Britain and the war

Front matter

ANDRE CHEVRILLON

WITH A PREFACE BY

RUDYARD KIPLING

Preface

This book, by my friend, Andre Chevrillon, tells how England met and is taking the strain of the war.

It is, of course, difficult for outsiders to comprehend the organically intimate relation which has grown up between France and England during the last two years. Necessity, at first, and later the habit of common effort, brought about this fusion till, to-day, mutual love and trust are so taken for granted that we have almost ceased to think about them. But as between man and wife, so between the nations whom this war has joined together, the mystery and the wonder of the union remains unsubdued. Each asks himself " What in essence is this other soul to whose hands I entrust my life and honour through all chances ? What springs move it ? What Gods possess it ? Above all, to

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what power does it refer when it needs that help which no mortal can give ? " Monsieur Chevrillon answers these questions, with the knowledge of the psychologist and the profound sympathy of one long acquainted with our Hves, our history, and the expression, formal or idiomatic, of our thoughts.

If all his conclusions are not flattering to our self-esteem, the fault is not with him.

He draws an accurate picture of a people almost as aggressively educated and organised for extravagant peace as were the Germans for the extravagances of war— blind and deaf to visible menace and reiterated warning, and still further weakened by German agency which had, of set design, exploited and infected as much as it could among Enghsh journalism, finance, and politics to confuse, delay and disorganise counsel and action. We realise now that the enemy before the war laboured to some purpose in the fruitful soil of our national weaknesses and prejudices. How far they went, who were their dupes and who their accomplices, will be passed upon later, but, two years ago, England saw very little and imagined less of these

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things. Admitting it would have been impossible for any civilisation, at that time, to have conceived the German as he has now revealed himself, we must recall that far the larger section of English intellectual leadership and political opinion had, for many years, given itself with passion to a world of strictly insular outlook which not only disregarded, but took for its doctrine and its shibboleth to deny, the very possibility of war. If facts did not conform to their view, so much the worse for the facts and for those who reported them. As M. Chevrillon says with illuminating insight of that vanished England, it was a land of " Governments too dependent upon popular opinion not to follow instead of leading it ; of politicians too concerned for popular reforms — their sole reason for existence — to recognise the most pressing actualities ; of a democracy too wrapped up in its dreams, passions, and party strife to see the coming of its aggressor."

To such a community an instant choice between peace and war was presented out of a hohday sky, at the sword's point,

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over the body of Belgium. England, as a whole, knew nothing of the situation which Germany had scientifically prepared for her undoing. One might say that outside her Navy she possessed relatively little more than certain ancestral instincts of right and wrong — ^that implanted conscience which, as M. Chevrillon says, will save her. Germany, he explains, had a double reason for counting on the inaction of the land she regarded as her future prey. She believed that her methodical propaganda in commercial, labour and dissenting circles would have enfeebled England's moral strength to her ends. Nor did it enter her mind that a people who had so clearly willed not to arm themselves for war would arm for duty's sake. Here, it seems to me, M. Chevrillon omits a third point which has always been a factor in Germany's reckoning— England's secular dependence upon the Navy, and her equally ancient habit of regarding it as her main contribution to all emergencies. However this may be, the incredible, from the German point of view, happened. England went to war, literally and coldly, on a point

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of conscience. She could not have done otherwise.

Some day we may learn with what appallingly insignificant material backing, her land forces were committed to the work. M. Chevrillon traces our initial unpreparedness in this respect. The sea-power that unites and upholds, comes less within his study, even as the guardian fleets themselves are veiled from men's sight. He deals step by step with the gradual awakening of a people who were at first no more than resolute for war as the sole means to adjust intolerable wrong. He shows how, later, when they had seen all known standards of evil-doing overtopped by a power that stood outside humanity — when, as he says, they had " recommenced to believe in the Devil " — ^they addressed themselves to its overthrow in much the same sombre temper as a man self-convinced of sin brings all body, soul and mind to his struggle for redemption. And that view of our attitude is just if, as he argues throughout, England has since her origin been rather a natural growth than any designed product xii PREFACE

of conscious thought on the part of a few clever individuals. Her people have accepted little from without, and have instinctively cut down that little to the barest needs of any situation which imposed itself. Spiritually as well as intellectually and physically, England has been slow to take that thought which is supposed to add a cubit to the national stature. What came to her of power came as growth to a tree —unsystematically, but visibly accommodated to the experience of wind and weather, cumbered with many excrescences, yet in every fibre alive and the home of free and variegated lives.

