Now It Can Be Told Part 56

VII

The men came home in a queer mood, startling to those who had not watched them "out there," and to those who welcomed peace with flags. Even before their homecoming, which was delayed week after week, month after month, unless they were lucky young miners out for the victory push and back again quickly, strange things began to happen in France and Flanders, Egypt and Palestine. Men who had been long patient became suddenly impatient. Men who had obeyed all discipline broke into disobedience bordering on mutiny. They elected spokesmen to represent their grievances, like trade-unionists. They "answered back" to their officers in such large bodies, with such threatening anger, that it was impossible to give them "Field Punishment Number One," or any other number, especially as their battalion officers sympathized mainly with their point of view. They demanded demobilization according to their terms of service, which was for "the duration of the war." They protested against the gross inequalities of selection by which men of short service were sent home before those who had been out in 1914, 1915, 1916. They demanded justness, fair play, and denounced red tape and official lies. "We want to go home!" was their shout on parade. A serious business, subversive of discipline.

Similar explosions were happening in England. Bodies of men broke camp at Folkestone and other camps, demonstrated before town halls, demanded to speak with mayors, generals, any old fellows who were in authority, and refused to embark for France until they had definite pledges that they would receive demobilization papers without delay. Whitehall, the sacred portals of the War Office, the holy ground of the Horse Guards' Parade, were invaded by bodies of men who had commandeered ambulances and lorries and had made long journeys from their depots. They, too, demanded demobilization. They refused to be drafted out for service to India, Egypt, Archangel, or anywhere. They had "done their bit," according to their contract. It was for the War Office to fulfil its pledges. "Justice" was the word on their lips, and it was a word which put the wind up (as soldiers say) any staff-officers and officials who had not studied the laws of justice as they concern private soldiers, and who had dealt with them after the armistice and after the peace as they had dealt with them before-as numbers, counters to be shifted here and there according to the needs of the High Command. What was this strange word "justice" on soldiers' lips?... Red tape squirmed and writhed about the business of demobilization. Orders were made, communicated to the men, canceled even at the railway gates. Promises were made and broken. Conscripts were drafted off to India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Archangel, against their will and contrary to pledge. Men on far fronts, years absent from their wives and homes, were left to stay there, fever-stricken, yearning for home, despairing. And while the old war was not yet cold in its grave we prepared for a new war against Bolshevik Russia, arranging for the spending of more millions, the sacrifice of more boys of ours, not openly, with the consent of the people, but on the sly, with a fine art of camouflage.

The purpose of the new war seemed to many men who had fought for "liberty" an outrage against the "self-determination of peoples" which had been the fundamental promise of the League of Nations, and a blatant hypocrisy on the part of a nation which denied self-government to Ireland. The ostensible object of our intervention in Russia was to liberate the Russian ma.s.ses from "the b.l.o.o.d.y tyranny of the Bolsheviks," but this ardor for the liberty of Russia had not been manifest during the reign of Czardom and grand dukes when there were ma.s.sacres of mobs in Moscow, b.l.o.o.d.y Sundays in St. Petersburg, pogroms in Riga, floggings of men and girls in many prisons, and when free speech, liberal ideas, and democratic uprisings had been smashed by Cossack knout and by the torture of Siberian exile.

Anyhow, many people believed that it was none of our business to suppress the Russian Revolution or to punish the leaders of it, and it was suspected by British working-men that the real motive behind our action was not a n.o.ble enthusiasm for liberty, but an endeavor to establish a reactionary government in Russia in order to crush a philosophy of life more dangerous to the old order in Europe than high explosives, and to get back the gold that had been poured into Russia by England and France. By a strange paradox of history, French journalists, forgetting their own Revolution, the cruelties of Robespierre and Marat, the September Ma.s.sacres, the torture of Marie Antoinette in the Tuileries, the guillotining of many fair women of France, and after 1870 the terrors of the Commune, were most horrified by the anarchy in Russia, and most fierce in denunciation of the b.l.o.o.d.y struggle by which a people made mad by long oppression and infernal tyrannies strove to gain the liberties of life.

