Books: Now It Can Be Told

P >> Philip Gibbs >> Now It Can Be Told

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"We shall go on for two years, or three years, or four, or five, and
in the end we shall smash you," said the woman who told me this.

The German officer stared at her and said, "You people are wonderful!"

Yes, they were wonderful, the French, and their hatred of the Germans,
their desire for vengeance, complete and terrible, at all cost of
life, even though France should bleed to death and die after victory,
is to be understood in the heights and depths of its hatred and in the
passion of its love for France and liberty. When I think of France I
am tempted to see no greater thing than such patriotism as that to
justify the gospel of hate against such an enemy, to uphold vengeance
as a sweet virtue. Yet if I did so I should deny the truth that has
been revealed to many men and women by the agony of the war--that if
civilization may continue patriotism is "not enough," that
international hatred will produce other wars worse than this, in which
civilization will be submerged, and that vengeance, even for dreadful
crimes, cannot be taken of a nation without punishing the innocent
more than the guilty, so that out of its cruelty and injustice new
fires of hatred are lighted, the demand for vengeance passes to the
other side, and the devil finds another vicious circle in which to
trap the souls of men and "catch 'em all alive O!"

To deny that would also be a denial of the faith with which millions
of young Frenchmen rushed to the colors in the first days of the war.
It was they who said, "This is a war to end war." They told me so. It
was they who said: "German militarism must be killed so that all
militarism shall be abolished. This is a war for liberty." So soldiers
of France spoke to me on a night when Paris was mobilized and the
tragedy began. It is a Frenchman--Henri Barbusse--who, in spite of the
German invasion, the outrages against his people, the agony of France,
has the courage to say that all peoples in Europe were involved in the
guilt of that war because of their adherence to that old barbaric
creed of brute force and the superstitious servitude of their souls to
symbols of national pride based upon military tradition. He even
denounces the salute to the flag, instinctive and sacred in the heart
of every Frenchman, as a fetish worship in which the narrow bigotry of
national arrogance is raised above the rights of the common masses of
men. He draws no distinction between a war of defense and a war of
aggression, because attack is the best means of defense, and all
peoples who go to war dupe themselves into the belief that they do so
in defense of their liberties, and rights, and power, and property.
Germany attacked France first because she was ready first and sure of
her strength. France would have attacked Germany first to get back
Alsace-Lorraine, to wipe out 1870, if she also had been ready and sure
of her strength. The political philosophy on both sides of the Rhine
was the same. It was based on military power and rivalry of secret
alliances and imperial ambitions. The large-hearted internationalism
of Jean Jaures, who with all his limitations was a great Frenchman,
patriot, and idealist, had failed among his own people and in Germany,
and the assassin's bullet was his reward for the adventure of his soul
to lift civilization above the level of the old jungle law and to save
France from the massacre which happened.

In war France was wonderful, most heroic in sacrifice, most splendid
in valor. In her dictated peace, which was ours also, her leaders were
betrayed by the very evil which millions of young Frenchmen had gone
out to kill at the sacrifice of their own lives. Militarism was
exalted in France above the ruins of German militarism. It was a peace
of vengeance which punished the innocent more than the guilty, the
babe at the breast more than the Junker in his Schloss, the poor
working-woman more than the war lord, the peasant who had been driven
to the shambles more than Sixt von Arnim or Rupprecht of Bavaria, or
Ludendorff, or Hindenburg. It is a peace that can only be maintained
by the power of artillery and by the conscription of every French boy
who shall be trained for the next "war of defense" (twenty years
hence, thirty years hence), when Germany is strong again--stronger
than France because of her population, stronger then, enormously, than
France, in relative numbers of able-bodied men than in August, 1914.
So if that philosophy continue--and I do not think it will--the old
fear will be re-established, the old burdens of armament will be piled
up anew, the people of France will be weighed down as before under a
military regime stifling their liberty of thought and action, wasting
the best years of their boyhood in barracks, seeking protective
alliances, buying allies at great cost, establishing the old spy
system, the old diplomacy, the old squalid ways of inter--national
politics, based as before on fear and force. Marshal Foch was a fine
soldier. Clemenceau was a strong Minister of War. There was no man
great enough in France to see beyond the passing triumph of military
victory and by supreme generosity of soul to lift their enemy out of
the dirt of their despair, so that the new German Republic should
arise from the ruins of the Empire, remorseful of their deeds in
France and Belgium, with all their rage directed against their ancient
tyranny, and with a new-born spirit of democratic liberty reaching
across the old frontiers.

