Part 5 (1/2)
”What do you mean?” asked the man with the cigar, with a bullying eye.
”Who yer talking about?”
”I'm talking about what you were talking about,” I replied; ”as you put it so perfectly, about the handful of obstinate fellows who are standing between the country and the coal. I mean the men who are selling their own coal for fancy prices, and who, as long as they can get those prices, care as little for national starvation as most merchant princes and pirates have cared for the provinces that were wasted or the peoples that were enslaved just before their s.h.i.+ps came home. But though I am a bit of a revolutionist myself, I cannot quite go with you in the extreme violence you suggest. You say—”
”I say,” he cried, bursting through my speech with a really splendid energy like that of some n.o.ble beast, ”I say I'd take all these blasted miners and—”
I had risen slowly to my feet, for I was profoundly moved; and I stood staring at that mental monster.
”Oh,” I said, ”so it is the miners who are all to be sent to penal servitude, so that we may get more coal. It is the miners who are to be shot dead, every man Jack of them; for if once they are all shot dead they will start mining again...You must forgive me, sir; I know I seem somewhat moved. The fact is, I have just found something. Something I have been looking for for years.”
”Well,” he asked, with no unfriendly stare, ”and what have you found?”
”No,” I answered, shaking my head sadly, ”I do not think it would be quite kind to tell you what I have found.”
He had a hundred virtues, including the capital virtue of good humour, and we had no difficulty in changing the subject and forgetting the disagreement. He talked about society, his town friends and his country sports, and I discovered in the course of it that he was a county magistrate, a Member of Parliament, and a director of several important companies. He was also that other thing, which I did not tell him.
The moral is that a certain sort of person does exist, to whose glory this article is dedicated. He is not the ordinary man. He is not the miner, who is sharp enough to ask for the necessities of existence. He is not the mine-owner, who is sharp enough to get a great deal more, by selling his coal at the best possible moment. He is not the aristocratic politician, who has a cynical but a fair sympathy with both economic opportunities. But he is the man who appears in scores of public places open to the upper middle cla.s.s or (that less known but more powerful section) the lower upper cla.s.s. Men like this all over the country are really saying whatever comes into their heads in their capacities of justice of the peace, candidate for Parliament, Colonel of the Yeomanry, old family doctor, Poor Law guardian, coroner, or above all, arbiter in trade disputes. He suffers, in the literal sense, from softening of the brain; he has softened it by always taking the view of everything most comfortable for his country, his cla.s.s, and his private personality.
He is a deadly public danger. But as I have given him his name at the beginning of this article there is no need for me to repeat it at the end.
THE CONSCRIPT AND THE CRISIS
Very few of us ever see the history of our own time happening. And I think the best service a modern journalist can do to society is to record as plainly as ever he can exactly what impression was produced on his mind by anything he has actually seen and heard on the outskirts of any modern problem or campaign. Though all he saw of a railway strike was a flat meadow in Ess.e.x in which a train was becalmed for an hour or two, he will probably throw more light on the strike by describing this which he has seen than by describing the steely kings of commerce and the b.l.o.o.d.y leaders of the mob whom he has never seen—nor any one else either. If he comes a day too late for the battle of Waterloo (as happened to a friend of my grandfather) he should still remember that a true account of the day after Waterloo would be a most valuable thing to have. Though he was on the wrong side of the door when Rizzio was being murdered, we should still like to have the wrong side described in the right way. Upon this principle I, who know nothing of diplomacy or military arrangements, and have only held my breath like the rest of the world while France and Germany were bargaining, will tell quite truthfully of a small scene I saw, one of the thousand scenes that were, so to speak, the anterooms of that inmost chamber of debate.
In the course of a certain morning I came into one of the quiet squares of a small French town and found its cathedral. It was one of those gray and rainy days which rather suit the Gothic. The clouds were leaden, like the solid blue-gray lead of the spires and the jewelled windows; the sloping roofs and high-shouldered arches looked like cloaks drooping with damp; and the stiff gargoyles that stood out round the walls were scoured with old rains and new. I went into the round, deep porch with many doors and found two grubby children playing there out of the rain.
