Books: Now It Can Be Told

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

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The chaplain, an Anglican, found it hard to reconcile Christianity
with such a war as this, but he did not camouflage the teachings of
the Master he tried to serve. He preached to his men the gospel of
love and forgiveness of enemies. It was reported to the general, who
sent for him.

"Look here, I can't let you go preaching 'soft stuff' to my men. I
can't allow all that nonsense about love. My job is to teach them to
hate. You must either cooperate with me or go."

The chaplain refused to change his faith or his teaching, and the
general thought better of his intervention.

For all chaplains it was difficult. Simple souls were bewildered by
the conflict between the spirit of Christianity and the spirit of war.
Many of them--officers as well as men--were blasphemous in their scorn
of "parson stuff," some of them frightfully ironical.

A friend of mine watched two chaplains passing by. One of them was a
tall man with a crown and star on his shoulder-strap.

"I wonder," said my friend, with false simplicity, "whether Jesus
Christ would have been a lieutenant--colonel?"

On the other hand, many men found help in religion, and sought its
comfort with a spiritual craving. They did not argue about Christian
ethics and modern warfare. Close to death in the midst of tragedy,
conscious in a strange way of their own spiritual being and of a
spirituality present among masses of men above the muck of war, the
stench of corruption, and fear of bodily extinction, they groped out
toward God. They searched for some divine wisdom greater than the
folly of the world, for a divine aid which would help them to greater
courage. The spirit of God seemed to come to them across No Man's Land
with pity and comradeship. Catholic soldiers had a simpler, stronger
faith than men of Protestant denominations, whose faith depended more
on ethical arguments and intellectual reasonings. Catholic chaplains
had an easier task. Leaving aside all argument, they heard the
confessions of the soldiers, gave them absolution for their sins, said
mass for them in wayside barns, administered the sacraments, held the
cross to their lips when they fell mortally wounded, anointed them
when the surgeon's knife was at work, called the names of Jesus and
Mary into dying ears. There was no need of argument here. The old
faith which has survived many wars, many plagues, and the old
wickedness of men was still full of consolation to those who accepted
it as little children, and by their own agony hoped for favor from the
Man of Sorrows who was hanged upon a cross, and found a mother-love in
the vision of Mary, which came to them when they were in fear and pain
and the struggle of death. The padre had a definite job to do in the
trenches and for that reason was allowed more liberty in the line than
other chaplains. Battalion officers, surgeons, and nurses were patient
with mysterious rites which they did not understand, but which gave
comfort, as they saw, to wounded men; and the heroism with which many
of those priests worked under fire, careless of their own lives,
exalted by spiritual fervor, yet for the most part human and humble
and large-hearted and tolerant, aroused a general admiration
throughout the army. Many of the Protestant clergy were equally
devoted, but they were handicapped by having to rely more upon
providing physical comforts for the men than upon spiritual acts, such
as anointing and absolution, which were accepted without question by
Catholic soldiers.

Yet the Catholic Church, certain of its faith, and all other churches
claiming that they teach the gospel of Christ, have been challenged to
explain their attitude during the war and the relation of their
teaching to the world-tragedy, the Great Crime, which has happened. It
will not be easy for them to do so. They will have to explain how it
is that German bishops, priests, pastors, and flocks, undoubtedly
sincere in their professions of faith, deeply pious, as our soldiers
saw in Cologne, and fervent in their devotion to the sacraments on
their side of the fighting-line, as the Irish Catholics on our side,
were able to reconcile this piety with their war of aggression. The
faith of the Austrian Catholics must be explained in relation to their
crimes, if they were criminal, as we say they were, in leading the way
to this war by their ultimatum to Serbia. If Christianity has no
restraining influence upon the brutal instincts of those who profess
and follow its faith, then surely it is time the world abandoned so
ineffective a creed and turned to other laws likely to have more
influence on human relationships. That, brutally, is the argument of
the thinking world against the clergy of all nations who all claimed
to be acting according to the justice of God and the spirit of Christ.
It is a powerful argument, for the simple mind, rejecting casuistry,
cuts straight to the appalling contrast between Christian profession
and Christian practice, and says: "Here, in this war, there was no
conflict between one faith and another, but a murderous death-struggle
between many nations holding the same faith, preaching the same
gospel, and claiming the same God as their protector. Let us seek some
better truth than that hypocrisy! Let us, if need be, in honesty, get
back to the savage worship of national gods, the Ju-ju of the tribe."

