Books: Heartbreak House
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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW >> Heartbreak House
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The Rabid Watchdogs of Liberty
Not content with these rancorous abuses of the existing law, the
war maniacs made a frantic rush to abolish all constitutional
guarantees of liberty and well-being. The ordinary law was
superseded by Acts under which newspapers were seized and their
printing machinery destroyed by simple police raids a la Russe,
and persons arrested and shot without any pretence of trial by
jury or publicity of procedure or evidence. Though it was
urgently necessary that production should be increased by the
most scientific organization and economy of labor, and though no
fact was better established than that excessive duration and
intensity of toil reduces production heavily instead of
increasing it, the factory laws were suspended, and men and women
recklessly over-worked until the loss of their efficiency became
too glaring to be ignored. Remonstrances and warnings were met
either with an accusation of pro-Germanism or the formula,
"Remember that we are at war now." I have said that men assumed
that war had reversed the order of nature, and that all was lost
unless we did the exact opposite of everything we had found
necessary and beneficial in peace. But the truth was worse than
that. The war did not change men's minds in any such impossible
way. What really happened was that the impact of physical death
and destruction, the one reality that every fool can understand,
tore off the masks of education, art, science and religion from
our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying grotesquely in
the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and most
abject terrors. Ever since Thucydides wrote his history, it has
been on record that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet
the pretences of civilization are blown from men's heads into the
mud like hats in a gust of wind. But when this scripture was
fulfilled among us, the shock was not the less appalling because
a few students of Greek history were not surprised by it. Indeed
these students threw themselves into the orgy as shamelessly as
the illiterate. The Christian priest, joining in the war dance
without even throwing off his cassock first, and the respectable
school governor expelling the German professor with insult and
bodily violence, and declaring that no English child should
ever again be taught the language of Luther and Goethe, were kept
in countenance by the most impudent repudiations of every decency
of civilization and every lesson of political experience on the
part of the very persons who, as university professors,
historians, philosophers, and men of science, were the accredited
custodians of culture. It was crudely natural, and perhaps
necessary for recruiting purposes, that German militarism and
German dynastic ambition should be painted by journalists and
recruiters in black and red as European dangers (as in fact they
are), leaving it to be inferred that our own militarism and our
own political constitution are millennially democratic (which
they certainly are not); but when it came to frantic
denunciations of German chemistry, German biology, German poetry,
German music, German literature, German philosophy, and even
German engineering, as malignant abominations standing towards
British and French chemistry and so forth in the relation of
heaven to hell, it was clear that the utterers of such barbarous
ravings had never really understood or cared for the arts and
sciences they professed and were profaning, and were only the
appallingly degenerate descendants of the men of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries who, recognizing no national frontiers
in the great realm of the human mind, kept the European comity of
that realm loftily and even ostentatiously above the rancors of
the battle-field. Tearing the Garter from the Kaiser's leg,
striking the German dukes from the roll of our peerage, changing
the King's illustrious and historically appropriate surname (for
the war was the old war of Guelph against Ghibelline, with the
Kaiser as Arch-Ghibelline) to that of a traditionless locality.
One felt that the figure of St. George and the Dragon on our
coinage should be replaced by that of the soldier driving his
spear through Archimedes. But by that time there was no coinage:
only paper money in which ten shillings called itself a pound as
confidently as the people who were disgracing their country
called themselves patriots.
The Sufferings of the Sane
The mental distress of living amid the obscene din of all these
carmagnoles and corobberies was not the only burden that lay on
sane people during the war. There was also the emotional strain,
complicated by the offended economic sense, produced by the
casualty lists. The stupid, the selfish, the narrow-minded, the
callous and unimaginative were spared a great deal. "Blood and
destruction shall be so in use that mothers shall but smile when
they behold their infantes quartered by the hands of war," was a
Shakespearean prophecy that very nearly came true; for when
nearly every house had a slaughtered son to mourn, we should all
have gone quite out of our senses if we had taken our own and our
friend's bereavements at their peace value. It became necessary
to give them a false value; to proclaim the young life worthily
and gloriously sacrificed to redeem the liberty of mankind,
instead of to expiate the heedlessness and folly of their
fathers, and expiate it in vain. We had even to assume that the
parents and not the children had made the sacrifice, until at
last the comic papers were driven to satirize fat old men,
sitting comfortably in club chairs, and boasting of the sons they
had "given" to their country.
