Books: Now It Can Be Told

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

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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-classes. 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 noble-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 passion. 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
passion, 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 passion, but by homicidal mania and secret
lust. 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-lust 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
shell-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 shell 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 substitute 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. Sexually 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 slut 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 shell-
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 passions 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
pass 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 spaciousness 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 classes 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 masses of men against other masses 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 God mocks at us. Or, rather, if that is so, there is
no God 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 God's truth
somehow, remembering the boys who died too soon, and all the falsity
and hatred of these past five years. By blood and passion 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.