CHAPTER VION THE EVEΤῶνδε δὲ ὄυτε πλούτον tis τις τὴν ἒτι ἀπόλαυσιν προτιμήσας ἐμαλακίσθη οῦτε πενίας ἐλπίδι, ὡς κᾶν ἒτι διαφογὼν αοτὴν πλουτήσειεν, ἀναβολὴν τοῦ δεινοῦ ἐποιήσατο. Τὴν δὲ τῶν ἐναντίων timôτιμωρίαν ποθεινοτέραμ αὐτῶν λαβὀντες καὶ κινδύνωυ ἀμα τὂνδε κάλλιστον νομίσαντες ἑβουλήθησαν μετ, αύτοῦ τοὺς μὲν τιμωρεῖσθαι, τὼν δε ἐφιεσθαι, ἐλπίδι μὲν τὸ ἀφανὲς τοῦ κατορθώσειν επιτρέψαντες, ἕργῳ δὲ περὶ τοῦ ἤδη ὁρομόνου σφίσιν αυτοῖς ἀξιοῦντες πεποιθέναι, καὶ ἑν αὐτῷ τῶ ἀμύνεσθαι καὶ παθεῖν μᾶλλον ἡγησάμενοι ἢ [τὸ] ἐνδόντες σώζεσθαι, τὸ μὲν αἲσχρὸν τοῧ λὀγου ἔφυγον, τὸ δ' ἔργον τῷ σόματι ὑπέμειναν καὶ δι, ἐλαχιστου καιροῦ τύχης ἃμα ἀκμῆ τῆς δόξης μᾶλλον ἢ τοῧ δέος ἀπηλλάγησανThucydides, II. 42.IIn choosing the late summer of 1914 for the "inevitable war", which, to the eyes of Bernhardi and of his school, was to lead ultimately either to "world-power" or "downfall", the German great general staff chose the moment when its own organisation was most efficient and when its adversaries were jointly and severally less well able or inclined to accept the challenge than at any time since the Anglo-Frenchentente. At home, the Kiel Canal had been reconstructed and the western strategic railways completed; abroad, Russia, with her slow, cumbrous mobilisation, could be left out of account for three weeks; and three weeks was thought sufficient to crumple up an army which the French, true till death to their policy of giving everything to theircountry but the money in their pockets, had neglected to equip. Politically, too, France was distracted by one of her periodical Caillaux scandals.There remained Great Britain; and, if the French were uncertain of armed support until the first units of the expeditionary force landed, the German general staff may be excused for thinking that the expeditionary force would never embark. For months it was believed at the German Embassy in London that England was faced with volcanic labour disturbances; Sir Edward Carson and Lady Londonderry on one side, Mr. Asquith and Mr. Birrell on the other had brought Ireland to the brink of civil war; and a government which could not restrain unruly women from breaking windows and burning churches was not an efficient machine for waging a war in which the last ounce of ability and determination would tip the balance. Never, since the day when the tripleententefirst loomed in the delirium of German statecraft as an aggressive encircling movement in diplomacy, had it seemed flimsier and more vulnerable to the first shock of the "inevitable" war.This, as will be seen later, is not to hold the German government solely responsible for the war nor to admit that war was inevitable. The ancestral voices of the Chauvinists who in 1914 took most credit for their prescience in prophesying war might have been stilled by the reflection that from the Fashoda incident to the Lansdowneententethey had predicted a no less inevitable war with France, as, a generation earlier, they had predicted one with Russia; the good-will, moreover, which Great Britain for half-a-dozen years before the war extended to Russia and France had its exact counterpart in the former good-will which obtained whenLord Salisbury presented Heligoland to Germany and when, earlier, English sympathy was on the side of Prussia in the war of 1870. No war is inevitable until it breaks out, if then; and successful diplomacy in effect and in intention is the history of inevitable wars which have never taken place.By 1914, as indeed in 1911, the blundering of four Foreign Offices had produced a state of tension in which war was very difficult to avoid; but the phrase-fed population which repeated in solemn tones that Germany had "been preparing for this war for forty years" seemed never to enquire why the war had not been fought by instalments (as, all were told, Germany would assuredly do if Great Britain did not play her part in 1914) and why the first attack had not been launched in 1905 when Russia was exhausted by her struggle with Japan in Manchuria and distracted at home by revolution and experiments in constitution-making. So she might have rid herself for many years of the Russian menace; and, if France had been drawn in, it is inconceivable that so early as 1906 Great Britain would have been drawn in too. The reconstruction of the Kiel Canal was therefore unimportant; and, for an occasion of war, nothing less flimsy than the assassination of an archduke was ever necessary. And archdukes were plentiful. That Germany did not provoke a conflict in 1905 suggests that she had not in fact devoted forty years to preparing for a world-war and, further, that in that year she did not regard a war of any kind as inevitable. By 1914 her view of world-politics had swung round; and, if other nations contributed to bring war nearer, Germany must bear full and sole responsibility for provoking it.What had happened between 1905 and 1914 to bring about this change of heart? Now that the war is at last over and truth is no longer disguised or concealed for the purposes of propaganda, now too that every nation of the world is wondering what benefit any one has secured by nearly five years of unequalled sacrifice and suffering, it is interesting to examine why this war should have been considered inevitable. It is more than interesting, it is vital; for the horrors of war are being forgotten even by those who suffered most from them, and, in a few years' time, another government of men who are themselves over military age may see, with one eye, the "necessity" of war and, with the other, its romance or glory, as, before 1914, the youth and age of England alike saw chiefly the "romance" of the Napoleonic wars without remembering the brutality of the press-gang, the nightmare tortures of field surgery unaided by anæsthetics and antiseptics, the calculated atrocities of the Peninsular campaign and the unromantic, hideous reality of killing and maiming at all times. If the war was inevitable, someone should surely have benefited by it materially. Belgium, a pawn on the board of inevitability, has been dragged from the conflict of the great powers and restored for a few years at least to the number of small nations; and all who went to the succour of Belgium may feel that they risked the world to gain their own souls. Nevertheless, if Belgian neutrality was indeed but the occasion of a war which the great powers could no longer avoid and if no one of them is richer, stronger, safer, healthier or happier, it would have been better not to undertake it; and, before any have time to forget, all should take steps to make other wars impossible.Yet not even this boon has been secured. Since 1914 mankind has gained the creed of the league of nations, which is reverently mumbled with as much conviction as would be exhibited by a well-bred agnostic who found himself shepherded to church and discovered his neighbours mumbling the apostles' creed. The league of nations has been accepted with the blithe vagueness of a man who proclaims that he "believes in progress and all that sort of thing." M. Clemenceau accepted it, with the reservation that it must not remove the foot of France from the neck of her adversary; President Wilson accepted it, with the reservation that he could not bring pressure to bear on Congress if Congress refused to take a hand in policing the world; Mr. Lloyd George accepted it, with the reservation that the work of the league was to be entrusted indefinitely to the supreme council of the allies.It would be foolish to disparage a machine which is being deliberately kept from functioning by a number of men too suspicious or too lustful of power to give the fly-wheel its preliminary spin: if that international duelling which men call war is to be stamped out as, a hundred years ago, duelling between individuals was stamped out in England, every nation must make a vast preliminary sacrifice by surrendering the right of private vengeance and aggression, as the individual perforce surrendered his private right to punish an enemy or to protect his own honour at the sword-point; there must no more be reservations in arbitration between states than there are reservations to the English law under which aggressor and aggrieved submit their case, even where it involve their fortune and honour, to the judgement of an impartial court. Want of courage orof honesty has kept most champions of the league[23]from admitting, still more from insisting on, this repugnant idea of sacrifice; the league remains an abstraction; and already there is talk of an "inevitable" war between the United States and Japan, "inevitable" rivalry in ship-building between Great Britain and the United States.Much is to be hoped from sane historical education; but, whatever contribution the League of Nations may make to the peace of the world, the first preparatory lesson, which no one as yet should have had time to forget, is that every modern war is a complex which includes "men disembowelled by guns five miles away" and that a war between several of the great powers, conducted with modern methods of destruction, is one in which no one, probably, gains anything. The second lesson is that, as the late war struck at combatants and noncombatants, neutrals and belligerents impartially if not with the same force, involving German women and children in the starving grip of the allied blockade and spattering the walls of English coast-towns with the brains and blood of British women and children slaughtered in some naval bombardment or air-raid, so any future war, with its call for the last resources of the nation, will convert into belligerents and potential victims the old men who are left to till the fields and the boys who stand at a lathe, the girls who fill a shell-case and the mothers who suckle future soldiers: all are providing the sinews of war; and the sinews of war have to be cut without too nice concern for age or sex. The third lesson is that there is no inherent, life-and-death antagonism between a Stettin dock-hand and a Bristol dock-hand, between a London physician and a Berlin physician,between Professor Gilbert Murray and Professor von Willamowitz-Moellendorff. So, at least, one school would be inclined to assert; and, if the assertion hold truth, it was no less true in 1914. Why, then, was this unnecessary war, which has impoverished the world in everything but bravery and suffering, considered necessary?There was much ill intention, it may be submitted; more ignorance; and bad faith most of all. Russia and Germany stood, like every autocracy, to gain by a successful blood-bath; the triumph of a "spirited foreign policy" deflected attention from domestic politics and strengthened the bonds of discipline. France nurtured a spirit of hatred and revenge against the power which had after many years curtailed her privilege of exploiting and disturbing the German states for her own profit; she hankered, also, to recover two provinces which had been torn from her side as ruthlessly as she had torn them from the side of another. So much for ill intention.There was ignorance in the epidemic of international fear which arose and spread from the day in 1892 when Germany made overtures of friendship to Great Britain. Before the government of the day had time to promulgate its historic doctrine of insularity, France was overtaken by panic at the possibility of being encircled; to counter an Anglo-German alliance which never came to birth, she purchased the alliance of Russia by financing the trans-Siberian railway and acquired at second-hand an interest in the thieves' kitchen of south-east Europe and a responsibility for its periodical conflagration. It was now Germany's turn to suspect an encircling movement directed at her immense double frontier; the uneasy suspicion turned to active alarm when the pacificgeniality of King Edward and the cautious diplomacy of Lord Lansdowne added the resources of the world's greatest naval power to those of the world's most numerous and of Europe's most scientific armies.In such an atmosphere of suspicion, the "race of armaments" progressed apace and was fostered by an economic hallucination that, if Great Britain or Germany could destroy the other's trade, the survivor would be roughly twice as rich—with the embarrassing richness of a seller who brings his goods to a market where no one has anything to offer him in exchange. In brief sun-bursts of sanity, the manipulators of British foreign policy sickened of the suspicion-disease which themselves had spread; there were "peace talks" and peace missions: Mr. Churchill proposed a naval holiday; Lord Haldane visited Germany, flitting between Potsdam and Windsor, from one soveran to another, with a pregnant gravity and consequence that would have turned the head of a man less prone to personal vanity. By this time, unfortunately, the suspicion was too deep-seated to be charmed away by the bilingual fluency of a philosophic chancellor; the offer of a naval holiday, by a power which was already predominant at sea, suggested some kind of confidence trick; and the German government not only believed that an attack was impending, but knew well that, if the parts had been reversed, a boat-load of German Churchills and Haldanes would have been sent with messages of good-will to England. And no one outside the ranks of labour had proclaimed the simple doctrine that the Nürnberg toy-maker had no inherent, life-and-death quarrel with the toy-maker of Birmingham. So much for ignorance.IIIn England at least there was also bad faith.A new chapter in British foreign policy began with the Anglo-Frenchentente: designed originally to end a long period of friction in North Africa, it effectually ended the longer period of British isolation from continental politics. So successful was its work as an instrument of peace that a similarententewas established with Russia; and, as soon as London and Paris had disposed of North Africa, London and Petersburg turned their attention to unsettled problems in Persia. It was speciously claimed that theententeprinciple reduced the menace of war: henceforth all international differences could be accommodated by friendly chats between the foreign ministers ofententepowers; if Germany would join the happy family, the menace of war would vanish.Those who sincerely hoped to see growing from the firstententean informal United States of Europe revealed one blind spot in their imagination. The object of war, seen from one angle, is to upset the existing order in the interests of one belligerent; the object of theententewas to preserve the existing order; but, though this brought substantial advantage to Great Britain, France and Russia by putting North Africa and Persia out of bounds for diplomatic skirmishing, it brought no corresponding advantage to a country which joined theententeafter the spoils had been divided. "You have helped yourselves," the German imperialist might fairly say; "you not only refuse to let me participate, but you wish me to guarantee you in permanent possession."The German government refused to recognise the right of three nations to distribute among themselves the unallocated territories of the world; it presumed, further, to doubt their power; and the Agadir episode was an experiment to test the strength of theentente. A mailed fist and shining armour had prevailed against Russia when Bosnia and Herzegovina were annexed; they were worth trying again.The international crisis of 1911 proved that,on this occasion and on this subject, Great Britain and France were not to be intimidated; here, at least, theententewas impregnable. Would it always be as solid? Throughout Europe, after 1911, the dominating question in foreign politics was whether the diplomacy of Great Britain and of France could always count on the armed backing of the other. Was there an offensive and defensive alliance? In the absence of an alliance, was there a binding obligation on either power to come to the assistance of the other?The question was asked in the House of Commons:"There is a very general belief," said Lord Hugh Cecil, on March 10th, 1913, "that this country is under an obligation, not a treaty obligation, but an obligation arising owing to an assurance given by the Ministry, in the course of diplomatic negotiations, to send a very large armed force out of this country to operate in Europe. That is the general belief."To this Mr. Asquith replied:"I ought to say that is not true."A fortnight later he amplified his assurance by stating that this country was not under any obligation, not public and known to parliament, which compelled it to take part in any war. In other words, if war arose betweenEuropean powers, there were no unpublished agreements, which would restrict or hamper the freedom of the government, or of parliament, to decide whether or not Great Britain should participate in a war. The use that would be made of the naval and military forces, if the government and parliament decided to take part in any war was, for obvious reasons, not a matter about which public statements could be made.If the House of Commons had received any assurance less unequivocal, it is more than possible that the ministerial party would have split and that the government would have fallen. Though heavily reduced in numbers, the liberal majority was identical in spirit with that which had been returned to support Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman; it was strongly radical, straitly nonconformist and essentially pacific, knowing little of history and nothing of foreign policy, neither understanding nor liking continental adventures and occasionally resisting vehemently a quarter-comprehended drifting which demonstrably absorbed in armaments a revenue which might have been devoted to social reform. It disliked Mr. Churchill's activities at the Admiralty, it distrusted the liberal-imperialist elements which had risen to the top of the cabinet in the persons of Mr. