The hope of Europe

Front matter

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PHILIP GIBBS’ HISTORY OF THE WAR

Contents

CHAPTER

I. Leaders of the Old Tradition

II. Ideals of the Humanists

I

Looking back at the three years of history after the Armistice — three years of blundering, moral degradation and reaction to the lowest traditions of national politics — the most tolerant of minds examining into the causes of that evil time must formulate a grave indictment against one company of men. Arraigned before an honest jury of public opinion they are a fairly small gang of notorious persons, politically of doubtful character and shady antecedents. They are the Leaders of Europe — the Old Gang, still for the most part in command of the machinery of government.

These men in England, France, and Italy are those who were playing the game of politics before the war, fighting for place and power, taking their turn, now in now out, according to the revolutions of the party wheels, but whether in or out, belonging to the inner circle of that system which, under the fair name of “ representative government/’ arranges the fate of peoples without their knowledge or consent, and by artful appeals to popular passion and ignorance, by spell-words and watchwords of fine sound and empty meaning, keeps the mob obedient to their directing wills, even though it is led to the shambles with the enticing cry of “ Hilly, dilly, come and be killed.”

It would be ridiculous now to re-examine all the psychological and political causes of the European War. That argument has been threshed out in millions and billions of words, in White Papers, and Yellow Papers, and Red Papers ; and in spite of the publication of secret documents from the

Russian archives, and the papers of other Governments revealing the sinister game of bluff and bluster, intrigue, and conspiracy, between the old Courts of Europe, it is certain, if anything in history is certain, that nothing will ever reverse the verdict of Guilty given against the German military caste for having planned, desired, and made the war. The German bureaucracy and bourgeoisie share that guilt by criminal consent, though the peasants and common folk must be acquitted on the plea of ignorance, and their inability to resist the poison of false propaganda administered to them by their rulers and teachers. Let us leave it there — this terrible verdict against which there is no Court of Appeal except at the judgment seat of God.

But the statesmen of Europe, among the nations which ranged themselves against the Germanic power, cannot be acquitted of all guilt, though they pleaded a dove-like innocence when the frightful challenge of war resounded through Europe, and the armies moved to the fields of massacre. They were guilty of maintaining, defending, and intensifying the old regime of international rivalry with its political structure resting entirely on armed force, and as damnably guilty of hiding from their own peoples the inevitability of the conflict which was approaching them because of this grouping and manoeuvring of forces.

For many years before the war the conscience of people without power in many countries had been stirred by the spiritual idea of a closer brotherhood of man, united by the common interests of labour and liberty. In France there was a growing revolt against the burden of militarism. The spirit of “ La Revanche,” any passion of desire to recapture Alsace-Lorraine at the cost of millions of lives, had died down, and almost out in the cold ashes of extinct fires. In Germany the Social Democrats, quite sincerely despite their betrayal afterwards, were anti-militarists, and the advocates of international peace. In England the people were so devoid of military ambition, so sure that war on the big scale had been abandoned forever by the Great Powers of white civilization, that even when it happened they were incredulous, and like the countryman who saw a giraffe for the first time, said: “ Hell ! . . . I don’t believe it !”

The statesmen of Europe — English, French, German, Russian, and others, might have allied themselves with the new idealism stirring among the common folk of Europe. Some of them, indeed, paid lip-service to those ideals of international peace, and with elaborate insincerity, smiling with cynicism up their sleeves, proposed resolutions at The Hague, to restrict the horrors of war, and to sprinkle its stench with rose-water. But mostly, and with intellectual atheism, they used the immense and secret powers of their Governments, to kill the pacifist instincts of democratic idealism, to break or buy its leaders, and to secure the continuance of the old game between Courts and Foreign Offices for commercial advantages, military alliances, unexploited territories.

