or outlook find themselves very much at home in Germany. From time to time agitated articles appear in the English papers deploring the fact that English soldiers are “getting to like Germans,” and calling on some one to do something drastic. The fact that the bow of hatred does not remain tense and strung, as desired by some people, will certainly cause no regret to those who are appalled by the perils of the present state of Europe. Better relations between nations will, I believe, be built up ultimately on working-class levels. The diplomacy of the politicians in power is too bitter and too tortuous to further the cause of European reconstruction. From this point of view the Occupation has been wholly to the good, inasmuch as tens of thousands of Englishmen whohave passed through the country have gone home with a saner appreciation of the situation.
German households, on whom many of these men were quartered, found to their amazement that instead of proving, as they feared, demons incarnate, the British soldiers were good-hearted, good-tempered fellows who shared the family life, peeled potatoes, and played with the children. The soldiers on their side appreciated the kindly treatment they received and were touched by the many evidences of hunger and suffering among the working-classes. Some day I hope we shall have a “Book of Decent Deeds” showing that among all belligerents there is another side to war besides that of atrocities. We may smile at the true story of the British Tommy writing home to his mother to send him a feeding-bottle, with tubes and apparatus complete, for a German baby in his billet who was in a poor way owing to the lack of these things. The German mother burst into tears when she was given the bottle which meant the difference between life and death to the child. But such an act and the Spirit it breathes is a ray of light in the darkness.
Loud protests are sometimes made by well-fed, well-to-do people as to the impropriety of helping the starving children of Central Europe. Very different was the attitude of the soldiers who had overthrown the German military power. It is to the eternal honour of the conquering army which marched into the Rhineland, that its first act was one of pity and mercy to the hungry women and children of Cologne. It was necessary for the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Plumer, to telegraph to the Peace Conference that, unless supplies were forthcoming for the underfed German civilians, he could not be responsiblefor the effect on the discipline of the Army. The soldiers were up in arms at the spectacle of starvation, and nothing could prevent them, contrary to orders, from sharing their rations with the enemy.
I think the question of hatred is one which calls for clear thinking at the present crisis in the world’s history. Many people imagine that when they have abused the Boche in round terms they have “done their bit” towards squaring the accounts of devastated France or Belgium. All that they have done is to feed and sustain the spirit which led in the first place to the devastations. Whatever enormities Germany may have committed during the war, the task of punishment is not the problem of supreme urgency which here and now confronts us all. What we are face to face with is the question as to whether civilisation as a whole can survive the blows rained on it. The responsibility of Germany for this state of affairs is at the moment less important than the rescue of civilisation from the brink of the chasm on which it is trembling. It is useless to go on saying that Germany must be punished or that Germany must pay, if in fact the actual policy pursued is calculated to involve conquerors and conquered alike in common ruin. At times it is difficult to avoid the gloomy conclusion that we are approaching the end of a cycle of history, and that a period of darkness and chaos bids fair to overwhelm a world incapable of saving itself. The economic and political condition of Europe is grave in the extreme. In every country wild forces are surging upwards, the peril of which lies in the absence of any powers of moral and spiritual counteraction. The strain of the war has swallowed up the spiritualreserves of the world, and its moral credit is not only exhausted but overdrawn.
No nation ever went to war in a spirit more grave and more responsible than that in which the British people accepted the German challenge. The call to arms is invariably a great and inspiring moment. At such a time men and women realise that they are caught up and raised on the wing of ideals greater than themselves. But it is part of the evil of war that the longer it lasts the more black and the more bitter the spirit it breeds. From August 1914 and the hush of consecration which fell on the nation, to December 1918 and what was well described by a distinguished publicist as the “organized blackguardism” of the General Election, is a falling away in temper and standard almost unbearable to contemplate.
