Education by violence; essays on the war and the future

Front matter

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Introduction

In the fat, green days before 1914, a book was made in a manner that had become almost conventional. You lived, you studied, you thought, and then retired, like an expectant mother, to some mental solitude, where the travail in due and decorous order was ended, and the book came forth complete. But in this book, conceived in war time and finished in the early days of peace, I have been subject to a different ordering. Life burned intensely in 1918. The battle-front, the tumultuous humanity behind the lines, Great Britain and France at war, where I was a humble observer, flung imperious summons. Ideas, hopefully interpretative of the surging forces loose everywhere, shot into the mind, sometimes in a trench, sometimes in a munitions factory, on a steamer deck, or at midnight in Piccadilly, and would wait only for the quiet of an Oxford garden, or the peace of a room high hung in Kensington above a park cheery with thrushes, to be worked out as far as the uncertainties of the time would permit.

As I wrote, then and later, I felt there was only vii viii INTRODUCTION

one question : What will come afterward ? — and that reflections upon race and education and working women and fighting men were all, like the game of Twenty Questions, aimed at one answer. The next generation may find that answer. I see only a little further now that the war is over, than in April of 1918, when Hardy's President of the Immortals seemed about to play his own game with our ideals and our little strengths behind them. The ideas begin to fall together ; one sees the connecting links and I have written in many of them in brief transitional and prefatory sections ; but these essays are still most valuable, if valuable at all, as historical evidence of how the war and its aftermath affected one American mind. And hence I have left them much as they were first conceived : some with the memory of last night's bombing behind the words, or the intense sense of racial contrast felt by an alien who finds himself among comrades and friends ; others written in the dawn of peace and looking forward to a future full of urgency and promise and doubt. And though only one bears that title all — the first four on international relationships, the fifth on morale, the sixth and seventh on education, the eighth on reconstruction, and the ninth on war's ending — all, and the brief prefatory essays that precede them, present the fruits of education by violence.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to acknowledge the kindness of the editors of Harper's Magazine for permission to reprint " Transport 106," Education by Violence, and Spes Unica ; The Century Magazine for Blood and Water, Innocents Abroad, and When Johnny Comes Marching Home; The Atlantic Monthly for The Irish Mind; and The Yale Review for Tanks and War's Ending.

Contents

PAGE

Introduction vii

Acknowledgments ix

II On The English

What I most envy in the Englishman is his freedom of mind. He is so sure of his loyalties, and his prejudices, and his essential relations with the island he lives in ; he is so conscious of race that he dares to be individual. His character is like his climate : it has no angles in it. Looking into his mind is like gazing from Piccadilly Circus down Regent Street and across the hazy park to hazier Parliament towers. It is all blended and misted into smoothness, with a good solidity behind.

What he seems most to envy in us is the definiteness of our minds, which, like our atmosphere, are sharp and clear. He finds them naive and invigorating; naive because so many things — changes, for example in dwelling place, or political philosophy, or business systems, or religion — seem easy to us ; invigorating because in our clearer air we are constantly looking ahead, to uplifts, or reforms, or efficiencies.

When his racial consciousness encounters ours there is often a collision. That is because we travel on the same line, but with different speeds and occasionally in opposite directions. We are both blessed and handicapped b} r fundamentally understanding each other. Words which in the

SO EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE

mouth of an Italian would not trouble him because they would be unheeded, in my mouth rouse him to anger. Mannerisms which would amuse me in a Frenchman, irritate me sadly if he uses them. Why should an Englishman be so affected in accent (I say), being after all Anglo-Saxon? Why should an American (he says) differ with me in opinion, being fundamentally English? And so we quarrel easily like two dogs tied to a single rope. The best international friendships are between English and Americans, and also the liveliest (though not the deepest) international prejudices.

We should therefore send as many Americans as possible to England in the years following the war, and bring as many English as possible here. It is an invaluable experience for us to see what manner of men we would have been like if we had not broken loose our civilization from its ancient moorings. An American is inclined to take stock after such an experience. He feels a little flimsy, a little detached, like a commercial traveler stepping from a train into a long-established home. And it will be good for the English to feel by contact how readily the mind we share in common can slough off fat and ancient prejudices, and what happens to it when set free.