These men of the Old Gang were at least no nobler than their predecessors through centuries of conflict. There was not one of them inspired by any vision of world policy higher than immediate material advantage or Imperial aggrandizement. Not a man among them, seeing the shadow of a world-war creeping nearer, uttered a loud cry to the conscience of humanity, or any warning of approaching doom, or any plea for some better argument than that of massacre. They were industrious with squalid bargains for the “ undeveloped ” spaces of the earth, in Africa and Asia. From one Foreign Office to another went bickering notes, claims, protests, and threats. The Fashoda crisis menaced England with war against France. The Agadir crisis, twenty years later, was a challenge to Germany by England and France — a challenge voiced by Lloyd George, the “ leader of democracy,” in a speech which summoned up the dreadful vision of Armageddon as lightly, as carelessly, as men might tell a fantastic nightmare across the dinner-table, as a warning against lobster salad. It seemed so to the British people, a little startled, but not shocked into the tragic consciousness that Lloyd George’s message was the revelation of enormous forces assembling and getting ready for a conflict in which the youth of Europe, ignorant of that meaning, not told in plain words, not asked for consent, would be slain by millions, because the old men of the old regime were greedy for empire, on this side or that.

It is easy to say that Germany was the wild beast of Europe, with devouring instincts, and that the other nations would have been a feebler prey, ready for the slaughter-house, if they had been more weakened by the idealism of world peace. That is true. So is it true that in Napoleon’s time France was the wild beast of the European jungle, and in other times other nations. So is it true that in England once there were seven kings at war with each other, and in Ireland sixty. So is it true that a century ago there were highwaymen in Hyde Park, and that for any slight offence or imagined insult one gentleman would challenge another and kill him, if gifted with great strength, or skill, or luck. The history of civilization is a gradual taming of the wild beast in human society, an education of human intelligence to a widening sphere of law and order and self-restraint. So it seemed, until the last war made a mockery of law-makers and of gentlemen. The old men of Europe (not old in years, but in traditions) made never an effort to tame the wild beast in the heart of Germany (or in their own), never once raised ideals to which the German people might rise with a sense of liberty and brotherhood from the spell of Junkerdom. They made no kind of effort to get European civilization out of the jungle darkness to new clearing places of light. They were all in the jungle together.

A friend of mine with bitter cynicism compared the international politicians before the war with ape-men, peering out of their caves, gibbering and beckoning to friendly apes, frothing and mouthing to hostile apes, collecting great stores of weapons for defence and offence, strengthening the approaches to the monkey rocks, listening with fear to the crashing of the Great Ape in the undergrowth of his own jungle, whispering together with a grave nodding of heads, a plucking of white hairs, while the young apes played among the trees with the ignorance and carelessness of youth.

That simile is an outrage upon the high intelligence, the fine manners, the culture and refinement of the statesmen who directed the fate of Europe before the war — men like Grey, Asquith, Delcasse, Poincare, Viviani, Briand, Giolitti. Yet outrageous though it be, if the European system were put into the parable of the animal world, by the spirit of iEsop or of Swift or of Lafontaine, it is with jungle life and with ape-life that it could only be compared.

During the war many of the statesmen of the countries engaged in that conflict behaved with the virtue that belongs to patriotism and to the old traditions of national honour. I do not underrate that virtue or those traditions. In their time, and when necessity demands them, they call out the supreme qualities of manhood in all classes directly engaged. When once the war was declared, and we were back again to the primitive contest of nation against nation, there was no other way for honourable men than devotion to the life of one’s people, the highest service of one’s soul for the national cause, self-sacrifice even to death. In obedience to that last law of patriotism, youth, the best of European manhood, answered the call with illimitable courage, and an immense spiritual fervour never seen on such a scale in human history. Without a murmur of revolt, uplifted by enthusiasm, at least in the early days of war, the legions of British, French, Italian, Russian, and German youth marched to the fields of death, and largely died. Different motives impelled them, different professions of faith were theirs, but on both sides of the fighting lines there was the one common primitive instinct that the life and liberty of one’s people could be saved only by the death of the enemy. It was a war to the death without mercy, without chivalry, except in rare cases, on either side — the worst war the world has seen.