Knowledge, pure intelligence and the like, England in her heart has never reckoned among her first values. Her achievements along these lines have placed her in the forefront of spiritual civilisation, yet to all appearance, and possibly in all truth, this has been an accident as huge and as puzzling to the world without as the accretion of her inexplicable Empire.

On v\^hat then does our national structure rest, since it obviously lacks reason

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and logic as those are understood elsewhere ? M. Chevrillon answers, upon sheer character and morals — adherence to an elementary standard of right and wrong, judged for himself by the individual concerned. In his own words : " Le principe, d'origine politique et protestante, c'est que I'Anglais, parce qu'il a conquis par un effort seculaire ses libertes sur le pouvoir central, et parce qu'il est responsable envers Dieu de tous ses actes, gouverne lui-meme sa personne et sa vie."

To this point he returns again and again as the ultimate secret of England for good or evil. Out of this spirit, jealous of control and stubborn of belief, were born those multitudes who went silently to arms under pressure of their own convictions in the first year of the war. They had few aids to enthusiasm, and of stage-management on the part of the State there was none. The conception of a State omnipotent for war did not exist. Even the recruiting appeals of the posters, rightly examined, are, for the most part, in the nature of reproaches to the defaulter or hints of the punishment his conscience will xiv PREFACE

presently deal out to him if he does not answer the summons. The State from the continental point of view hardly comes into the picture until the people's sense of right and wrong tardily persuades it that it would be but justice to enact conscription.

Monsieur Chevrillon's analysis of the national mind— especially the chapters on " The Appeal to Conscience "—is nearer the root of the matter than anything that has yet been written by any Englishman. One may say that he lays too much stress on the puritan and religious side of it — those very qualities whose defects have been so subtly used by the enemy, and in time past have laid us open to the charge of hypocrisy. Yet, when the blow fell, the people as a whole acted on those qualities rather than any intellectual promptings. Immemorially trained to refer all thought and deed to certain standards of right and wrong which, they held, lay equally on all men, they had to deal with an enemy for whom right and wrong do not exist except as the State decides. Small wonder that, at first, they realised neither themselves nor that enemy.

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France, by experience burned into her enduring soul, knew, remembered, and in great part stood organised against possibilities. England grew to the needs of the case, inarticulate as always, and, once again, with the defects of her qualities well to the front. Inarticulate she was, since the ornate expression of sentiment has never been practised by any class ; and the same spiritual motive which leads a man to enlistment as though it were a religious conversion, makes his nation slower to insist on what it has done than what is left undone. This attitude is misleading ; but crisis cannot change character. If we are good shopkeepers, we have always been bad window-dressers. So the carefully circulated legend, first that England could give no help to her Allies, and secondly, that she was giving as little as she could, must be allowed to die out in slaughter and disillusionment.

For obvious reasons, the author does not deal except in general terms with England's war- work ; but shows us with an insight and affection few others possess the very pulse of the machine— the spirit that

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created the effort. His analysis is brought up to the end of 1915 only. Not a little blood has flowed since that date and the land's temper whose birth and growth he traces has set and hardened. We know now that the issues involved will not be served by any such " victories " as closed any war of the past ; that we, with our Allies, have to destroy not only a visible world of evil but the whole unspeakable system of thought that begot and engineers it. This we have learned as we have learned everything else in our history, by direct experience, each man for himself, often in the teeth of preconceived opinion. Our knowledge is being put into practice with the weight of the whole people behind it, and none can foretell how far the momentum of that mass will drive. M. Chevrillon hints that had the enemy done other than he has done, observed, for instance, some measure of decency in his dealings or thrown even a gloss of words over them, England might have put out less than her full strength, and eventually, perhaps, have come to some accommodation with him. Myself, I think this would only have slowed

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the war a little ; but that question has been settled for us by the enemy's choice of methods, so that our present temper bears as little relation to the temper in which we entered the war as it will bear to the temper in which we shall close our account.

It will be profoundly interesting to read, when it comes to be written, M. Chevrillon's record and judgment of this rebirth.

RuDYARD Kipling.