No one grudged these anodynes to acute personal grief; but they
only embittered those who knew that the young men were having
their teeth set on edge because their parents had eaten sour
political grapes. Then think of the young men themselves! Many of
them had no illusions about the policy that led to the war: they
went clear-sighted to a horribly repugnant duty. Men essentially
gentle and essentially wise, with really valuable work in hand,
laid it down voluntarily and spent months forming fours in the
barrack yard, and stabbing sacks of straw in the public eye, so
that they might go out to kill and maim men as gentle as
themselves. These men, who were perhaps, as a class, our most
efficient soldiers (Frederick Keeling, for example), were not
duped for a moment by the hypocritical melodrama that consoled
and stimulated the others. They left their creative work to
drudge at destruction, exactly as they would have left it to take
their turn at the pumps in a sinking ship. They did not, like
some of the conscientious objectors, hold back because the ship
had been neglected by its officers and scuttled by its wreckers.
The ship had to be saved, even if Newton had to leave his
fluxions and Michael Angelo his marbles to save it; so they threw
away the tools of their beneficent and ennobling trades, and took
up the blood-stained bayonet and the murderous bomb, forcing
themselves to pervert their divine instinct for perfect artistic
execution to the effective handling of these diabolical things,
and their economic faculty for organization to the contriving of
ruin and slaughter. For it gave an ironic edge to their tragedy
that the very talents they were forced to prostitute made the
prostitution not only effective, but even interesting; so that
some of them were rapidly promoted, and found themselves actually
becoming artists in wax, with a growing relish for it, like
Napoleon and all the other scourges of mankind, in spite of
themselves. For many of them there was not even this consolation.
They "stuck it," and hated it, to the end.
Evil in the Throne of Good
This distress of the gentle was so acute that those who shared it
in civil life, without having to shed blood with their own hands,
or witness destruction with their own eyes, hardly care to
obtrude their own woes. Nevertheless, even when sitting at home
in safety, it was not easy for those who had to write and speak
about the war to throw away their highest conscience, and
deliberately work to a standard of inevitable evil instead of to
the ideal of life more abundant. I can answer for at least one
person who found the change from the wisdom of Jesus and St.
Francis to the morals of Richard III and the madness of Don
Quixote extremely irksome. But that change had to be made; and we
are all the worse for it, except those for whom it was not really
a change at all, but only a relief from hypocrisy.
Think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write nor to
fight, and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the
inestimable loss to the world of four years of the life of a
generation wasted on destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making
works of the human mind might not have been aborted or destroyed
by taking their authors away from their natural work for four
critical years. Not only were Shakespeares and Platos being
killed outright; but many of the best harvests of the survivors
had to be sown in the barren soil of the trenches. And this was
no mere British consideration. To the truly civilized man, to the
good European, the slaughter of the German youth was as
disastrous as the slaughter of the English. Fools exulted in
"German losses." They were our losses as well. Imagine exulting
in the death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death
blow!
Straining at the Gnat and swallowing the Camel
But most people could not comprehend these sorrows. There was a
frivolous exultation in death for its own sake, which was at
bottom an inability to realize that the deaths were real deaths
and not stage ones. Again and again, when an air raider dropped a
bomb which tore a child and its mother limb from limb, the people
who saw it, though they had been reading with great cheerfulness
of thousands of such happenings day after day in their
newspapers, suddenly burst into furious imprecations on "the
Huns" as murderers, and shrieked for savage and satisfying
vengeance. At such moments it became clear that the deaths they
had not seen meant no more to them than the mimic death of the
cinema screen. Sometimes it was not necessary that death should
be actually witnessed: it had only to take place under
circumstances of sufficient novelty and proximity to bring it
home almost as sensationally and effectively as if it had been
actually visible.