II

The old Leaders of Europe handed over a great deal of their directive power to the military mind, which despised them with a traditional contempt for politicians, reciprocated heartily by those gentlemen, who were impatient with the rigid self-conceit, the abrupt and undiplomatic manners, the complete lack of sympathy and candour among many members of the High Command. In all countries the politicians responsible for the civil organization of the State complained bitterly of the autocratic methods, the intellectual narrowness of the military command. In all countries the High Command — German, French, British — accused the politicians of “ betraying ” them and undermining the chances of victory.

Outwardly a political truce had been called in all countries. Party opposition had been silenced by Coalition Governments in which all parties were represented. There was what the French called “ L’Union Sacree ” before the enemy. Secretly, and with but a thin camouflage of decency, there were continual intrigues, conspiracies and plots among the various groups of political personalities, aided and abetted by people of high rank and social influence. In France and England intrigues were rife in the Cabinet and the War Office. Kitchener was beset by enemies in high places and low places, intent upon pulling him down by fair means or foul. The early failures of the war, the ghastly mistakes, the endless slaughter, called for victims. Every man in public life, and every woman of social influence, backed his or her fancy for the War Ministry, the Commander-in- Chief, the Chief of Staff, the Army, Corps, or Divisional Generals, and had a private personal allegiance to this man or that, or a bitter vindictive grudge against him. There were cabals for and against Kitchener and Robertson, French and Haig, Fisher and Jellicoe. Newspaper editors were invited to breakfast, luncheon, dinner, by Ministers of State and Generals of the High Command, in order to enlist their influence by subtle suggestions in leading articles, or personal paragraphs or open attacks, for or against the latest favourite or the latest scapegoat. Military critics, war correspondents home on leave, Parliamentary correspondents and lobby men, were favoured by these dangerous attentions. The Press became a hot-bed of favouritism and conspiracy. The Commanders in the Field, Joffre as well as French, Petain as well as Haig, endeavoured to counter-attack the conspirators by forming their own body-guard of political adherents, and directing the Press. Colonel Repington, Military Critic of The Times , busy as Warwick the King-maker, was invited to Sir John French’s Headquarters, and told all the secret history of the relations between the Commander-in-Chief and the Secretary of War. The war correspondent of The Daily Mail (at that time Mr. Valentine Williams, afterwards a Captain in the Irish Guards) was also a “ whiteheaded boy ” at the Headquarters of Sir John French. The Daily Mail worked up a sensation about the shortage of high- explosive shells, and attacked Lord Kitchener with a ferocity which for a while so angered the British public that they burned their favourite paper in public places — and then renewed their subscriptions.

Sir John French’s enemies were too strong for him after the ghastly failure of the Loos battle. Haig’s friends triumphed. Robertson succeeded in supreme command when Kitchener was drowned to the great relief of many patriots. Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice, on Sir John French’s staff until his fall, was raised to a higher place as Director of Military Operations on the Imperial General Staff, under Sir William Robertson. Then another set of intrigues went on, and never finished until the ending of the war. Asquith, hounded down by The Daily Mail , and betrayed by his own supporters, was succeeded by Lloyd George as Prime Minister of England. Then Repington, the correspondent, wonderfully confidential with Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in close liaison with Maurice, Director of Military Operations, conducted a longrange attack upon the new Prime Minister for his conduct of the war, and revealed the most jealously guarded secrets of the Supreme War Council. Haig in France, obstinate against the idea of a unified command which would place him under the authority of a French generalissimo, conscious that Lloyd George had little faith in his generalship after the enormous slaughter of the Somme battles, and the still more frightful losses in Flanders, had his attention diverted from the state of his front to the political danger behind him. With Petain in command of the French Armies, he was arranging plans which would relieve them both of subordination to a supreme command — a system of mutual defence which broke down utterly when the Germans attacked in March of 1918, and nearly won the war.

