More that must be told

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Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. Leaders of the Old Tradition i

II. Ideals of the Humanists 50

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 candor 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 favorite or the latest scapegoat. Military critics, war correspondents home on leave, Parliamentary correspondents and lobby men, were favored by these dangerous attentions. The press became a hotbed of favoritism and conspiracy. The commanders in the field, JofFre as well as French, Petain as well as Haig, endeavored to counter-attack the conspirators by forming their own bodyguard 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, afterward a captain in the Irish Guards) was also a "white-headed 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 favorite 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 Frederic 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 long-range 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 keep Foch out of supreme command — a system of mutual defense 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 rumors of intrigue and private rancor, could not reconcile the spirit of it with the marvelous 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-a-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 2 9 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 nonsense 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 home 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, Doctor 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 one another. 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

ii 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 valor 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.

in

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? Austria was 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 quarreled over its distribution. The "mandates" obtained by Great Britain and France in Africa and Asia made the cynics phortle 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 statesman 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 laborers, 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 leaped 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 labor, 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

IS 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 smoldering 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 afterward, 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 fulfill 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 honors 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!

There seemed for a little while to be one. It was President Wilson, the only man in the world who, before the armistice, wrote words which rang true in the heart of humanity. In dirty places where men lived under the imminent menace of death they were read, as I know, with hopefulness that here at last was a leader who had a greater vision than a war of extermination or a peace of vengeance. His words were like a new Gospel, or the old Gospel recalled in this time of hatred and massacre. He looked across the frontiers of hostility, offered just terms to all warring nations, promised a new world to democracy if it would disown the evil of its ruling powers. Among millions of men, to youth being sacrificed, in millions of homes, death-haunted, on both sides of No-Man's Land, his words found instant response. They raised enormous hopes. They had a spiritual, almost a divine sweetness. The Germans, below the Junker caste, the German soldiers whom I met on the battlefields, whose letters I grabbed from lousy dugouts or picked up as they littered the shell-churned earth, put their faith in Wilson, hailed him as the great arbitrator, accepted in their souls his terms of peace. I affirm that with absolute belief. Before the armistice they raised banners in many cities of Germany proclaiming their adherence to Wilson's "Fourteen Points." After the armistice for a little while, until one by one the Fourteen Points were abandoned or betrayed, they clamored for their fulfillment.

I saw Wilson come to London. It was as though a savior of the world were passing. Miles deep the crowd stood and waited while he passed. Only the foremost ranks caught a glimpse of his silvered hairs. But from all those vast crowds came a roar of cheers in which there was a note I had never heard before, and the eyes of people about me were wet with tears. So it was in Paris when he came.

We all know now how he failed in many ways, why he failed — his hard, autocratic temper, so that even his advisers like House and Lansing were kept in ignorance of his acts and pledges, the vanity which made him weaken to flattery, the pedagogic quality of his brain, the fatal egotism which caused him to neglect the ordinary safeguards of statesmanship — consultation with his people and winning of their consent, the right and liberty of their Senate and Congress. He had the greatest chance that any man has had in the whole history of the world, and he missed it. But his people missed it too, by the bitterness of their political passion, by desertion of their representative (who should have had their loyalty in this crisis of the world's fate in spite of all his errors), and by a cruelty which killed him as a leader and almost killed him as a man.

All that is old and tragic history. There is nothing new to be said about it, but its tragedy remains, and makes more difficult the task of human progress which then was easier because of that mass emotion leaping up to hope. Quickly came disillusionment, cynicism, a hark back to material and selfish interests. The lowest passions of humanity were prodded up by the press and by the politicians. The noblest souls in England in all classes were sickened and dumfounded by the moral depravity of the appeals made to the beast instinct of the mob by ministers of state and all their sycophants. In the khaki election of 191 8, which gave Lloyd George a renewal of his power, there was the promise of great loot from the enemy's treasure and the Kaiser's head was to be the reward of victory. The ideals for which youth had fought in the war, at least the watchwords which had urged them to fight — the war to end war, the downfall of militarism — were flung away and forgotten. The material motive of making Germany pay for all the costs of war of all the victor nations replaced the better hope of establishing a lasting peace between the democracies of Europe.