Of course we mixed before the war. But that was different. We Americans were self-sufficient then ; we went abroad to see, not to mix with, our ancestral world. Germany was an irritant ; France was pleasure ; Belgium a triviality ; England a deep satisfaction mingled with surprise at

ON THE ENGLISH 31

the lack of geniality among its inhabitants. We never thought of ourselves in relation to a world state ; we might well have dropped down from Mars with return tickets in our pockets. And as for the English, they were still thinking of all the English-speaking world as colonials — clever, rich, energetic — but still colonials. As late as 1914 we were still felt to be colonials who must necessarily think as England thought. We seemed therefore mere recreants when we hesitated before entering the war.

It is all changed now. The American has taken up the white man's burden of learning to live with other white men. He is no longer safe from international complications, even in Kansas. And the Englishman, in the hour when his fine traits of race have turned into steel and met the test, has suddenly dropped his barriers, put on humility, and asked to be friends.

" Why do these British officers say, ' Ah real-ly ' and ' Sorry,' and ' Herry on?' " asked two Arkansas doughboys in St. Valery one day. " Can't they talk English! "

" How can you Americans have central heating," murmured the apple-cheeked daughter of an Oxford professor, " when you know it's bad for the health? "

Of such inessentials, leading to effrontery on the one side and superciliousness on the other, is our international prejudice made up. And therefore, if we learn to respect racial differences, ours will be a great friendship; for our quarrels have been the quarrels of relatives and friends.

I have heard that " blood is thicker than water," and that the British are our " cousins " until I am sick of these platitudes. Let me try to give some better reasons for the faith within us, that the compact now formed among English-speaking peoples is durable and may solve even harder problems than " winning the war." But first I must sketch in, no matter how hastily, the traits of contemporary Great Britain, a nation strangely altered.

It was in the midst of the confusion of an air raid that I began my observations. Indeed, I did not know I was in dark London on that night in 1918 until through the windows of my train I saw waving search-lights and stepped into a clatter of invisible crowds and the confusing rumble of unseen vehicles. An hour later the signal-guns boomed. There was a rush of giggling maids past my hotel door, — one was to die the night after, — and the voice of the hall porter was heard ordering every one below. I followed to a crypt below the basement, the farther end of which was open to the street. A fainting woman was carried past me;

behind her were little toddlers, sleepy-eyed, with coats over their undershirts ; cockneys from the near-by slums ; men and women in evening dress ; officers — a curious assemblage. Last, as the barrage fire began to rattle above, came a solemn procession of railway guards from the station, each with his lantern. One tipped over a biscuit-box and offered me an end. " Sit down, sir," he said. We sat together and talked of England. " Thank God the Americans have come ! " he said. " The war is demoralizing England. The labor unions are selfish. The people are losing sight of everything great behind. Their courage is only self-preservation."

Two shaky cockneys with bleared eyes edged up beside to listen. A bomb fell, shaking our refuge with sullen tremors ; the barrage redoubled.

" Best throw up the sponge, Ah say," one of the cockneys muttered; the twist-back beside him agreed. My guard turned upon them angrily.

" That's you and your kind ! I say Germany ' 11 'ave to be punished for her sins. We'll see this through." The crowd was with him. On the steps a group of girls and workmen began to sing; bugles sounded the " all clear." Quietly we separated.

Thus I first met England as she was, pessimistic, self-critical, determined. Neither hope deferred nor reverses could change this strong determination. It was a race trait, displayed in France and Flanders and behind every action at home, the product of long inheritance, doubly intensified by four years of conflict.

This is the first, and just now the most important quality of that British character which in better or in worse we must learn to know more sympathetically than we as a nation have known any race outside our borders. We shall not wholly love it; most probably we shall admire it; we must understand its dominant qualities as they have been hardened or altered by war. But of that curious, dogged determination that makes the puny, undersized East-Londoner a better soldier for the defensive than either the Australian or the Canadian, the American desires merely to be reassured. It is the new humility of the British that most needs explanation.

We have, for example, grossly misunderstood the part that Great Britain has played in this war. We have taken the Englishman in particular at his own published valuation. Now, the Englishman, although he has a reputation for selfsuperiority, is actually diffident, self-critical, and obstinate in national self-depreciation. He has filled his papers and our own for four years with complaints of his inefficiency and mistakes. He has written far more of the humorous experiences of his " Tommies " than of the remarkable organization of the First Expeditionary Army or the astounding transformation of central Great Britain into a workshop of military supplies, where for hours in the train one never lost sight of the machinery of war. He has told us far more of the asinine incapacity of his leaders than of the right-about march of England from the easy ways of commerce or leisure, accomplished, one supposes, under these very men. The British have not boasted, they are certainly not boasting now ; but with a kind of shamefaced grumble, " we've been grousing too much," they are willing as never before to be judged.