Officers home on leave, hearing some of those rumours of intrigue and private rancour, could not reconcile the spirit of it with the marvellous optimism of public men — those very people — in public print. I remember dining with Lord Burnham in London of war-time. I had come home on leave from the mud of Flanders where I had seen the tragic slaughter of our youth, the daily harvest of the wounded boys. I had no notion that it was more than a tete-d-tete with Lord Burnham at the Garrick Club, so coming up from the country and arriving late in town did not put on evening clothes. It was a humiliation to me (more hurtful to one’s vanity than moral delinquency) when I found a company of great people, including Sir William Robertson, Lord Charles Beresford (old “ Charlie B.,” as he was always called), and a variety of peers and politicians who were helping in divers ways and offices to “ win the war.” They were the people, anyhow, who pulled many wires of our Imperial activities, knew all the secrets of the war on land and sea, and held in their hands the decision of peace, if there ever could be peace, which then seemed doubtful. My ears were alert to catch any words of hope which might be a reprieve to thousands of boys — those I passed daily on the Albert-Bapaume road and other highways of abomination— who otherwise would be condemned to death. These people knew whether the Germans were weakening. To them came all the reports of spies, the “peace feelers” through neutral countries, the secret views of our Allies, beneath official proclamations, and triumphant propaganda. God ! Here I was in the company of those who held the keys of knowledge and the power of fate in this great drama of tragic history.

They talked freely. One to another they kept the conversation going without a pause. Only one man was silent, and that was Robertson. I made out that the Navy was not doing well; that the sinking of our ships by German submarines was more serious than the nation knew. (Not good news, I thought, for the boys at the Front !) Haig seemed to be hopeless. His battles were bloody but indecisive. It was n®nsense to make out that we were winning. It was mere folly to pretend that our losses were lighter than the enemy’s. The Germans still had immense reserves of man power. (So the optimism of our Chief of Intelligence did not cheer the company !) The French were troublesome again, letting us down deliberately, not working in close or loyal liaison, intriguing for supreme command. Our reserves were wearing pretty thin, in spite of the high percentage of recovery among lightly wounded men. The war might go on easily for another two years, or three, if the peoples did not break before then. ... I listened with a sinking heart. This was gloomy and dreadful talk, more gloomy than my own forebodings in miserable hours. Here was no hope for boys I knew who would be marching to-night to the line again, sitting again in the dirty ditches under infernal fire, praying with blasphemous oaths for some miracle that would bring them a reprieve and peace.

“ Well, gentlemen,” said Sir William Robertson at last, “ you are all very pessimistic ! All I can say is, if we’re a bit winded, the enemy is just as puffed. It’s a case of who holds on the longest.”

One man there had written to The Times that very day ridiculing the German “ peace ” offers, and proclaiming our certainty of victory in the end. He had no certainty of faith at dinner that night, but spoke despairingly. Through all the conversation there was a note of querulous irritation against the men in high command, hardly camouflaged even against Robertson, sitting there with them, not answering their criticism of failure and loss.

It was a rainy night, and dark in Garrick Street when I went out. A soldier homo on leave lurched by drunkenly and uttered a foul oath. Away in Flanders his pals would be listening to “ crumps ” and the whining of high velocities passing overhead, and the hiss of the gas shells. The stretcher-bearers would be busy with the usual casualties — arm wounds, stomach wounds, gassed, the ordinary muck of a night’s work in the Line. ... I had no hope to take out to them. Our leaders were just carrying on, hoping for the odd trick after years more of slaughter. “ Just a question,” said Robertson, “ of who holds out the longest.” That was the highest hope of our highest generalship . . . And Robertson was right.

Tragic history ! Is it worth while washing so much dirty linen in public as that exposed to the vulgar gaze in the memoirs of Colonel Repington, Captain Peter Wright, Dr. Dillon, and many others ? There is only one purpose to be served, and that was not, I think, Repington’s purpose. It is to give a frightful warning to the world that the leaders who were responsible for the destiny of civilization in that time of monstrous conflict were unsafe guides, uncertain of their own way, distrustful of each other. They were but little men playing a game of hazard with millions of lives. They had, with few exceptions, no vision greater than the safety of their own jobs, and the continuance of their own prestige. These same men, long in power after all their failures, their intrigues, and their errors, proved themselves incapable of leading the way to new heights which we must attain unless we resign ourselves to a deeper sinking into the abyss of ruin. There was no spiritual light in them, not much of nobility, no inspiration of genius. They groped and fumbled their way to victory which came by the valour of the youth that died, and then was worthless because of what they have done with it. They put out the best that was in them, but it was not good enough — not big enough, without virtue.