My own belief is that the war was no proof against the Christian
faith, but rather is a revelation that we are as desperately in need
of the spirit of Christ as at any time in the history of mankind. But
I think the clergy of all nations, apart from a heroic and saintly
few, subordinated their faith, which is a gospel of charity, to
national limitations. They were patriots before they were priests, and
their patriotism was sometimes as limited, as narrow, as fierce, and
as bloodthirsty as that of the people who looked to them for truth and
light. They were often fiercer, narrower, and more desirous of
vengeance than the soldiers who fought, because it is now a known
truth that the soldiers, German and Austrian, French and Italian and
British, were sick of the unending slaughter long before the ending of
the war, and would have made a peace more fair than that which now
prevails if it had been put to the common vote in the trenches;
whereas the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of Cologne, and
the clergy who spoke from many pulpits in many nations, under the
Cross of Christ, still stoked up the fires of hate and urged the
armies to go on fighting "in the cause of justice," "for the defense
of the Fatherland," "for Christian righteousness," to the bitter end.
Those words are painful to write, but as I am writing this book for
truth's sake, at all cost, I let them stand . . . .

VI

The entire aspect of the war was changed by the Russian Revolution,
followed by the collapse of the Russian armies and the Peace of Brest-
Litovsk, when for the first time the world heard the strange word
"Bolshevism," and knew not what it meant.

The Russian armies had fought bravely in the first years of the war,
with an Oriental disregard of death. Under generals in German pay,
betrayed by a widespread net of anarchy and corruption so villainous
that arms and armaments sent out from England had to be bribed on
their way from one official to another, and never reached the front,
so foul in callousness of human life that soldiers were put into the
fighting-line without rifle or ammunition, these Russian peasants
flung themselves not once, but many times, against the finest troops
of Germany, with no more than naked bayonets against powerful
artillery and the scythe of machine-gun fire, and died like sheep in
the slaughter-houses of Chicago. Is it a wonder that at the last they
revolted against this immolation, turned round upon their tyrants, and
said: "You are the enemy. It is you that we will destroy"?

By this new revelation they forgot their hatred of Germans. They said:
"You are our brothers; we have no hatred against you. We do not want
to kill you. Why should you kill us? We are all of us the slaves of
bloodthirsty castes, who use our flesh for their ambitions. Do not
shoot us, brothers, but join hands against the common tyranny which
enslaves our peoples." They went forward with outstretched hands, and
were shot, down like rabbits by some Germans, and by others were not
shot, because German soldiers gaped, wide-eyed, at this new gospel, as
it seemed, and said: "They speak words of truth. Why should we kill
one another?"

The German war lords ordered a forward movement, threatened their own
men with death if they fraternized with Russians, and dictated their
terms of peace on the old lines of military conquest. But as
Ludendorff has confessed, and as we now know from other evidence, many
German soldiers were "infected" with Bolshevism and lost their
fighting spirit.

Russia was already in anarchy. Constitutional government had been
replaced by the soviets and by committees of soldiers and workmen.
Kerensky had fled. Lenin and Trotzky were the Marat and Danton of the
Revolution, and decreed the Reign of Terror. Tales of appalling
atrocity, some true, some false (no one can tell how true or how
false), came through to France and England. It was certain that the
whole fabric of society in Russia had dissolved in the wildest anarchy
the world has seen in modern times, and that the Bolshevik gospel of
"brotherhood" with humanity was, at least, rudely "interrupted" by
wholesale murder within its own boundaries.