The truth is that the Englishman has always been fiercely intolerant of the faults of his countrymen, and therefore, by natural continuation, on the defensive against nations without. Nor can one deny a belief in racial superiority. It is all this that made him the reserved and supercilious person who became the "type " Britisher for us in America. The trait was preferable to German self-assertion, but it was not lovable. And now it has changed. To see the " haughty Englishman " as he was, you must go to Ireland, where special and most unfortunate circumstances still automatically develop all that is most unhappy in the British breed. At home it is a different story. For weeks, to cite a trivial instance, I looked for the well-known figure who refuses to speak except under compulsion, and found instead quiet men in railway carriages who made excuse of the least incident of travel to ask for American impressions, and would give gladly in exchange from their years of bitter experience. At last I met him, churlish, silent, cold, as he sat beside me each morning in the breakfast-room — only to learn that he was deaf, stone-deaf !

Or, for a better example, General Sir Archibald Murray, late commander of the Palestinian army, took me through Aldershot, that marvelous organization where every detail, whether in the bombing school, the gas school, cavalry, or infantry, is devised to train muscle and mind together, an educational establishment of the first order, whether for war or peace.

" If we could put all England through such training after the war," he said, " the English workman could finish his task in six hours a day and have time to live and be happy and be a man. But now when we do send them through, they kill them."

I saw his point, and realized, too, the essential humility of the remark. England was aware of its neglects and its failures, and as ready now for sympathy with its new undertakings as in the past it had been indifferent to criticism from without.

I do not know how effective the British general is in the field ; no one will know until long after the war. It is certain that he has made his mistakes. I do not know how much leadership in a time of confusion is to be found in English statesmen. Certainly England lacks now such definite leadership as President Wilson has given America. But this I know from experience, and since I am estimating racial character rather than racial achievement, it is important, in several months of association with naval officers, with army officers of all ranks, with public officials of all conditions from the War Cabinet down, and with a multitude of unassorted, not once did I miss the new note. — " It has been a hard four years. We are glad America is with us. You see that at least we are ' carrying on.' "

Yes, once I missed it, in a munition superintendent traveling with me through northern Wales. It was in the midst of the spring offensive.

" You'll see what England is now," he said. " She has to be almost beaten. It was so in Edward I's time. It always will be true." This is the spirit of determination; but it is precisely not the dominant note of this new England which has learned with a humility dangerous for arrogant enemies that stubbornness without science and hard work and a will for the future as well as a memory of the past is not enough. No American remembering our martial enthusiasm, can guess at the burden of armament upon Great Britain, of the effect of the daily sacrifice of young life, of the darkening of existence that resulted from strain long continued. " There is no joy in life now," said one of the most vigorous and hopeful of the ministry workers. " Spring is a mockery." But there was gain as well as loss.

The third racial characteristic springing to new life in this war is energy, but energy of a new kind that is worth studying in America. I went through vast ranges of clanging shops, airy, well lighted, perfect in modern equipment and completeness, and all built upon what was swamp or common two years ago. I saw I do not know how many thousands of men and women busy over every instrument of death devised for this conflict, cheery, healthy, content, as seldom before the war. Overall skirts mingle with overall trousers down the long lines of machine tools. One sees silk stockings beneath rough working-garments, jewelry at the throat of blackened working-blouses, mob-caps on fresh faces of girls who laugh as they turn and smooth the shells. An old granny fishes out redhot shell rings like loaves from an oven. A pretty creature bombards a casting with hammer blows in rhythm.

There is energy in brains, too. Each great government plant was provided with its enthusiastic specialists, captains who begged you to smell their new gas, majors who could think only in terms of engines, organizers who were passionately eager that you should understand in five minutes the work of two years. What were these men and women before the war? I asked unceasingly; and rarely I found a decline in condition. Usually energy had been released. It may be disconcerting to discover that clerks in munition plants were once educational experts — few people were what they seemed to be in England, — but it was thrilling to meet a duke's daughter assembling parts, and heartening to find cricketers and foxhunters happy in real work that for thousands a year they would not have turned to before, or girls, once shop assistants or idle " flappers," now rosy from exercise, filing or hammering for good wages, or swinging with strong arm-sweeps the passengers on board a bus, one grade up at least from the unhealthy conditions of our bad world as it was in 1913.