Is that the foolish dream of the sentimentalist? No, more than that;
for the German people, after their agony, were ready to respond to
generous dealing, pitiful in their need of it, and there is enough
sentiment in German hearts--the most sentimental people in Europe--to
rise with a surge of emotion to a new gospel of atonement if their old
enemies had offered a chance of grace. France has not won the war by
her terms of peace nor safeguarded her frontiers for more than a few
uncertain years. By harking back to the old philosophy of militarism
she has re-established peril amid a people drained of blood and deeply
in debt. Her support of reactionary forces in Russia is to establish a
government which will guarantee the interest on French loans and
organize a new military regime in alliance with France and England.
Meanwhile France looks to the United States and British people to
protect her from the next war, when Germany shall be strong again. She
is playing the militarist role without the strength to sustain it.

IV

What of England? . . . Looking back at the immense effort of the
British people in the war, our high sum of sacrifice in blood and
treasure, and the patient courage of our fighting-men, the world must,
and does, indeed, acknowledge that the old stoic virtue of our race
was called out by this supreme challenge, and stood the strain. The
traditions of a thousand years of history filled with war and travail
and adventure, by which old fighting races had blended with different
strains of blood and temper--Roman, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, Norman-
survived in the fiber of our modern youth, country-bred or city-bred,
in spite of the weakening influences of slumdom, vicious environment,
ill-nourishment, clerkship, and sedentary life. The Londoner was a
good soldier. The Liverpools and Manchesters were hard and tough in
attack and defense. The South Country battalions of Devons and
Dorsets, Sussex and Somersets, were not behindhand in ways of death.
The Scots had not lost their fire and passion, but were terrible in
their onslaught. The Irish battalions, with recruiting cut off at the
base, fought with their old gallantry, until there were few to answer
the last roll-call. The Welsh dragon encircled Mametz Wood, devoured
the "Cockchafers" on Pilkem Ridge, and was hard on the trail of the
Black Eagle in the last offensive. The Australians and Canadians had
all the British quality of courage and the benefit of a harder
physique, gained by outdoor life and unweakened ancestry. In the mass,
apart from neurotic types here and there among officers and men, the
stock was true and strong. The spirit of a seafaring race which has
the salt in its blood from Land's End to John o' Groat's and back
again to Wapping had not been destroyed, but answered the ruffle of
Drake's drum and, with simplicity and gravity in royal navy and in
merchant marine, swept the highways of the seas, hunted worse monsters
than any fabulous creatures of the deep, and shirked no dread
adventure in the storms and darkness of a spacious hell. The men who
went to Zeebrugge were the true sons of those who fought the Spanish
Armada and singed the King o' Spain's beard in Cadiz harbor. The
victors of the Jutland battle were better men than Nelson's (the
scourings of the prisons and the sweepings of the press-gang) and not
less brave in frightful hours. Without the service of the British
seamen the war would have been lost for France and Italy and Belgium,
and all of us.

The flower of our youth went out to France and Flanders, to Egypt,
Palestine, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Saloniki, and it was a fine
flower of gallant boyhood, clean, for the most part eager, not brutal
except by intensive training, simple in minds and hearts, chivalrous
in instinct, without hatred, adventurous, laughter-loving, and
dutiful. That is God's truth, in spite of vice-rotted, criminal,
degenerate, and brutal fellows in many battalions, as in all crowds of
men.

In millions of words during the years of war I recorded the bravery of
our troops on the western front, their patience, their cheerfulness,
suffering, and agony; yet with all those words describing day by day
the incidents of their life in war I did not exaggerate the splendor
of their stoic spirit or the measure of their sacrifice. The heroes of
mythology were but paltry figures compared with those who, in the
great war, went forward to the roaring devils of modern gun-fire,
dwelt amid high explosives more dreadful than dragons, breathed in the
fumes of poison-gas more foul than the breath of Medusa, watched and
slept above mine-craters which upheaved the hell-fire of Pluto, and
defied thunderbolts more certain in death-dealing blows than those of
Jove.