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey and Lord Haldane; it had no quarrel with any one and, if its fears had not been lulled by the prime minister's explicit assurances, it would have taken steps to dissipate that danger of a European war in which Great Britain began to be involved on the day when she involved herself in continental politics. If the "obligation of honour," disclosed in 1914, had been made public any time in the three years preceding, if the government had fallen, if the commons of Great Britainhad shewn themselves to the pacific minorities and majorities in every country of Europe as backing their peace-talk with deeds, there would have been reality in the professions of the foreign secretary; the naval holiday and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's hopes for proportional disarmament might have had a hearing.Perhaps there would have been no war.When there was no obligation to participate, there was no cause for uneasiness. It was not until August Bank Holiday, 1914, that the House of Commons and the country discovered that "no obligation" was the same as "an obligation of honour." Sir Edward Grey, in guiding the House to war, used the words:"For many years we have had a long-standing friendship with France ... how far that friendship entails... an obligation, let every man look into his own heart,and his own feelings, and construe the extent of the obligation for himself."There was no "obligation," as stated by Mr. Asquith; there was "a debt of honour," as implied by Sir Edward Grey. "I ought to say that is not true," Mr. Asquith had replied in reference to an alleged "assurance given by the Ministry, in the course of diplomatic negotiations, to send a very large armed force out of this country to operate in Europe"; yet, to judge from another passage in Sir Edward Grey's same speech, there was so much telepathic harmony between the naval staffs of Great Britain and France that the French fleet had already withdrawn to protect their joint trade routes in the Mediterranean and was leaving the northern and western coast of France to the hypothetical protection of the British navy. An Irishman, unversed in the niceties of parliamentary good faith, has to pause for thought.Bishop Thirlwall, when challenged to say whether he did not prefer compulsory religion to no religion at all, is reported to have confessed that the difference was too subtile for his comprehension; any one of sensitive conscience must confess that his comprehension is not subtile enough to detect any other difference between an "obligation" and a "debt of honour" than that the debt of honour, unbacked by such sanction as is purchasable by a sixpenny contract-stamp, is the more strongly binding. Because there had been no exchange of signed notes, it is arguable that Mr. Asquith was justified by legal training and usage in denying that an obligation existed; Sir Edward Grey appealed to the chivalry of the House of Commons and defied it to say that there existed no obligation of honour.Chivalry was stronger than resentment; the pacific majority, which, in its innocence of legalism, had kept the government in power on the assurance that no continental commitments existed, voted the country into war on the assurance that its honour was involved. It only remains to put on record the impression left by this hazy obligation on the mind of one party to it:"We had a compact with France," said Mr. Lloyd George in August, 1918, "that, if she were wantonly attacked, the United Kingdom would go to her support."In reply to an objection he added:"There was no compact as to what force we should bring into the arena. In any discussion that ever took place, either in this country or outside, there was no idea that we should ever be able to supply a greater force than six divisions."Later still he borrowed the qualifying language ofpredecessors who had tried to keep faith with France and Great Britain at the same time:"I think," he said, "the word 'compact' was too strong for use in that connection. In my judgement it was an obligation of honour...."So much for bad faith. The people of England, apart from occasional panics and blood-lusts, are justified in claiming that they did not want war; misled—and it is hard to refrain from adding "wilfully misled"—by their rulers, they were given no chance of preserving peace.The public, which was left to pay the bill, is unlikely to know for many years how many members of the government shared with the prime minister and the foreign secretary the responsibility of misleading the House of Commons and the country. It is fair to assume that the terms of this compact, which was not an obligation, but only a debt of honour, were divulged to Lord Haldane before he carried out his peace mission to Potsdam; and to so consistent a champion of peace, of retrenchment on armaments and of social reform as Mr. Lloyd George, before he lectured Germany in his Mansion House speech during the Agadir crisis of 1911; and to Mr. Churchill, before he changed in a night from a "little-navy" man to a "big-navy" man; and to any one else who, like Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Churchill, forced the cabinet door to see what manner of skeleton lay behind. It is equally fair to assume that the smaller fry of the ministry were not admitted to the guilty secret; nothing but ignorance could justify so egregious a speech as that in which one member informed the public that "he could conceive no circumstance in which continental operations would not be a crime against the people of this country."From Agadir to Armageddon, those who believed in the word of the government believed also that nothing in the international position of those days could involve Great Britain in a continental war. Sir Edward Grey's adroitness and love of peace had steered Europe through a Moroccan crisis and two Balkan wars; when Austria hurled her bullying ultimatum at Servia, it was hoped that his intervention would again be successful and that, whatever the foreign ministers might achieve, the world would not commit suicide in revenge for the assassination of an Austrian archduke.No one troubled; no one, surely, had reason to trouble. London in 1914 was an exaggerated caricature of London in 1913 or 1912. The carnival moved with the inconsequent speed and false recklessness of arevue. Of the thousands who besieged every railway-station on the last Friday of July, bound for all parts of England and for every kind of holiday, few can have fancied that it was their last holiday in a world at peace.IIIAn average group, assembling at Paddington, found the train service disorganised by a minor strike and whiled away its time of idleness enforced by exchanging news of the Buckingham Palace conference and of the menace to peace in south-eastern Europe. One of the party had been lunching with the Pilgrims and retailed a rumour that there had been a slight run on the Bank of England that morning; this was in the early days of rumours, and all listened respectfully, though it was difficult to see why English depositors should be alarmedat the Balkan imbroglio. Another of the party enlivened the journey by exhibiting new maps of Servia and south-east Austria, but, once away from the neurosis of London, no one was interested in anything but the threatened civil war in Ireland.Any one who asked perfunctorily for news of Servia was assured that she would yield to superior force at the last moment. Though a journalist might whisper confidentially that the fleet had sailed from Portsmouth with coal stacked on deck, this was very far from making war unavoidable: if Servia refused to comply with the terms of the ultimatum, Russia would indeed come to her protection against Austria; but then Germany would come to the aid of Austria against Russia, while France would hasten to help Russia against Germany. The same automatic widening of the conflict had been threatened when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina; but, as it was then recognised that one great power would bring in another, so it would be recognised now and prevented; as Great Britain could not face a European war for Bosnia, so she could not now face it for Servia.Similar conversations were taking place at that hour in thousands of similar houses. Few of all who took part in these last meetings imagined that within a few days they would be training for commissions; no one dreamed that, before a year had passed, almost every man at all these tables would have entered the army, that some would be wounded, others already killed. To most, a general war only became conceivable two days later, when the Sunday newspapers reported that German troops had crossed the frontiers of France and Luxemburg.Thereafter, more quickly than dazed minds could takein, the impossible became the actual. On Monday, though Kuhlmann's efforts to localise the conflict brought a moment's hope, letters and telegrams, flying from one part of the country to another, convinced even the most sanguine that war—in which Great Britain would be involved—was inevitable; and, before nightfall, every town and village was ringing with Sir Edward Grey's speech."How far that friendship entails ... an obligation, let every man look into his own heart, and his own feelings, and construe the extent of the obligation for himself...."The thousands who had scattered four days earlier to every part of England poured back, on a common impulse, to London. There, all felt, they would gain readier news, perhaps better news, when the silence and isolation of the country had become unbearable. They assembled at hundreds of country stations, debating to the last whether the peace-trained navy would stand the test of war; and, as they read the morning papers, they found that the full text of the foreign secretary's speech made war a certainty, unless Germany submitted to a diplomatic rebuff more disastrously humiliating than the worst defeat in the field.London that afternoon lay at the mercy of the first war-expositors. Those who had most vehemently attacked the 1909 ship-building programme now most loudly thanked God that England was an island protected by a strong fleet; a few railed against the earlier course of a foreign policy which had embroiled Great Britain in continental rivalries; no one at that time or in that place suggested that war could be averted. When the major issues had been discussed, confidences wereexchanged about the ministers who had resigned and wobbled and withdrawn their resignations. Lord Morley and Mr. John Burns had left the cabinet, followed by a small number of minor office-holders; Lord Beauchamp and others, who had refused to support a war for which the sanction of the country had been neither obtained nor sought, renewed their allegiance to the government when the neutrality of Belgium, which Great Britain was bound by treaty to defend, was violated; but the champions of peace, who had vowed that British troops should only leave England over their dead bodies, and the opponents of intervention, who had explained to wavering colleagues that Great Britain was under no international obligation to take part, remained snugly if silently in office. The fleet, it was now heard, had been ordered to take up war-stations and to seal the German forces in port before the ultimatum was issued; the expeditionary force, it was also heard, had received at least preliminary mobilization-orders while war hung yet in the balance; and so quickly do moral standards decline when personal security is threatened that those who had attacked Germany for her too timely massing of troops congratulated themselves that in England also there were men of laudable vigilance and decision.And, like punctuation-marks at the end of every sentence, came interruptions from men torn out of familiar surroundings and flung into a world whose very language they did not understand:"They say there will be a run on the banks for gold ...," murmured one."They say the Government will have to declare a moratorium ...," murmured another."They say there will very likely be bread riots....""They say that special constables are to be enrolled....""They say you ought to lay in a certain amount of food...."At eleven o'clock at night a state of war began between Great Britain and Germany.IVFrom the moment when the ultimatum took effect until the day when the first reports of military activity reached England, political speculation and prophecy raged unconfined. In the betting-book of one club stands recorded a wager that, in the event of war, there will within ten years be not one crowned head in Europe. Now that war had come, every one was calculating how long it could go on: for all her preparation, it was said, Germany would soon run short of certain essentials; but a decision must be reached quickly, as banking experts were already predicting a general collapse of credit in November. Memories of the Franco-German war suggested that, with the precision of modern weapons and with the size of modern armies, no nation in the world could support the strain for more than a few weeks.Nevertheless, whether peace were signed within three months or six, the old national and international conditions under which the men of military age had grown up were destroyed for ever: most of them, though even now they did not realise it, would be killed or maimed; a long war would bleed the world slowly to death, a short war would be followed by such frenzied re-arming and re-equipment as would exhaust every country notless surely. The days of general luxury, perhaps even of common comfort, were over; taxation would close the great houses and disperse the old retinues. Ethically, politically, intellectually, economically and socially every war marked a transition from one epoch to another; and, before the first unit of the expeditionary force had landed in France, every one felt dimly that an era had closed. As yet there had been no call for more men, as yet none knew whether there was time to train them, as yet it seemed likely that the casualties would be confined to the professional soldiers of the regular army and to the volunteers of the territorial forces; but, though imagination refused to contemplate such an upheaval as took place within even one month, the men between twenty and thirty felt that their world had passed away. Before five years had run their course, the best of them had passed away, too; and of one generation the finest work in the most fruitful period of construction was lost for ever.This was a time of meditation and heart-searching. So staggering was the shock of war that men's minds refused to conceive of it as the human punishment of human malevolence or folly: Fleet Street dragged in Armageddon and laid the responsibility on God, while finding an excuse for Him in the depravity of man. The moral laxities of France and the perversions of Germany were to be punished by a retribution not less overwhelming than that which had fallen upon Sodom and Gomorrah; as Belgium, Russia and England were included in the general destruction, it was explained that they were being punished, respectively, for the Congo atrocities, the Jewish massacres and the attempted disestablishment of the Welsh church; only Servia, whichsuffered first and longest, and Japan, which was far enough away to be forgotten, were overlooked by those who set themselves to justify the ways of God to man. It would take too long to trace the workings of providence in so many countries, but of England at least it may be claimed that there was a disproportion between her offence and her punishment: at the worst her people were indolent, vulgar, selfish and lacking in an imaginative conscience, but a nation would not seem ripe for destruction when four or five million of its members voluntarily offer themselves for mutilation and death.Meditation passed away with the first bewilderment and was discouraged with every forward step of a nation arming itself for defence. From time to time spirits dwelling in isolation struggled to preserve detachment, the young poets who lay out under the stars in momentary expectation of death raised their voices in challenge to incomprehensibility; but the first were arrested as sedition-mongers and the second were dismissed as poets. Meditation was not allowed to become articulate until the armistice. It were fruitless and ungracious to dwell on the epidemic delusions and organised fury of those first days: they are common to every country in every war;[24]though they broke out periodically, their grotesque violence abated as new work called for undivided attention.Not for long did it seem that the casualties would be confined to the regular army and the expeditionary force. Officers of the special reserve received theirmobilisation-orders and reported for duty on the south coast; after long and anxious silence, during which it could only be assumed that they had crossed the channel and were being hurried into Belgium, some of the survivors at length wrote that they had been in the great advance and the great retreat, that they had lost almost every part of their kit, but were enjoying a moment's breathing-time. After the Marne, they moved up again, "dodging death and danger, without rest or food or drink ... till death seemed relaxation and a wound a luxury." Although for more than four years hardly a day passed without bringing news of the death, disablement or loss of some relation or friend, for the men under thirty the casualties crowded thickest in the early weeks; their generation was the most plenteously represented in the first months; and, after four years, of their generation fewest remained.
ON THE EVE
Τῶνδε δὲ ὄυτε πλούτον tis τις τὴν ἒτι ἀπόλαυσιν προτιμήσας ἐμαλακίσθη οῦτε πενίας ἐλπίδι, ὡς κᾶν ἒτι διαφογὼν αοτὴν πλουτήσειεν, ἀναβολὴν τοῦ δεινοῦ ἐποιήσατο. Τὴν δὲ τῶν ἐναντίων timôτιμωρίαν ποθεινοτέραμ αὐτῶν λαβὀντες καὶ κινδύνωυ ἀμα τὂνδε κάλλιστον νομίσαντες ἑβουλήθησαν μετ, αύτοῦ τοὺς μὲν τιμωρεῖσθαι, τὼν δε ἐφιεσθαι, ἐλπίδι μὲν τὸ ἀφανὲς τοῦ κατορθώσειν επιτρέψαντες, ἕργῳ δὲ περὶ τοῦ ἤδη ὁρομόνου σφίσιν αυτοῖς ἀξιοῦντες πεποιθέναι, καὶ ἑν αὐτῷ τῶ ἀμύνεσθαι καὶ παθεῖν μᾶλλον ἡγησάμενοι ἢ [τὸ] ἐνδόντες σώζεσθαι, τὸ μὲν αἲσχρὸν τοῧ λὀγου ἔφυγον, τὸ δ' ἔργον τῷ σόματι ὑπέμειναν καὶ δι, ἐλαχιστου καιροῦ τύχης ἃμα ἀκμῆ τῆς δόξης μᾶλλον ἢ τοῧ δέος ἀπηλλάγησαν
Thucydides, II. 42.
In choosing the late summer of 1914 for the "inevitable war", which, to the eyes of Bernhardi and of his school, was to lead ultimately either to "world-power" or "downfall", the German great general staff chose the moment when its own organisation was most efficient and when its adversaries were jointly and severally less well able or inclined to accept the challenge than at any time since the Anglo-Frenchentente. At home, the Kiel Canal had been reconstructed and the western strategic railways completed; abroad, Russia, with her slow, cumbrous mobilisation, could be left out of account for three weeks; and three weeks was thought sufficient to crumple up an army which the French, true till death to their policy of giving everything to theircountry but the money in their pockets, had neglected to equip. Politically, too, France was distracted by one of her periodical Caillaux scandals.
There remained Great Britain; and, if the French were uncertain of armed support until the first units of the expeditionary force landed, the German general staff may be excused for thinking that the expeditionary force would never embark. For months it was believed at the German Embassy in London that England was faced with volcanic labour disturbances; Sir Edward Carson and Lady Londonderry on one side, Mr. Asquith and Mr. Birrell on the other had brought Ireland to the brink of civil war; and a government which could not restrain unruly women from breaking windows and burning churches was not an efficient machine for waging a war in which the last ounce of ability and determination would tip the balance. Never, since the day when the tripleententefirst loomed in the delirium of German statecraft as an aggressive encircling movement in diplomacy, had it seemed flimsier and more vulnerable to the first shock of the "inevitable" war.