But when I saw the finished product of all this new energy, great howitzers beside their vast carriages, shells by the million, hangars of flyingboats (sperm-whales with broad wings, each a marvel undreamed of in last year's philosophy), aerodromes like wing^encircled pigeon-houses, ships of enormous length, rising, like Mulciber's palace, to the reverberating music of a thousand hammers and drills; when I went on the gray, silent cruisers, miracles of human ingenuity, crouching in coast harbors, each with its sea-plane like a dragon-fly above the prow ; and saw the trawlers, the chasers, the submarines, the destroyers, little and big, that, born of this vast energy, could sweep and harry the sea for thousands of miles, why, then I was driven back upon the cynical thought that must come again and again to every one who saw the activities of Great Britain doubled in aid of death. Can England, which the Germans thought decadent, and we effete, renew its youth only to destroy?

No, there is more than galvanic activity in this new energy of Great Britain. It will last after the war, because it is inspired by something more than self-preservation. It springs from sources too little explored in our old industrial system, from the innate, perhaps the inherited, desire of the gregarious animal to work for larger issues than his own food and his master's pocket-book. As a girl in a munition plant waited for the frame to bring the next shell to her tool, I asked :

"Do you like the work? Are you happy here? "

She answered as she caught and turned the shell :

" 0f course. I get good wages. And then I've got a boy in France. I make the shells. He shoots them."

Humanitarians may object to this story, but the principle is sound. Millions in England and America have been working with a consciousness that they were earning more than their wages, and that the surplus was going not to stockholders or employers, but for the common welfare of all. It is ironical, if not pathetic, that war, the greatest destroyer of goods, was necessary in order to establish in effective practice a truth we have long known, but neglected.

This generous, light-hearted, independent endeavor is not a purely British virtue, as I well know ; but it has had, I think, its first and best release there. It has been safeguarded by a labor policy that Americans have criticized with little knowledge of the facts ; and though sprung from conflict, it is not, as in Germany, tied fast to a state that protects and encourages its subjects only that they may be more fit for war. If the words of great employers can be trusted, and the plans of the reconstructionists and the desires of powerful labor leaders, this old-new discovery will not be forgotten with the coming of peace, and the new and better-directed British energy will remain.

Here, then, are three dominant traits of the new England. The first an American must admire, for his ancestors possessed it, and he hopes that he still retains it. The second warms his heart, as its absence would have chilled him. The third he welcomes as his own best-admired virtue. And all three should make it easier for us to like and understand Great Britain as the war has molded it. But the crisis is too grave, the corner we are turning in the world's history too sharp, to rest hopes for the future upon manifestations of character, no matter how significant they may be for the better understanding of two great peoples. Indeed, that these British qualities stir a response in us might mean little for our relationship if it were not for another factor of the highest political importance. The Germans lack neither energy nor determination, and they with Austria now aspire toward humility ; but no upspringing love is thereby engendered in our breasts. It is different with the British, for with them and with the races they have fathered we are essentially like-minded. This is a kinship much truer than the highly watered Anglo-Saxonism that is supposed to unite us.

I do not of course mean anything so improbable as an identity of feeling. No one expects precisely the same reactions to ideas and experience in a Hoosier of German descent and a Shropshire farmer. Indeed, it is easy to find whole sets of conditions, some trivial, some important, where the British and the American will never come together. The English conception of food, for example, as something to be calculated by mass instead of by taste is quite un-American; but let that pass. Or again, an American in Ireland finds that his most violent urging against the extremists can make him no enemies, while the most concessive Englishman can make no friends. This is a political factor to which I shall return, but it may serve here as proof that I am advancing no argument for the complete brotherhood of the English-speaking races.

Nor am I insinuating that France and America are not in many respects in extraordinary agreement. Their ideals, especially as regards the freedom of the mind and the worth of the individual man, are much alike, and this is the best guarantee of mutual faith after the war. Furthermore, French thought touches the American imagination with curious ease and with results most beneficial. But the better one knows the French, and appreciates their unique and highly self-contained civilization, their tradition of the family, their view of how to live, the clearer it is that the French and ourselves will remain the best of friends and admirers without being like-minded. As a now famous American said recently, to learn to know the real France is to admire as a woman of thirty the girl you loved from a distance in youth.