Thousands of British soldiers newly come from war in France were sullenly determined that they would not be dragged off to the new adventure. They were not alone. As Lord Rothermere pointed out, a French regiment mutinied on hearing a mere unfounded report that it was being sent to the Black Sea. The United States and j.a.pan were withdrawing. Only a few of our men, disillusioned by the ways of peace, missing the old comradeship of the ranks, restless, purposeless, not happy at home, seeing no prospect of good employment, said: "h.e.l.l!... Why not the army again, and Archangel, or any old where?" and volunteered for Mr. Winston Churchill's little war.

After the trouble of demobilization came peace pageants and celebrations and flag-wavings. But all was not right with the spirit of the men who came back. Something was wrong. They put on civilian clothes again, looked to their mothers and wives very much like the young men who had gone to business in the peaceful days before the August of '14. But they had not come back the same men. Something had altered in them. They were subject to queer moods, queer tempers, fits of profound depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure. Many of them were easily moved to pa.s.sion when they lost control of themselves. Many were bitter in their speech, violent in opinion, frightening. For some time, while they drew their unemployment pensions, they did not make any effort to get work for the future. They said: "That can wait. I've done my bit. The country can keep me for a while. I helped to save it... Let's go to the 'movies.'" They were listless when not excited by some "show." Something seemed to have snapped in them; their will-power. A quiet day at home did not appeal to them.

"Are you tired of me?" said the young wife, wistfully. "Aren't you glad to be home?"

"It's a dull sort of life," said some of them.

The boys, unmarried, hung about street-corners, searched for their pals, formed clubs where they smoked incessantly, and talked in an aimless way.

Then began the search for work. Boys without training looked for jobs with wages high enough to give them a margin for amus.e.m.e.nt, after the cost of living decently had been reckoned on the scale of high prices, mounting higher and higher. Not so easy as they had expected. The girls were clinging to their jobs, would not let go of the pocket-money which they had spent on frocks. Employers favored girl labor, found it efficient and, on the whole, cheap. Young soldiers who had been very skilled with machine-guns, trench-mortars, hand-grenades, found that they were cla.s.sed with the ranks of unskilled labor in civil life. That was not good enough. They had fought for their country. They had served England. Now they wanted good jobs with short hours and good wages. They meant to get them. And meanwhile prices were rising in the shops. Suits of clothes, boots, food, anything, were at double and treble the price of pre-war days. The profiteers were rampant. They were out to bleed the men who had been fighting. They were defrauding the public with sheer, undisguised robbery, and the government did nothing to check them. England, they thought, was rotten all through.

Who cared for the men who had risked their lives and bore on their bodies the scars of war? The pensions doled out to blinded soldiers would not keep them alive. The consumptives, the ga.s.sed, the paralyzed, were forgotten in inst.i.tutions where they lay hidden from the public eye. Before the war had been over six months "our heroes," "our brave boys in the trenches" were without preference in the struggle for existence.

Employers of labor gave them no special consideration. In many offices they were told bluntly (as I know) that they had "wasted" three or four years in the army and could not be of the same value as boys just out of school. The officer cla.s.s was hardest hit in that way. They had gone straight from the public schools and universities to the army. They had been lieutenants, captains, and majors in the air force, or infantry battalions, or tanks, or trench-mortars, and they had drawn good pay, which was their pocket-money. Now they were at a loose end, hating the idea of office-work, but ready to knuckle down to any kind of decent job with some prospect ahead. What kind of job? What knowledge had they of use in civil life? None. They scanned advertis.e.m.e.nts, answered likely invitations, were turned down by elderly men who said: "I've had two hundred applications. And none of you young gentlemen from the army are fit to be my office-boy." They were the same elderly men who had said: "We'll fight to the last ditch. If I had six sons I would sacrifice them all in the cause of liberty and justice."

Elderly officers who had lost their businesses for their country's sake, who with a n.o.ble devotion had given up everything to "do their bit," paced the streets searching for work, and were shown out of every office where they applied for a post. I know one officer of good family and distinguished service who hawked round a subscription-book to private houses. It took him more courage than he had needed under sh.e.l.l-fire to ring the bell and ask to see "the lady of the house." He thanked G.o.d every time the maid handed back his card and said, "Not at home." On the first week's work he was four pounds out of pocket... Here and there an elderly officer blew out his brains. Another sucked a rubber tube fastened to the gas-jet... It would have been better if they had fallen on the field of honor.