For example, in the spring of 1915 there was an appalling
slaughter of our young soldiers at Neuve Chapelle and at the
Gallipoli landing. I will not go so far as to say that our
civilians were delighted to have such exciting news to read at
breakfast. But I cannot pretend that I noticed either in the
papers, or in general intercourse, any feeling beyond the usual
one that the cinema show at the front was going splendidly, and
that our boys were the bravest of the brave. Suddenly there came
the news that an Atlantic liner, the Lusitania, had been
torpedoed, and that several well-known first-class passengers,
including a famous theatrical manager and the author of a popular
farce, had been drowned, among others. The others included Sir
Hugh Lane; but as he had only laid the country under great
obligations in the sphere of the fine arts, no great stress was
laid on that loss. Immediately an amazing frenzy swept through
the country. Men who up to that time had kept their heads now
lost them utterly. "Killing saloon passengers! What next?" was
the essence of the whole agitation; but it is far too trivial a
phrase to convey the faintest notion of the rage which possessed
us. To me, with my mind full of the hideous cost of Neuve
Chapelle, Ypres, and the Gallipoli landing, the fuss about the
Lusitania seemed almost a heartless impertinence, though I was
well acquainted personally with the three best-known victims, and
understood, better perhaps than most people, the misfortune of
the death of Lane. I even found a grim satisfaction, very
intelligible to all soldiers, in the fact that the civilians who
found the war such splendid British sport should get a sharp
taste of what it was to the actual combatants. I expressed my
impatience very freely, and found that my very straightforward
and natural feeling in the matter was received as a monstrous and
heartless paradox. When I asked those who gaped at me whether
they had anything to say about the holocaust of Festubert, they
gaped wider than before, having totally forgotten it, or rather,
having never realized it. They were not heartless anymore than I
was; but the big catastrophe was too big for them to grasp, and
the little one had been just the right size for them. I was not
surprised. Have I not seen a public body for just the same reason
pass a vote for œ30,000 without a word, and then spend three
special meetings, prolonged into the night, over an item of seven
shillings for refreshments?
Little Minds and Big Battles
Nobody will be able to understand the vagaries of public feeling
during the war unless they bear constantly in mind that the war
in its entire magnitude did not exist for the average civilian.
He could not conceive even a battle, much less a campaign. To the
suburbs the war was nothing but a suburban squabble. To the miner
and navvy it was only a series of bayonet fights between German
champions and English ones. The enormity of it was quite beyond
most of us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the dimensions of a
railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce any
effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments of
Scarborough and Ramsgate were colossal tragedies, and the battle
of Jutland a mere ballad. The words "after thorough artillery
preparation" in the news from the front meant nothing to us; but
when our seaside trippers learned that an elderly gentleman at
breakfast in a week-end marine hotel had been interrupted by a
bomb dropping into his egg-cup, their wrath and horror knew no
bounds. They declared that this would put a new spirit into the
army; and had no suspicion that the soldiers in the trenches
roared with laughter over it for days, and told each other that
it would do the blighters at home good to have a taste of what
the army was up against. Sometimes the smallness of view was
pathetic. A man would work at home regardless of the call "to
make the world safe for democracy." His brother would be killed
at the front. Immediately he would throw up his work and take up
the war as a family blood feud against the Germans. Sometimes it
was comic. A wounded man, entitled to his discharge, would return
to the trenches with a grim determination to find the Hun who had
wounded him and pay him out for it.
It is impossible to estimate what proportion of us, in khaki or
out of it, grasped the war and its political antecedents as a
whole in the light of any philosophy of history or knowledge of
what war is. I doubt whether it was as high as our proportion of
higher mathematicians. But there can be no doubt that it was
prodigiously outnumbered by the comparatively ignorant and
childish. Remember that these people had to be stimulated to make
the sacrifices demanded by the war, and that this could not be
done by appeals to a knowledge which they did not possess, and a
comprehension of which they were incapable. When the armistice at
last set me free to tell the truth about the war at the following
general election, a soldier said to a candidate whom I was
supporting, "If I had known all that in 1914, they would never
have got me into khaki." And that, of course, was precisely why
it had been necessary to stuff him with a romance that any
diplomatist would have laughed at. Thus the natural confusion of
ignorance was increased by a deliberately propagated confusion of
nursery bogey stories and melodramatic nonsense, which at last
overreached itself and made it impossible to stop the war before
we had not only achieved the triumph of vanquishing the German
army and thereby overthrowing its militarist monarchy, but made
the very serious mistake of ruining the centre of Europe, a thing
that no sane European State could afford to do.