Something there was in the spirit of our men which led them to endure
these things without revolt--ideals higher than the selfish motives of
life. They did not fight for greed or glory, not for conquest, nor for
vengeance. Hatred was not the inspiration of the mass of them, for I
am certain that except in hours when men "see red" there was no direct
hatred of the men in the opposite trenches, but, on the other hand, a
queer sense of fellow--feeling, a humorous sympathy for "old Fritz,"
who was in the same bloody mess as themselves. Our generals, it is
true, hated the Germans. "I should like one week in Cologne," one of
them told me, before there seemed ever a chance of getting there, "and
I would let my men loose in the streets and turn a blind eye to
anything they liked to do."

Some of our officers were inspired by a bitter, unrelenting hate.

"If I had a thousand Germans in a row," one of them said to me, "I
would cut all their throats, and enjoy the job.

But that was not the mentality of the men in the ranks, except those
who were murderers by nature and pleasure. They gave their cigarettes
to prisoners and filled their water-bottles and chatted in a friendly
way with any German who spoke a little English, as I have seen them
time and time again on days of battle, in the fields of battle. There
were exceptions to this treatment, but even the Australians and the
Scots, who were most fierce in battle, giving no quarter sometimes,
treated their prisoners with humanity when they were bundled back.
Hatred was not the motive which made our men endure all things. It was
rather, as I have said, a refusal in their souls to be beaten in
manhood by all the devils of war, by all its terrors, or by its
beastliness, and at the back of all the thought that the old country
was "up against it" and that they were there to avert the evil.

Young soldiers of ours, not only of officer rank, but of "other
ranks," as they were called, were inspired at the beginning, and some
of them to the end, with a simple, boyish idealism. They saw no other
causes of war than German brutality. The enemy to them was the monster
who had to be destroyed lest the world and its beauty should perish--
and that was true so long as the individual German, who loathed the
war, obeyed the discipline of the herd-leaders and did not revolt
against the natural laws which, when the war had once started, bade
him die in defense of his own Fatherland. Many of those boys of ours
made a dedication of their lives upon the altar of sacrifice,
believing that by this service and this sacrifice they would help the
victory of civilization over barbarism, and of Christian morality over
the devil's law. They believed that they were fighting to dethrone
militarism, to insure the happiness and liberties of civilized
peoples, and were sure of the gratitude of their nation should they
not have the fate to fall upon the field of honor, but go home blind
or helpless.

I have read many letters from boys now dead in which they express that
faith.

"Do not grieve for me," wrote one of them, "for I shall be proud to
die for my country's sake."

"I am happy," wrote another (I quote the tenor of his letters),
"because, though I hate war, I feel that this is the war to end war.
We are the last victims of this way of argument. By smashing the
German war-machine we shall prove for all time the criminal folly of
militarism and Junkerdom."

There were young idealists like that, and they were to be envied for
their faith, which they brought with them from public schools and from
humble homes where they had read old books and heard old watchwords. I
think, at the beginning of the war there were many like that. But as
it continued year after year doubts crept in, dreadful suspicions of
truth more complex than the old simplicity, a sense of revolt against
sacrifice unequally shared and devoted to a purpose which was not that
for which they had been called to fight.