Where was the nation's grat.i.tude for the men who had fought and died, or fought and lived? Was it for this reward in peace that nearly a million of our men gave up their lives? That question is not my question. It is the question that was asked by millions of men in England in the months that followed the armistice, and it was answered in their own brains by a bitterness and indignation out of which may be lit the fires of the revolutionary spirit.

At street-corners, in tramway cars, in tea-shops where young men talked at the table next to mine I listened to conversations not meant for my ears, which made me hear in imagination and afar off (yet not very far, perhaps) the dreadful rumble of revolution, the violence of mobs led by fanatics. It was the talk, mostly, of demobilized soldiers. They asked one another, "What did we fight for?" and then other questions such as, "Wasn't this a war for liberty?" or, "We fought for the land, didn't we? Then why shouldn't we share the land?" Or, "Why should we be bled white by profiteers?"

They mentioned the government, and then laughed in a scornful way.

"The government," said one man, "is a conspiracy against the people. All its power is used to protect those who grow fat on big jobs, big trusts, big contracts. It used us to smash the German Empire in order to strengthen and enlarge the British Empire for the sake of those who grab the oil-wells, the gold-fields, the minerals, and the markets of the world."

VIII

Out of such talk revolution is born, and revolution will not be averted by pretending that such words are not being spoken and that such thoughts are not seething among our working-cla.s.ses. It will only be averted by cutting at the root of public suspicion, by cleansing our political state of its corruption and folly, and by a clear, strong call of n.o.ble-minded men to a new way of life in which a great people believing in the honor and honesty of its leadership and in fair reward for good labor shall face a period of poverty with courage, and co-operate unselfishly for the good of the commonwealth, inspired by a sense of fellowship with the workers of other nations. We have a long way to go and many storms to weather before we reach that state, if, by any grace that is in us, and above us, we reach it.

For there are disease and insanity in our present state, due to the travail of the war and the education of the war. The daily newspapers for many months have been filled with the record of dreadful crimes, of violence and pa.s.sion. Most of them have been done by soldiers or ex-soldiers. The attack on the police station at Epsom, the destruction of the town hall at Luton, revealed a brutality of pa.s.sion, a murderous instinct, which have been manifested again and again in other riots and street rows and solitary crimes. Those last are the worst because they are not inspired by a sense of injustice, however false, or any mob pa.s.sion, but by homicidal mania and secret l.u.s.t. The many murders of young women, the outrages upon little girls, the violent robberies that have happened since the demobilizing of the armies have appalled decent-minded people. They cannot understand the cause of this epidemic after a period when there was less crime than usual.

The cause is easy to understand. It is caused by the discipline and training of modern warfare. Our armies, as all armies, established an intensive culture of brutality. They were schools of slaughter. It was the duty of officers like Col. Ronald Campbell-"O.C. Bayonets" (a delightful man)-to inspire blood-l.u.s.t in the brains of gentle boys who instinctively disliked butcher's work. By an ingenious system of psychology he played upon their nature, calling out the primitive barbarism which has been overlaid by civilized restraints, liberating the brute which has been long chained up by law and the social code of gentle life, but lurks always in the secret lairs of the human heart. It is difficult when the brute has been unchained, for the purpose of killing Germans, to get it into the collar again with a cry of, "Down, dog, down!" Generals, as I have told, were against the "soft stuff" preached by parsons, who were not quite militarized, though army chaplains. They demanded the gospel of hate, not that of love. But hate, when it dominates the psychology of men, is not restricted to one objective, such as a body of men behind barbed wire. It is a spreading poison. It envenoms the whole mind. Like jealousy.

It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

Our men, living in holes in the earth like ape-men, were taught the ancient code of the jungle law, to track down human beasts in No Man's Land, to jump upon their bodies in the trenches, to kill quickly, silently, in a raid, to drop a hand-grenade down a dugout crowded with men, blowing their bodies to bits, to lie patiently for hours in a sh.e.l.l-hole for a sniping shot at any head which showed, to bludgeon their enemy to death or spit him on a bit of steel, to get at his throat if need be with nails and teeth. The code of the ape-man is bad for some temperaments. It is apt to become a habit of mind. It may surge up again when there are no Germans present, but some old woman behind an open till, or some policeman with a bull's-eye lantern and a truncheon, or in a street riot where fellow-citizens are for the time being "the enemy."

