Читать книгу A Woman and the War - Frances Evelyn Maynard Greville Countess of Warwick - Страница 5

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In his famous essay on Mr. Montgomery's poems Macaulay speaks of the degradation to which those must submit who are resolved to write when there are scarcely any who read.

It seems a little idle to suggest that two years of war have availed to reduce readers to vanishing point; indeed, editors and publishers of daily and weekly papers testify to an increase of circulation. Paper is harder to obtain than readers; the cause of trouble is that the written word is all of one kind. The love of sensation, strongest amongst those whose mental equipment is of the slightest, is being sedulously catered for, the townsman requires tales of the slaughter of his enemies to give a flavour to his breakfast, his lunch, and his dinner.

Even the countryman, who with no more than one newspaper in twenty-four hours must spread sensation over a day, seems to insist upon flamboyant headlines and cheerful tales of slaughter. Mild-mannered folk, who would turn vegetarians rather than help to kill the meat that is set upon their tables, may be heard enthusiastically calculating the enemy's losses in terms of six or seven figures, and discussing the hairbreadth incidents of flood and field as though they themselves carried a more dangerous weapon than an umbrella and had faced more serious troubles in the normal day than an ill-cooked meal, an appointment lost, or a train missed. In short, people who must stay at home because they are no longer of fighting age, strength, or inclination, are being encouraged to act as the audience. Happily, perhaps, for them, they cannot see the actual performance, but they can hear about it, and, as a rule, they are told what their minds are best prepared to receive. Truth has received instructions to remain at the bottom of her well or risk court-martial. Life is reduced to its primitive elements; war, while it dignifies many of those who take an active part in it, does little more than degrade the constant reader of papers of the baser and most popular kind. It is to be feared that the sane view of life is never the appealing one, the untrained eye can see trees but never a wood, and the man in the street is nearest to the editorial heart because his name is legion, and the advertiser says to him, as Ruth said to Naomi, "Whither thou goest, I will go."

In the early nineties there was a literary movement of great promise in London; the Boer War extinguished it; in the last half-dozen years we have seen a brisk effort towards the development of a national or even international social programme; this war may set it back for a generation; War is ever fatal to ideas. Men whose minds were being turned slowly and reluctantly to questions they had been educated to ignore are now concerned with two problems—winning the war and making good the injuries it has entailed. The increased taxation, the business losses, seemingly irrecoverable, will develop a certain natural hardness of fibre, and there is a danger that the social movements, slow in times of prosperity, will halt in the times to come.

The season of trouble for those "resolved to write" is upon the publicists of the social reform movement. They must be prepared for hard knocks and for all the arts of misrepresentation and vilification. The general reader will first denounce, then ignore and finally listen to the survivors of the common-sense crusade. The people who start to state facts will be the leaders of a forlorn hope, and our brave fellow-countrymen did not face as great an odds in the retreat from Mons. A fight for the universal reduction of armaments and for the remodelling of the existing system of government will be met by indignant cries for conscription and less freedom. The ubiquitous hand of the German will be traced in every line that pleads for toleration, good will, and the removal of all autocracies under whatever name; any suggestion of a return to Christian teaching will be denounced as the highest immorality. There are many who hold that a conscript Army and a larger Navy would have saved us from this war; they cannot see that we should have done no more than postpone the evil day until it dawned upon Europe in a still greater magnitude of evil, if this be possible, and that our commercial class, impeded by forced service, would have been unable to provide the means to pay the bill. The ulcer of European armament has burst at last, and the remedy proposed for the debilitated body of the Western World will be a still larger ulcer to take the place of the one that demanded so much labour to feed and so much life-blood to cleanse it.

In the same way the effort to make democracy articulate, to raise the standard of the national intelligence, will be fiercely resisted by those who believe that the way of the world in the past must be the way of the world in the future. The attempt to improve upon the methods of our fathers is tolerated in the worlds of science, medicine, and commerce, the innate conservatism of government is sacrosanct. To educate millions of able-bodied men, not to the fighting pitch but beyond and above it, will be denounced as high treason, and will be opposed by autocracies, bureaucracies, cannon-makers and publicans alike. A rise to the heights of sanity is, must be, the death of vested interests, and every force to the hands of authority will be employed to check the dreaded movement. According to a well-established formula, the method of attack will be to denounce very bitterly suggestions that have never been put forward and principles that have no adherents. In this way issues can be confused and obscured.