They had been told that they were fighting for liberty. But their
first lesson was the utter loss of individual liberty under a
discipline which made the private soldier no more than a number. They
were ordered about like galley--slaves, herded about like cattle,
treated individually and in the mass with utter disregard of their
comfort and well-being. Often, as I know, they were detrained at rail-
heads in the wind and rain and by ghastly errors of staff-work kept
waiting for their food until they were weak and famished. In the base
camps men of one battalion were drafted into other battalions, where
they lost their old comrades and were unfamiliar with the speech and
habits of a crowd belonging to different counties, the Sussex men
going to a Manchester regiment, the Yorkshire men being drafted to a
Surrey unit. By R.T.O.'s and A.M.L.O.'s and camp commandments and town
majors and staff pups men were bullied and bundled about, not like
human beings, but like dumb beasts, and in a thousand ways injustice,
petty tyranny, hard work, degrading punishments for trivial offenses,
struck at their souls and made the name of personal liberty a mockery.
From their own individuality they argued to broader issues. Was this
war for liberty? Were the masses of men on either side fighting with
free will as free men? Those Germans--were they not under discipline,
each man of them, forced to fight whether they liked it or not?
Compelled to go forward to sacrifice, with machine-guns behind them to
shoot them down if they revolted against their slave-drivers? What
liberty had they to follow their conscience or their judgment--"
Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die"--like all soldiers
in all armies. Was it not rather that the masses of men engaged in
slaughter were serving the purpose of powers above them, rival powers,
greedy for one another's markets, covetous of one another's wealth,
and callous of the lives of humble men? Surely if the leaders of the
warring nations were put together for even a week in some such place
as Hooge, or the Hohenzollern redoubt, afflicted by the usual
harassing fire, poison-gas, mine explosions, lice, rats, and the
stench of rotting corpses, with the certainty of death or
dismemberment at the week-end, they would settle the business and come
to terms before the week was out. I heard that proposition put forward
many times by young officers of ours, and as an argument against their
own sacrifice they found it unanswerable.

V

The condition and psychology of their own country as they read about
it in the Paris Daily Mail, which was first to come into their
billets, filled some of these young men with distress and disgust,
strengthened into rage when they went home on leave. The deliberate
falsification of news (the truth of which they heard from private
channels) made them discredit the whole presentation of our case and
state. They said, "Propaganda!" with a sharp note of scorn. The breezy
optimism of public men, preachers, and journalists, never downcast by
black news, never agonized by the slaughter in these fields,
minimizing horrors and loss and misery, crowing over the enemy,
prophesying early victory which did not come, accepting all the
destruction of manhood (while they stayed safe) as a necessary and
inevitable "misfortune," had a depressing effect on men who knew they
were doomed to die, in the law of averages, if the war went on. "Damn
their optimism!" said some of our officers. "It's too easy for those
behind the lines. It is only we who have the right of optimism. It's
we who have to do the dirty work! They seem to think we like the job!
What are they doing to bring the end nearer?"

The frightful suspicion entered the heads of some of our men (some of
those I knew) that at home people liked the war and were not anxious
to end it, and did not care a jot for the sufferings of the soldiers.
Many of them came back from seven days' leave fuming and sullen.
Everybody was having a good time. Munition-workers were earning
wonderful wages and spending them on gramophones, pianos, furs, and
the "pictures." Everybody was gadding about in a state of joyous
exultation. The painted flapper was making herself sick with the
sweets of life after office hours in government employ, where she did
little work for a lot of pocket-money. The society girl was dancing
bare-legged for "war charities," pushing into bazaars for the "poor,
dear wounded," getting her pictures into the papers as a "notable
warworker," married for the third time in three years; the middle-
class cousin was driving staff-officers to Whitehall, young gentlemen
of the Air Service to Hendon, junior secretaries to their luncheon.
Millions of girls were in some kind of fancy dress with buttons and
shoulder--straps, breeches and puttees, and they seemed to be making a
game of the war and enjoying it thoroughly. Oxford dons were
harvesting, and proud of their prowess with the pitchfork--behold
their patriotism!--while the boys were being blown to bits on the Yser
Canal. Miners were striking for more wages, factory hands were downing
tools for fewer hours at higher pay, the government was paying any
price for any labor--while Tommy Atkins drew his one-and-twopence and
made a little go a long way in a wayside estaminet before jogging up
the Menin road to have his head blown off. The government had created
a world of parasites and placemen housed in enormous hotels, where
they were engaged at large salaries upon mysterious unproductive
labors which seemed to have no result in front-line trenches.
Government contractors were growing fat on the life of war, amassing
vast fortunes, juggling with excess profits, battening upon the flesh
and blood of boyhood in the fighting-lines. These old men, these fat
men, were breathing out fire and fury against the Hun, and vowing by
all their gods that they would see their last son die in the last
ditch rather than agree to any peace except that of destruction. There
were "fug committees" (it was Lord Kitchener's word) at the War
Office, the Board of Trade, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the
Ministry of Munitions, the Ministry of Information, where officials on
enormous salaries smoked cigars of costly brands and decided how to
spend vast sums of public money on "organization" which made no
difference to the man stifling his cough below the parapet in a wet
fog of Flanders, staring across No Man's Land for the beginning of a
German attack.