Contents

PAQB

Introduction i

I. Before the war — Politics of the Radical Party — ^Atten-

Introduction

Of all the circumstances of the war in which the destiny of the chief nations of the world, and no doubt of humanity itself, is at stake, the most astonishing, perhaps, to posterity, will be the failure of all the nations which Germany intended to attack, to foresee the event. That Europe, on the eve and during the early stages of the French Revolution, did not foresee the eruption which for the space of twenty years submerged her in its fiery flood, is not difficult to understand : that revolution was an incalculable cataclysm, bringing in its train an infinite series of inevitable results that sprang from no concerted plan. But for the lightning attack which was to cast the continent and then the world at her feet, Germany had long been preparing her plans, her armies and weapons, and this without any concealment. Publicists, leaders of naval and colonial leagues, military writers, professors, and even theologians proclaimed or justified her ambition, demonstrating the right of war and of force, and investigating ways and means. Immediately after the Agadir affair the newspapers, which only say what the

Government desires, began to utter threats; and for years past it has been quite clear that they have been occupied in stirring up against the Triple Entente, and especially against England, hatred and contempt. Towards Russia on the question of the small Slavonic nations, towards France in the matter of Morocco, Austro-German policy has been aggressive. Each time the attempt was made to win a position or to inflict an affront merely by the threat of the sword, and the attempt was successful. In the Reichstag the leaders of three great parties gave violent expression to their hostility towards England, and the Crown Prince had been seen to attend the sitting in order to applaud them publicly. Not only did Germany reject sarcastically every proposal of disarmament, but to the burdens of a military establishment already formidable and superior to that of France, and of a navy quite useless if it were not intended one day to defy the maritime power of England, she added fresh and mighty armaments. That so much force and will to conquer should have been visibly accumulated against the two great nations of the West, and that, meanwhile, the one should have remained absorbed in party quarrels springing from metaphysical disputes (one of our ministers went, a few years ago, to the very root of the discussion, when he declared in a public speech "that miracles do not exist"); that the other, led by idealists blind to reality and to the signs of the outer world, should have concentrated all thoughts and efforts on a programme of constitutional reforms and social legislation

INTRODUCTION 3

which the party in power hoped to finance at the expense of the mihtary resources of the country — in a word, that the first flash of the rising storm should have illuminated a France absorbed in the Caillaux trial, and an England on the eve of the civil war towards which she was being led by her pacifists, these are facts which future generations will probably think scarcely credible.

France, at least, having once had experience of the danger, retained some idea of it. She possessed a weapon of defence which she kept in fairly good order in accordance with her traditions and administrative routine, without making it the main object of her efforts and thoughts. She had even, in order to set a good example, begun to diminish at the same time its power and its expense. But, in the face of the last sudden and decisive increase of the German army she had been forced to return (every one knows how reluctantly, and what an interminable discussion there was about it) to the Three Years' Service. Against the sudden attack by which the Germans hoped to establish themselves opposite her coast, and to point a dagger at her heart, England had made no preparations. Not envying or hating any one, she had no suspicion of the hatred and envy of Germany. It seemed to her incredible that a neighbouring people, whom she thought she knew, and who appeared very similar to herself, could take it into its head, in the twentieth century, to draw the political map of the world afresh. The division of the world was a settled matter : all that remained was for each nation to organise her share of the world for the reign of justice, happiness and enhghtenment. The Radical Government existed only to maintain order and peace by democratic methods; that was the primary and essential end of its being. Mr. Asquith's cabinet was a continuation of that of Sir Henry Campbell - Bannerman, which sprang from the reaction against the Boer War. So opposed were the Radicals to Imperialist and Militarist ideals that they were called "Little Englanders." They began by restoring to the Boers almost everything which the war had taken from them : in a word, the chief power in South Africa. Towards Germany, which kept on increasing her navy and whose alarms and excursions periodically filled Europe with trepidation, this party, the party in power, made repeated advances. The Entente was displeasing to the Germans : it endeavoured to reduce the meaning and the import of the Entente. Several times over, its leaders, who formed the Government, attempted to disarm Germany morally by beginning to disarm England materially. They believed for a long time that to propose a Hague Conference was an efficient reply to each hostile movement. The only thing, according to these pacifists, was to convert Germany to pacifism. It is the very irony of fate that humanitarians, fervent believers in democracy, men like Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George and Sir Edward Grey, of whom it is as certain as of Jaures that they stood specially for the lofty ideals of peace and social progress, should have found themselves all at once burdened with