III

There never was a time in modern history when there was such a readiness for spiritual guidance among the peoples of Europe. Their guides led them into degradation. They appealed to the lowest instincts of human nature, and not to the highest. Deliberately they chose the lowest.

It began with the Peace Treaty. That document which for a little while had been the promise of a new Great Charter for the liberties of common folk in all nations was discovered to be nothing better than the intensification of old hatreds by new frontiers, and the aggrandizement of victorious Powers by the dismemberment of defeated Empires. Not deliberately, I think, but as a compromise of greedy interests in conflict, it violated in a hundred ways the principles proclaimed by President Wilson as the ideals of peace, and accepted for a little while by victors and vanquished. What became of the self-determination of peoples ? Austrians were put under Italian rule and Czech rule and Slovak rule, Germans under Poles, Turks under Greeks, Arabs under French and British. It was not a Peace for the rebuilding of civilization out of the ruins upon nobler lines, but a Peace of vengeance, and a Peace of greed, and a Peace of hypocrisy.

The old politicians who had played the game of politics before the war, gambling with the lives and souls of men for new territory, privileged markets, oil fields, native races, coaling stations, and Imperial prestige, grabbed the pool which the German gamblers had lost when their last bluff was called, and quarrelled over its distribution. The “ mandates ” obtained by Great Britain and France in Africa and Asia made the cynics chortle with laughter, and the politicians of the smaller Powers squirm with envy. Italy denounced them all as robbers because her share of loot was small. France was aggrieved with England because she had taken the lion’s share. But the statesmen of Europe, dividing the world afresh, and reconciling their spoils with the high words of justice and retribution, imagined in their ignorance of world conditions after a war of exhaustion that what they took they could hold, and that out of the ruin of their enemies they could gain great wealth. They did not understand then, nor after three years do they now understand, that not only all their own wealth was spent in four and a half years of destruction, but that all the former wealth of Europe, in all nations engaged in the conflict, had disappeared in shell fire and in blood.

Not to them was it revealed that the paper money which circulated in European countries was but a reminder of enormous debt, unredeemed and unredeemable, and a promissory note on the future industry of peoples. No single statesmen of the old regime helping to draw up the Treaty of Versailles had intelligence enough to see, or honesty enough to admit, that after the scourge that had passed over Europe, killing the flower of its youth, its young tillers of the soil, its labourers, only mutual helpfulness between one nation and another, former friends and enemies, could bring a chance of recovery and economic health. The complete ruin of Austria, condemned to death by the Peace Treaty, did but place a pauper population upon the books of the “ Reparations Committee.” It was just a hospital of starving children, and a casual ward of adult unemployed, unable to buy from us or anyone, unable to work for themselves or us (because they could not buy the raw material of industry), just lapsing into decay and death, whose corruption would spread to surrounding countries.

So little did the politicians know of economic laws in modern commerce, that they did not foresee the loss to their own trades in the closing of enemy markets, nor the futility of their own industry if there were no customers to buy their products. They did not even guess that by enlarging their Imperial territory, in “ mandates ” over races who disliked them, they were relying upon armies that could not be raised (unless we raised the dead), and wasting more millions of borrowed money in new administration, when their Imperial Treasury was empty except of unpaid debts, and the citizens of Empire were already in revolt against the tax-collectors.