The Dumb Capables and the Noisy Incapables
Confronted with this picture of insensate delusion and folly, the
critical reader will immediately counterplead that England all
this time was conducting a war which involved the organization of
several millions of fighting men and of the workers who were
supplying them with provisions, munitions, and transport, and
that this could not have been done by a mob of hysterical
ranters. This is fortunately true. To pass from the newspaper
offices and political platforms and club fenders and suburban
drawing-rooms to the Army and the munition factories was to pass
from Bedlam to the busiest and sanest of workaday worlds. It was
to rediscover England, and find solid ground for the faith of
those who still believed in her. But a necessary condition of
this efficiency was that those who were efficient should give all
their time to their business and leave the rabble raving to its
heart's content. Indeed the raving was useful to the efficient,
because, as it was always wide of the mark, it often distracted
attention very conveniently from operations that would have been
defeated or hindered by publicity. A precept which I endeavored
vainly to popularize early in the war, "If you have anything to
do go and do it: if not, for heaven's sake get out of the way,"
was only half carried out. Certainly the capable people went and
did it; but the incapables would by no means get out of the way:
they fussed and bawled and were only prevented from getting very
seriously into the way by the blessed fact that they never knew
where the way was. Thus whilst all the efficiency of England was
silent and invisible, all its imbecility was deafening the
heavens with its clamor and blotting out the sun with its dust.
It was also unfortunately intimidating the Government by its
blusterings into using the irresistible powers of the State to
intimidate the sensible people, thus enabling a despicable
minority of would-be lynchers to set up a reign of terror which
could at any time have been broken by a single stern word from a
responsible minister. But our ministers had not that sort of
courage: neither Heartbreak House nor Horseback Hall had bred it,
much less the suburbs. When matters at last came to the looting
of shops by criminals under patriotic pretexts, it was the police
force and not the Government that put its foot down. There was
even one deplorable moment, during the submarine scare, in which
the Government yielded to a childish cry for the maltreatment of
naval prisoners of war, and, to our great disgrace, was forced by
the enemy to behave itself. And yet behind all this public
blundering and misconduct and futile mischief, the effective
England was carrying on with the most formidable capacity and
activity. The ostensible England was making the empire sick with
its incontinences, its ignorances, its ferocities, its panics,
and its endless and intolerable blarings of Allied national
anthems in season and out. The esoteric England was proceeding
irresistibly to the conquest of Europe.
The Practical Business Men
>From the beginning the useless people set up a shriek for
"practical business men." By this they meant men who had become
rich by placing their personal interests before those of the
country, and measuring the success of every activity by the
pecuniary profit it brought to them and to those on whom they
depended for their supplies of capital. The pitiable failure of
some conspicuous samples from the first batch we tried of these
poor devils helped to give the whole public side of the war an
air of monstrous and hopeless farce. They proved not only that
they were useless for public work, but that in a well-ordered
nation they would never have been allowed to control private
enterprise.