This, as will be seen later, is not to hold the German government solely responsible for the war nor to admit that war was inevitable. The ancestral voices of the Chauvinists who in 1914 took most credit for their prescience in prophesying war might have been stilled by the reflection that from the Fashoda incident to the Lansdowneententethey had predicted a no less inevitable war with France, as, a generation earlier, they had predicted one with Russia; the good-will, moreover, which Great Britain for half-a-dozen years before the war extended to Russia and France had its exact counterpart in the former good-will which obtained whenLord Salisbury presented Heligoland to Germany and when, earlier, English sympathy was on the side of Prussia in the war of 1870. No war is inevitable until it breaks out, if then; and successful diplomacy in effect and in intention is the history of inevitable wars which have never taken place.
By 1914, as indeed in 1911, the blundering of four Foreign Offices had produced a state of tension in which war was very difficult to avoid; but the phrase-fed population which repeated in solemn tones that Germany had "been preparing for this war for forty years" seemed never to enquire why the war had not been fought by instalments (as, all were told, Germany would assuredly do if Great Britain did not play her part in 1914) and why the first attack had not been launched in 1905 when Russia was exhausted by her struggle with Japan in Manchuria and distracted at home by revolution and experiments in constitution-making. So she might have rid herself for many years of the Russian menace; and, if France had been drawn in, it is inconceivable that so early as 1906 Great Britain would have been drawn in too. The reconstruction of the Kiel Canal was therefore unimportant; and, for an occasion of war, nothing less flimsy than the assassination of an archduke was ever necessary. And archdukes were plentiful. That Germany did not provoke a conflict in 1905 suggests that she had not in fact devoted forty years to preparing for a world-war and, further, that in that year she did not regard a war of any kind as inevitable. By 1914 her view of world-politics had swung round; and, if other nations contributed to bring war nearer, Germany must bear full and sole responsibility for provoking it.
What had happened between 1905 and 1914 to bring about this change of heart? Now that the war is at last over and truth is no longer disguised or concealed for the purposes of propaganda, now too that every nation of the world is wondering what benefit any one has secured by nearly five years of unequalled sacrifice and suffering, it is interesting to examine why this war should have been considered inevitable. It is more than interesting, it is vital; for the horrors of war are being forgotten even by those who suffered most from them, and, in a few years' time, another government of men who are themselves over military age may see, with one eye, the "necessity" of war and, with the other, its romance or glory, as, before 1914, the youth and age of England alike saw chiefly the "romance" of the Napoleonic wars without remembering the brutality of the press-gang, the nightmare tortures of field surgery unaided by anæsthetics and antiseptics, the calculated atrocities of the Peninsular campaign and the unromantic, hideous reality of killing and maiming at all times. If the war was inevitable, someone should surely have benefited by it materially. Belgium, a pawn on the board of inevitability, has been dragged from the conflict of the great powers and restored for a few years at least to the number of small nations; and all who went to the succour of Belgium may feel that they risked the world to gain their own souls. Nevertheless, if Belgian neutrality was indeed but the occasion of a war which the great powers could no longer avoid and if no one of them is richer, stronger, safer, healthier or happier, it would have been better not to undertake it; and, before any have time to forget, all should take steps to make other wars impossible.
Yet not even this boon has been secured. Since 1914 mankind has gained the creed of the league of nations, which is reverently mumbled with as much conviction as would be exhibited by a well-bred agnostic who found himself shepherded to church and discovered his neighbours mumbling the apostles' creed. The league of nations has been accepted with the blithe vagueness of a man who proclaims that he "believes in progress and all that sort of thing." M. Clemenceau accepted it, with the reservation that it must not remove the foot of France from the neck of her adversary; President Wilson accepted it, with the reservation that he could not bring pressure to bear on Congress if Congress refused to take a hand in policing the world; Mr. Lloyd George accepted it, with the reservation that the work of the league was to be entrusted indefinitely to the supreme council of the allies.
It would be foolish to disparage a machine which is being deliberately kept from functioning by a number of men too suspicious or too lustful of power to give the fly-wheel its preliminary spin: if that international duelling which men call war is to be stamped out as, a hundred years ago, duelling between individuals was stamped out in England, every nation must make a vast preliminary sacrifice by surrendering the right of private vengeance and aggression, as the individual perforce surrendered his private right to punish an enemy or to protect his own honour at the sword-point; there must no more be reservations in arbitration between states than there are reservations to the English law under which aggressor and aggrieved submit their case, even where it involve their fortune and honour, to the judgement of an impartial court. Want of courage orof honesty has kept most champions of the league[23]from admitting, still more from insisting on, this repugnant idea of sacrifice; the league remains an abstraction; and already there is talk of an "inevitable" war between the United States and Japan, "inevitable" rivalry in ship-building between Great Britain and the United States.
Much is to be hoped from sane historical education; but, whatever contribution the League of Nations may make to the peace of the world, the first preparatory lesson, which no one as yet should have had time to forget, is that every modern war is a complex which includes "men disembowelled by guns five miles away" and that a war between several of the great powers, conducted with modern methods of destruction, is one in which no one, probably, gains anything. The second lesson is that, as the late war struck at combatants and noncombatants, neutrals and belligerents impartially if not with the same force, involving German women and children in the starving grip of the allied blockade and spattering the walls of English coast-towns with the brains and blood of British women and children slaughtered in some naval bombardment or air-raid, so any future war, with its call for the last resources of the nation, will convert into belligerents and potential victims the old men who are left to till the fields and the boys who stand at a lathe, the girls who fill a shell-case and the mothers who suckle future soldiers: all are providing the sinews of war; and the sinews of war have to be cut without too nice concern for age or sex. The third lesson is that there is no inherent, life-and-death antagonism between a Stettin dock-hand and a Bristol dock-hand, between a London physician and a Berlin physician,between Professor Gilbert Murray and Professor von Willamowitz-Moellendorff. So, at least, one school would be inclined to assert; and, if the assertion hold truth, it was no less true in 1914. Why, then, was this unnecessary war, which has impoverished the world in everything but bravery and suffering, considered necessary?
There was much ill intention, it may be submitted; more ignorance; and bad faith most of all. Russia and Germany stood, like every autocracy, to gain by a successful blood-bath; the triumph of a "spirited foreign policy" deflected attention from domestic politics and strengthened the bonds of discipline. France nurtured a spirit of hatred and revenge against the power which had after many years curtailed her privilege of exploiting and disturbing the German states for her own profit; she hankered, also, to recover two provinces which had been torn from her side as ruthlessly as she had torn them from the side of another. So much for ill intention.
There was ignorance in the epidemic of international fear which arose and spread from the day in 1892 when Germany made overtures of friendship to Great Britain. Before the government of the day had time to promulgate its historic doctrine of insularity, France was overtaken by panic at the possibility of being encircled; to counter an Anglo-German alliance which never came to birth, she purchased the alliance of Russia by financing the trans-Siberian railway and acquired at second-hand an interest in the thieves' kitchen of south-east Europe and a responsibility for its periodical conflagration. It was now Germany's turn to suspect an encircling movement directed at her immense double frontier; the uneasy suspicion turned to active alarm when the pacificgeniality of King Edward and the cautious diplomacy of Lord Lansdowne added the resources of the world's greatest naval power to those of the world's most numerous and of Europe's most scientific armies.
In such an atmosphere of suspicion, the "race of armaments" progressed apace and was fostered by an economic hallucination that, if Great Britain or Germany could destroy the other's trade, the survivor would be roughly twice as rich—with the embarrassing richness of a seller who brings his goods to a market where no one has anything to offer him in exchange. In brief sun-bursts of sanity, the manipulators of British foreign policy sickened of the suspicion-disease which themselves had spread; there were "peace talks" and peace missions: Mr. Churchill proposed a naval holiday; Lord Haldane visited Germany, flitting between Potsdam and Windsor, from one soveran to another, with a pregnant gravity and consequence that would have turned the head of a man less prone to personal vanity. By this time, unfortunately, the suspicion was too deep-seated to be charmed away by the bilingual fluency of a philosophic chancellor; the offer of a naval holiday, by a power which was already predominant at sea, suggested some kind of confidence trick; and the German government not only believed that an attack was impending, but knew well that, if the parts had been reversed, a boat-load of German Churchills and Haldanes would have been sent with messages of good-will to England. And no one outside the ranks of labour had proclaimed the simple doctrine that the Nürnberg toy-maker had no inherent, life-and-death quarrel with the toy-maker of Birmingham. So much for ignorance.
In England at least there was also bad faith.
A new chapter in British foreign policy began with the Anglo-Frenchentente: designed originally to end a long period of friction in North Africa, it effectually ended the longer period of British isolation from continental politics. So successful was its work as an instrument of peace that a similarententewas established with Russia; and, as soon as London and Paris had disposed of North Africa, London and Petersburg turned their attention to unsettled problems in Persia. It was speciously claimed that theententeprinciple reduced the menace of war: henceforth all international differences could be accommodated by friendly chats between the foreign ministers ofententepowers; if Germany would join the happy family, the menace of war would vanish.
Those who sincerely hoped to see growing from the firstententean informal United States of Europe revealed one blind spot in their imagination. The object of war, seen from one angle, is to upset the existing order in the interests of one belligerent; the object of theententewas to preserve the existing order; but, though this brought substantial advantage to Great Britain, France and Russia by putting North Africa and Persia out of bounds for diplomatic skirmishing, it brought no corresponding advantage to a country which joined theententeafter the spoils had been divided. "You have helped yourselves," the German imperialist might fairly say; "you not only refuse to let me participate, but you wish me to guarantee you in permanent possession."The German government refused to recognise the right of three nations to distribute among themselves the unallocated territories of the world; it presumed, further, to doubt their power; and the Agadir episode was an experiment to test the strength of theentente. A mailed fist and shining armour had prevailed against Russia when Bosnia and Herzegovina were annexed; they were worth trying again.
The international crisis of 1911 proved that,on this occasion and on this subject, Great Britain and France were not to be intimidated; here, at least, theententewas impregnable. Would it always be as solid? Throughout Europe, after 1911, the dominating question in foreign politics was whether the diplomacy of Great Britain and of France could always count on the armed backing of the other. Was there an offensive and defensive alliance? In the absence of an alliance, was there a binding obligation on either power to come to the assistance of the other?
The question was asked in the House of Commons:
"There is a very general belief," said Lord Hugh Cecil, on March 10th, 1913, "that this country is under an obligation, not a treaty obligation, but an obligation arising owing to an assurance given by the Ministry, in the course of diplomatic negotiations, to send a very large armed force out of this country to operate in Europe. That is the general belief."
To this Mr. Asquith replied:
"I ought to say that is not true."
A fortnight later he amplified his assurance by stating that this country was not under any obligation, not public and known to parliament, which compelled it to take part in any war. In other words, if war arose betweenEuropean powers, there were no unpublished agreements, which would restrict or hamper the freedom of the government, or of parliament, to decide whether or not Great Britain should participate in a war. The use that would be made of the naval and military forces, if the government and parliament decided to take part in any war was, for obvious reasons, not a matter about which public statements could be made.
If the House of Commons had received any assurance less unequivocal, it is more than possible that the ministerial party would have split and that the government would have fallen. Though heavily reduced in numbers, the liberal majority was identical in spirit with that which had been returned to support Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman; it was strongly radical, straitly nonconformist and essentially pacific, knowing little of history and nothing of foreign policy, neither understanding nor liking continental adventures and occasionally resisting vehemently a quarter-comprehended drifting which demonstrably absorbed in armaments a revenue which might have been devoted to social reform. It disliked Mr. Churchill's activities at the Admiralty, it distrusted the liberal-imperialist elements which had risen to the top of the cabinet in the persons of Mr. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey and Lord Haldane; it had no quarrel with any one and, if its fears had not been lulled by the prime minister's explicit assurances, it would have taken steps to dissipate that danger of a European war in which Great Britain began to be involved on the day when she involved herself in continental politics. If the "obligation of honour," disclosed in 1914, had been made public any time in the three years preceding, if the government had fallen, if the commons of Great Britainhad shewn themselves to the pacific minorities and majorities in every country of Europe as backing their peace-talk with deeds, there would have been reality in the professions of the foreign secretary; the naval holiday and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's hopes for proportional disarmament might have had a hearing.
Perhaps there would have been no war.
When there was no obligation to participate, there was no cause for uneasiness. It was not until August Bank Holiday, 1914, that the House of Commons and the country discovered that "no obligation" was the same as "an obligation of honour." Sir Edward Grey, in guiding the House to war, used the words:
"For many years we have had a long-standing friendship with France ... how far that friendship entails... an obligation, let every man look into his own heart,and his own feelings, and construe the extent of the obligation for himself."
There was no "obligation," as stated by Mr. Asquith; there was "a debt of honour," as implied by Sir Edward Grey. "I ought to say that is not true," Mr. Asquith had replied in reference to an alleged "assurance given by the Ministry, in the course of diplomatic negotiations, to send a very large armed force out of this country to operate in Europe"; yet, to judge from another passage in Sir Edward Grey's same speech, there was so much telepathic harmony between the naval staffs of Great Britain and France that the French fleet had already withdrawn to protect their joint trade routes in the Mediterranean and was leaving the northern and western coast of France to the hypothetical protection of the British navy. An Irishman, unversed in the niceties of parliamentary good faith, has to pause for thought.Bishop Thirlwall, when challenged to say whether he did not prefer compulsory religion to no religion at all, is reported to have confessed that the difference was too subtile for his comprehension; any one of sensitive conscience must confess that his comprehension is not subtile enough to detect any other difference between an "obligation" and a "debt of honour" than that the debt of honour, unbacked by such sanction as is purchasable by a sixpenny contract-stamp, is the more strongly binding. Because there had been no exchange of signed notes, it is arguable that Mr. Asquith was justified by legal training and usage in denying that an obligation existed; Sir Edward Grey appealed to the chivalry of the House of Commons and defied it to say that there existed no obligation of honour.
Chivalry was stronger than resentment; the pacific majority, which, in its innocence of legalism, had kept the government in power on the assurance that no continental commitments existed, voted the country into war on the assurance that its honour was involved. It only remains to put on record the impression left by this hazy obligation on the mind of one party to it:
"We had a compact with France," said Mr. Lloyd George in August, 1918, "that, if she were wantonly attacked, the United Kingdom would go to her support."
In reply to an objection he added:
"There was no compact as to what force we should bring into the arena. In any discussion that ever took place, either in this country or outside, there was no idea that we should ever be able to supply a greater force than six divisions."
Later still he borrowed the qualifying language ofpredecessors who had tried to keep faith with France and Great Britain at the same time:
"I think," he said, "the word 'compact' was too strong for use in that connection. In my judgement it was an obligation of honour...."
So much for bad faith. The people of England, apart from occasional panics and blood-lusts, are justified in claiming that they did not want war; misled—and it is hard to refrain from adding "wilfully misled"—by their rulers, they were given no chance of preserving peace.