I have often wondered whether the men and women who lent themselves casually to “hatred stunts” during the war ever realised what cruel suffering was caused to a large number of humble and obscure folk. Now that the spirit of sanity and moderation is making itself heard again, English people must surely look back with shame on the treatment meted out to inoffensive enemy aliens. Busybodies obsessed by spy mania were merely a source of nuisance and ridicule to the Secret Service. That Service was highly efficient, and its agents were quite capable of doing their work without the interference of officious amateurs. The German wife and the English woman with a German husband were in many cases treated as outcasts. Years of residence in England, even the fact of children fighting with the British Army, did not serve in many cases to mitigate the violence and hatred of their neighbours. The German wives of English subjects, andthe English wives of Germans, were naturally in a painful and trying position and one which was bound to excite prejudice. The degree, however, to which a group of men within Parliament, and a section of the Press without, sought deliberately to inflame the lowest passions of the mob in this matter, is the most sordid page in the history of the war. Helpless, friendless, without money, unable to make their voices heard, these unhappy people, treated as pariahs both in the land of their birth and in that of their adoption, were hunted from pillar to post.
Periodically “intern-them-all” campaigns were worked up which led to obscure Germans of proved respectability being locked up. Many of these people had English wives and families, who suffered severely through the removal of the breadwinner. English women were forced to take refuge in Germany from the persecutions of their own countrymen. What are we to think of the spirit and policy which could drive from the shores of England—England the home of Liberty, England the safe asylum of the oppressed—women of our own race who found the treatment meted out to them too hard to be endured?
Wives and families landed in Germany not speaking one word of the language, to be welcomed naturally by a spirit as hard and bitter as any they had left. The lot of English wives resident in Germany was unenviable. But I do not gather that enemy aliens were treated with a greater measure of harshness in Germany during the war than what occurred in England. Many English women living in Germany throughout the war did not suffer in any marked degree from the hostility of their neighbours. Naturally these would-be pogroms never catchthe right person. Rich people who may be really mischievous escape; the poor man is hunted. The Junkers whom it would be satisfactory to punish are living in comfort and prosperity on their estates. The poor starve and are driven down into inconceivable depths of misery both of body and soul.
Even to-day the position of many English women in Germany who are married to Germans is most pitiful. Under the Peace Treaty the Allies reserved the power to retain and liquidate all property belonging to German nationals. I am not concerned at this point to raise the question as to how far this precedent of confiscation may prove a double-edged weapon in the capitalist world. But again, it is not the rich man who suffers. Large fortunes can always take care of themselves. The people who have been ground to powder by this provision are women with tiny incomes or annuities, the complete stopping of which has meant literal starvation. Most painful cases of this character came to my notice in the Rhineland. In some instances women are told that if they leave their husbands and return to England the money will be paid. Is a war fought for “truth and justice” to eventuate in alternatives of such a character? Are women, at the end of an agonising experience, to choose between husbands they may love and the stark fact of starvation? I heard of one English woman, too proud to beg or receive alms, who came by stealth and searched the swill-tubs of a mess in order to pick out food from it. The British military authorities have shown invariable sympathy and kindness to these unfortunates. They have done what lay in their power to mitigate the circumstances. Soldiers do not fail in compassion to the poor and needy. The little group ofpoliticians conspicuous for their Hun-hunting activities have not served with the colours. The British Army fights its enemies in the field. It does not persecute women and decrepit old men. But the soldiers cannot alter the confiscation clauses of the Treaty which press with such peculiar hardship on people of small incomes. If these clauses are directed to searching the pockets of the Stinnes and the Krupps, let exceptions at least be made on the lower levels. The Treaty of Versailles in many of its provisions merely reflects the current hatreds of the hour. Modification of these clauses is inevitable when the wave of passion has subsided.
