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Twenty Years After.... Who, among those of us who had been through that terrific ordeal and stood alive amidst its wreckage, could have prophesied the kind of world which now we have, or the failure to make any certain peace in all this time? For there has been no real peace—certainly no peace of mind among men and nations—since that first day of Armistice. It has been only an armed truce broken by isolated wars which threatened to engulf all the old combatants again; and by revolutions, violent episodes, political passions, and dangerous forces stirring beneath the thin crust on which we stand.

The things that have happened in those twenty years since the World War seem to make a mockery of all that agony, and death, and valour on all fronts, and at least has made that human sacrifice vain and purposeless. For the turn of the wheel of fate has robbed such victory as there was of all its imagined fruits, and the vanquished have risen again to power. The very ideas for which on one side many nations were urged to fight—the killing of militarism—the safeguarding of Democracy, the overthrow of autocrats and despots, the reign of law, the Christian ideal, and other fine phrases used by the leaders to give a sanction to this slaughter, have been revoked or are in retreat.

What is the cause of all this fearful talk of another war not far ahead?

In September last we escaped another world war only by a hair’s breadth and we in England stared into trenches being dug hastily in our public gardens.

There are prophets of woe who have timed it for the year now gone, 1938! It was foretold, they say, by the Egyptian Pyramids or by other mystical revelations. Reading the signs of the times without the aid of stars or stones, but by the simple process of putting two and two together with horrid logic, other prophets—politicians and newspaper reporters and those gloomy fellows the professional economists—combined to foretell its horrors. For the past year or two—more than that—a sense of its approach has darkened our mental horizon and made happiness difficult even for those who have the chance of it. The rapid communication of news by the miracles of modern science—wireless messages, broadcasting, and the news-reel of the cinema—brings this menace into every household and homestead and keeps all nerves on edge; for nearly always it is news of some alarming incident of current history, some new act of aggression, some new repudiation of law, some increase of violence, some further threat to peace, or some report of flaming war itself—in Abyssinia, Spain, China—with its piled up horrors of murders and massacre.

Murder and massacre now seem to be the necessary accompaniments of warfare. Chivalry is dead, it seems, if it ever lived. The old wars between professional armies, recorded by war correspondents and war artists for the pleasure of those who sat at home, have gone for ever. Crowded cities are now the targets of big guns and bombing aeroplanes. Women and children are killed if they happen to be in the way, as of course they are. It is that aspect of modern warfare which makes it very easy for rulers and statesmen to play on the fears of their peoples for the purposes of increased taxation and ever-increasing armaments; but in the minds of some of the rulers and statesmen there is the same alarm and they are not insincere when they appeal to panic.

Could we who heard the bugles blow that “Cease Fire” twenty years ago have guessed that, if we lived so long as this after the miracle of escape, we should still be groping for some kind of peace? Could we have guessed that all the nations would be rearming with feverish industry, draining all their reserves of wealth, piling-up monstrous debts, and training their children to the use of arms?

We hoped for a good peace! The men who had fought had lost all hatred for each other. Certainly there was no hatred between German and English soldiers who had lain in the mud not far from each other and were sick and tired of all that filth. Because they had been through the same ordeal and knew the life of the trenches in their bodies and souls they had a sense of mutual sympathy when the job was done. The people at home didn’t understand of course. They would never understand for there was no language to make them do so. Hatred had gone a long time before the end—if it ever existed—between those who had to kill each other. When British troops first reached the Rhineland they gave their rations to hungry children, and General Plumer applied urgently for food supplies to be sent to the civilians lest the health of his troops should be undermined. They were sent by order of Winston Churchill. German soldiers who had just torn off their uniforms, or their shoulder-straps, sat drinking beer with British Tommies, and they got on famously together.

“It must never happen again,” they said.

We were inclined to be optimistic then, when the river of blood ceased flowing. We believed for a little while, that “the world would be made safe for democracy.” Wasn’t that the slogan? We believed that the Peace to be arranged would be the beginning of a new chapter of history in which the common folk of nations would be assured of their decent way of livelihood without fear of war, for a long while ahead. There would be, surely, a new sense of comradeship and co-operation across the frontiers between democratic peoples. We were all democratic then! Many crowns had crashed. The old despotisms had gone. The militarists were in hiding. The false glamour of war had been put out for ever.

“There goes the old Pomp and Glory!” I heard a German soldier say when he wheeled a barrow-load of swords towards the scrap-heap on a day following the Armistice. “It’s the end of all that.”