The public, which was left to pay the bill, is unlikely to know for many years how many members of the government shared with the prime minister and the foreign secretary the responsibility of misleading the House of Commons and the country. It is fair to assume that the terms of this compact, which was not an obligation, but only a debt of honour, were divulged to Lord Haldane before he carried out his peace mission to Potsdam; and to so consistent a champion of peace, of retrenchment on armaments and of social reform as Mr. Lloyd George, before he lectured Germany in his Mansion House speech during the Agadir crisis of 1911; and to Mr. Churchill, before he changed in a night from a "little-navy" man to a "big-navy" man; and to any one else who, like Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Churchill, forced the cabinet door to see what manner of skeleton lay behind. It is equally fair to assume that the smaller fry of the ministry were not admitted to the guilty secret; nothing but ignorance could justify so egregious a speech as that in which one member informed the public that "he could conceive no circumstance in which continental operations would not be a crime against the people of this country."
From Agadir to Armageddon, those who believed in the word of the government believed also that nothing in the international position of those days could involve Great Britain in a continental war. Sir Edward Grey's adroitness and love of peace had steered Europe through a Moroccan crisis and two Balkan wars; when Austria hurled her bullying ultimatum at Servia, it was hoped that his intervention would again be successful and that, whatever the foreign ministers might achieve, the world would not commit suicide in revenge for the assassination of an Austrian archduke.
No one troubled; no one, surely, had reason to trouble. London in 1914 was an exaggerated caricature of London in 1913 or 1912. The carnival moved with the inconsequent speed and false recklessness of arevue. Of the thousands who besieged every railway-station on the last Friday of July, bound for all parts of England and for every kind of holiday, few can have fancied that it was their last holiday in a world at peace.
An average group, assembling at Paddington, found the train service disorganised by a minor strike and whiled away its time of idleness enforced by exchanging news of the Buckingham Palace conference and of the menace to peace in south-eastern Europe. One of the party had been lunching with the Pilgrims and retailed a rumour that there had been a slight run on the Bank of England that morning; this was in the early days of rumours, and all listened respectfully, though it was difficult to see why English depositors should be alarmedat the Balkan imbroglio. Another of the party enlivened the journey by exhibiting new maps of Servia and south-east Austria, but, once away from the neurosis of London, no one was interested in anything but the threatened civil war in Ireland.
Any one who asked perfunctorily for news of Servia was assured that she would yield to superior force at the last moment. Though a journalist might whisper confidentially that the fleet had sailed from Portsmouth with coal stacked on deck, this was very far from making war unavoidable: if Servia refused to comply with the terms of the ultimatum, Russia would indeed come to her protection against Austria; but then Germany would come to the aid of Austria against Russia, while France would hasten to help Russia against Germany. The same automatic widening of the conflict had been threatened when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina; but, as it was then recognised that one great power would bring in another, so it would be recognised now and prevented; as Great Britain could not face a European war for Bosnia, so she could not now face it for Servia.
Similar conversations were taking place at that hour in thousands of similar houses. Few of all who took part in these last meetings imagined that within a few days they would be training for commissions; no one dreamed that, before a year had passed, almost every man at all these tables would have entered the army, that some would be wounded, others already killed. To most, a general war only became conceivable two days later, when the Sunday newspapers reported that German troops had crossed the frontiers of France and Luxemburg.
Thereafter, more quickly than dazed minds could takein, the impossible became the actual. On Monday, though Kuhlmann's efforts to localise the conflict brought a moment's hope, letters and telegrams, flying from one part of the country to another, convinced even the most sanguine that war—in which Great Britain would be involved—was inevitable; and, before nightfall, every town and village was ringing with Sir Edward Grey's speech.
"How far that friendship entails ... an obligation, let every man look into his own heart, and his own feelings, and construe the extent of the obligation for himself...."
The thousands who had scattered four days earlier to every part of England poured back, on a common impulse, to London. There, all felt, they would gain readier news, perhaps better news, when the silence and isolation of the country had become unbearable. They assembled at hundreds of country stations, debating to the last whether the peace-trained navy would stand the test of war; and, as they read the morning papers, they found that the full text of the foreign secretary's speech made war a certainty, unless Germany submitted to a diplomatic rebuff more disastrously humiliating than the worst defeat in the field.
London that afternoon lay at the mercy of the first war-expositors. Those who had most vehemently attacked the 1909 ship-building programme now most loudly thanked God that England was an island protected by a strong fleet; a few railed against the earlier course of a foreign policy which had embroiled Great Britain in continental rivalries; no one at that time or in that place suggested that war could be averted. When the major issues had been discussed, confidences wereexchanged about the ministers who had resigned and wobbled and withdrawn their resignations. Lord Morley and Mr. John Burns had left the cabinet, followed by a small number of minor office-holders; Lord Beauchamp and others, who had refused to support a war for which the sanction of the country had been neither obtained nor sought, renewed their allegiance to the government when the neutrality of Belgium, which Great Britain was bound by treaty to defend, was violated; but the champions of peace, who had vowed that British troops should only leave England over their dead bodies, and the opponents of intervention, who had explained to wavering colleagues that Great Britain was under no international obligation to take part, remained snugly if silently in office. The fleet, it was now heard, had been ordered to take up war-stations and to seal the German forces in port before the ultimatum was issued; the expeditionary force, it was also heard, had received at least preliminary mobilization-orders while war hung yet in the balance; and so quickly do moral standards decline when personal security is threatened that those who had attacked Germany for her too timely massing of troops congratulated themselves that in England also there were men of laudable vigilance and decision.
And, like punctuation-marks at the end of every sentence, came interruptions from men torn out of familiar surroundings and flung into a world whose very language they did not understand:
"They say there will be a run on the banks for gold ...," murmured one.
"They say the Government will have to declare a moratorium ...," murmured another.
"They say there will very likely be bread riots...."
"They say that special constables are to be enrolled...."
"They say you ought to lay in a certain amount of food...."
At eleven o'clock at night a state of war began between Great Britain and Germany.
From the moment when the ultimatum took effect until the day when the first reports of military activity reached England, political speculation and prophecy raged unconfined. In the betting-book of one club stands recorded a wager that, in the event of war, there will within ten years be not one crowned head in Europe. Now that war had come, every one was calculating how long it could go on: for all her preparation, it was said, Germany would soon run short of certain essentials; but a decision must be reached quickly, as banking experts were already predicting a general collapse of credit in November. Memories of the Franco-German war suggested that, with the precision of modern weapons and with the size of modern armies, no nation in the world could support the strain for more than a few weeks.
Nevertheless, whether peace were signed within three months or six, the old national and international conditions under which the men of military age had grown up were destroyed for ever: most of them, though even now they did not realise it, would be killed or maimed; a long war would bleed the world slowly to death, a short war would be followed by such frenzied re-arming and re-equipment as would exhaust every country notless surely. The days of general luxury, perhaps even of common comfort, were over; taxation would close the great houses and disperse the old retinues. Ethically, politically, intellectually, economically and socially every war marked a transition from one epoch to another; and, before the first unit of the expeditionary force had landed in France, every one felt dimly that an era had closed. As yet there had been no call for more men, as yet none knew whether there was time to train them, as yet it seemed likely that the casualties would be confined to the professional soldiers of the regular army and to the volunteers of the territorial forces; but, though imagination refused to contemplate such an upheaval as took place within even one month, the men between twenty and thirty felt that their world had passed away. Before five years had run their course, the best of them had passed away, too; and of one generation the finest work in the most fruitful period of construction was lost for ever.
This was a time of meditation and heart-searching. So staggering was the shock of war that men's minds refused to conceive of it as the human punishment of human malevolence or folly: Fleet Street dragged in Armageddon and laid the responsibility on God, while finding an excuse for Him in the depravity of man. The moral laxities of France and the perversions of Germany were to be punished by a retribution not less overwhelming than that which had fallen upon Sodom and Gomorrah; as Belgium, Russia and England were included in the general destruction, it was explained that they were being punished, respectively, for the Congo atrocities, the Jewish massacres and the attempted disestablishment of the Welsh church; only Servia, whichsuffered first and longest, and Japan, which was far enough away to be forgotten, were overlooked by those who set themselves to justify the ways of God to man. It would take too long to trace the workings of providence in so many countries, but of England at least it may be claimed that there was a disproportion between her offence and her punishment: at the worst her people were indolent, vulgar, selfish and lacking in an imaginative conscience, but a nation would not seem ripe for destruction when four or five million of its members voluntarily offer themselves for mutilation and death.
Meditation passed away with the first bewilderment and was discouraged with every forward step of a nation arming itself for defence. From time to time spirits dwelling in isolation struggled to preserve detachment, the young poets who lay out under the stars in momentary expectation of death raised their voices in challenge to incomprehensibility; but the first were arrested as sedition-mongers and the second were dismissed as poets. Meditation was not allowed to become articulate until the armistice. It were fruitless and ungracious to dwell on the epidemic delusions and organised fury of those first days: they are common to every country in every war;[24]though they broke out periodically, their grotesque violence abated as new work called for undivided attention.
Not for long did it seem that the casualties would be confined to the regular army and the expeditionary force. Officers of the special reserve received theirmobilisation-orders and reported for duty on the south coast; after long and anxious silence, during which it could only be assumed that they had crossed the channel and were being hurried into Belgium, some of the survivors at length wrote that they had been in the great advance and the great retreat, that they had lost almost every part of their kit, but were enjoying a moment's breathing-time. After the Marne, they moved up again, "dodging death and danger, without rest or food or drink ... till death seemed relaxation and a wound a luxury." Although for more than four years hardly a day passed without bringing news of the death, disablement or loss of some relation or friend, for the men under thirty the casualties crowded thickest in the early weeks; their generation was the most plenteously represented in the first months; and, after four years, of their generation fewest remained.
CHAPTER VIITHE FRINGE OF WAR" ... In a few hours at most, as they well knew, perhaps a tenth of them would have looked their last on the sun, and be a part of foreign earth or dumb things that the tides push. Many of them would have disappeared for ever from the knowledge of man, blotted from the book of life none would know how—by a fall or chance shot in the darkness, in the blast of a shell, or alone, like a hurt beast, in some scrub or gully, far from comrades and the English speech and the English singing. And perhaps a third of them would be mangled, blinded or broken, lamed, made imbecile or disfigured, with the colour and the taste of life taken from them, so that they would never more move with comrades nor exult in the sun. And those not taken thus would be under the ground, sweating in the trench, carrying sandbags up the sap, dodging death and danger, without rest or food or drink ... till death seemed relaxation and a wound a luxury. But as they moved out these things were but the end they asked, the reward they had come for, the unseen cross upon the breast. All that they felt was a gladness of exultation that their young courage was to be used. They went like kings in a pageant to the imminent death. As they passed from moorings to the man-of-war anchorage on their way to the sea, their feeling that they had done with life and were going out to something new welled up in those battalions; they cheered and cheered till the harbour rang with cheering. As each ship crammed with soldiers drew near the battleships, the men swung their caps and cheered again, and the sailors answered, and the noise of cheering swelled, and the men in the ships not yet moving joined in, and the men ashore, till all the life in the harbour was giving thanks that it could go to death rejoicing. All was beautiful in the gladness of men about to die, but the most moving thing was the greatness of their generous hearts...."John Masefield:Gallipoli.I"For various reasons," wrote William Glynne Charles Gladstone to General Sir Henry MacKinnon,[25]"I feel the time has come when I ought to enlist in His Majesty's Army. Heaven knows, sofar from having the least inclination for military service, I dread it and dislike it intensely; consistently with that I have no natural aptitude for it, and what is more, no training of any sort. I have never done a single minute's military training in my whole life, I am a rank although not a very robust civilian; even my love of shooting has somehow never led to my learning to shoot with a rifle. I recall all that to your mind because I want to put it to you that under these circumstances there is only one thing for me to do, and that is to begin at the beginning and enlist as a private. I am not prepared to face the possibility, however remote, of being put in some post of responsibility without knowing the ropes very well and from the beginning.... I have decided not to enlist in any force which is confined to home defence, but one which in its turn will be called upon to go to the front."Had William Gladstone been elected spokesman of the men under thirty, he could not have expressed their collective and individual attitude to the war in apter terms than those which described his own mingled sense of diffidence and duty. All who had loved and followed him at Eton, at Oxford and at Westminster shared his hatred for a war which arrested human progress and destroyed human life, as they shared his ignorance of warfare and his dread of assuming inexpert responsibility for the lives of other men; all, or at least all who mattered, living or dead, offered themselves, no less resolutely than he did, in the first hours of war for any purpose to which the government might put them. The rank civilians who were even less robust than he was laid siege to the doors of any organisation that would make use of them and, with no more training in their wholelife than he had of military training, enlisted as substitutes in place of those who were accepted for the army. Before the government, with its counsel of "business as usual," attempted to set going again the arrested pulse of the national life, those who had time, energy or aptitude, how little so ever, to place at the service of the community were already absorbed in new work or awaiting a call to fresh duties.Sheer inability to sit idle, no less than patriotism, urged them to drive cars and ambulances, to raise funds and equip hospitals, to take the places of their own clerks or gardeners and to toil at the routine of a public office. Dependent on censored newspapers, jejune letters and ill-informed gossip, England was an uneasy home in the unfamiliar days when the whole world was first seething with war. To men past middle-age the news-bills recalled the names of places which they had forgotten since the time, forty-four years earlier, when another German army was pouring into France; would this onrush, all wondered, be as irresistible? Morning after morning the converging black lines of the German advance raced down the map, ever nearer to Paris; one Sunday the notorious "Amiens despatch" prepared its readers for the news that the entire expeditionary force had been encircled. Men, more men and yet more men were the crying need; the order had gone forth and volunteers were to be enrolled by the hundred thousand; but, until they could be trained to an equality with the professional soldiers of Germany, a veritable human breakwater was required to prevent France from being submerged.It is small wonder—the wish being parent to the thought—that some accepted unhesitatingly from excitedneighbours that twenty, fifty, a hundred thousand Russians, secretly embarked at Arkangel and disembarked at Aberdeen, were passing as secretly through England to a southern port; letters from Scotland told of cars commandeered to divide the stream between the east-coast route and the west; the amateur strategist demonstrated with atlas and encyclopædia that Arkangel could be kept ice-free until September; and it was both pleasanter and easier to believe the man who claimed to have spoken to the mysterious troops in Russian than to enquire what facilities existed for transporting a single brigade to the northern coast of Russia.