Death, their own or other people's, does not mean very much to some who, in the trenches, sat within a few yards of stinking corpses, knowing that the next sh.e.l.l might make such of them. Life was cheap in war. Is it not cheap in peace?...

The discipline of military life is mainly an imposed discipline-mechanical, and enforced in the last resort not by reason, but by field punishment or by a firing platoon. Whereas many men were made brisk and alert by discipline and saw the need of it for the general good, others were always in secret rebellion against its restraints of the individual will, and as soon as they were liberated broke away from it as slaves from their chains, and did not subst.i.tute self-discipline for that which had weighed heavy on them. With all its discipline, army life was full of lounging, hanging about, waste of time, waiting for things to happen. It was an irresponsible life for the rank and file. Food was brought to them, clothes were given to them, entertainments were provided behind the line, sports organized, their day ordered by high powers. There was no need to think for themselves, to act for themselves. They moved in herds dependent on their leaders. That, too, was a bad training for the individualism of civil life. It tended to destroy personal initiative and willpower. Another evil of the abnormal life of war sowed the seeds of insanity in the brains of men not strong enough to resist it. s.e.xually they were starved. For months they lived out of the sight and presence of women. But they came back into villages or towns where they were tempted by any poor s.l.u.t who winked at them and infected them with illness. Men went to hospital with venereal disease in appalling numbers. Boys were ruined and poisoned for life. Future generations will pay the price of war not only in poverty and by the loss of the unborn children of the boys who died, but by an enfeebled stock and the heritage of insanity.

The Prime Minister said one day, "The world is suffering from sh.e.l.l-shock." That was true. But it suffered also from the symptoms of all that illness which comes from syphilis, whose breeding-ground is war.

The majority of our men were clean-living and clean-hearted fellows who struggled to come unscathed in soul from most of the horrors of war. They resisted the education of brutality and were not envenomed by the gospel of hate. Out of the dark depths of their experience they looked up to the light, and had visions of some better law of life than that which led to the world-tragedy. It would be a foul libel on many of them to besmirch their honor by a general accusation of lowered morality and brutal tendencies. Something in the spirit of our race and in the quality of our home life kept great numbers of them sound, chivalrous, generous-hearted, in spite of the frightful influences of degradation bearing down upon them out of the conditions of modern warfare. But the weak men, the vicious, the murderous, the primitive, were overwhelmed by these influences, and all that was base in them was intensified, and their pa.s.sions were unleashed, with what result we have seen, and shall see, to our sorrow and the nation's peril.

The nation was in great peril after this war, and that peril will not pa.s.s in our lifetime except by heroic remedies. We won victory in the field and at the cost of our own ruin. We smashed Germany and Austria and Turkey, but the structure of our own wealth and industry was shattered, and the very foundations of our power were shaken and sapped. Nine months after the armistice Great Britain was spending at the rate of 2,000,000 a day in excess of her revenue. She was burdened with a national debt which had risen from 645 millions in 1914 to 7,800 millions in 1919. The pre-war expenditure of 200,000,000 per annum on the navy, army, and civil service pensions and interest on national debt had risen to 750 millions.

Our exports were dwindling down, owing to decreased output, so that foreign exchanges were rising against us and the American dollar was increasing in value as our proud old sovereign was losing its ancient standard. So that for all imports from the United States we were paying higher prices, which rose every time the rate of exchange dropped against us. The slaughter of 900,000 men of ours, the disablement of many more than that, had depleted our ranks of labor, and there was a paralysis of all our industry, owing to the dislocation of its machinery for purposes of war, the soaring cost of raw material, the crippling effect of high taxation, the rise in wages to meet high prices, and the lethargy of the workers. Ruin, immense, engulfing, annihilating to our strength as a nation and as an empire, stares us brutally in the eyes at the time I write this book, and I find no consolation in the thought that other nations in Europe, including the German people, are in the same desperate plight, or worse.