Not sorrow, loss, and suffering, but the temper born and bred of war, is its real and essential evil. The ruthless and cruel spirit which dominated the German war-machine and the many crimes committed are mainly responsible for the bitterness which was developed among the British peoples during the struggle. However natural the growth of this temper, its survival to-day is a menace to the future of the world. Hatred when it takes possession of the soul of a man or woman is a wholly corroding and destructive force. Where hatred abides the powers of darkness have their being, ready to sally forth and work havoc anew. Meanwhile the breaking of this coil promises to be no easy task. The war let loose in every country a new and evil force called propaganda—in plain language, organised lying. It is one of the foibles of propagandists that they insist on speaking of themselves as super-George Washingtons. But during the war any fiction which came to hand was good enough so long as it served to inflame national hatreds. Propaganda during the last years of the struggle did a great deal to obscurethe moral issues for which we were fighting. It corrupted both character and temper. But the propaganda genie, having emerged from its bottle in clouds of smoke and dirt, entirely refuses to subside now the struggle is over. It is one of the horrid forces with vitality derived from the war which continues to pursue an independent existence. It is the weapon-in-chief for keeping open sores and exasperating passions which good sense would try to allay. Nations catch sight of each other dimly through mists of misrepresentation and bitterness. Truth and justice disappear in the welter, and without truth and justice the practical affairs of the world drift daily towards an ultimate whirlpool of chaos.
Great, therefore, as I see it is the responsibility of all who to-day throw their careless offerings on the altars of hatred, so that the flames of discord flare up anew. The men and women who talk and act thus must try to realise that the world is reaching its limit of endurance, and the situation calls not for any post-war fomenting of the terrible legacy of strife, but for a truce of God between victors and vanquished. No prejudices are harder to shift than those which ignorance has exalted into moral principles of the first order. Thought is apt to be an unpleasant and disturbing process; the clichés of hatred are easy to use—why alter them when they round off a sentence so well? But unless some movement can develop between nations, unless the forces of destruction can be checked, then civilisation in the form we know it would appear to be doomed.
Germany has still a whole volume of bitter truth to learn as to the part she has played in the world catastrophe provoked by her rulers. Until she recognises and admitsthe evil done she cannot regain her place in the fellowship of nations. But after the great bartering of ideals represented by the Treaty of Versailles, the Allies are hardly in a position to preach sermons to her day in and day out on moral failures. The practical fact which confronts us all is that the world is in ruin, and that where the politicians have failed hopelessly the decent people of all nations have to get together and make it habitable again. To dismiss the German nation as a gang of criminals unfit for human intercourse may be a magnificent gesture on the part of the thoughtless. But it is not business. There are good Germans and bad Germans, Germans animated by a quite detestable spirit, others who are conscientious and high-minded. The wholesale indictment of a nation is as absurd as the wholesale indictment of a class. Human nature falls into types of character far more than into social and racial divisions. In the ultimate issue society is divided into two sets of people: those who behave decently and those who do not. People of the first type have a common kinship whatever their race or colour, and the need for asserting that kinship was never more urgent than at present.
If the world is to survive, tolerable social, economic, and political relations must be resumed sooner or later between enemy countries. It is of the first importance that the better elements in Germany should be encouraged and strengthened, so that through their influence a new spirit should animate the general German outlook on life. When no effort is made to discriminate, when good and bad are branded alike in one sweeping condemnation, hope of improvement vanishes. A nation to whom all place for repentance is denied loses heart and ceases to try. Reasonablemen cannot make their voices heard under such conditions. Anger and bitterness at what is considered unfair treatment surge upwards again, and from them the desire for revenge is born anew. It is foolish to kick a man repeatedly in the face and then to complain that he does not behave like a gentleman. If the spirit of hatred is to rule in Europe we are heading straight for another war. This eventuality should, I think, be recognised clearly by the hotheads of all nations.
Germany cannot continue indefinitely to fulfil the function of the whipping-boy of Europe. The Junkers and soldiers who made the war, and were responsible for all that was cruel and brutal in its conduct, have disappeared. Owing to gross mismanagement in connection with the war criminals, many Germans guilty of specific acts of cruelty who should have been dealt with severely have slipped through the net. But where statesmanship has blundered inexcusably, it is unjust to visit vicariously on a whole community the sins of a class or of individuals. To do so is to destroy any chance of the growth of a better spirit among the German people as a whole. I recall the words of farewell addressed to me by a saleswoman in a Cologne shop to whom I was saying good-bye: “When you go back to England, tell your countrymen that we are not such dreadful people as they think, and ask them also to remember that we too have our pride and our self-respect.”
