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My discovery—the one incontrovertible moral that I could read into the war—had been made by others before me; and I doubt not that some at least of them reached it by the same road after toiling conscientiously through the official explanations and apologies which every foreign office in Europe issued in proof of its own innocence. The polychromatic outpouring of white papers, green books and red books was succeeded by a vaster flood of unofficial polemics, in which defensive chancellors and prime ministers, field-marshals and admirals demonstrated that some one else was responsible for the war and that peace would have been preserved or victory secured if only their advice had been followed. To the strategical arguments I paid little attention: nothing will make me understand strategy by land or sea, and it was hardly relevant to my main enquiry. The diplomatic defence, on the other hand, I studied with care, deciding—as, I imagine, most people outside Germany have decided independently—that, while Berlin was guilty of starting the conflagration, every other power lent a hand in piling up an inflammable heap of suspicions, jealousies and misunderstandings. It was this conclusion that pointed me my moral.

“And what do you make of it all?,” my mother asked as I laid aside the last of these bitter, aggressive manifestoes.

“Well,” I said, “whoever made the war, it’s clear that no single country, no single form of government was able to keep the peace.”

With that conclusion no one could disagree.

“In contrasting Jim’s world with the present,” I told Violet Loring, when my essay was ready for her criticism, “the outstanding lesson is that the government of man by his fellow-man has broken down in every form that’s been tried. You had constitutional monarchy in England, absolutism in Russia, a republic in France and America, a feudal kingship in Austria-Hungary. None of them could perform the elementary duty of protecting the life and liberty of their citizens. Those who took no part lived on the sufferance of the belligerents. From China to Honduras ...”

“When once war breaks out ...” Violet began helplessly.

“The governments that allowed war to break out failed in their first duty,” I maintained. “By negligence or malignity or impotence they’re responsible for the death or mutilation of some ten million human beings. It’s not enough to put the blame on Germany or the kaiser or Bernhardi. If a homicidal maniac runs amok in England, we blame the police for not stopping him.”

While my cousin turned the pages of my manuscript, I flung a similar cold douche of first principles over the head of Philip Hornbeck, who had come to us for a week between dismantling his old department and erecting the new.

“If you’d had a bigger police-force,” he suggested, “your homicidal maniac would have had no run for his money. If we’d smashed the German navy while it was building ...”

“And turned homicidal maniac on our own account?,” I interrupted.

“If you like to put it that way. It’s not much use arguing with me, George, because I’m one of the old impenitents who believe that there will always be wars and what not. Admitting that it’s the duty of all governments to keep the peace, admitting that every government has failed in its duty, what are you going to do then?”

“Try a different kind of government,” I answered.

“A soviet?,” he asked. “If the aristocracy and bourgeoisie have failed, that’s all you have left.”

“I’d sooner have a soviet that thought it could keep peace than an aristocracy that admits it can’t.”

“You should go and live in Russia,” Hornbeck recommended.

The battle-piece which I was composing for Violet seemed naturally to take the form of a triptych; and the first two panels shewed that the governing classes in all countries had failed to keep the peace and had bungled the business of making war. When the third panel came to be painted, I wondered whether they would be more successful in making peace.

“Is this going to be a lasting settlement?,” I asked Lucien de Grammont, when he came to refresh himself after his work on the agenda.

“We’re doing our best,” he answered. “As I told you at the time, the war stopped too soon. If we’re to secure that France is never again to be menaced, we must to some extent carry the war on into the peace.”

“Do you still think there will be another war in fifty years’ time?”

“I won’t pin myself to a date, but you’ll never abolish war.”

“Then,” I said, “it’s time you made way for somebody who will. The old systems, the old diplomacy, the old men who ran the old system, are a self-confessed failure.”

Lucien twirled his neat moustache and addressed to his neatly-shod feet a muttered confidence about doctrinaire idealists. Gerald Deganway, for the honour of the old diplomacy as practised in the British Foreign Office, screwed his eye-glass into place and exclaimed:

“I say, you know, George, you’re an absolute bolshevist!”

And Hornbeck administered the most damaging criticism by accepting my premises and proceeding to a diametrically opposite conclusion.

“You’re proving too much, old son,” he argued. “I agree that governments should prevent wars, I agree that every government in the world failed to prevent this last one. That only shews you’re asking governments to do an impossibility. Take every nation in turn, from Belgium to the States, and tell me how the government of any one could have kept out of the war. When once the racket begins ...”

“We must go back a stage, then,” I said, “to the time before it begins. We must have a ‘will to peace’.”