INTRODUCTION 5

the conduct of the most terrible war in history; that the men of the budget of 1910, the champions of the people against the Lords, the authors of a legislation tending towards socialism, the defenders of Free Trade, the opponents of ImperiaHsm should now be busy extracting from their country the greatest powers possible for destruction, blockading and starving Germany, and, in a word, that it should now be the special function of a Lloyd George to manufacture man-slaughtering machines. And it is another irony that sixty-five million Germans should be firmly convinced that these pure idealists were slyly wishing and preparing for war, and that a Sir Edward Grey was a gaunt Mephistopheles inciting to murder, in the service of a grabbing England who dreamt only of defending her trade. In the face of such distortions of the real it seems as though nations were led by dreams; and when it is recognised how blind to the real were both our rationalists and those of England, one cannot but wonder whether rationalism itself is not also a kind of dream. This, perhaps, is the most fundamental lesson of the war. Once again, it reveals what all history teaches ; the omnipotence of the irrational, the incalculable forces which lie latent whilst the daily order, the usual peacefulness of things seems established for ever, but whose sudden awakening, whose terrific explosion, changes for a new period the face of the world. Because Germany has long been pregnant with the war, because morally and mechanically she has prepared for it, a study bearing the title Germany and the War would be the history of a deUberate will, aiming at realisation, and previous, therefore, to the war. It would be necessary, in order to write it, to go far beyond the present event, to go back to 1813 and 1806, perhaps even to the first kings and to the very origins of Prussia ; and by the time the beginning of the war would be reached, the essential would have been told.

Because on the contrary England did not want war, because it was forced on her, a study of England and the war is mainly the history of the reactions of this people to the accomplished fact. No doubt it is necessary to glance at previous history, but what we then have to note is what is lacking : previous history consists of negatives : England did not foresee . . . England was not anxious . . . England did not prepare. . . . Positive history only begins at the end of July 1914. Then does this country awake to the danger, then does she discover her enemy, and gradually she changes her habits, she gathers herself together, she adapts herself to the new circumstances and she arms.

Another difference between these two studies would correspond to the essential psychological differences between the two nations. In order to understand the German meaning of the war books alone are almost sufficient. Everything was worked out, everything was written down beforehand : Treitschke, Bernhardi, Von der Goltz, the publications of the Pan- Germans, the manual of the customs of war, state the reasons, the object, the methods. The whole idea is there, defined in

INTRODUCTION 7

every detail, from the enthusiastic memories of the Holy Roman Empire down to the scheme of a future European Federation under the hegemony of Germany, from the argument of the superiority of race and its mystic influence down to the plan of attack with its flanking movement through western Flanders, and its pivot in Lorraine, from the thesis which declares morality and treaties subordinate to the absolute power of the State, to that which makes " f rightfulness " a legitimate military principle. The reason is that, as we have long known, in Germany everything first exists theoretically; the ideal is first set up clear and complete, directing deductively the patient will which then works to force, bit by bit, the real into the required form. Hence the German scorn for the real which — even when it is a question of " colonising " part of France and first " emptying " it — even when it is a question of cutting up and then piecing Europe together again like a mere Congo State, and finally of upsetting the British Empire — ^they affect to regard with scorn, as mere matter, which can be compelled to assume the preconceived shape. However, it is not always sufficient merely to accumulate force in order to manipulate objects of such magnitude : it may be important first of all to have formed an accurate estimate of them. The German idea, inflamed with pride and passion, hides reality from sight and blots it out : we now know the England which the German professors have invented in the place of the real England. And we have heard also of the animal which one of them once evolved out of his own inner consciousness. The German metaphysical camel has now revealed itself as a calamity for the whole world. It seems likely this time to be one for Germany too.

No intellectual process could be more totally opposed to this than the one which is natural to Germany's English cousins. In England thought works on empirical and inductive lines : reality engenders and controls the ideal; the latter is not the theoretic simplification of the former, often distorting it out of all resemblance under the pretence of abstracting its essential nature and making it clearer. Thought repeats reality bit by bit, with every feature of its visible and living nature, and with all its contingent and complex diversity. And similarly the English will is, above all, a power of adaptation to this reality : an adaptation which takes place only by degrees, which is modest because patient, often discontinuous, corrected gradually under the continual teaching of circumstances, and which is persistently pursued through all obstacles and in spite of all disappointments. This is the history of England's present effort, and it is the whole history of this nation, of its growth, of its extension over the planet, of its successes, of its miraculous Empire, which the Germans affect to despise as incoherent, decaying, incapable of survival, because so great a success has sprung from a principle which is the very opposite of their own, not from a central and creative a priori idea, but, according to them, from accident, from luck — because this Empire has been built no one knows

INTRODUCTION 9

exactly how, piecemeal, without any systematic design, irrationally, so they say, but in reality in accordance with the process of life itself.