[26]At the same time, in London and in the country, impromptu local committees of relief applied for unoccupied cottages and houses, for furniture and bedding, for food and money to be distributed among the Belgians who had sought asylum in England; in those days, though the Englishman and the Belgian never pretended to feel personal cordiality towards each other, the decision of King Albert to uphold the neutrality of his country was ungrudgingly voted one of the bravest political acts in history; the brief defence of Liége was at least long and unexpected enough to hold up the annihilating German advance for precious hours while the British expeditionary force effected its union with the French army; nothing, in consequence, was too good for the victims of German treachery and of their own honour; and, until it became a legitimate form of English humour to describe a Belgian refugee as a Belgianatrocity, these dazed and ruined outcasts were received with liberality and general kindness.From them and from the press England learned a little of the savagery which had been let loose in Belgium and North France: murders, single and wholesale; raping, private and public; mutilation worthy of a necrophile; burning and pillage. After six years some memories may be dulled, the superior may affect a toleration that they did not feel in those days; some of the stories were exaggerated, and before the end every belligerent had perpetrated a certain number of atrocities. Nevertheless, the original charges were investigated by a commission working under the chairmanship of Lord Bryce, who must be credited with some knowledge of the rules that govern historical and legal evidence; and, even if other armies followed a vile lead, it was the Germans who set the example and enshrined "frightfulness" in their war-book. There was no effective protest in Germany; and, though the need for propaganda and apologetics has lessened, there has been no recantation, no hint of repentance nor sign of grace. It is not surprising that, among those who remember, the name of a German stinks and the presence of a German is an outrage.Until she appears bare-footed and draped in a sheet, Germany must remain branded with the mark of bestiality: though peace has been restored, though trade has been resumed, there can be no good-will between humane, just-minded men and a barbarian nation which has not repented of its misdeeds. It is not an excuse to say that "frightfulness" was imposed from above, for the humblest private has an inalienable right to disobey such an order and to gain his soul at the loss of his life;frightfulness, so far from being resisted, was applauded and spread by the women who mocked and spat in the faces of enemy prisoners. Never has a nation been more solid; never has the collective responsibility been heavier. As it is at least conceivable that this will not prove to be the last war, the present result of impenitence on the one side and of short memory on the other is that, if ever there be another, it can be begun in comfortable certainty that murder, rape, arson, pillage and mutilation go unpunished and are a form of warfare for which there is an unchallenged precedent.The civil and military population of Germany has not made even a coward's show of repentance by choosing scape-goats for the burden of its sins; and repentance has not been forced upon it from without. In the general election of 1918, Mr. Lloyd George promised that the war criminals should be brought to trial; in 1921 we are still waiting to see them punished. Already the Kaiser has one party claiming indulgence for him as the creature of his own general staff, while another would leave him unpunished and even untried for fear that apparent persecution might make a martyr of him. But was not the KaiserKriegsherr? Is not theKriegsherrresponsible for his own war-book? Is it not an offence against humanity and even against the laws of nations to use a human screen when advancing through hostile country? On that count alone he should be hanged.The fear of making martyrs is based on the misunderstanding of a single historical example: Louis Napoleon fostered the Bonapartist legend a quarter of a century after his uncle's death as a romantic appeal against the unromantic dreariness of the Orleanist rule; it is forgottenthat the "martyrdom" of Napoleon I. bore no fruit until the French, with their paradoxical blended love of logic and sentiment, found themselves more than twenty years later under a government which satisfied neither craving; it is forgotten that Marshal Ney, "the bravest of the brave," was executed in a way which shewed that French chivalry was dead, yet no one called him martyr. The former German emperor, ruling by right divine, strutting and phrase-making by the affliction of congenital insanity, may be excused as the Emperor of the Sahara was excused, or confined with his fellows in a criminal-lunatic asylum; if he assert his sanity, then his place is on a cart and his fate a noosed rope. Yet one more party, its sentiment stirred by the sight of Count Hohenzollern chopping trees in a Dutch park, pleads that in his downfall he is paying longer and heavier penalty than that of instant and painless death; it may be suggested that inglorious exile is a blessing unexpected and undeserved of the degenerate who flitted across the frontier when the country that he had misruled was in its death agony. The pantaloon of Europe gave up his mumming when the game grew dangerous; with it he gave up his last opportunity of ascending from the ridiculous to the sublime.Where no imagination is required, the English are a kindly race who find it easier and more congenial to forget than to inflict punishment even when it is deserved, even when the criminal unpunished becomes a model for future crime. Every murderer may be sure of his petition for reprieve; in the excitement of the present an Englishman will always forget the excitement of the past, even when this shortness of memory leaves a debt unpaid. The war is so long over, its laterstages were so different from the earlier that few now remember their obligation to Lord Kitchener in those first months. It is for soldiers and statesmen to decide whether he outlived his own usefulness, whether he reduced the War Office to chaos, even whether the new armies would not have been formed without the inspiration of his name; others may be grateful to an imagination and a courage that led him to warn the country that he was preparing for a three years' war, when the country was wondering whether war on such a scale could possibly drag on after Christmas. Those who were then living on the remote fringe of the war may recall the indefinable sense of security which was brought by the news that he had been appointed secretary of state for war.More quickly forgotten than anything else in these days was the nation's debt of gratitude to Lord Haldane for reorganising the army and for preparing, in the expeditionary force, the finest fighting weapon in recorded history. His admiration for Germany, his visits to the Kaiser and his study of German methods led a people which prided itself on its dogged common-sense to charge him with treacherous German sympathies; political opponents, eager enough before the party truce to discredit the ministry by destroying one of its most prominent members, encouraged the belief that Lord Haldane, while in temporary charge of the war office, had obstructed the mobilisation of the expeditionary force; and the man who had made the new model army was credited with designs on the country which it saved. When once it is recognised that the English, in their present credulity and ignorance, are unfit for self-government, these aberrations become easily intelligible; itis not so easy to understand or to justify the action of Lord Haldane's colleagues who, for all their worthless moral support and for all their entreaties that he should remain in the cabinet, allowed him to be sacrificed to popular clamour without raising a voice or stirring a finger to protect him publicly.[27]These early impressions are perhaps the deeper for that there was so little in those early days, before each man had taken up his new work, to disturb a course of general reflection. When the morning and evening papers had been read, there was nothing to do but to brood over this spectacle of a world gone mad. Everywhere in England there was the same chatter and speculation, the same spy-rumours and epidemics of hoarding; the same competition in war-economies and rivalry in war-services. Every day brought news of new recruits to the army, the civil service and a score of services no less unexpected, until, at the end of September, one who was equally without training or aptitude for teaching returned to Westminster with cap and gown, to become a temporary schoolmaster.IIThere would be a smaller public-school literature if the privilege of describing or criticising public schools were restricted to those who had seen them from both the form-room and the common room.[28]"Ian Hay" speaks somewhere of the schoolmaster's life as being the worst paid and the most richly rewarded; and, if no remuneration compensates the damage to nerves, temper and faith when a man tries simultaneously to maintain order, to excite interest and to impart instruction to fiftyor sixty boys of fourteen to seventeen, reward comes from contact with the minds of boys first stirring to wakefulness and with the characters of boys who, for all their mischief and resourcefulness of attack, are lovable in their ingenuousness, their humour, their chivalry, their conservatism, their strict and strictly-circumscribed honour.And, if faith is sometimes tried, faith in public-school education was justified in the years from 1914 to 1918. If it be granted hypothetically that the war was won for England and, further, that it was won by soldiers in the field rather than by ministers, munition-makers, bankers and military correspondents, it was won by the leadership of the officers and by the fighting quality of the men; and the leaders were supplied first to the old army and then to the new, for the first years of the war, almost wholly by the public schools. When, at the end, the net was thrown more widely, the quality of the officers deteriorated; though they lacked nothing of courage, they could furnish no substitute for something indefinable but recognisable—never so quickly recognised as by the men they led—which only a public school provides.Apart from its training in character, public-school education was justified in that, if the aim of education be to teach a man how to learn, the versatility of the old public-schoolboy was a rare tribute to his education; and versatility is not confined to knowing the commercial or even the scientific jargon of half-a-dozen languages. Hardly a man was not in some degree uprooted; and all took to their new work and to their new responsibilities as lightheartedly as they would to a new game. It is in this sense that the British may fairly claim to be an imperial people: the empire, since the days of WarrenHastings (an Old Westminster), has been administered by public-school boys with public-school methods and the public-school tradition of responsibility; if the empire disintegrate, it will be because the time has come for the administration to pass into native hands or because the work of the public schools abroad is stultified at home. It was the public-schoolboy who officered the new armies, the new civil service, the whole of a new nation organising itself for war.Though outward forms change little in a school so old as Westminster, the war had brought a new spirit and a new vent for enthusiasm: all but a handful were in the uniform of the officers' training corps; most of the time out of school was given up to parades and drills, shooting-practise, lectures and instruction in map-reading; and war was the one subject that competed with the narrower interests of the school.Neither in 1914 nor ten years before the testing of war would an unbiased observer have suggested that English public schools were incapable of improvement; at both times, however, he might have insisted that the improvement must come from the homes of the boys. In effect, English parents try to get their sons, who are destined for a controlling position in the life of the nation, educated for half-a-dozen of their most critical years at a price which is less than they would pay for an equal time at a moderate hotel. The emoluments of a schoolmaster, as of a soldier or a clergyman, would tempt no one who had the assurance or the contrivance to support himself in commerce, in the civil service or at the bar; and for that reason a fellow of All Souls is not commonly found in the army, on the staff of a school or in holy orders. The vaunted long holidays give aschoolmaster the leisure to keep his mind fresh with travel; they do not supply the means. To marry on his salary is to look forward to years of sordid economies, rewarded at length by the grant of a house and of the right to make money as an inn-keeper.The establishment fees like those for tuition and board are so insufficient that most schools are hampered for want of money to build, to rebuild, to equip and to replenish; the sanitary accommodation is usually inadequate and sometimes scandalous. This cannot be remedied until parents are willing to pay more; and the mental attitude of many parents is one of irresponsible relief at getting rid of their sons for three-quarters of the year and, with them, of the educational and moral problems that they have artfully shelved until their sons reach school age. Between that which a parent expects a boy to learn at school and that which the school expects him to have learned at home, many unnecessary lessons are taught and many necessary lessons are left untaught.If, in care and training, a boy were regarded as not less important than a race-horse, the public schools would need to ask nothing more. An adequate payment for the responsibility of education would attract the best scholars in the country and would enable them to retire in affluence after ten years' service and before their hearts were broken by routine. The schoolmaster could dictate to the parent not less than a trainer dictates to an owner, and in this way the gaps in public-school education might be filled; if music, French and German were taught abroad during the school holidays, if the rudiments of divinity and English had been imparted at home in the first twelve years of a boy's life, if the intellectual atmosphere in which a boy is brought up wereless fog-infested, the foundations on which the schoolmaster has to build would be more secure.Amateur and professional schoolmasters, temporary and permanent civil servants, with those who were over age or unfit for the army, met to the number of many thousands in these days on one field of war activity which deserves a few words of commemoration. To relieve the regular police, already depleted, in their normal duties and to furnish an additional force to guard railway-bridges, power-stations and similar vital parts from enemy attack, the government authorized the enrolment of special constables; for those who were engaged by day, a separate unit with distinctive duties was established in the headquarters central detachment. Divided into sections manned from the clubs and government offices,[29]this detachment was entrusted with the task of patrolling the grounds of Buckingham Palace nightly from 9.0 until 5.0; in addition, its members were required to report at Scotland House at every alarm of air-raid or riot and to hold themselves in readiness to be sent whithersoever required. Organised under a commandant, inspectors, sub-inspectors and sergeants, arrayed in a uniform of its own, equipped with truncheons, whistles, brassards and torches and drilled—whenever it could be collected—in the gardens of the Temple, the headquarters detachment watched and waited through four years.The spirit of the men was better than the use that was made of them. It would be consoling to think that the mere existence of such a force discouraged enemyagents from their work of destruction; certainly moral influence was seldom backed by a successful trial of strength; and, when the truncheons were surrendered, very few had been drawn and fewer still blooded. Once or twice, when German shops were being looted, the headquarters detachment was sent to Limehouse or Shoreditch, there as a rule to be mewed up in reserve at the local police-station while the necessary work was done by the ordinary constables; once or twice a cordon would be made round a shattered building or a fallen aeroplane; but for the most part the detachment sat in Scotland House from the summons until the dismissal or patrolled Buckingham Palace gardens through the night, waiting for a conflict which never took place. Before the end, each constable must have sat in the guardroom for one or two hundred hours and patrolled the grounds for one or two thousand miles; the biscuits and tobacco that he consumed are to be reckoned by scores of pounds, the coffee that he drank by tens of gallons; and, though some at least had seen the sun rise more often in the summers before the war, none ever fancied that he could see it with such weariness and loathing. For men who were already overworked by day, the additional fatigue was mistaken patriotism; and many dropped out before the armistice. If, however, few members of the detachment can look back on their service with much sense of pleasure or profit, some can at least hold themselves indebted for new friendships.IIIThe speed with which men threw themselves into unfamiliar work during the war was only equalled by thespeed with which they were transferred from one kind of unfamiliar work to another; and to a man who had as little knowledge of administration as of teaching there was nothing surprising in the lightning conversion of an amateur schoolmaster into an amateur civil servant.[30]One serious gap in the history of the war remains to be filled by a comprehensive account of the origin and growth of the temporary departments. Their number is to be reckoned by the score, their strength by scores of thousands; in function they ranged from encouraging thrift and translating enemy newspapers to ordering heavy artillery, commandeering ships and controlling the supply, distribution and price of food. Some were vast expansions of a sub-department in Foreign Office, Admiralty, Board of Trade or War Office, others—like those of Food and Shipping—were created by a minister out of a museum or hotel, a private telephone-exchange, a code of instructions, a supply of official stationery and an assortment of male and female clerks; some were set to function by an old civil servant borrowed from another office or resuscitated from retirement, others evolved their system by imitation or by the light of nature. If in five years there was a heavy bill to pay for overlapping and waste, for errors of judgement and blunders in execution, for interdepartmental warfare and magnification of private bishoprics, any one who saw the temporary civil service from the inside may feel that it was yet light in relation to themultiplicity of interests involved and to the amount of work accomplished.In its genesis and development, the Trade Clearing House of the War Trade Department[31]was typical of most temporary offices. On the outbreak of hostilities, the National Service League found itself with premises, furniture, a staff and a number of at least temporarily obsolete functions. For a time a special censorship was established in connection with the Admiralty; one recruiting officer scoured the clubs of London, another the colleges of Oxford until a big and varied personnel had been collected; when more hands were required, each of the original members would recruit a friend, for whom he could vouch. As the work of the department was concerned with every kind of export trade, no one was admitted who could turn to private account any knowledge that came to him in his official capacity; and, though military service was not yet compulsory nor departmental exemption the desire of the gun-shy, the recruiting for the office was almost entirely confined to men who were over age or unfit.The "department" had at first no official status; and, when a report of its activities in censorship reached the home secretary, he suggested that it should regularise itself if it wished to escape heavy penalties for interfering with his majesty's mails. At this time the Customs were thrown into difficulty and confusion by the proclamation of the king in council, forbidding all trade with the enemy: in the absence of records, investigation and an intelligence department, it was impossible to say whether goods cleared from London would ultimatelyreach enemy destination; and the censors who were watching the cable and wireless operations of Dutch and Scandinavian importers seemed the natural advisers to approach. At this point the embryonic department, which had risen from the ashes of the National Service League, joined with a licensing delegation from the Customs to form the War Trade Department and Trade Clearing House.The formal executive authority lay with the Privy Council, but the department was a joint administrative and advisory body, receiving and transmitting information between War Office, Admiralty, Foreign Office, Home Office, Scotland Yard, the new Censorships and, indeed, any other department that would give or accept information designed to strengthen the blockade, to check espionage at home and the transmission of information abroad and to prevent trade with the enemy. As the work became organised and the records increased, there arose further duties of editing, compiling, summarising and translating, too numerous and technical to be described here.The staff was recruited from dons and barristers, men of letters and stockbrokers, solicitors and merchants; but, until an incapacitated officer was here and there drafted on light duty to a government department, there was not one civil servant. The independent tributes of Lord Emmott and, later, of Lord Robert Cecil are the most convincing testimony that, even without the guidance of those who had been trained in the civil service, these temporary civil servants acquired its methods and imbibed something of its tradition. Within a few days the raw newcomers felt as if they had lived all their lives in a world of registries and files, of minutesand memoranda, of "second-division clerks" and messengers, as in a few days they were acclimatised to the universal office equipment of trestle-tables and desk-telephones, of card-indices and steel filing-cabinets, of "in" and "out" trays, of rubber stamps and "urgent" labels. The work was done first in congested corners of Central Buildings, Westminster, later in Broadway House and later still in Lake Buildings, St. James' Park. Everywhere the duties of the department expanded more quickly than its accommodation; and, though it began with apparently sufficient space in each new home, within a few weeks the big rooms were being divided by temporary partitions and the small were being filled with additional occupants.As the civil service has undergone some slight modification in the last hundred years, it is encouraging to find that there is also a slight modification in the public estimate of it since Dickens satirised the Circumlocution Office. As yet, justice has only been done to it by ministers who recognise thankfully that it has no rival in the world for intellectual ability, conscientiousness, loyalty, honour and integrity. Recruited by a most searching examination from the best brains of the Oxford and Cambridge type, it receives fewer rewards and less payment than any other body of men charged with equal responsibility. No "budget secret" has ever leaked out, though it is in the power of a Treasury clerk to become rich beyond the dreams of avarice; during the war no man worked harder than the civil servant. Whether the "business men" who were acclaimed and imported so eagerly contrived to run their departments more cheaply can be answered by any tax-payer who chooses to enquire; that they ran them more efficientlymay be doubted by any one who recalls the nightmare of confusion in which, say, the Ministry of Munitions came to birth; that they ran them with equal integrity may be challenged by small men who were compelled to disclose to powerful competitors their organisation and secret processes.The temporary civil servant may be glad of his experience in a public department for many reasons, of which not the least is that it gave him some idea of the size and complexity of the government machine; he might sympathise more with a business man's complaints if in his correspondence with a government office the business man were sufficiently businesslike to read what was written and sufficiently intelligent to understand what he read.From the first, the personnel of the War Trade Department was remarkably varied and variedly remarkable. The chairman of the Trade Clearing House, (Sir) Henry Penson was an Oxford economist; the head of the Intelligence Section a translator.