“Didn’t we have that in England?,” asked Violet. “Honour apart, we couldn’t afford to stay out in 1914.”

“You must go beyond England,” I told her. “We want an international ‘will to peace’; a solemn league and covenant, not between foreign secretaries, but between the units of the world’s cannon-fodder. War will end of its own accord when you can’t fill your armies.”

“And how will you set your solemn league and covenant to work?,” Hornbeck enquired sceptically.

I could make no reply until I had found more time to think; time, too, perhaps, to talk with my uncle Bertrand of the old Disarmament League and of the propaganda that issued from Peace office before the war. When I told Barbara that, so far as I could see, my work was only beginning, I felt that in all likelihood the task before our generation would be to create a ‘will to peace’ out of the present disgust with war. If history was human nature repeating itself, there had been the same disgust at the end of every great war; but the memory of that disgust faded quickly. It was no match for the urgent plea that honour or security was at stake; no match for the cynical resignation of those who said that there always had been wars and always would be.

“Of course you’re right to try,” was the utmost encouragement that I could win even from Violet, “but these Hague Conventions and things haven’t done much good, have they?”

“No one has yet appealed to the rank-and-file,” I answered. “No one has appealed while the full horror of war was vividly remembered. No one has shewn the dumb millions of the world how much alike they all are, how they swim together and sink together. In all I’ve been reading these last few weeks I’ve been amazed by the sameness of conditions in all countries. If we can work on that till the sameness becomes a oneness ...”

In aiming at perspective for my second panel, I tried to set my own impressions and experiences of the war beside those of the cosmopolitan population that floated through Cannes in these first weeks of the armistice. When we had passed the stage of fancying that our individual histories were unique, I was more struck by the similarities of what I heard than by the differences. Necessarily, the islander and the continental must always disagree on foreign politics; and in Cannes I met for the first time the chronic terror that is begotten of land frontiers. “It’s all very well for you,” I was told by Italians, Greeks, Poles and Dutch: “You’re an island.” With allowance for this, I felt that the war had left on every country an almost identical mark. The Austrians and Germans whom I met in Monte Carlo, old journalistic allies—for the most part—, were as bitterly convinced that the war had been forced upon them as we in England were convinced that they had forced it on us; but, when we had agreed to differ, their description of the last four years in their own countries might have been applied, almost without a word changed, to England. There were, I discovered, idlers, embusqués and adventurers of both sexes in all classes everywhere; and it was amusing, for one who thought of a German alternately as a sheep and a genius, to hear the tribute of Austria and Germany to our more than Teutonic docility and enterprise. France had her rapacious profiteers, Prussia her bloated munition-makers. The drinking that was said to obtain in English high-places could be matched by the drugging that was reported to be corrupting Austrian society. I was assured, without calling for proof, that there was little to choose for courage and endurance between the best troops of any two countries; and, when the public morale broke, any one class in its own way cut as sorry a figure as any other. If I despaired of the populace that believed the grotesque stories in the Pemberton-Billing case, I despaired more profoundly of Lady Dainton when she told me that Prince Louis of Battenberg had been executed in the Tower for treason.

“The moral is,” I told Violet Loring, “that, under an abnormal strain, the sublime and the dastardly go hand-in-hand. Five years ago, we didn’t know the meaning of danger or suffering. To face it without breaking, we called up the primitive beast that lies inside all of us: he was a very brave beast, but he was also very treacherous, savage, credulous.” ...

As Violet turned my pages, I looked through a palisade of palm-trees to the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean and filled my lungs with warm, scented air. Cannes, after London, was like the open street after an opium-den; and, in thinking of the strange shapes seen in the long, mad half-light of the war, I almost fancied that I had been dreaming. The political intrigue and chicanery that began with the high-explosive controversy in 1915 and continued until the 1918 election was incredible unless one likened it to a panic on board a burning ship. If Violet had told me four years earlier that one common acquaintance would be imprisoned for trafficking in cocaine and that another would commit suicide to avoid prosecution for forgery, I should not have believed her. I could now hardly believe my own certain knowledge until I remembered that every war has claimed its civil casualties.

“How long does it take to chain up your primitive beast?,” Violet asked. “I mean, ... these are the people that the war has left us to live with and work with.” ...

To that I had no answer ready. It was easier to say that Sonia O’Rane would not have run away from her husband before the war than to be certain she would not run away again. And it seemed idle to talk of international conferences and a reconstructed world, of a new spirit and a ‘will to peace’ while the passions of the war were still unfettered.