With the English-speaking races — Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Irish, English, Scotch, and Welsh — the story is a different one. It was borne in upon me first by the sight of Australian soldiers on leave in London. Fine, bronzed fellows, with clear eyes and a reckless swing to their limbs, they so absolutely placed themselves as recruits from our Rocky Mountain States that their unexpected accent was always a shock. Blood relationship? No, blood relationship evidently had little to do with it ; for the Westerners with whom I identified them might be named Blankenberg or Fitzenheimer. It was like conditions that had produced like results, and the likeness had extended to more than broad spaces, a free life, and a new world in the making.

I wish we had a term for the variety of world civilization that has extended itself over the English-speaking countries, and deeply affected many where English is'only a lingua franca. It is British in origin, of course ; but to tell an Irishman or a German-American that his culture is British does not further world peace. Nor is it true, for the like-mindedness I am trying to describe long since passed from British control. To call it an Anglo- Saxon culture is equally unfortunate. If it were, then only Anglo-Saxons would be like-minded ; whereas the bond of which I write links the Anglo-Danish-Norman-Celtic Englishman and the Anglo - French - Dutch - German - Celtic " old American " with the pure German or the pure Italian of the second generation in America.

If we break free from some of the nonsense about races and look at the facts in our own country, the thing becomes clearer. Here are a dozen or more races in the slow progress of amalgamation, all living in the same environment, all studying (and this is enormously important) the same text-book (your text-book is your great leveler), all subject to the same general ideals of what life is for, what success means, how a country should be governed, how a man should treat his wife and bring up his children. It is absurd to suppose that this makes them all into Americans of the type we developed before the Civil War. No, the ideals, the text-books, the very character of the nation, are all altering in response to the new blood. But the change is in degree, not in kind. The essential qualities of the English-speaking culture (if I must use a term) with which we began, remain the same, though lightened by the French and Italians, given humor by the Irish, and tolerance by the Jews. And this in a lesser degree has happened in Canada and Australia, while New Zealand, the youngest offshoot, proves how far the original stock may vary without infusion of alien blood. I venture to assert that the son of an Italian, having graduated from an American high school, can better understand the ideas of a Manchester boy of the same age, despite vast differences in temperament, than the point of view of an eighteen-year-old Neapolitan, even if, as is by no means certain, he can talk to him in Italian. I know that this war has brought a revelation to many Americans abroad. They have found it difficult to remember that the Canadians are not fellow-countrymen. They have found that the native Britisher of every class who at first, in his restraint or in his mannerisms, burlesqued on our stage time out of mind, has seemed to belong to another world, is after a little acquaintance curiously familiar. The differences that once irritated become a source of pleasure. There is a breakdown of alien feeling, so that your very accents become passports to good understanding. A fellowship is established that comes from looking differently and talking differently and thinking just about the same. " You Americans and hus ought to 'ave been in it before together, Ah sy," says my table mate at " The Fish and Anchor." It was not an appeal; it was a testimonial.

Again, I talked recently of a possible league of nations with a man responsible in no small measure for Great Britain's policies. The French and Italians, he said, regard the League of Nations as an idea belonging particularly to the British Empire and to America. They would gladly join in a new world order, once it became effective, but the hope of it, and the desire to realize it at all costs, appertain to an order of thinking and experience different from their hard training in nationalism.

Or still again, the special brand of moral indignation aroused in the English-speaking world by German aggression is quite different from the perhaps clearer-sighted self-defense of the French. No reader of French books of the last three years can have failed to observe how fundamental is the belief of France that she was defending a unique civilization which was to liberalize, not subdue, the world. Her endeavor was beyond praise, but it differed, nevertheless, in character, if not in object, from our binding passion for a " square deal " and the rights of nations to follow their destinies. In this, English speakers everywhere were like-minded; so much so that the German- American, who has no love for England and owes her nothing except through the common American inheritance, nevertheless opposed himself wholeheartedly to men of his own blood whose minds in matters of war and politics had become different from his own.

If, then, we speakers of English of all races are in a few essentials like-minded, let us unhesitatingly apply this fact of supreme historical importance to the test of the present and the hope of the future. How can we realize those ideals of a better international order that now, to most sane men, are the final, though not the sole, justification for the losses of the war? Only by finding and strengthening that common will which resides in like-minded communities, able to feel and think and act together in a common cause. In America and the British nations such groups are dominant. In America and the British nations, now that France and Italy have been drained in mere self-preservation, is to be found the surplus of power to make sane construction arise upon the ruins of destruction, and direct what is still a doubtful conclusion toward ends profitable for the world.