Part 4 (1/2)
Personally, I am probably more International by temperament than Patriotic. I feel a strange kins.h.i.+p and intimacy with all sorts of queer and outlandish races--Chinese, Egyptian, Mexican, or Polynesian--and always a slight but persistent sense of estrangement and misapprehension among my own people. Flag-waving certainly, does not stir me. Still, I feel that, whatever one's country may be, the love of it has value and is not to be scoffed at. The Nation is bigger than the Parish; and to a man of limited outlook it is a means of getting him out of his own very narrow and local circle of life; to rob him of that in order to jump him into a cosmopolitan att.i.tude (which to him may be quite empty and arid) is a mistake. It is easy enough to break the sh.e.l.l for the growing chick, but if you break it too soon your chick, when hatched, will be dead.
If you look at the great majority of those who are enthusing just now about our country and patriotically detesting the Germans, you will see that notwithstanding lies and slanders and cant galore, and much of conceit and vanity, their patriotism _is_ pulling them together from one end of Britain to another, causing them to help each other in a thousand ways, urging them to make sacrifices for the common good, helping them to grow the sinews and limbs of the body politic, and even the wings which will one day transport that body into a bigger world. Really, I think we ought to be very grateful to the Germans for doing all this for us; and the Germans ought to be grateful to us for an exactly similar reason. You will see plainly enough that the great majority of those who are at this moment giving their thoughts and lives for their countrymen and neighbours either in Germany or in England could not by any manner of possibility be expected to act with similar self-surrender and enthusiasm in an International cause. They are not grown to that point of development yet, and it is better that they should learn helpfulness and brotherhood within somewhat narrow bounds than perhaps not learn these things at all in the open and indiscriminate field of universal equality. After all, to stimulate love and friends.h.i.+p there is nothing like a common enemy!
It is an old story and an old difficulty. There comes a time when every inst.i.tution of social life becomes rotten and diseased and has to be removed to make way for the new life which is expanding behind it.
Broadly speaking, we may say that the inst.i.tution of Patriotism is _approaching_ this period--at any rate over Western Europe. The outlines of an International life are becoming clearly visible behind it.
What we have to do is to help on that international life and spirit to our best, and certainly clear out a lot of sham patriotism that stands in its way; but this has to be done with discrimination and a certain tact. People must be made to see that ”my country, right or wrong,” is not the genuine article. They must be made to understand how easily this sort of slapdash sentiment throws them into the hands of scheming politicians and wire-pullers for sinister purposes--how readily it can be made use of directly it has become a mere unreasoning instinct and habit. If a war is wanted, or conscription, or a customs tariff--it may be merely to suit the coward fears of autocratic rulers, or the selfish interests of some group of contractors or concession-hunters--all that the parties concerned have to do is to play the patriotic stop, and they stand a good chance of getting what they want. Just now there is a good bit of fleecing going on in this fas.h.i.+on--both of the public and the wage-workers. Even in its more healthy forms, when delayed in too long, patriotism easily becomes morbid and delays also the birth of the larger spirit which is waiting behind it. The Continental Socialists complain that their cause has. .h.i.therto made little progress in Alsace-Lorraine and Poland for the simple reason that political circ.u.mstances have over-accentuated the patriotic devotion in both these regions.
Thus we have to push on with discrimination. Always we have to remember that the wide, free sense of equality and kins.h.i.+p which lies at the root of Internationalism is the real goal, and that the other thing is but a step on the way, albeit a necessary step. Always we have to press on towards that great and final liberation--the realization of our common humanity, the recognition of the same great soul of man slumbering under all forms in the heart of all races--the one guarantee and a.s.surance of the advent of World-peace.
That we are verging rapidly towards some altered perspective I quite believe; and the day is coming when in the social and political spheres International activity will make excessive patriotism seem somewhat ridiculous--as, in fact, it has already done in the spheres of Science and Industry and Art. Still, I also do not see any reason why the two tendencies should not work side by side. The health of local organs and members in the human body is by no means incompatible with the health of the whole organism, and we may understand the great map of Humanity all the better for its being differently coloured in different parts.
VIII
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF, WAR AND RECRUITING
_November_, 1914.
I sometimes think the country-folk round about where I live the most sensible people I know. They say with regard to the War--or said at its outset: ”What are they fighting about? _I_ can't make out, and n.o.body seems to know. What I've seen o' the Germans they're a decent enough folk--much like ourselves. If there's got to be fightin', why don't them as makes the quarrel go and fight wi' each other? But killing all them folk that's got no quarrel, and burnin' their houses and farms, and tramplin' down all that good corn--and all them brave men dead what can never live again--its scandalous, I say.”
This at the outset. But afterwards, when the papers had duly explained that the Germans were mere barbarians and savages, bent on reducing the whole world to military slavery, they began to take sides and feel there was good cause for fighting. Meanwhile almost exactly the same thing was happening in Germany, where England was being represented as a greedy and deceitful Power, trying to boss and crush all the other nations.
Thus each nation did what was perhaps, from its own point of view, the most sensible thing to do--persuaded itself that it was fighting in a just and heroic cause, that it was a St. George against the Dragon, a David out to slay Goliath.