How the Fools shouted the Wise Men down
Thus, like a fertile country flooded with mud, England showed no
sign of her greatness in the days when she was putting forth all
her strength to save herself from the worst consequences of her
littleness. Most of the men of action, occupied to the last hour
of their time with urgent practical work, had to leave to idler
people, or to professional rhetoricians, the presentation of the
war to the reason and imagination of the country and the world in
speeches, poems, manifestoes, picture posters, and newspaper
articles. I have had the privilege of hearing some of our ablest
commanders talking about their work; and I have shared the common
lot of reading the accounts of that work given to the world by
the newspapers. No two experiences could be more different. But
in the end the talkers obtained a dangerous ascendancy over the
rank and file of the men of action; for though the great men of
action are always inveterate talkers and often very clever
writers, and therefore cannot have their minds formed for them by
others, the average man of action, like the average fighter with
the bayonet, can give no account of himself in words even to
himself, and is apt to pick up and accept what he reads about
himself and other people in the papers, except when the writer is
rash enough to commit himself on technical points. It was not
uncommon during the war to hear a soldier, or a civilian engaged
on war work, describing events within his own experience that
reduced to utter absurdity the ravings and maunderings of his
daily paper, and yet echo the opinions of that paper like a
parrot. Thus, to escape from the prevailing confusion and folly,
it was not enough to seek the company of the ordinary man of
action: one had to get into contact with the master spirits. This
was a privilege which only a handful of people could enjoy. For
the unprivileged citizen there was no escape. To him the whole
country seemed mad, futile, silly, incompetent, with no hope of
victory except the hope that the enemy might be just as mad. Only
by very resolute reflection and reasoning could he reassure
himself that if there was nothing more solid beneath their
appalling appearances the war could not possibly have gone on for
a single day without a total breakdown of its organization.
The Mad Election
Happy were the fools and the thoughtless men of action in those
days. The worst of it was that the fools were very strongly
represented in parliament, as fools not only elect fools, but can
persuade men of action to elect them too. The election that
immediately followed the armistice was perhaps the maddest that
has ever taken place. Soldiers who had done voluntary and heroic
service in the field were defeated by persons who had apparently
never run a risk or spent a farthing that they could avoid, and
who even had in the course of the election to apologize publicly
for bawling Pacifist or Pro-German at their opponent. Party
leaders seek such followers, who can always be depended on to
walk tamely into the lobby at the party whip's orders, provided
the leader will make their seats safe for them by the process
which was called, in derisive reference to the war rationing
system, "giving them the coupon." Other incidents were so
grotesque that I cannot mention them without enabling the reader
to identify the parties, which would not be fair, as they were no
more to blame than thousands of others who must necessarily be
nameless. The general result was patently absurd; and the
electorate, disgusted at its own work, instantly recoiled to the
opposite extreme, and cast out all the coupon candidates at the
earliest bye-elections by equally silly majorities. But the
mischief of the general election could not be undone; and the
Government had not only to pretend to abuse its European victory
as it had promised, but actually to do it by starving the enemies
who had thrown down their arms. It had, in short, won the
election by pledging itself to be thriftlessly wicked, cruel, and
vindictive; and it did not find it as easy to escape from this
pledge as it had from nobler ones. The end, as I write, is not
yet; but it is clear that this thoughtless savagery will recoil
on the heads of the Allies so severely that we shall be forced by
the sternest necessity to take up our share of healing the Europe
we have wounded almost to death instead of attempting to complete
her destruction.
The Yahoo and the Angry Ape
Contemplating this picture of a state of mankind so recent that
no denial of its truth is possible, one understands Shakespeare
comparing Man to an angry ape, Swift describing him as a Yahoo
rebuked by the superior virtue of the horse, and Wellington
declaring that the British can behave themselves neither in
victory nor defeat. Yet none of the three had seen war as we have
seen it. Shakespeare blamed great men, saying that "Could great
men thunder as Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet; for
every pelting petty officer would use his heaven for thunder:
nothing but thunder." What would Shakespeare have said if he had
seen something far more destructive than thunder in the hand of
every village laborer, and found on the Messines Ridge the
craters of the nineteen volcanoes that were let loose there at
the touch of a finger that might have been a child's finger
without the result being a whit less ruinous? Shakespeare may
have seen a Stratford cottage struck by one of Jove's
thunderbolts, and have helped to extinguish the lighted thatch
and clear away the bits of the broken chimney. What would he have
said if he had seen Ypres as it is now, or returned to Stratford,
as French peasants are returning to their homes to-day, to find
the old familiar signpost inscribed "To Stratford, 1 mile," and
at the end of the mile nothing but some holes in the ground and a
fragment of a broken churn here and there? Would not the
spectacle of the angry ape endowed with powers of destruction
that Jove never pretended to, have beggared even his command of
words?
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