To be drunk with victory or dazed by defeat is to be particularly sensitive to the more brutal cries of war. The victor desires the full reward of good fortune, as Germany did in 1871; the vanquished nurses revenge, as France has done ever since the end of the struggle that found her so ill-prepared. Counsels of moderation are declared to be inadmissible until the status quo ante has been restored, and every force that makes for the spoliation of the simple by the worldly wise takes the field against common sense. The appeal of the dead is forgotten by all living save the woman whose mission it is to raise another generation for destruction; the lessons of history cannot be recalled by those who have never learned them.

Against all the difficulties outlined here, and many another that need not be set down, a small body of men and women, inspired by a great ideal, must labour in every country that has seen war or even realised its significance. They must speak and write in the face of fierce opposition and contempt, for war has swept away many of the landmarks they had already set up, together with many of those who had learned to regard them; they must face the truth that many a genuine altruist, shocked unutterably by the revelations of the war, is a little ashamed of his earlier altruism and anxious to forget its existence. They must be prepared for a certain coarsening of the nation's moral fibre, for a long-lived return to the more brutal outlook associated with the Napoleonic era. In some countries revenge will have become an article of faith, in others suspicion will be a no less dominant factor. The whole mental currency will have suffered debasement, and it will be difficult for some vices to be recognised as anything worse than virtues enforced upon a nation by the hazard of war.

If the truth about the whole conflict that has laid waste so great a portion of the civilised world could be ascertained and agreed, the difficulties would tend to disappear, responsibility would be fixed. Unfortunately, agreement is beyond the generation's reach; we may remember that there are many who still regard the seizure of Silesia by Frederick the Great as a genuine expression of Prussia's mission, and that history is written to suit the country to which it is intended to appeal. Limitations, whether geographical, political, or social, are the sworn foes of truth, and in the effort to remove them an appeal to international common sense affords the best hope of success.

For many of the world's thinkers who stay at home to-day, neither physically fit to fight nor financially able to succour distress, there is this great work waiting to be done. They cannot fight soldiers, but they can fight rancour, malice, and uncharitableness. They cannot fill hungry bodies, but they may help to feed starved minds. They can bring a light to those who walk in darkness and make articulate the thoughts that stir many a heart and brain. They can give courage to those who fear the sound of their own voices and have not the strength of mind to say the words that may not be spoken without offence to the unthinking. When fighting is over—and it will pass, as all tragedies must, though it seems to fill a lifetime while it lasts—the greatest questions of strife will clamour for a wise solution. People write glibly about the war that is to end war, but let us remember that this issue depends not upon statesmen but upon the democracies of all the combatant and neutral countries. What we want is a modern Peter the Hermit or two in every country of Europe, to preach the crusade of Christianity and to bring home to the world at large the price of war. There is no material reward for this service, and even recognition is likely to be posthumous; the courage required is of the fine kind that moves alone over uncharted ground. But, just as a kingdom at war calls for men to man the trenches and face annihilation with the smiling cheerfulness that robs death of half its sting and all its terror, so a return of peace calls for its heroes of thought to do battle with all the evils that make it possible for men who have no quarrel to assemble in their millions for mutual destruction.

The whole system of government that makes these conditions and must be indicted for them is rotten to the core, but it is enthroned in power, and will not deal lightly, or even justly, with those who assail it.

Against this hard truth we have to remember that every evil that has been subdued since the dawn of history has been fought in the first instance by one man or a handful of men. If we have only a small proportion of thinkers to-day we have more than there were of old time, when the simplest education was the advantage of the few. Paganism was a more terrible force than militarism in the years of the advent of Christ, and it was overthrown by the labours of one man and his tiny following. To-day democracy is all powerful, if and when it can be taught to open eyes and ears. Those who will undertake the perilous task may make this war, whatever and whenever its termination, a fruitful thing for the generations to come, while, on the other hand, if the lessons are not read aright, we may look to pass from tragedy to tragedy, until all civilisation is submerged.