A condition of this process is time, and this, through good luck which is not altogether unconnected with their insular position, has never failed the English, not less in this war than in other critical moments of their history; but this time they really counted on it too much. Natural adaptation to environment is slow and, moreover, fragmentary; it stops, it starts again : now one organ then another is adjusted; new armies may spring up, almost as if by magic, before factories have been organised for the production of arms and munitions. Some invisible psychological forces may accelerate the effort, others may retard it. Thus the effort and the working of the spirit which creates it cannot be studied methodically, like the productions of German thought and will : there is no theory to be examined, no principle to be grasped and then followed out in its necessary and mutually connected developments. Here it is a question of observing the answer of a certain organism to the external danger which threatens it. In order to understand and explain it nothing more is required than to proceed in the simple English fashion, by observation and narration, noting actions and reactions, following many roads, but first referring to the past — a very recent past — in order to see the necessity arise and the first efforts at adaptation. Almost at once, in the external phenomena as in the most hidden causes, a remarkable element is noticeable, which can be isolated but scarcely defined, and which colours with a quite peculiar tint all the threads of this history — ^that is, as it were, a certain universal and entirely spiritual characteristic which seems to be the very essence of England. Such a study leads one into the deeper psychology of a nation. It is the special feature of this war that the nations engaged in it — ^nations which, viewed superficially, seem to belong to the same civilisation — reveal as never before, their secret and absolute differences.

February 1916,

In London, in June 1915, in those streets which are as busy as ever, where the only sign of war is the number of men in khaki, it seemed as if some moments of the past were rising once more : Mafeking night, the Coronation of Edward VII, his funeral, the agitations for and against the House of Lords, for and against Mr. Lloyd George's famous budget. How could one fail to think of it? Under such similar appearances I knew that life had been revolutionised, all its rhythms, all its landmarks and tendencies altered by one engrossing idea, by an effort which was beginning to draw into itself all the forces of the country. One's mind was ever looking backward, seeking the mistakes, the neglected signs, and wondering how the surprise had come about.

At Westminster, on the Embankment, along which I often passed, the picturesque uproar of bands, picture posters and recruiting speeches reminded me forcibly of the merry din of trumpets, bills and election harangues in 1910. The same spirit was revealed in both — a naive, boyish, energetic spirit, in love with bright and glaring colours, but also with sentiment and morality — a spirit so very serious in its depths. At that period, this nation, whose movements are ever behind those of the rest of the world, and which adapts itself to outer changes only under the pressure of events (it still reckons by ounces, inches and farthings), this great nation was passing, after 1832, after 1867 and 1884, through a new stage of its revolution. With the Boer War the national mind had completed one of its long periodical oscillations. From the dream of Imperialism which Kipling had sung, together with the strength, the conscience and the will power of England, the nation was returning to an ideal of justice and reason : justice and reason that stand not for one nation alone, but for all mankind. Against the fictions, prejudices, traditions, illogicalities by which England strives to maintain her ancient form and the ruling class to perpetuate its ascendancy, new thinkers, poets, playwrights and novelists, a Wells, a Shaw, a Chesterton, a Galsworthy, were directing their sarcastic challenges, tearing off all the veils, urging and compelling their countrymen to look through and beyond the old English conventions at the face of truth, of all truths, and especially at the hidden and seamy side of society and life from which they strive, both by instinct and systematically, to turn away their eyes.

This general spiritual movement was having an effect on practical affairs, inspiring a prolonged effort in the direction of political and social reform. A new system of taxation had been introduced, the purpose of which was not only to put the burden on acquired wealth, but to deprive the rich of the monopoly of a land which they keep almost empty, and to re-people the country. The power of the Lords was restricted, they were reduced to the state of supernumeraries, Hke so many of the coronation dignitaries who remain but as memories of a romantic past : one might almost say that a single-chamber government was established. Payment of members, abolition of the plural vote, which favours the wealthy, abolition of the privileges of the Anglican Church in Wales, Home Rule for Ireland, and then extension of the same principle to other parts of the kingdom (there was even a talk of going back to the Heptarchy), social legislation, old age pensions, compulsory insurance, reduction of the number of public houses, purchase and division of the land by the State in order to encourage small proprietors — such are the main items of the programme the discussion of which absorbed the attention of the country, and which the governments, idealist and pacifist in their tendency, of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Mr. Asquith had begun to put into practice.