One other thing was certain. Having been relieved of the Russian
menace, Germany was free to withdraw her armies on that front and use
all her striking force in the west. It should have cautioned our
generals to save their men for the greatest menace that had confronted
them. But without caution they fought the battles of 1917, in
Flanders, as I have told.

In 1917 and in the first half of 1918 there seemed no ending to the
war by military means. Even many of our generals who had been so
breezy in their optimism believed now that the end must come by
diplomatic means--a "peace by understanding." I had private talks with
men in high command, who acknowledged that the way must be found, and
the British mind prepared for negotiations, because there must come a
limit to the drain of blood on each side. It was to one man in the
world that many men in all armies looked for a way out of this
frightful impasse.

President Wilson had raised new hope among many men who otherwise were
hopeless. He not only spoke high words, but defined the meanings of
them. His definition of liberty seemed sound and true, promising the
self-determination of peoples. His offer to the German people to deal
generously with them if they overthrew their tyranny raised no quarrel
among British soldiers. His hope of a new diplomacy, based upon "open
covenants openly arrived at," seemed to cut at the root of the old
evil in Europe by which the fate of peoples had been in the hands of
the few. His Fourteen Points set out clearly and squarely a just basis
of peace. His advocacy of a League of Nations held out a vision of a
new world by which the great and small democracies should be united by
a common pledge to preserve peace and submit their differences to a
supreme court of arbitration. Here at last was a leader of the world,
with a clear call to the nobility in men rather than to their base
passions, a gospel which would raise civilization from the depths into
which it had fallen, and a practical remedy for that suicidal mania
which was exhausting the combatant nations.

I think there were many millions of men on each side of the fighting-
line who thanked God because President Wilson had come with a wisdom
greater than the folly which was ours to lead the way to an honorable
peace and a new order of nations. I was one of them . . . Months
passed, and there was continual fighting, continued slaughter, and no
sign that ideas would prevail over force. The Germans launched their
great offensive, broke through the British lines, and afterward
through the French lines, and there were held and checked long enough
for our reserves to be flung across the Channel--300,000 boys from
England and Scotland, who had been held in hand as the last counters
for the pool. The American army came in tidal waves across the
Atlantic, flooded our back areas, reached the edge of the
battlefields, were a new guaranty of strength. Their divisions passed
mostly to the French front. With them, and with his own men,
magnificent in courage still, and some of ours, Foch had his army of
reserve, and struck.

So the war ended, after all, by military force, and by military
victory greater than had seemed imaginable or possible six months
before.

In the peace terms that followed there was but little trace of those
splendid ideas which had been proclaimed by President Wilson. On one
point after another he weakened, and was beaten by the old militarism
which sat enthroned in the council-chamber, with its foot on the neck
of the enemy. The "self-determination of peoples" was a hollow phrase
signifying nothing. Open covenants openly arrived at were mocked by
the closed doors of the Conference. When at last the terms were
published their merciless severity, their disregard of racial
boundaries, their creation of hatreds and vendettas which would lead,
as sure as the sun should rise, to new warfare, staggered humanity,
not only in Germany and Austria, but in every country of the world,
where at least minorities of people had hoped for some nobler vision
of the world's needs, and for some healing remedy for the evils which
had massacred its youth. The League of Nations, which had seemed to
promise so well, was hedged round by limitations which made it look
bleak and barren. Still it was peace, and the rivers of blood had
ceased to flow, and the men were coming home again. . . Home again!

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 masses from "the bloody 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
massacres of mobs in Moscow, bloody 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 noble 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 Massacres, 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
bloody 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 Japan 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: "Hell! . . . 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 passion 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 amusement, 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 classed 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 gassed, the
paralyzed, were forgotten in institutions 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 class 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
advertisements, 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 noble 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
shell-fire to ring the bell and ask to see "the lady of the house." He
thanked God 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 gratitude 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?"