Yet we must be fair to the leaders of the old tradition. Looking at the Treaty of Versailles upon the plane of thought no higher than that of the statesmen who framed it — that is, as a document carving up Europe according to the old ethics of victors dealing with vanquished and demanding retribution and reparation — it is difficult to see, except in minor details of unnecessary injustice, how a better Peace could have been made. The convulsion of Europe had been so great, the conflict so widespread, that the structure of human society everywhere had been immensely upheaved, and no group of politicians thinking upon the old lines of thought, each trying to make the best bargain for his own nation or Empire, and to secure immediate advantage without much thought of the future or the commonwealth of Europe, could reconcile all conflicting interests, rearrange frontiers on reasonable lines, and safeguard the economic life of all peoples. Such an ideal arrangement was indeed impossible of achievement, owing to the geographical confusion of races and nationalities. Therefore all criticism of the Peace Treaty is futile, if it is conducted on the basis of the old philosophy of international relations in Europe with its balance of power, its rival groups, and the claim of the victor to exact the price of war from the vanquished.

The hope which for a little while leapt up in the hearts of many people was for a Treaty which would give a new call to humanity and, leading it clear away from its old Jungle

Law, would break down the old frontiers, demobilize armed force everywhere, and unite the democracies of Europe in the common interests of labour, liberty, and peace. Whether the peoples of Europe could have risen to such an ideal at that time is uncertain. The mere thought of “ letting off ” Germany would have aroused fury among the Chauvinists in France, England, and the United States. It is impossible to say with any sure evidence whether the people of Europe would have been capable of rising to a height of idealism which, as we now see, would have been also good business on the most materialistic lines, as true idealism is always good business according to the old adage that honesty is the best policy, and the Christian precept, “ Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

A mutual cancellation of our debts by a stroke of the pen in the Treaty would have been a supreme act of faith in the future of humanity which would have lighted the soul of the world. Yet in a niggling way, by the sheer impossibility of paying even the interest on those debts, or of extracting reparation out of the ruin of Austria and getting a healthy interchange of commerce, we are bound to come to that in the long run, without any light of splendid renunciation in the soul of the world, but only lamentation and recrimination.

The rapid demobilization of armies in France as well as in Germany would have been another act of faith, helpful and glorious to the life of Europe. Militarism would have been dethroned, so that the purpose proclaimed by us in the war would have been fulfilled. In a practical way it would have saved France more than she will ever get from Germany, and helped her to reconstruct more rapidly the devastated districts which are still in ruins.

A spiritual appeal to the German people, not based on threats of force, but calling with the voice of one people to another across the fields of dead, might have been answered by the offer of a whole nation to repair the damage they had done, to atone by immense self-sacrifice and service, because of the liberation of their spirit from hatred and from bondage to evil ideas in a new era of fellowship after the agony of universal war. On the plane of realism it would have been better business, for the Allies would have* gained more by consent than they have gained by force, and the impulse to vengeance, burning and smouldering in the heart of Germany now, after so many threats and so much hatred, might not have existed, but might have been melted away in the enthusiasm of the new-found movement of humanity.

IV

Such idealism was impossible without great leadership, a spiritual leader so high in virtue, so on fire with human charity, so clear and shining in vision that the people of Europe would have been caught up and carried on by his call to the New World. If we had had such a man, I believe firmly in my soul that this would have happened. For at that time, immediately before the Armistice, and for a little while afterwards, there was a mass emotion in Europe after the long agony of the years which would have risen to any great call. Europe was stricken, shell-shocked, hysterical. And it is by the emotion of peoples that great leaders are able to fulfil their aspirations. In millions of homes families were mourning their dead, aghast at the cruelty of life, hopeless except for a vague hope of spiritual revival. The women of the world had wept until they had no more tears to weep. The fighting men, no longer filled with blood-lust, if any of them ever were for more than the minutes of killing and terror, sick of the stench of death, contemptuous of the honours and glories of their job, cynical of civilization, looking forward to some new scheme of life which would prevent this kind of thing from happening ever again, were in a mood to abandon all the old fetishes of thought which caused this conflict, and to advance to a greater victory by which the beauty and joy of life could be recaptured. But we had no leaders to take advantage of that enormous stirring of thought and feeling among the people of the stricken nations so that they might have been lifted out of the old ruts. Alas ! alas !