Many Germans are as much blinded by hatred as to our actions and motives as we are about theirs. We recognise with angry exasperation the measure of their misconceptions about ourselves. Is it not possible that misconceptions may exist on our side as to the characterand attitude of, anyway, some Germans? We are sore, and sad, and bitter. So are countless Germans who are convinced that their lives have been ruined by our jealousy and ambition. Is it humanly possible to carry on the business of life in a nightmare world, where millions of human beings view each other through glasses so distorted? The moral deadlock at the moment is complete. It can only be solved by the spread of a new spirit of truth and charity. That cannot arise till reasonable men and women of all nations, realising the perils which confront us one and all, try and form unbiassed judgments, not only of each other’s actions, but what is perhaps even more important, of each other’s motives and principles. In all this there is no question of slurring over evil where evil exists, or condoning wrong where wrong has been done. It is a question of seeing these things in their true scale and right proportion. Righteous anger may rouse a sense of repentance where hatred only hardens and embitters. The wrath of man has had its full play through years of strife and horror. Judged as a constructive force, its fruits up to the present have been meagre. Is it possible that, after all, Paul of Tarsus was right, and that the fruits of the spirit, joy, peace, and righteousness, do not lie along this particular path? In so far as the spirit of hatred is cultivated and encouraged, it perpetuates all that is worst in war, without any of the redeeming qualities of heroism and self-sacrifice which make war tolerable. Hatred breeds hatred, strife further strife, violence yet more violence. From this vicious circle, so long as we allow ourselves to turn in it, there is no escape. Faith, hope, and charity alone can break the wheel of torment in which at present we revolve, and bring about thenecessary moral and spiritualdétentewithout which the world must surely perish.
Peace is not a question of documents and treaties. The world is still in a condition of bitter strife, because the spiritual values which make peace in the real sense possible are at present wholly lacking in the relations of the respective nations. I am driven to the conclusion that in this, as in other respects, the instinct of the great mass of the people throughout Europe is sounder and better than that of their rulers. Whatever the schemes and intrigues of a tortuous diplomacy, it is already clear that the working-classes are determined not to be made pawns in any fresh war of aggression. The German working-man is saturated with the misery of war. He will have no more of it unless some policy of oppression, suicidal in its character, re-creates the temper and spirit of the post-Jena period. Among my memories of Germany I dwell on none with more hope than an incident which befell us one spring evening in the Eifel. We were spending Sunday at Nideggen, a village perched high on its red volcanic cliffs above the valley of a delectable trout stream. We stopped in the course of our walk to admire a cottage garden where peas and beans were growing with mathematical diligence and regularity. Care had obviously been lavished on every plant and flower of the little plot, which lay on a sunny slope facing south. The owner who was hard at work among the peas, seeing our interest, asked if we would like to go over his garden. We accepted the invitation willingly, and he conducted us with pride from one end to the other of his tiny kingdom. He was an admirable type of peasant, a tall grave man with honest eyes and courteous manners. He combined some market-gardeningwith his business of stone-mason. The conversation drifted as usual to the war. He had served in a pioneer corps but had come through, “Gott sei dank,” unscathed. Of war or the possible recurrence of war he spoke with that intense horror which marks all the German working-classes. Never must such a thing happen again, he said; never must there be another war. My mind fled across the seas to a corner of Kent where I was well assured on this fine spring evening, another friend of mine, one William Catt, a son of the soil, just as honest and simple, just as devoted to his home and family, was also attending to peas and runner beans. William Catt too had served in the war. What crazy system could send those two good men with rifles in their hands to shoot each other? The Nideggen peasant had reflected to some purpose on “Earth’s return for whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin.” Spade in hand he looked across the fair landscape at our feet, where the river lay like a silver streak winding among woods and meadows. Then he turned to me and said very seriously, “For a thousand years men have been mad; now we must all learn to be more reasonable.”
Would that the diplomatists of all countries could take to heart words so true and so wise! Here was the spirit which alone can create and sustain the League of Nations. While the political wire-pullers of Europe seek to make of the League the unhappy pushball of their own intrigues, this German working-man had the root of the matter in him. May his vision of a world in which men are learning to be “reasonable” wax from dim hope into full and perfect realisation.