"Germany will be squeezed," said Sir Eric Geddes, "until the pips squeak" — a naked betrayal of Wilson's pledge to German democracy which we had countersigned with our honor. Facilis decensus Averni. The people who were ready for spiritual guidance yielded when appeal was made to the brute in them. They share the guilt of this degradation and are paying for it now, but the greater guilt is that of men who, seeing

J 9 the light, chose the darkness. The old leaders stand condemned. Theirs was the steepest downfall.

The story of President Wilson is tragic. Yet he never hauled down the banner of his idealism, and, torn and tattered though it was after his single fight with enemies in front and behind, he nailed it to the mast with his crippled hand and never surrendered in his poor, dazed soul. He was faithful to the League of Nations, though his people would have none of it. In spite of their abandonment, weakened by the immense loss of their alliance, the League of Nations still lives and struggles in a futile way against unequal odds, and is a memorial of the spirit which created it as the best hope of the world. Even now it might become the machine by which youth could re-create the world.

Greater than the tragedy of Mr. Wilson was that of the other signatories of the Peace Treaty, whodl, having pledged themselves to the League of Nations with the consent of their nations, mocked at it with cynical laughter, flouted its authority, undermined its purpose, and maintained the power of the Supreme Council, whose will and acts have been in direct and open conflict with the whole spirit of the League. They upheld government by force alone, whereas the League is based on government by arbitration and consent. They denied the rights of small nations to a voice in the councils of the world by declaring the will of the great victor powers enforced by standing armies. By sending representatives without authority to the assembly of the League, they deprived it of all reality in its decisions and of all influence in the settlement of world problems. They betrayed it.

Tragic was the physical breakdown of Wilson, President of the United States. More tragic was the spiritual surrender of Lloyd George, Prime Minister of England.

It is hard for English people to speak or to write about Lloyd George without passion — passion of dislike or passion of hero worship. There have been times when most have hated him, but it is significant that the people who hated him once because of the things for which I and others liked him (his democratic audacity, his amusing vulgarity of challenge to the snob tradition of England) are now those who like him most. I hated him for his speech about the "Knock-out blow" at a time when there seemed no ending to war except by the extermination of the world's youth. I hated him afterward for helping to arrange a peace which seemed to me to guarantee the certainty of new and more dreadful war. I hated him for handing over the fate of Ireland to men like Sir Edward Carson, Hamar Greenwood, Sir John French, General Tudor, and the gang of bureaucrats and brass hats in Dublin Castle who tried to break the spirit of a passionate people by methods of Prussian militarism, and tried to stamp out the Sinn Fein terror by a counter-terror which stoked up its fires, put murderous hatred in the heart of every Irish youth, made martyrs of those who died, and dishonored the old fame of England by an abandonment of justice, chivalry, and the spirit of liberty for which so much of English youth had died. For that I hated Lloyd George, and sometimes I think I hate him still.

Yet analyzing my own feelings I find, as so many of his political opponents find, that not hatred, but admiration strangely mingled with regret, affection twisted by anger and annoyance, amusement causing laughter with a groan in it, are my dominant impressions of this amazing little man. The straight principles of honorable men are warped under his influence. They weakened, as I have seen them, visibly, under the spell of his babesi blue eyes. Men go into his room cursing him in their hearts, determined to resist his blandishments, resolutely fixed to arguments and facts and convictions from which they will not budge. In less than an hour with him they have resisted nothing, have budged from all their fixed points, and come out looking sheepish, smiling weakly, saying, "Marvelous!" Time and time again that has happened to trade-union leaders, political critics, newspaper editors, ministers of state, generals.