I also found a notice of services, etc., and among these I found the announcement that at 11.30 (that is about half an hour later) there would be a special service for the Conscripts, that is to say, the draft of young men who were being taken from their homes in that little town and sent to serve in the French Army; sent (as it happened) at an awful moment, when the French Army was encamped at a parting of the ways.
There were already a great many people there when I entered, not only of all kinds, but in all att.i.tudes, kneeling, sitting, or standing about. And there was that general sense that strikes every man from a Protestant country, whether he dislikes the Catholic atmosphere or likes it; I mean, the general sense that the thing was ”going on all the time”; that it was not an occasion, but a perpetual process, as if it were a sort of mystical inn.
Several tricolours were hung quite near to the altar, and the young men, when they came in, filed up the church and sat right at the front.
They were, of course, of every imaginable social grade; for the French conscription is really strict and universal. Some looked like young criminals, some like young priests, some like both. Some were so obviously prosperous and polished that a barrack-room must seem to them like h.e.l.l; others (by the look of them) had hardly ever been in so decent a place. But it was not so much the mere cla.s.s variety that most sharply caught an Englishman's eye. It was the presence of just those one or two kinds of men who would never have become soldiers in any other way.
There are many reasons for becoming a soldier. It may be a matter of hereditary luck or abject hunger or heroic virtue or fugitive vice; it may be an interest in the work or a lack of interest in any other work.
But there would always be two or three kinds of people who would never tend to soldiering; all those kinds of people were there. A lad with red hair, large ears, and very careful clothing, somehow conveyed across the church that he had always taken care of his health, not even from thinking about it, but simply because he was told, and that he was one of those who pa.s.s from childhood to manhood without any shock of being a man. In the row in front of him there was a very slight and vivid little Jew, of the sort that is a tailor and a Socialist. By one of those accidents that make real life so unlike anything else, he was the one of the company who seemed especially devout. Behind these stiff or sensitive boys were ranged the ranks of their mothers and fathers, with knots and bunches of their little brothers and sisters.
The children kicked their little legs, wriggled about the seats, and gaped at the arched roof while their mothers were on their knees praying their own prayers, and here and there crying. The gray clouds of rain outside gathered, I suppose, more and more; for the deep church continuously darkened. The lads in front began to sing a military hymn in odd, rather strained voices; I could not disentangle the words, but only one perpetual refrain; so that it sounded like
Sacrarterumbrrar pour la patrie, Valdarkararump pour la patrie.
Then this ceased; and silence continued, the coloured windows growing gloomier and gloomier with the clouds. In the dead stillness a child started crying suddenly and incoherently. In a city far to the north a French diplomatist and a German aristocrat were talking.
I will not make any commentary on the thing that could blur the outline of its almost cruel actuality. I will not talk nor allow any one else to talk about ”clericalism” and ”militarism.” Those who talk like that are made of the same mud as those who call all the angers of the unfortunate ”Socialism.” The women who were calling in the gloom around me on G.o.d and the Mother of G.o.d were not ”clericalists”; or, if they were, they had forgotten it. And I will bet my boots the young men were not ”militarists”—quite the other way just then. The priest made a short speech; he did not utter any priestly dogmas (whatever they are), he uttered plat.i.tudes. In such circ.u.mstances plat.i.tudes are the only possible things to say; because they are true. He began by saying that he supposed a large number of them would be uncommonly glad not to go.
They seemed to a.s.sent to this particular priestly dogma with even more than their alleged superst.i.tious credulity. He said that war was hateful, and that we all hated it; but that ”in all things reasonable”
the law of one's own commonwealth was the voice of G.o.d. He spoke about Joan of Arc; and how she had managed to be a bold and successful soldier while still preserving her virtue and practising her religion; then he gave them each a little paper book. To which they replied (after a brief interval for reflection):
Pongp.r.o.ngperesklang pour la patrie, Tambraugtararronc pour la patrie.