In all classes of people there was an epidemic of dancing, jazzing,
card-playing, theater-going. They were keeping their spirits up
wonderfully. Too well for men slouching about the streets of London on
leave, and wondering at all this gaiety, and thinking back to the
things they had seen and forward to the things they would have to do.
People at home, it seemed, were not much interested in the life of the
trenches; anyhow, they could not understand. The soldier listened to
excited tales of air raids. A bomb had fallen in the next street. The
windows had been broken. Many people had been killed in a house
somewhere in Hackney. It was frightful. The Germans were devils. They
ought to be torn to pieces, every one of them. The soldier on leave
saw crowds of people taking shelter in underground railways, working--
men among them, sturdy lads, panic-stricken. But for his own wife and
children he had an evil sense of satisfaction in these sights. It
would do them good. They would know what war meant--just a little.
They would not be so easy in their damned optimism. An air raid? Lord
God, did they know what a German barrage was like? Did they guess how
men walked day after day through harassing fire to the trenches? Did
they have any faint idea of life in a sector where men stood, slept,
ate, worked, under the fire of eight-inch shells, five-point--nines,
trench-mortars, rifle-grenades, machine-gun bullets, snipers, to say
nothing of poison-gas, long-range fire on the billets in small
farmsteads, and on every moonlight night air raids above wooden
hutments so closely crowded into a small space that hardly a bomb
could fall without killing a group of men.

"Oh, but you have your dugouts!" said a careless little lady.

The soldier smiled.

It was no use talking. The people did not want to hear the tragic side
of things. Bairnsfather's "Ole Bill" seemed to them to typify the
spirit of the fighting-man. .. "'Alf a mo', Kaiser!" . . .

The British soldier was gay and careless of death--always. Shell-fire
meant nothing to him. If he were killed--well, after all, what else
could he expect? Wasn't that what he was out for? The twice-married
girl knew a charming boy in the air force. He had made love to her
even before Charlie was "done in." These dear boys were so greedy for
love. She could not refuse them, poor darlings! Of course they had all
got to die for liberty, and that sort of thing. It was very sad. A
terrible thing--war! . . . Perhaps she had better give up dancing for
a week, until Charlie had been put into the casualty lists.

"What are we fighting for?" asked officers back from leave, turning
over the pages of the Sketch and Tatler, with pictures of race-
meetings, strike-meetings, bare--backed beauties at war bazaars, and
portraits of profiteers in the latest honors list. "Are we going to
die for these swine? These parasites and prostitutes? Is this the war
for noble ideals, liberty, Christianity, and civilization? To hell
with all this filth! The world has gone mad and we are the victims of
insanity."

Some of them said that below all that froth there were deep and quiet
waters in England. They thought of the anguish of their own wives and
mothers, their noble patience, their uncomplaining courage, their
spiritual faith in the purpose of the war. Perhaps at the heart
England was true and clean and pitiful. Perhaps, after, all, many
people at home were suffering more than the fighting-men, in agony of
spirit. It was unwise to let bitterness poison their brains. Anyhow,
they had to go on. How long, how long, O Lord?

"How long is it going to last?" asked the London Rangers of their
chaplain. He lied to them and said another three months. Always he had
absolute knowledge that the war would end three months later. That was
certain. "Courage!" he said. "Courage to the end of the last lap!"

Most of the long-service men were dead and gone long before the last
lap came. It was only the new boys who went as far as victory. He
asked permission of the general to withdraw nineteen of them from the
line to instruct them for Communion. They were among the best
soldiers, and not afraid of the ridicule of their fellows because of
their religious zeal. The chaplain's main purpose was to save their
lives, for a while, and give them a good time and spiritual comfort.
They had their good time. Three weeks later came the German attack on
Arras and they were all killed. Every man of them.