[32]In a neighbouring room worked Alfred Sutro; in another, H. W. C.Davis, of Balliol; in others again would be found a professor, a poet, a publisher, a critic, a novelist and a historiographer royal.Before the end of the war, the department had grown so big that few could have known more than half of the men and women in it; during the early days, when the machinery of the blockade had still to be erected, a small and amazingly harmonious body, contributing diverse experience from many countries and callings, established a freemasonry with hard-driven men in other departments; there was little obsolete routine; and other offices were not slow to recognise sympathetically that an immense burden of work had to be accomplished with few hands in a short time.It has been said that the department changed its domicile several times; it also changed its constitution and title. When Lord Robert Cecil was appointed Minister of Blockade, the Trade Clearing House severed its connection with Lord Emmott's War Trade Department and became the War Trade Intelligence Department, under Lord Robert and in conjunction with such blockade organisations as the Contraband Committee and the Foreign Trade Department. At the end of the war, its decomposing remains were buried under the Department of Overseas Trade.The task of preliminary organisation was not made easier by the uncertainty into which all government offices were plunged whenever a section of the press proclaimed that every department was sheltering companies of potential recruits. This is not the place to engage in a general discussion of the policy or the morality of conscription as imposed, without reference to the constituencies, on a country which, six years earlier, had supported a liberal government in its contest with the House of Lords. The constitutionalists may object that such a course made mock of representative government; the idealist may feel that the achievement of the voluntary system in the first eighteen months of the war was the greatest in English history and that no victory is worth a press-gang; and every critic who is not also a militarist will wonder how the army, alone of the services which require to draw from the limited common reservoir of man-power, is allowed to say that it can fix no maximum but requires all the men that it can get and then still more.These are general reflections on compulsory service; and, as it had been imposed before the summer of 1916, criticism was then only relevant when directed to the method of its application. If industry was kept in the same uncertainty as the government service, it is amazing that industry was not destroyed. The first principle of applied conscription seemed to be that there were no principles: the system of one day was discarded the next; and no permanent arrangement of work was secure from the risk that a man exempted on Monday would be called up on Monday week. All men of military age were periodically reviewed and subjected to medical reexamination; apart from the waste of timeto all concerned and the occasional incivility of medical boards which attributed physical defects to temperamental malice, no personal hardship was involved at first, though, when the doctors were encouraged to pass as fit for general service a man who had with difficulty qualified for "sedentary duty at home," the civil service too often lost a valuable worker in presenting to the army a confirmed invalid. The hardship fell rather on those who were responsible for organising the work without being sure who would be left to do it.When once the machinery of the blockade was perfected, the chief concern of the department was to improve and to economise in its working. The year 1916 lacked the excitement of those earlier months when the temporary organisations were playing a game, picking up sides and inventing the rules as they went on; for one amateur civil servant interest only revived with the adhesion of America to the allies. On Easter-Eve, 1917, the department was requested to choose a representative to join the diplomatic mission which was being sent to Washington with Mr. Balfour at its head.IVThe late war has been described a hundred thousand times as a life-and-death struggle. While a soldier may engage in such a struggle without allowing his reason to be overmastered by his nerves, the civilian population at home, learning little and understanding less, is always in some degree influenced by fear in the formation of its opinions:[33]credit in excess of its military deserts will begiven to the power that joins the war on the right side, while opprobrium in excess of its moral turpitude will be poured on the power that joins the war on the wrong side or omits to join it at all. Italy, which forsook the triple alliance and ran away at Caporetto, is loaded with territorial rewards and praised as a champion of civilisation, while Turkey, which had no alliance to forsake and entered the war—like many another—for what could be got out of it, is first vilified and then skinned alive. It is the fortune of war: by throwing in its lot with the enemy, the Turkish government embarrassed the allies and increased their despondency; by throwing in its lot with the allies, the Italian government relieved that embarrassment and lightened that despondency.The allies would have been strengthened beyond calculation if, on the outbreak of war, the United States had upheld the neutrality of Belgium by force of arms; or if, on the sinking of theLusitania, they had maintained by force of arms their own prestige; or if, at any time before 1917 and on any pretext, they had eased by military and naval assistance the strain under which Great Britain was suffering. It is interesting and, unhappily, not wholly academic to speculate what Great Britain would have done or would do in the future if the government of a central or south American republic appealed to the great powers for assistance in repellingan unprovoked Japanese invasion; it is conceivable that the notes in which President Wilson defended his neutrality from 1914 to 1917 would constitute a valuable precedent and model for a British foreign secretary in defending his. The public in England did not pause to sympathise with a people which aimed at keeping itself free from the costly heritage of European politics, nor to understand a country in which the interests of the Atlantic coast were unintelligible on the coast of the Pacific and both were different from the interests of the middle west. It did not even pause to record or feel gratitude for the moral, financial and charitable support of a big section of the United States.From the day when President Wilson elected to stand aloof until the day when he declared war, Great Britain, despairing of help, gave herself over to sullen murmuring and periodical explosions. That a nation would sooner swallow an indignity than sacrifice its ideal of standing apart from all wars, that it should hope and work for a peace in which the victor should not be able to leave the vanquished only his eyes to weep with was unpalatable in a country which was threatened with starvation at home and with defeat or stalemate abroad. And no attempt was made to conceal this feeling of distaste.Nevertheless, no enthusiasm was too extravagant when at last America abandoned her neutrality—and abandoned it on the unidealistic ground of material self-protection. By the autumn of 1916 the allies had reached their low-water mark. The summer campaign on the Somme had cost more than half a million casualties without breaking the German line; the Russian thrust in the south had been repelled and the Russian armies flung back with such violence that they requiredlong leisure for recovery and re-equipment, if indeed they were ever again to play an effective part in the war; Servia, left to the undivided attention of Austria, had been put out of action; and Roumania, entering the war precipitously, was now almost expunged from the map of Europe; if the French had succeeded at Verdun, they had failed everywhere else; forgetting everything and learning nothing from the tragedy of the Dardanelles, the British government had been persuaded by the French to lock up another army in Salonica; the battle of Jutland was still widely believed to have been the greatest defeat in British naval history; Ireland was smouldering with a half-extinguished half-revolution; and a wave of "defeatism" was spreading through England and France until even the armies were affected.When the belligerents took stock before settling down to the trench-warfare winter campaign of 1916-17, all must have felt that the war had reached its climax. The general exhaustion was so great that, even if hostilities had ceased, every country would have been crippled; if hostilities continued, they would continue on a scale of unlimited effort in which no reserve of strength would any longer be husbanded. Set free on her eastern frontier, Germany must mass all her resources in one last effort to break through the western line; the allies must hold out till the attempt had spent itself and then strike one last blow at a worn enemy; Germany must in turn prevent the allies from holding out by cutting their sea-communications. If unrestricted submarine warfare ranged America on the side of the allies, it must have been felt that either the war would be over before any effective help could be given or else that, in the final, hopeless, death-grapple, a few million soldiers more orless would not substantially change the degree or character of Germany's defeat.Many of those who meditate on the war from its climax in 1916 to its end in the Versailles conference may wonder whether they did wisely in execrating and howling down any one who shewed the courage to advocate peace before the sphere of war underwent its last desperate expansion. The government stood by its policy of a "knock-out blow"; the knock-out blow has been dealt. Is any one the better for it? The fire-eaters who proclaimed that anything less than the unconditional surrender of Germany would entail another German war within a generation now proclaim with no more doubt or qualification that Germany is preparing her revenge and has already recovered more quickly than any other of the belligerents.[34]The added two years of war, then, have not brought such security as Rome enjoyed after the destruction of Carthage; the added bitterness of those two years, on the other hand, has made more difficult any good-will and any common effort to substitute a saner and better system of international relationship.Worst of all are the world-wide economic depression and political unrest for which the protraction of the war was responsible. Had negotiations been opened in 1916, the Russian revolution and its consequences might well have been averted; Germany, Austria and Turkey might have been left with stable governments and yet with enough experience of modern warfare to discourage any taste for further adventures; and Italy, France andGreat Britain—in that order—might have been saved from insolvency. The war, if ended at that time, would have been ended without American help; and peace would have been concluded without American intervention. This last result might by now be a matter for regret if thereby the world had been cheated of an equitable and permanent peace, such as President Wilson sought to impose on the militarist party of the Versailles conference; but it would perhaps have been better for the terms to be drawn by M. Clemenceau and Mr. Lloyd George on Carthaginian lines than for the world to be tantalised by a glimpse of statesmanship that revealed the universal spirit and then to be fobbed off with a compromise which embraced even the good faith of England.Of peace negotiations there was much talk in the last months of 1916; even the cabinet was alleged to have its peace-party; and, though the first coalition fell for other reasons, its fall was made possible by a vague general belief that one faction was indifferent whether the war was won or lost and that, if the war had to go on, it must be controlled by the faction which was most vociferously identified with the policy of the knock-out blow. Whether the most tentative offer was made to Germany or by Germany has not been admitted; but informal communications were passing, from the beginning of the war till the end, through unofficial channels, and it would interest any one who is dissatisfied with the present settlement to know whether the German government refused or would have refused a peace in which Belgium, northern France and Russia were evacuated and repaired, in which the authors of all atrocities were surrendered for trial and in which there were neither territorial acquisitions nor indemnities on either side.For more than this the allies were not entitled to ask, when the gamble of war was at its height; with less than this they could not be content.Returned to power for a second term of office in the November elections of 1916, President Wilson made a final attempt to open peace negotiations; but the unrestricted submarine campaign frustrated his efforts and impelled him reluctantly to issue a declaration of war: if the allies were defeated, as now seemed more than possible, America lay exposed to any power with a fleet in being. The United States engaged in the war independently and without entering into alliance with any other power; but the closest cooperation was expected and invited. To assist this cooperation, the Foreign Office proposed that a representative mission should be sent to Washington; and, when the United States government received the proposal favourably, the mission was assembled to discuss war-measures with the government of a country at which the British public and press had been scoffing on the ground that it was "too proud to fight."
THE FRINGE OF WAR
" ... In a few hours at most, as they well knew, perhaps a tenth of them would have looked their last on the sun, and be a part of foreign earth or dumb things that the tides push. Many of them would have disappeared for ever from the knowledge of man, blotted from the book of life none would know how—by a fall or chance shot in the darkness, in the blast of a shell, or alone, like a hurt beast, in some scrub or gully, far from comrades and the English speech and the English singing. And perhaps a third of them would be mangled, blinded or broken, lamed, made imbecile or disfigured, with the colour and the taste of life taken from them, so that they would never more move with comrades nor exult in the sun. And those not taken thus would be under the ground, sweating in the trench, carrying sandbags up the sap, dodging death and danger, without rest or food or drink ... till death seemed relaxation and a wound a luxury. But as they moved out these things were but the end they asked, the reward they had come for, the unseen cross upon the breast. All that they felt was a gladness of exultation that their young courage was to be used. They went like kings in a pageant to the imminent death. As they passed from moorings to the man-of-war anchorage on their way to the sea, their feeling that they had done with life and were going out to something new welled up in those battalions; they cheered and cheered till the harbour rang with cheering. As each ship crammed with soldiers drew near the battleships, the men swung their caps and cheered again, and the sailors answered, and the noise of cheering swelled, and the men in the ships not yet moving joined in, and the men ashore, till all the life in the harbour was giving thanks that it could go to death rejoicing. All was beautiful in the gladness of men about to die, but the most moving thing was the greatness of their generous hearts...."
John Masefield:Gallipoli.
"For various reasons," wrote William Glynne Charles Gladstone to General Sir Henry MacKinnon,[25]"I feel the time has come when I ought to enlist in His Majesty's Army. Heaven knows, sofar from having the least inclination for military service, I dread it and dislike it intensely; consistently with that I have no natural aptitude for it, and what is more, no training of any sort. I have never done a single minute's military training in my whole life, I am a rank although not a very robust civilian; even my love of shooting has somehow never led to my learning to shoot with a rifle. I recall all that to your mind because I want to put it to you that under these circumstances there is only one thing for me to do, and that is to begin at the beginning and enlist as a private. I am not prepared to face the possibility, however remote, of being put in some post of responsibility without knowing the ropes very well and from the beginning.... I have decided not to enlist in any force which is confined to home defence, but one which in its turn will be called upon to go to the front."
Had William Gladstone been elected spokesman of the men under thirty, he could not have expressed their collective and individual attitude to the war in apter terms than those which described his own mingled sense of diffidence and duty. All who had loved and followed him at Eton, at Oxford and at Westminster shared his hatred for a war which arrested human progress and destroyed human life, as they shared his ignorance of warfare and his dread of assuming inexpert responsibility for the lives of other men; all, or at least all who mattered, living or dead, offered themselves, no less resolutely than he did, in the first hours of war for any purpose to which the government might put them. The rank civilians who were even less robust than he was laid siege to the doors of any organisation that would make use of them and, with no more training in their wholelife than he had of military training, enlisted as substitutes in place of those who were accepted for the army. Before the government, with its counsel of "business as usual," attempted to set going again the arrested pulse of the national life, those who had time, energy or aptitude, how little so ever, to place at the service of the community were already absorbed in new work or awaiting a call to fresh duties.
