Part 8 (2/2)
Now everyone knows by experience that it is something utterly dirty and detestable. We thought it was the Nemean lion, and we have found it is the Augean stable. But being bored by war and hating war is quite unproductive _unless you are thinking about its nature and causes so thoroughly that you will presently be able to take hold of it and control it and end it._ It is no good for everyone to say unanimously, ”We will have no more war,” unless you have thought out how to avoid it, and mean to bring that end about. It is as if everyone said, ”We will have no more catarrh,” or ”no more flies,” or ”no more east wind.” And my point is that the immense sorrows at home in every European country and the vast boredom of the combatants are probably not really producing any effective remedial mental action at all, and will not do so unless we get much more thoroughly to work upon the thinking-out process.
In such talks as I could get with men close up to the front I found beyond this great boredom and attempts at distraction only very specialised talk about changes in the future. Men were keen upon questions of army promotion, of the future of conscription, of the future of the temporary officer, upon the education of boys in relation to army needs. But the war itself was bearing them all upon its way, as unquestioned and uncontrolled as if it were the planet on which they lived.
II. THE YIELDING PACIFIST AND THE CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR
1 Among the minor topics that people are talking about behind the western fronts is the psychology of the Yielding Pacifist and the Conscientious Objector. Of course, we are all pacifists nowadays; I know of no one who does not want not only to end this war but to put an end to war altogether, except those blood-red terrors Count Reventlow, Mr.
Leo Maxse--how he does it on a vegetarian dietary I cannot imagine!--and our wild-eyed desperados of _The Morning Post._ But most of the people I meet, and most of the people I met on my journey, are pacifists like myself who want to _make_ peace by beating the armed man until he gives in and admits the error of his ways, disarming him and reorganising the world for the forcible suppression of military adventures in the future.
They want belligerency put into the same category as burglary, as a matter of forcible suppression. The Yielding Pacifist who will accept any sort of peace, and the Conscientious Objector who will not fight at all, are not of that opinion.
Both Italy and France produce parallel types to those latter, but it would seem that in each case England displays the finer developments.
The Latin mind is directer than the English, and its standards--shall I say?--more primitive; it gets more directly to the fact that here are men who will not fight. And it is less charitable. I was asked quite a number of times for the English equivalent of an _embusque._ ”We don't generalise,” I said, ”we treat each case on its merits!”
One interlocutor near Udine was exercised by our Italian Red Cross work.
”Here,” he said, ”are sixty or seventy young Englishmen, all fit for military service.... Of course they go under fire, but it is not like being junior officers in the trenches. Not one of them has been killed or wounded.”
He reflected. ”One, I think, has been decorated,” he said....
My French and Italian are only for very rough common jobs; when it came to explaining the Conscientious Objector sympathetically they broke down badly. I had to construct long parenthetical explanations of our antiquated legislative methods to show how it was that the ”conscientious objector” had been so badly defined. The foreigner does not understand the importance of vague definition in British life.
”Practically, of course, we offered to exempt anyone who conscientiously objected to fight or serve. Then the Pacifist and German people started a campaign to enrol objectors. Of course every s.h.i.+rker, every coward and slacker in the country decided at once to be a conscientious objector.
Anyone but a British legislator could have foreseen that. Then we started Tribunals to wrangle with the objectors about their _bona fides._ Then the Pacifists and the Pro-Germans issued little leaflets and started correspondence courses to teach people exactly how to lie to the Tribunals. Trouble about freedom of the pamphleteer followed. I had to admit--it has been rather a sloppy business. The people who made the law knew their own minds, but we English are not an expressive people.”
These are not easy things to say in Elementary (and slightly Decayed) French or in Elementary and Corrupt Italian.
”But why do people support the sham conscientious objector and issue leaflets to help him--when there is so much big work clamouring to be done?”
”That,” I said, ”is the Whig tradition.”
When they pressed me further, I said: ”I am really the questioner. I am visiting _your_ country, and you have to tell _me_ things. It is not right that I should do all the telling. Tell me all about Romain Rolland.”
And so I pressed them about the official socialists in Italy and the Socialist minority in France until I got the question out of the net of national comparisons and upon a broader footing. In several conversations we began to work out in general terms the psychology of those people who were against the war. But usually we could not get to that; my interlocutors would insist upon telling me just what they would like to do or just what they would like to see done to stop-the-war pacifists and conscientious objectors; pleasant rather than fruitful imaginative exercises from which I could effect no more than plat.i.tudinous uplifts.
But the general drift of such talks as did seem to penetrate the question was this, that among these stop-the-war people there are really three types. First there is a type of person who hates violence and the infliction of pain under any circ.u.mstances, and who have a mystical belief in the rightness (and usually the efficacy) of non-resistance.
These are generally Christians, and then their cardinal text is the instruction to ”turn the other cheek.” Often they are Quakers. If they are consistent they are vegetarians and wear _Lederlos_ boots. They do not desire police protection for their goods. They stand aloof from all the force and conflict of life. They have always done so. This is an understandable and respectable type. It has numerous Hindu equivalents.
It is a type that finds little difficulty about exemptions--provided the individual has not been too recently converted to his present habits.
But it is not the prevalent type in stop-the-war circles. Such genuine ascetics do not number more than a thousand or so, all three of our western allied countries. The ma.s.s of the stop-the-war people is made up quite other elements.
2
In the complex structure of the modern community there are two groups or strata or pockets in which the impulse of social obligation, the gregarious sense of a common welfare, is at its lowest; one of these is the cla.s.s of the Resentful Employee, the cla.s.s of people who, without explanation, adequate preparation or any chance, have been shoved at an early age into uncongenial work and never given a chance to escape, and the other is the cla.s.s of people with small fixed incomes or with small salaries earnt by routine work, or half independent people practising some minor artistic or literary craft, who have led uneventful, irresponsible lives from their youth up, and never came at any point into relations of service to the state. This latter cla.s.s was more difficult to define than the former--because it is more various within itself. My French friends wanted to talk of the ”Psychology of the Rentier.” I was for such untranslatable phrases as the ”Genteel Whig,”
or the ”Donnish Liberal.” But I lit up an Italian--he is a Milanese manufacturer--with ”these Florentine English who would keep Italy in a gla.s.s case.” ”I know,” he said. Before I go on to expand this congenial theme, let me deal first with the Resentful Employee, who is a much more considerable, and to me a much more sympathetic, figure in European affairs. I began life myself as a Resentful Employee. By the extremest good luck I have got my mind and spirit out of the distortions of that cramping beginning, but I can still recall even the anger of those old days.
He becomes an employee between thirteen and fifteen; he is made to do work he does not like for no other purpose that he can see except the profit and glory of a fortunate person called his employer, behind whom stand church and state blessing and upholding the relations.h.i.+p. He is not allowed to feel that he has any share whatever in the employer's business, or that any end is served but the employer's profit. He cannot see that the employer acknowledges any duty to the state. Neither church nor state seems to insist that the employer has any public function.
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