The att.i.tude of the peasant, however, or agriculturist, all over the world, is the same. He does not deal in romantic talk about St. George and the Dragon. He sees too clearly the downright facts of life. He has no interest in fighting, and he does not want to fight. Being the one honest man in the community--the one man who creates, not only his own food but the food of others besides, and who knows the value of his work, he perceives without illusion the foolery of War, the hideous waste of it, the shocking toll of agony and loss which it inflicts--and if left to himself would as a rule have no hand in it. It is only occasionally--when ground down beyond endurance by the rent-racking cla.s.ses above him, or threatened beyond endurance by an enemy from abroad, that he turns his reaping-hook into a sword and his muck-fork into a three-p.r.o.nged bayonet, exchanges his fowling-piece for a rifle, and fights savagely for his home and his bit of a field.
England, curiously enough, is almost the only country in the world where the peasant or ordinary field-worker _has_ no field of his own[22]; and I find that in the villages and among the general agricultural population there is even now but little enthusiasm for the present war--though the raid on our coasts at Scarborough and other places certainly did something to stimulate it. Partly this is, as I have said, because the agricultural worker knows that his work is foundational, and that nothing else is of importance compared with it. [At this moment, for instance, there are peasants in Belgium and Northern France ploughing and sowing, and so forth, actually close to the trenches and between the fighting lines.] Partly it is because in England, alas! the countryman _has_ so little right or direct interest in the soil. One wonders sometimes why he _should_ feel any enthusiasm. Why should men want to fight for their land when they have no land to fight for--when the most they can do is to die at the foot of a trespa.s.s-board, singing, ”Britons never, never shall be slaves!”
If the War is ever finished, surely one of the first things to be insisted on afterwards, with regard to England, must be the settlement of the actual people (not the parasites) on the land. Else how, after all that they have gone through, can it be expected that they will ever again ”fight for their country”? But that this vast landless population in the villages and country districts--hungering as it is for some sure tenure and interest in the soil--should actually, as now, be berated and scolded by superior persons of the ”upper” cla.s.ses, and threatened with conscription if it does not ”come forward” more readily, is a spectacle sufficient to gratify the most hardened cynic.
Certainly it is remarkable that such numbers of the great working ma.s.ses of this country (including villagers) should come forward in connexion with the war, and join the standard and the ranks of fighting men--as they do--and it is a thing for which one must honour them. But in that matter there are not a few considerations to be kept in mind.
In the first place a large number are not really very enthusiastic, but simply join because pressure to do so is put upon them by their ”masters.” The press-gangs of old exist no longer, but subst.i.tutes for them revive in subtler form. Many large landlords, for instance, have given notice to a percentage of their gamekeepers, gardeners, park employees, and the like, to the effect that their services are no longer required, but that if they enlist in the ranks now they will be reinstated in their masters' service again when the war is over (”if still alive” is, we presume, understood). Large numbers of manufacturing and other firms have notified their workmen and clerks in similar terms.
This means pretty serious economic pressure. A man in the prime of life, suddenly ousted from his job, and with no prospect either of finding a similar job elsewhere or of learning any new one, is in a pretty fix.
His only certain refuge lies in the fact that he can be taught to use a rifle in a few weeks; and in a few weeks perhaps it becomes clear to him that to accept that offer and the pay that goes with it--poor as it is--is his only chance.
There are others, again--perhaps a very large number--who do not care much about the war in itself, and probably have only the vaguest notion of what it is all about, but for them to join the ranks means adventure, comrades.h.i.+p, the open air--all fascinating things; and they hail the prospect with joy as an escape from intolerable dullness--from the monotony of the desk and the stuffy office, from the dreary round and mechanical routine of the factory bench, from the depressing environment of ”home” and domestic squalor.
I must confess--though I have no general prejudice in favour of war--that I have been much struck, since the outbreak of the present one, by the altered look of crowds of young men whom I personally know--who are now drilling or otherwise preparing for it. The gay look on their faces, the blood in their cheeks, the upright carriage and quick, elate step--when compared with the hang-dog, sallow, dull creatures I knew before--all testify to the working of some magic influence.
As I say, I do not think that this influence in most cases has much to do with enthusiasm for the ”cause” or any mere l.u.s.t of ”battle” (happily indeed for the most part they do not for a moment realize what modern battle means). It is simply escape from the hateful conditions of present-day commercialism and its hideous wage-slavery into something like the normal life of young manhood--a life in the open under the wide sky, blood-stirring enterprise, risk if you will, co-operation and _camaraderie_. These are the inviting, beckoning things, the things which swing the balance down--even though hards.h.i.+ps, low pay, and high chances of injury and death are thrown in the opposite scale.
Nevertheless, and despite these other considerations, there does certainly remain, in this as in other wars, a fair number of men among those who enlist who are _bona fide_ inspired by some Ideal which they feel to be worth fighting for. It may be Patriotism or love of their country; it may be ”to put down militarism”; it may be Religion or Honour or what not. And it is fine that it should be so. They may in cases be deluded, or mistaken about facts; the ideal they fight for may be childish (as in the mediaeval Crusades); still, even so it is fine that people should be willing to give their lives for an idea--that they should be capable of being inspired by a vision. Humanity has at least advanced as far as that.
I suppose patriotism, or love of country--when it comes to its full realization, as in the case of invasion by an enemy, is the most powerful and tremendous of such ideals, sweeping everything before it.
It represents something ingrained in the blood. In that case all the other motives for fighting--economic or what not--disappear and are swallowed up. Material life and social conditions under a German government might externally be as comfortable and prosperous as under our own, but for most of us something in the soul would wither and sicken at the thought.