Sheer inability to sit idle, no less than patriotism, urged them to drive cars and ambulances, to raise funds and equip hospitals, to take the places of their own clerks or gardeners and to toil at the routine of a public office. Dependent on censored newspapers, jejune letters and ill-informed gossip, England was an uneasy home in the unfamiliar days when the whole world was first seething with war. To men past middle-age the news-bills recalled the names of places which they had forgotten since the time, forty-four years earlier, when another German army was pouring into France; would this onrush, all wondered, be as irresistible? Morning after morning the converging black lines of the German advance raced down the map, ever nearer to Paris; one Sunday the notorious "Amiens despatch" prepared its readers for the news that the entire expeditionary force had been encircled. Men, more men and yet more men were the crying need; the order had gone forth and volunteers were to be enrolled by the hundred thousand; but, until they could be trained to an equality with the professional soldiers of Germany, a veritable human breakwater was required to prevent France from being submerged.
It is small wonder—the wish being parent to the thought—that some accepted unhesitatingly from excitedneighbours that twenty, fifty, a hundred thousand Russians, secretly embarked at Arkangel and disembarked at Aberdeen, were passing as secretly through England to a southern port; letters from Scotland told of cars commandeered to divide the stream between the east-coast route and the west; the amateur strategist demonstrated with atlas and encyclopædia that Arkangel could be kept ice-free until September; and it was both pleasanter and easier to believe the man who claimed to have spoken to the mysterious troops in Russian than to enquire what facilities existed for transporting a single brigade to the northern coast of Russia.[26]
At the same time, in London and in the country, impromptu local committees of relief applied for unoccupied cottages and houses, for furniture and bedding, for food and money to be distributed among the Belgians who had sought asylum in England; in those days, though the Englishman and the Belgian never pretended to feel personal cordiality towards each other, the decision of King Albert to uphold the neutrality of his country was ungrudgingly voted one of the bravest political acts in history; the brief defence of Liége was at least long and unexpected enough to hold up the annihilating German advance for precious hours while the British expeditionary force effected its union with the French army; nothing, in consequence, was too good for the victims of German treachery and of their own honour; and, until it became a legitimate form of English humour to describe a Belgian refugee as a Belgianatrocity, these dazed and ruined outcasts were received with liberality and general kindness.
From them and from the press England learned a little of the savagery which had been let loose in Belgium and North France: murders, single and wholesale; raping, private and public; mutilation worthy of a necrophile; burning and pillage. After six years some memories may be dulled, the superior may affect a toleration that they did not feel in those days; some of the stories were exaggerated, and before the end every belligerent had perpetrated a certain number of atrocities. Nevertheless, the original charges were investigated by a commission working under the chairmanship of Lord Bryce, who must be credited with some knowledge of the rules that govern historical and legal evidence; and, even if other armies followed a vile lead, it was the Germans who set the example and enshrined "frightfulness" in their war-book. There was no effective protest in Germany; and, though the need for propaganda and apologetics has lessened, there has been no recantation, no hint of repentance nor sign of grace. It is not surprising that, among those who remember, the name of a German stinks and the presence of a German is an outrage.
Until she appears bare-footed and draped in a sheet, Germany must remain branded with the mark of bestiality: though peace has been restored, though trade has been resumed, there can be no good-will between humane, just-minded men and a barbarian nation which has not repented of its misdeeds. It is not an excuse to say that "frightfulness" was imposed from above, for the humblest private has an inalienable right to disobey such an order and to gain his soul at the loss of his life;frightfulness, so far from being resisted, was applauded and spread by the women who mocked and spat in the faces of enemy prisoners. Never has a nation been more solid; never has the collective responsibility been heavier. As it is at least conceivable that this will not prove to be the last war, the present result of impenitence on the one side and of short memory on the other is that, if ever there be another, it can be begun in comfortable certainty that murder, rape, arson, pillage and mutilation go unpunished and are a form of warfare for which there is an unchallenged precedent.
The civil and military population of Germany has not made even a coward's show of repentance by choosing scape-goats for the burden of its sins; and repentance has not been forced upon it from without. In the general election of 1918, Mr. Lloyd George promised that the war criminals should be brought to trial; in 1921 we are still waiting to see them punished. Already the Kaiser has one party claiming indulgence for him as the creature of his own general staff, while another would leave him unpunished and even untried for fear that apparent persecution might make a martyr of him. But was not the KaiserKriegsherr? Is not theKriegsherrresponsible for his own war-book? Is it not an offence against humanity and even against the laws of nations to use a human screen when advancing through hostile country? On that count alone he should be hanged.
The fear of making martyrs is based on the misunderstanding of a single historical example: Louis Napoleon fostered the Bonapartist legend a quarter of a century after his uncle's death as a romantic appeal against the unromantic dreariness of the Orleanist rule; it is forgottenthat the "martyrdom" of Napoleon I. bore no fruit until the French, with their paradoxical blended love of logic and sentiment, found themselves more than twenty years later under a government which satisfied neither craving; it is forgotten that Marshal Ney, "the bravest of the brave," was executed in a way which shewed that French chivalry was dead, yet no one called him martyr. The former German emperor, ruling by right divine, strutting and phrase-making by the affliction of congenital insanity, may be excused as the Emperor of the Sahara was excused, or confined with his fellows in a criminal-lunatic asylum; if he assert his sanity, then his place is on a cart and his fate a noosed rope. Yet one more party, its sentiment stirred by the sight of Count Hohenzollern chopping trees in a Dutch park, pleads that in his downfall he is paying longer and heavier penalty than that of instant and painless death; it may be suggested that inglorious exile is a blessing unexpected and undeserved of the degenerate who flitted across the frontier when the country that he had misruled was in its death agony. The pantaloon of Europe gave up his mumming when the game grew dangerous; with it he gave up his last opportunity of ascending from the ridiculous to the sublime.
Where no imagination is required, the English are a kindly race who find it easier and more congenial to forget than to inflict punishment even when it is deserved, even when the criminal unpunished becomes a model for future crime. Every murderer may be sure of his petition for reprieve; in the excitement of the present an Englishman will always forget the excitement of the past, even when this shortness of memory leaves a debt unpaid. The war is so long over, its laterstages were so different from the earlier that few now remember their obligation to Lord Kitchener in those first months. It is for soldiers and statesmen to decide whether he outlived his own usefulness, whether he reduced the War Office to chaos, even whether the new armies would not have been formed without the inspiration of his name; others may be grateful to an imagination and a courage that led him to warn the country that he was preparing for a three years' war, when the country was wondering whether war on such a scale could possibly drag on after Christmas. Those who were then living on the remote fringe of the war may recall the indefinable sense of security which was brought by the news that he had been appointed secretary of state for war.
More quickly forgotten than anything else in these days was the nation's debt of gratitude to Lord Haldane for reorganising the army and for preparing, in the expeditionary force, the finest fighting weapon in recorded history. His admiration for Germany, his visits to the Kaiser and his study of German methods led a people which prided itself on its dogged common-sense to charge him with treacherous German sympathies; political opponents, eager enough before the party truce to discredit the ministry by destroying one of its most prominent members, encouraged the belief that Lord Haldane, while in temporary charge of the war office, had obstructed the mobilisation of the expeditionary force; and the man who had made the new model army was credited with designs on the country which it saved. When once it is recognised that the English, in their present credulity and ignorance, are unfit for self-government, these aberrations become easily intelligible; itis not so easy to understand or to justify the action of Lord Haldane's colleagues who, for all their worthless moral support and for all their entreaties that he should remain in the cabinet, allowed him to be sacrificed to popular clamour without raising a voice or stirring a finger to protect him publicly.[27]
These early impressions are perhaps the deeper for that there was so little in those early days, before each man had taken up his new work, to disturb a course of general reflection. When the morning and evening papers had been read, there was nothing to do but to brood over this spectacle of a world gone mad. Everywhere in England there was the same chatter and speculation, the same spy-rumours and epidemics of hoarding; the same competition in war-economies and rivalry in war-services. Every day brought news of new recruits to the army, the civil service and a score of services no less unexpected, until, at the end of September, one who was equally without training or aptitude for teaching returned to Westminster with cap and gown, to become a temporary schoolmaster.
There would be a smaller public-school literature if the privilege of describing or criticising public schools were restricted to those who had seen them from both the form-room and the common room.[28]"Ian Hay" speaks somewhere of the schoolmaster's life as being the worst paid and the most richly rewarded; and, if no remuneration compensates the damage to nerves, temper and faith when a man tries simultaneously to maintain order, to excite interest and to impart instruction to fiftyor sixty boys of fourteen to seventeen, reward comes from contact with the minds of boys first stirring to wakefulness and with the characters of boys who, for all their mischief and resourcefulness of attack, are lovable in their ingenuousness, their humour, their chivalry, their conservatism, their strict and strictly-circumscribed honour.
And, if faith is sometimes tried, faith in public-school education was justified in the years from 1914 to 1918. If it be granted hypothetically that the war was won for England and, further, that it was won by soldiers in the field rather than by ministers, munition-makers, bankers and military correspondents, it was won by the leadership of the officers and by the fighting quality of the men; and the leaders were supplied first to the old army and then to the new, for the first years of the war, almost wholly by the public schools. When, at the end, the net was thrown more widely, the quality of the officers deteriorated; though they lacked nothing of courage, they could furnish no substitute for something indefinable but recognisable—never so quickly recognised as by the men they led—which only a public school provides.
Apart from its training in character, public-school education was justified in that, if the aim of education be to teach a man how to learn, the versatility of the old public-schoolboy was a rare tribute to his education; and versatility is not confined to knowing the commercial or even the scientific jargon of half-a-dozen languages. Hardly a man was not in some degree uprooted; and all took to their new work and to their new responsibilities as lightheartedly as they would to a new game. It is in this sense that the British may fairly claim to be an imperial people: the empire, since the days of WarrenHastings (an Old Westminster), has been administered by public-school boys with public-school methods and the public-school tradition of responsibility; if the empire disintegrate, it will be because the time has come for the administration to pass into native hands or because the work of the public schools abroad is stultified at home. It was the public-schoolboy who officered the new armies, the new civil service, the whole of a new nation organising itself for war.
Though outward forms change little in a school so old as Westminster, the war had brought a new spirit and a new vent for enthusiasm: all but a handful were in the uniform of the officers' training corps; most of the time out of school was given up to parades and drills, shooting-practise, lectures and instruction in map-reading; and war was the one subject that competed with the narrower interests of the school.
Neither in 1914 nor ten years before the testing of war would an unbiased observer have suggested that English public schools were incapable of improvement; at both times, however, he might have insisted that the improvement must come from the homes of the boys. In effect, English parents try to get their sons, who are destined for a controlling position in the life of the nation, educated for half-a-dozen of their most critical years at a price which is less than they would pay for an equal time at a moderate hotel. The emoluments of a schoolmaster, as of a soldier or a clergyman, would tempt no one who had the assurance or the contrivance to support himself in commerce, in the civil service or at the bar; and for that reason a fellow of All Souls is not commonly found in the army, on the staff of a school or in holy orders. The vaunted long holidays give aschoolmaster the leisure to keep his mind fresh with travel; they do not supply the means. To marry on his salary is to look forward to years of sordid economies, rewarded at length by the grant of a house and of the right to make money as an inn-keeper.
The establishment fees like those for tuition and board are so insufficient that most schools are hampered for want of money to build, to rebuild, to equip and to replenish; the sanitary accommodation is usually inadequate and sometimes scandalous. This cannot be remedied until parents are willing to pay more; and the mental attitude of many parents is one of irresponsible relief at getting rid of their sons for three-quarters of the year and, with them, of the educational and moral problems that they have artfully shelved until their sons reach school age. Between that which a parent expects a boy to learn at school and that which the school expects him to have learned at home, many unnecessary lessons are taught and many necessary lessons are left untaught.
If, in care and training, a boy were regarded as not less important than a race-horse, the public schools would need to ask nothing more. An adequate payment for the responsibility of education would attract the best scholars in the country and would enable them to retire in affluence after ten years' service and before their hearts were broken by routine. The schoolmaster could dictate to the parent not less than a trainer dictates to an owner, and in this way the gaps in public-school education might be filled; if music, French and German were taught abroad during the school holidays, if the rudiments of divinity and English had been imparted at home in the first twelve years of a boy's life, if the intellectual atmosphere in which a boy is brought up wereless fog-infested, the foundations on which the schoolmaster has to build would be more secure.
Amateur and professional schoolmasters, temporary and permanent civil servants, with those who were over age or unfit for the army, met to the number of many thousands in these days on one field of war activity which deserves a few words of commemoration. To relieve the regular police, already depleted, in their normal duties and to furnish an additional force to guard railway-bridges, power-stations and similar vital parts from enemy attack, the government authorized the enrolment of special constables; for those who were engaged by day, a separate unit with distinctive duties was established in the headquarters central detachment. Divided into sections manned from the clubs and government offices,[29]this detachment was entrusted with the task of patrolling the grounds of Buckingham Palace nightly from 9.0 until 5.0; in addition, its members were required to report at Scotland House at every alarm of air-raid or riot and to hold themselves in readiness to be sent whithersoever required. Organised under a commandant, inspectors, sub-inspectors and sergeants, arrayed in a uniform of its own, equipped with truncheons, whistles, brassards and torches and drilled—whenever it could be collected—in the gardens of the Temple, the headquarters detachment watched and waited through four years.
The spirit of the men was better than the use that was made of them. It would be consoling to think that the mere existence of such a force discouraged enemyagents from their work of destruction; certainly moral influence was seldom backed by a successful trial of strength; and, when the truncheons were surrendered, very few had been drawn and fewer still blooded. Once or twice, when German shops were being looted, the headquarters detachment was sent to Limehouse or Shoreditch, there as a rule to be mewed up in reserve at the local police-station while the necessary work was done by the ordinary constables; once or twice a cordon would be made round a shattered building or a fallen aeroplane; but for the most part the detachment sat in Scotland House from the summons until the dismissal or patrolled Buckingham Palace gardens through the night, waiting for a conflict which never took place. Before the end, each constable must have sat in the guardroom for one or two hundred hours and patrolled the grounds for one or two thousand miles; the biscuits and tobacco that he consumed are to be reckoned by scores of pounds, the coffee that he drank by tens of gallons; and, though some at least had seen the sun rise more often in the summers before the war, none ever fancied that he could see it with such weariness and loathing. For men who were already overworked by day, the additional fatigue was mistaken patriotism; and many dropped out before the armistice. If, however, few members of the detachment can look back on their service with much sense of pleasure or profit, some can at least hold themselves indebted for new friendships.
