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The rulers and statesmen have forgotten all about general disarmament in spite of much talk about it for seventeen years. We are now in the full swing of the most intensive rearming of nations that the world has ever seen, though it saw quite a lot of that in the years preceding the last great war.

I think I mentioned that I had seen with my own eyes, as the old saying goes, some part of the destruction not only of the German war machines, but of the very instruments—delicate and beautiful—which had made that machinery designed for the slaughter and mutilation of men. Germany and her Allies had been utterly disarmed except for a few secret hoards here and there, of no account except for internal strife. They remained disarmed, waiting—not with furious impatience as we must now admit—for the pledge inherent in the Covenant of the League, and confirmed many times, that the other nations would gradually reduce their armaments to the lowest common denomination agreed upon by the majority. They waited for fifteen years, until a man of some impatience named Adolf Hitler took charge of their affairs and demanded the fulfilment of that pledge lest otherwise Germany would rearm. It was not fulfilled. Germany has rearmed, stinting and scraping on every other form of expenditure to achieve a terrific programme which is putting a heavy strain upon their resources, their internal credit, their industrial output, their organising genius, and the spirit of discipline and sacrifice of a nation which has endured much since its armies went singing to war in 1914.

German rearmament has been answered by this new intensity of armament production in many frightened countries, and now after twenty years in the attempt of peace, we have reached the astonishing and alarming result—the awful paradox—that the world is getting stuffed with high explosives, and that thousands of factories are working night and day in the manufacture of great guns, bombing aeroplanes, tanks, machine-guns and other lethal weapons, all of them being produced in the name of self-defence, and to avoid, we are told, a war which, if it happens, will reduce what civilisation we have to dust and ashes.

The expenditure of the world on munitions is more than double that of the year 1913 when the great powers were arming to the teeth.

Great Britain had not done much in this way after the last war. With the German fleet sunk at Scapa Flow, and with our tradition as islanders, we did not think it necessary to keep a big standing army, or even a mighty fleet, beyond our immediate needs. There was no more danger in the North Sea. We had friends in the Mediterranean—Italy, our dear and honoured ally, and France, who occasionally raised the cry of “Perfide Albion,” forgetting a million men of our blood who lie beneath French soil, but was otherwise friendly and loyal. We could afford to economise in years when a frightful bill of costs had to be met on the last war. It had cost us eight millions a day. We had lent two thousand millions to our allies—none of which we should see again. We had a minimum of two million men out of work. Economy was much needed by a people more heavily taxed than any in the world, except perhaps Germany. So the Governments of Great Britain—Conservative as well as Labour—scrapped many old battleships and cruisers and “axed” many naval officers who became garage-owners, poultry-keepers or farmers until they went bankrupt, as mostly they did.

The British people had gone pacifist. Even Admirals and Generals denounced the folly of war. All the ex-service men were for peace and quiet, and had no quarrel with any nation, least of all Germany, who was now down and out—until suddenly, by some strange miracle, she was neither down nor out, but springing to arms, marching around, with a new dynamic energy under the leadership of an ex-corporal who was also a literary gentleman and the author of a book called Mein Kampf, which was very frightening to some of those who read it.

An English Prime Minister—very English after his Scottish and Welsh predecessors—strolled into the House of Commons one day after an Election which had given him a fine majority for some mandate unknown, because so many people trusted Mr. Baldwin. He fidgeted with a few notes. He spoke about the serious state of the world. He had come to the conclusion that his country would have to rearm. He mentioned the probable bill. For a start it would be one thousand five hundred million pounds sterling.

His Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, deplored the necessity for this expenditure. Still there it was, he said. It would have to be met and it was his duty to show how best the money could be obtained without putting an undue strain upon British credit and economy.

Astonishing world into which we have drifted after that war which nearly ruined us all! What perhaps is most astonishing is the fact that it doesn’t seem to astonish the very people—the statesmen and politicians—who are partly responsible for its phenomena. It doesn’t seem to astonish those who now accept, almost without question, what formerly they denounced. They now defend actions, such as war itself, which once horrified those who being pacifists are now militarists. They are scornful of governments, whom they accuse of cowardice because they refuse to fight wars on many fronts, or to intervene in civil wars which would plunge us all into general wars if such intervention happened.

No one was astonished by all this as far as I could find when one of these statesmen, who bears the new title of Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, addressed a company of manufacturers at luncheon at the beginning of the new rearmament programme and gave them some figures in his easy genial way which might have taken their breath away.