German militarism was broken, defeated and disarmed, wasn’t it? I saw the destruction of the German war machine, smashed by hammers, with all those delicate and beautiful instruments which had made the great guns in the workshops of Krupps. The German Fleet had surrendered and was sunk at Scapa Flow. There was no more danger from that quarter. Their war-lords had fled. Their old gods of caste and arrogance had toppled off the altars. The German people, it seemed, were eager and ready to take their place in European democracy working for the happiness of the common folk. At least they would be so, we thought, after they had got over their revolution and put down the “Reds” who were out for anarchy. They were a people who believed in law and order.

There was one man twenty years ago who expressed the mind of the fighting men on the subject of this coming peace. With a small group of officers I waited for him on the Hohenzollern Bridge across the Rhine at Cologne when our Army of Occupation first arrived. He came with an escort of cavalry and dismounted from his horse to speak to us. It was Sir Douglas Haig, our Commander-in-Chief, who during the years of war had been busy with his maps and orders. There were times when his handsome face had been drawn by the long strain of a command which involved the lives of millions of men and the fate of his own country. He had endured many failures. He had demanded frightful sacrifice. He had no special reason to love the Germans. But when he dismounted and spoke to us on the bridge which was Journey’s End for men who had trudged a long way to the Rhine, he spoke no words of exultation about this victory of his. After a few short sentences about the endurance of our Armies who had fought so long and so hard he talked of the Peace that was coming.

“I hope,” said Sir Douglas Haig, “that it will be a generous peace not touched by the spirit of vengeance against a nation whose soldiers have fought for their Fatherland with the same courage as ours.”

Noble words, unheard by the peace-makers who did not call him to their Council table.

There was at that time a great yearning for such a peace in millions of minds touched for a little while by a spiritual emotion. After so much torture, so much ruin, so much death, masses of men and women looked forward to a peace which would rise above petty hatreds and wipe out those past four years of murder by a clean slate, on which might be written a new charter for humanity based on justice and fair play, and a system of law among nations, and a spirit of co-operation for the building-up of civilisation which so nearly had slipped into the dark pit.

There would, of course, be general disarmament to a low level. Most of the guns would be scrapped. The standing armies would be disbanded except for police purposes. There would be no bartering of peoples or provinces as if they were mere chattels in the slave market. New arrangements would be made in the interests of the peoples concerned. There would be the “self-determination” of nations—a new high-sounding phrase! Any future grievances would be adjusted by general consent in some council of nations. Out of these years of agony—a terrible and unforgettable lesson—there would come, surely, a new era of hope.

There was that man named Wilson among the peace-makers. He had promised all that in sonorous language, which we believed. It was upon his promises made in Fourteen Points that the German people—don’t you remember?—put their faith and hope in the dark hours of defeat. He had promised that if they got rid of the rulers who had led them into this conflict they would not suffer from any peace of vengeance. That had happened. The Kaiser and the Crown Prince, abandoned by their Generals, had gone. The German Kings and Princes were in hiding. Among the war-lords only Hindenburg, that simple and stalwart old soldier, had led his army home.

In the last fury of the war President Wilson’s words had seemed to hold a message of redemption for all this baseness into which humanity had fallen. He stood for justice and magnanimity. I remember waiting for him in a crowd—a vast crowd—when he came to London on his way to the Peace Conference. Where I stood we could only hear the cheers, but I noticed that the men and women about me had tears in their eyes, as though a Messiah were passing—a Messiah in a top-hat with the face of a Professor. Was not this man going to make the good peace for which the world was longing?

He had in his mind, we knew, an age-long dream of noble men and intended to be the architect of its reality. It was to be a Parliament of Nations. Anything that might be amiss in the Peace Treaties—any oversight of justice—would be revised in due time by the Council and Assembly of this new League or Society of Nations. All international grievances would be settled here by arbitration and conciliation. One of its first tasks would be to promote general disarmament to the lowest level of national security. Its Covenant would contain clauses for the thwarting of any bandit nation which might threaten war against its neighbours. The other nations would act for the collective security of all.

Here was hope indeed! Here was the promise of a Brave New World. It was, at last, the chance of establishing a reign of law and order, thrusting back for ever the old barbarism of tribal warfare. The war would not have been fought in vain if it had led to this. Our dead would have died for a new and splendid civilisation.

Nothing of that happened, as we know too well by recent history. Something went wrong with the Peace that was made. Something went wrong with the League of Nations. Now, twenty years after, there is no assurance of peace. The League lies a-dying, or gravely stricken.