The speed with which men threw themselves into unfamiliar work during the war was only equalled by thespeed with which they were transferred from one kind of unfamiliar work to another; and to a man who had as little knowledge of administration as of teaching there was nothing surprising in the lightning conversion of an amateur schoolmaster into an amateur civil servant.[30]
One serious gap in the history of the war remains to be filled by a comprehensive account of the origin and growth of the temporary departments. Their number is to be reckoned by the score, their strength by scores of thousands; in function they ranged from encouraging thrift and translating enemy newspapers to ordering heavy artillery, commandeering ships and controlling the supply, distribution and price of food. Some were vast expansions of a sub-department in Foreign Office, Admiralty, Board of Trade or War Office, others—like those of Food and Shipping—were created by a minister out of a museum or hotel, a private telephone-exchange, a code of instructions, a supply of official stationery and an assortment of male and female clerks; some were set to function by an old civil servant borrowed from another office or resuscitated from retirement, others evolved their system by imitation or by the light of nature. If in five years there was a heavy bill to pay for overlapping and waste, for errors of judgement and blunders in execution, for interdepartmental warfare and magnification of private bishoprics, any one who saw the temporary civil service from the inside may feel that it was yet light in relation to themultiplicity of interests involved and to the amount of work accomplished.
In its genesis and development, the Trade Clearing House of the War Trade Department[31]was typical of most temporary offices. On the outbreak of hostilities, the National Service League found itself with premises, furniture, a staff and a number of at least temporarily obsolete functions. For a time a special censorship was established in connection with the Admiralty; one recruiting officer scoured the clubs of London, another the colleges of Oxford until a big and varied personnel had been collected; when more hands were required, each of the original members would recruit a friend, for whom he could vouch. As the work of the department was concerned with every kind of export trade, no one was admitted who could turn to private account any knowledge that came to him in his official capacity; and, though military service was not yet compulsory nor departmental exemption the desire of the gun-shy, the recruiting for the office was almost entirely confined to men who were over age or unfit.
The "department" had at first no official status; and, when a report of its activities in censorship reached the home secretary, he suggested that it should regularise itself if it wished to escape heavy penalties for interfering with his majesty's mails. At this time the Customs were thrown into difficulty and confusion by the proclamation of the king in council, forbidding all trade with the enemy: in the absence of records, investigation and an intelligence department, it was impossible to say whether goods cleared from London would ultimatelyreach enemy destination; and the censors who were watching the cable and wireless operations of Dutch and Scandinavian importers seemed the natural advisers to approach. At this point the embryonic department, which had risen from the ashes of the National Service League, joined with a licensing delegation from the Customs to form the War Trade Department and Trade Clearing House.
The formal executive authority lay with the Privy Council, but the department was a joint administrative and advisory body, receiving and transmitting information between War Office, Admiralty, Foreign Office, Home Office, Scotland Yard, the new Censorships and, indeed, any other department that would give or accept information designed to strengthen the blockade, to check espionage at home and the transmission of information abroad and to prevent trade with the enemy. As the work became organised and the records increased, there arose further duties of editing, compiling, summarising and translating, too numerous and technical to be described here.
The staff was recruited from dons and barristers, men of letters and stockbrokers, solicitors and merchants; but, until an incapacitated officer was here and there drafted on light duty to a government department, there was not one civil servant. The independent tributes of Lord Emmott and, later, of Lord Robert Cecil are the most convincing testimony that, even without the guidance of those who had been trained in the civil service, these temporary civil servants acquired its methods and imbibed something of its tradition. Within a few days the raw newcomers felt as if they had lived all their lives in a world of registries and files, of minutesand memoranda, of "second-division clerks" and messengers, as in a few days they were acclimatised to the universal office equipment of trestle-tables and desk-telephones, of card-indices and steel filing-cabinets, of "in" and "out" trays, of rubber stamps and "urgent" labels. The work was done first in congested corners of Central Buildings, Westminster, later in Broadway House and later still in Lake Buildings, St. James' Park. Everywhere the duties of the department expanded more quickly than its accommodation; and, though it began with apparently sufficient space in each new home, within a few weeks the big rooms were being divided by temporary partitions and the small were being filled with additional occupants.
As the civil service has undergone some slight modification in the last hundred years, it is encouraging to find that there is also a slight modification in the public estimate of it since Dickens satirised the Circumlocution Office. As yet, justice has only been done to it by ministers who recognise thankfully that it has no rival in the world for intellectual ability, conscientiousness, loyalty, honour and integrity. Recruited by a most searching examination from the best brains of the Oxford and Cambridge type, it receives fewer rewards and less payment than any other body of men charged with equal responsibility. No "budget secret" has ever leaked out, though it is in the power of a Treasury clerk to become rich beyond the dreams of avarice; during the war no man worked harder than the civil servant. Whether the "business men" who were acclaimed and imported so eagerly contrived to run their departments more cheaply can be answered by any tax-payer who chooses to enquire; that they ran them more efficientlymay be doubted by any one who recalls the nightmare of confusion in which, say, the Ministry of Munitions came to birth; that they ran them with equal integrity may be challenged by small men who were compelled to disclose to powerful competitors their organisation and secret processes.
The temporary civil servant may be glad of his experience in a public department for many reasons, of which not the least is that it gave him some idea of the size and complexity of the government machine; he might sympathise more with a business man's complaints if in his correspondence with a government office the business man were sufficiently businesslike to read what was written and sufficiently intelligent to understand what he read.
From the first, the personnel of the War Trade Department was remarkably varied and variedly remarkable. The chairman of the Trade Clearing House, (Sir) Henry Penson was an Oxford economist; the head of the Intelligence Section a translator.[32]In a neighbouring room worked Alfred Sutro; in another, H. W. C.Davis, of Balliol; in others again would be found a professor, a poet, a publisher, a critic, a novelist and a historiographer royal.
Before the end of the war, the department had grown so big that few could have known more than half of the men and women in it; during the early days, when the machinery of the blockade had still to be erected, a small and amazingly harmonious body, contributing diverse experience from many countries and callings, established a freemasonry with hard-driven men in other departments; there was little obsolete routine; and other offices were not slow to recognise sympathetically that an immense burden of work had to be accomplished with few hands in a short time.
It has been said that the department changed its domicile several times; it also changed its constitution and title. When Lord Robert Cecil was appointed Minister of Blockade, the Trade Clearing House severed its connection with Lord Emmott's War Trade Department and became the War Trade Intelligence Department, under Lord Robert and in conjunction with such blockade organisations as the Contraband Committee and the Foreign Trade Department. At the end of the war, its decomposing remains were buried under the Department of Overseas Trade.
The task of preliminary organisation was not made easier by the uncertainty into which all government offices were plunged whenever a section of the press proclaimed that every department was sheltering companies of potential recruits. This is not the place to engage in a general discussion of the policy or the morality of conscription as imposed, without reference to the constituencies, on a country which, six years earlier, had supported a liberal government in its contest with the House of Lords. The constitutionalists may object that such a course made mock of representative government; the idealist may feel that the achievement of the voluntary system in the first eighteen months of the war was the greatest in English history and that no victory is worth a press-gang; and every critic who is not also a militarist will wonder how the army, alone of the services which require to draw from the limited common reservoir of man-power, is allowed to say that it can fix no maximum but requires all the men that it can get and then still more.
These are general reflections on compulsory service; and, as it had been imposed before the summer of 1916, criticism was then only relevant when directed to the method of its application. If industry was kept in the same uncertainty as the government service, it is amazing that industry was not destroyed. The first principle of applied conscription seemed to be that there were no principles: the system of one day was discarded the next; and no permanent arrangement of work was secure from the risk that a man exempted on Monday would be called up on Monday week. All men of military age were periodically reviewed and subjected to medical reexamination; apart from the waste of timeto all concerned and the occasional incivility of medical boards which attributed physical defects to temperamental malice, no personal hardship was involved at first, though, when the doctors were encouraged to pass as fit for general service a man who had with difficulty qualified for "sedentary duty at home," the civil service too often lost a valuable worker in presenting to the army a confirmed invalid. The hardship fell rather on those who were responsible for organising the work without being sure who would be left to do it.
When once the machinery of the blockade was perfected, the chief concern of the department was to improve and to economise in its working. The year 1916 lacked the excitement of those earlier months when the temporary organisations were playing a game, picking up sides and inventing the rules as they went on; for one amateur civil servant interest only revived with the adhesion of America to the allies. On Easter-Eve, 1917, the department was requested to choose a representative to join the diplomatic mission which was being sent to Washington with Mr. Balfour at its head.
The late war has been described a hundred thousand times as a life-and-death struggle. While a soldier may engage in such a struggle without allowing his reason to be overmastered by his nerves, the civilian population at home, learning little and understanding less, is always in some degree influenced by fear in the formation of its opinions:[33]credit in excess of its military deserts will begiven to the power that joins the war on the right side, while opprobrium in excess of its moral turpitude will be poured on the power that joins the war on the wrong side or omits to join it at all. Italy, which forsook the triple alliance and ran away at Caporetto, is loaded with territorial rewards and praised as a champion of civilisation, while Turkey, which had no alliance to forsake and entered the war—like many another—for what could be got out of it, is first vilified and then skinned alive. It is the fortune of war: by throwing in its lot with the enemy, the Turkish government embarrassed the allies and increased their despondency; by throwing in its lot with the allies, the Italian government relieved that embarrassment and lightened that despondency.
The allies would have been strengthened beyond calculation if, on the outbreak of war, the United States had upheld the neutrality of Belgium by force of arms; or if, on the sinking of theLusitania, they had maintained by force of arms their own prestige; or if, at any time before 1917 and on any pretext, they had eased by military and naval assistance the strain under which Great Britain was suffering. It is interesting and, unhappily, not wholly academic to speculate what Great Britain would have done or would do in the future if the government of a central or south American republic appealed to the great powers for assistance in repellingan unprovoked Japanese invasion; it is conceivable that the notes in which President Wilson defended his neutrality from 1914 to 1917 would constitute a valuable precedent and model for a British foreign secretary in defending his. The public in England did not pause to sympathise with a people which aimed at keeping itself free from the costly heritage of European politics, nor to understand a country in which the interests of the Atlantic coast were unintelligible on the coast of the Pacific and both were different from the interests of the middle west. It did not even pause to record or feel gratitude for the moral, financial and charitable support of a big section of the United States.
From the day when President Wilson elected to stand aloof until the day when he declared war, Great Britain, despairing of help, gave herself over to sullen murmuring and periodical explosions. That a nation would sooner swallow an indignity than sacrifice its ideal of standing apart from all wars, that it should hope and work for a peace in which the victor should not be able to leave the vanquished only his eyes to weep with was unpalatable in a country which was threatened with starvation at home and with defeat or stalemate abroad. And no attempt was made to conceal this feeling of distaste.
Nevertheless, no enthusiasm was too extravagant when at last America abandoned her neutrality—and abandoned it on the unidealistic ground of material self-protection. By the autumn of 1916 the allies had reached their low-water mark. The summer campaign on the Somme had cost more than half a million casualties without breaking the German line; the Russian thrust in the south had been repelled and the Russian armies flung back with such violence that they requiredlong leisure for recovery and re-equipment, if indeed they were ever again to play an effective part in the war; Servia, left to the undivided attention of Austria, had been put out of action; and Roumania, entering the war precipitously, was now almost expunged from the map of Europe; if the French had succeeded at Verdun, they had failed everywhere else; forgetting everything and learning nothing from the tragedy of the Dardanelles, the British government had been persuaded by the French to lock up another army in Salonica; the battle of Jutland was still widely believed to have been the greatest defeat in British naval history; Ireland was smouldering with a half-extinguished half-revolution; and a wave of "defeatism" was spreading through England and France until even the armies were affected.
When the belligerents took stock before settling down to the trench-warfare winter campaign of 1916-17, all must have felt that the war had reached its climax. The general exhaustion was so great that, even if hostilities had ceased, every country would have been crippled; if hostilities continued, they would continue on a scale of unlimited effort in which no reserve of strength would any longer be husbanded. Set free on her eastern frontier, Germany must mass all her resources in one last effort to break through the western line; the allies must hold out till the attempt had spent itself and then strike one last blow at a worn enemy; Germany must in turn prevent the allies from holding out by cutting their sea-communications. If unrestricted submarine warfare ranged America on the side of the allies, it must have been felt that either the war would be over before any effective help could be given or else that, in the final, hopeless, death-grapple, a few million soldiers more orless would not substantially change the degree or character of Germany's defeat.
Many of those who meditate on the war from its climax in 1916 to its end in the Versailles conference may wonder whether they did wisely in execrating and howling down any one who shewed the courage to advocate peace before the sphere of war underwent its last desperate expansion. The government stood by its policy of a "knock-out blow"; the knock-out blow has been dealt. Is any one the better for it? The fire-eaters who proclaimed that anything less than the unconditional surrender of Germany would entail another German war within a generation now proclaim with no more doubt or qualification that Germany is preparing her revenge and has already recovered more quickly than any other of the belligerents.[34]The added two years of war, then, have not brought such security as Rome enjoyed after the destruction of Carthage; the added bitterness of those two years, on the other hand, has made more difficult any good-will and any common effort to substitute a saner and better system of international relationship.
Worst of all are the world-wide economic depression and political unrest for which the protraction of the war was responsible. Had negotiations been opened in 1916, the Russian revolution and its consequences might well have been averted; Germany, Austria and Turkey might have been left with stable governments and yet with enough experience of modern warfare to discourage any taste for further adventures; and Italy, France andGreat Britain—in that order—might have been saved from insolvency. The war, if ended at that time, would have been ended without American help; and peace would have been concluded without American intervention. This last result might by now be a matter for regret if thereby the world had been cheated of an equitable and permanent peace, such as President Wilson sought to impose on the militarist party of the Versailles conference; but it would perhaps have been better for the terms to be drawn by M. Clemenceau and Mr. Lloyd George on Carthaginian lines than for the world to be tantalised by a glimpse of statesmanship that revealed the universal spirit and then to be fobbed off with a compromise which embraced even the good faith of England.
Of peace negotiations there was much talk in the last months of 1916; even the cabinet was alleged to have its peace-party; and, though the first coalition fell for other reasons, its fall was made possible by a vague general belief that one faction was indifferent whether the war was won or lost and that, if the war had to go on, it must be controlled by the faction which was most vociferously identified with the policy of the knock-out blow. Whether the most tentative offer was made to Germany or by Germany has not been admitted; but informal communications were passing, from the beginning of the war till the end, through unofficial channels, and it would interest any one who is dissatisfied with the present settlement to know whether the German government refused or would have refused a peace in which Belgium, northern France and Russia were evacuated and repaired, in which the authors of all atrocities were surrendered for trial and in which there were neither territorial acquisitions nor indemnities on either side.For more than this the allies were not entitled to ask, when the gamble of war was at its height; with less than this they could not be content.
Returned to power for a second term of office in the November elections of 1916, President Wilson made a final attempt to open peace negotiations; but the unrestricted submarine campaign frustrated his efforts and impelled him reluctantly to issue a declaration of war: if the allies were defeated, as now seemed more than possible, America lay exposed to any power with a fleet in being. The United States engaged in the war independently and without entering into alliance with any other power; but the closest cooperation was expected and invited. To assist this cooperation, the Foreign Office proposed that a representative mission should be sent to Washington; and, when the United States government received the proposal favourably, the mission was assembled to discuss war-measures with the government of a country at which the British public and press had been scoffing on the ground that it was "too proud to fight."