In 1913-1914 this country, according to Sir Thomas Inskip, that genial man, spent something like £77,000,000 upon the two Defence Services. In a typical year after the war (that is to say when “Peace” had been made) the cost was £113,000,000. In the lowest post-war year after the depression the amount was £103,000,000. But in 1937 the expenditure had been £278,000,000, and in 1938-1939, estimates of which had still to be prepared, the expenditure would be something between £320,000,000 and £340,000,000, with, in addition, £5,000,000 to £10,000,000 upon air-raid precautions and other additions. Those figures have been considerably increased since that estimate was made.

What do they really mean apart from their sterling values, and the new burdens of taxation, and the absorption of labour into the intensive manufacture of destructive weapons? They mean, surely, that the British Government have acknowledged the complete break-down of security in Europe, the utter failure of all their diplomacy for twenty years past, the abandonment of hope in the League of Nations and any appeal to intelligence among nations, and have returned willy-nilly to a faith in force as the only method of self-protection in a jungle world. His Majesty’s Opposition of the Labour Party, formerly the advocates of disarmament, have accepted the same view.

Fear took hold of them early in 1938. They were constantly urging the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence to get on with the job more rapidly. Why all these delays? they asked. There was a particular hurry about fighting and bombing aeroplanes. The Right Honourable gentleman below the gangway, Mr. Winston Churchill, who had made a special study of this subject, deplored “the years that the locusts have eaten” in this country while Germany had a tremendous start in the building-up of a formidable air force, with new types of machine faster and more powerful than ours, and based upon a nation-wide organisation and training which we shall hardly catch up in two years or more. Did he not warn the Government more than two years ago? They disbelieved his figures and facts, but afterwards were forced to accept them.

It was the thought of aerial warfare, perhaps with ourselves at a disadvantage, which “put the wind up”—as we used to say in the last war—our statesmen and politicians and that public opinion to which they address themselves. England is horribly vulnerable from the air. The monstrous city of London with its vast population lies very near in time to continental air bases, with machines capable of flying at 300 miles an hour. If hostile aircraft should break through our defence, as many of them would do in all likelihood, the most lurid imagination fails to realise the full horror of the destruction, the shambles, and the possible panic which would happen. With heavier weight-carrying capacity, longer range and increased numbers, the German Air Force—it is always Germany which haunts the minds of our Ministers—might unload in one day as many bombs as they did last time during four and a half years of war.

It was an unpleasant thought. To reassure the people, to whom the propaganda of fear was doled out daily by the newspapers, the British Government instructed its Home Office last year to circulate those anti-gas precautions, and to obtain immense supplies of gas-masks for the civilian population, including as many children as could wear them without being suffocated. There were detailed instructions issued in little booklets for pasting-up doors and windows; and private members insisted that the Government should bear all the cost of this and make more extensive preparations for anti-gas refuges.

But why all this pother about gas? asked many private citizens. How many people who were killed in German air-raids during the last war would have been saved if they had had gas-masks in their chest-of-drawers or office desks? The answer is not one! They were killed by high explosives with which our enemy would be well provided next time if there is that war in the air.

The utter inadequacy of these air-raid precautions was revealed in a bleak and frightful light in the autumn of 1938 when the spectre of war appeared in London streets and Europe heard again the tramp of youth on their way to the ditches of death.

Something had happened in 1937 to intensify the dark apprehensions of the most thoughtful minds. It was the break-down of everything upon which many of them—millions of them—had set their faith and hope. It was, it seemed, the end of all dreams. There was no law among the nations now that the League had failed. Everything was in the melting-pot again—treaties, pacts, pledges, gentlemen’s agreements. All the conferences, discussions and diplomatic bargainings which had led up to them at Geneva, and other places of rendezvous, had been torn up and put into the scrap-heap of ancient futilities. The Locarno Pact which promised a new era of peace between old enemies was a vain memory in the vaults. The Kellogg Pact by which many nations pledged themselves most solemnly to abstain from war as a national policy was but the pipe-dream of an old gentleman who died a few months ago aware of its fading out. It was violated by the Japanese in Manchuria and by the Italians in Abyssinia. The ideal of collective security which was inherent in the Covenant of the League, and seemed to millions of simple folk the greatest safeguard of peace, collapsed like a house of cards when somebody kicks the table. Somebody kicked the table.

At that time when this became visible in its appalling bleakness to all but minds obsessed by unrealities or intellectually dishonest—there are lots of these about—the most hopeful of us was bound to admit that the world situation was at that time extremely dark, without any guiding light ahead for those who look for peace. It seemed brighter to those who looked for war.