IX

The nation, so far, has not found a remedy for the evil that has overtaken us. Rather in a kind of madness that is not without a strange splendor, like a ship that goes down with drums beating and banners flying, we are racing toward the rocks. At this time, when we are sorely stricken and in dire poverty and debt, we have extended the responsibilities of empire and of world-power as though we had illimitable wealth. Our sphere of influence includes Persia, Thibet, Arabia, Palestine, Egypt-a vast part of the Mohammedan world. Yet if any part of our possessions were to break into revolt or raise a "holy war" against us, we should be hard pressed for men to uphold our power and prestige, and our treasury would be called upon in vain for gold. After the war which was to crush militarism the air force alone proposed an annual expenditure of more than twice as much money as the whole cost of the army before the war. While the armaments of the German people, whom we defeated in the war against militarism, are restricted to a few warships and a navy of 100,000 men at a cost reckoned as 10,000,000 a year, we are threatened with a naval and military program costing 300,000,000 a year. Was it for this our men fought? Was it to establish a new imperialism upheld by the power of guns that 900,000 boys of ours died in the war of liberation? I know it was otherwise. There are people at the street-corners who know; and in the tram-cars and factories and little houses in mean streets where there are empty chairs and the portraits of dead boys.

It will go hard with the government of England if it plays a grandiose drama before hostile spectators who refuse to take part in it. It will go hard with the nation, for it will be engulfed in anarchy.

At the present time, in this August of 1919, when I write these words, five years after another August, this England of ours, this England which I love because its history is in my soul and its blood is in my body, and I have seen the glory of its spirit, is sick, nigh unto death. Only great physicians may heal it, and its old vitality struggling against disease, and its old sanity against insanity. Our Empire is greater now in s.p.a.ciousness than ever before, but our strength to hold it has ebbed low because of much death, and a strain too long endured, and strangling debts. The workman is tired and has slackened in his work. In his scheme of life he desires more luxury than our poverty affords. He wants higher wages, shorter hours, and less output-reasonable desires in our state before the war, unreasonable now because the cost of the war has put them beyond human possibility. He wants low prices with high wages and less work. It is false arithmetic and its falsity will be proved by a tremendous crash.

Some crash must come, tragic and shocking to our social structure. I see no escape from that, and only the hope that in that crisis the very shock of it will restore the mental balance of the nation and that all cla.s.ses will combine under leaders of unselfish purpose, and fine vision, eager for evolution and not revolution, for peace and not for blood, for Christian charity and not for hatred, for civilization and not for anarchy, to reshape the conditions of our social life and give us a new working order, with more equality of labor and reward, duty and sacrifice, liberty and discipline of the soul, combining the virtue of patriotism with a generous spirit to other peoples across the old frontiers of hate. That is the hope but not the certainty.

It is only by that hope that one may look back upon the war with anything but despair. All the lives of those boys whom I saw go marching up the roads of France and Flanders to the fields of death, so splendid, so lovely in their youth, will have been laid down in vain if by their sacrifice the world is not uplifted to some plane a little higher than the barbarity which was let loose in Europe. They will have been betrayed if the agony they suffered is forgotten and "the war to end war" leads to preparations for new, more monstrous conflict.

Or is war the law of human life? Is there something more powerful than kaisers and castes which drives ma.s.ses of men against other ma.s.ses in death-struggles which they do not understand? Are we really poor beasts in the jungle, striving by tooth and claw, high velocity and poison-gas, for the survival of the fittest in an endless conflict? If that is so, then G.o.d mocks at us. Or, rather, if that is so, there is no G.o.d such as we men may love, with love for men.

The world will not accept that message of despair; and millions of men to-day who went through the agony of the war are inspired by the humble belief that humanity may be cured of its cruelty and stupidity, and that a brotherhood of peoples more powerful than a League of Nations may be founded in the world after its present sickness and out of the conflict of its anarchy.

That is the new vision which leads men on, and if we can make one step that way it will be better than that backward fall which civilization took when Germany played the devil and led us all into the jungle. The devil in Germany had to be killed. There was no other way, except by helping the Germans to kill it before it mastered them. Now let us exorcise our own devils and get back to kindness toward all men of good will. That also is the only way to heal the heart of the world and our own state. Let us seek the beauty of life and G.o.d's truth somehow, remembering the boys who died too soon, and all the falsity and hatred of these past five years. By blood and pa.s.sion there will be no healing. We have seen too much blood. We want to wipe it out of our eyes and souls. Let us have Peace.