ON THE EVE

???de d? ??te p???t?? tis t?? t?? ?t? ?p??a?s?? p??t??sa? ?a?a??s?? ??te pe??a? ??p?d?, ?? ??? ?t? d?af???? a?t?? p???t?se?e?, ??a???? t?? de???? ?p???sat?. ??? d? t?? ??a?t??? timÔt????a? p??e???t??a a?t?? ?a??te? ?a? ???d???? ?a t??de ?????st?? ???sa?te? ???????sa? et, a?t?? t??? ?? t???e?s?a?, t?? de ?f?es?a?, ??p?d? ?? t? ?fa??? t?? ?at????se?? ep?t???a?te?, ???? d? pe?? t?? ?d? ??????? sf?s?? a?t??? ??????te? pep?????a?, ?a? ?? a?t? t? ???es?a? ?a? pa?e?? ????? ???s?e??? ? [t?] ??d??te? s??es?a?, t? ?? a?s???? t?? ????? ?f????, t? d' ????? t? s?at? ?p?e??a? ?a? d?, ??a??st?? ?a???? t???? ?a ??? t?? d???? ????? ? t?? d??? ?p??????sa?

Thucydides, II. 42.

I

In choosing the late summer of 1914 for the "inevitable war", which, to the eyes of Bernhardi and of his school, was to lead ultimately either to "world-power" or "downfall", the German great general staff chose the moment when its own organisation was most efficient and when its adversaries were jointly and severally less well able or inclined to accept the challenge than at any time since the Anglo-French entente. At home, the Kiel Canal had been reconstructed and the western strategic railways completed; abroad, Russia, with her slow, cumbrous mobilisation, could be left out of account for three weeks; and three weeks was thought sufficient to crumple up an army which the French, true till death to their policy of giving everything to their country but the money in their pockets, had neglected to equip. Politically, too, France was distracted by one of her periodical Caillaux scandals.

There remained Great Britain; and, if the French were uncertain of armed support until the first units of the expeditionary force landed, the German general staff may be excused for thinking that the expeditionary force would never embark. For months it was believed at the German Embassy in London that England was faced with volcanic labour disturbances; Sir Edward Carson and Lady Londonderry on one side, Mr. Asquith and Mr. Birrell on the other had brought Ireland to the brink of civil war; and a government which could not restrain unruly women from breaking windows and burning churches was not an efficient machine for waging a war in which the last ounce of ability and determination would tip the balance. Never, since the day when the triple entente first loomed in the delirium of German statecraft as an aggressive encircling movement in diplomacy, had it seemed flimsier and more vulnerable to the first shock of the "inevitable" war.

This, as will be seen later, is not to hold the German government solely responsible for the war nor to admit that war was inevitable. The ancestral voices of the Chauvinists who in 1914 took most credit for their prescience in prophesying war might have been stilled by the reflection that from the Fashoda incident to the Lansdowne entente they had predicted a no less inevitable war with France, as, a generation earlier, they had predicted one with Russia; the good-will, moreover, which Great Britain for half-a-dozen years before the war extended to Russia and France had its exact counterpart in the former good-will which obtained when Lord Salisbury presented Heligoland to Germany and when, earlier, English sympathy was on the side of Prussia in the war of 1870. No war is inevitable until it breaks out, if then; and successful diplomacy in effect and in intention is the history of inevitable wars which have never taken place.

By 1914, as indeed in 1911, the blundering of four Foreign Offices had produced a state of tension in which war was very difficult to avoid; but the phrase-fed population which repeated in solemn tones that Germany had "been preparing for this war for forty years" seemed never to enquire why the war had not been fought by instalments (as, all were told, Germany would assuredly do if Great Britain did not play her part in 1914) and why the first attack had not been launched in 1905 when Russia was exhausted by her struggle with Japan in Manchuria and distracted at home by revolution and experiments in constitution-making. So she might have rid herself for many years of the Russian menace; and, if France had been drawn in, it is inconceivable that so early as 1906 Great Britain would have been drawn in too. The reconstruction of the Kiel Canal was therefore unimportant; and, for an occasion of war, nothing less flimsy than the assassination of an archduke was ever necessary. And archdukes were plentiful. That Germany did not provoke a conflict in 1905 suggests that she had not in fact devoted forty years to preparing for a world-war and, further, that in that year she did not regard a war of any kind as inevitable. By 1914 her view of world-politics had swung round; and, if other nations contributed to bring war nearer, Germany must bear full and sole responsibility for provoking it.

What had happened between 1905 and 1914 to bring about this change of heart? Now that the war is at last over and truth is no longer disguised or concealed for the purposes of propaganda, now too that every nation of the world is wondering what benefit any one has secured by nearly five years of unequalled sacrifice and suffering, it is interesting to examine why this war should have been considered inevitable. It is more than interesting, it is vital; for the horrors of war are being forgotten even by those who suffered most from them, and, in a few years' time, another government of men who are themselves over military age may see, with one eye, the "necessity" of war and, with the other, its romance or glory, as, before 1914, the youth and age of England alike saw chiefly the "romance" of the Napoleonic wars without remembering the brutality of the press-gang, the nightmare tortures of field surgery unaided by anÆsthetics and antiseptics, the calculated atrocities of the Peninsular campaign and the unromantic, hideous reality of killing and maiming at all times. If the war was inevitable, someone should surely have benefited by it materially. Belgium, a pawn on the board of inevitability, has been dragged from the conflict of the great powers and restored for a few years at least to the number of small nations; and all who went to the succour of Belgium may feel that they risked the world to gain their own souls. Nevertheless, if Belgian neutrality was indeed but the occasion of a war which the great powers could no longer avoid and if no one of them is richer, stronger, safer, healthier or happier, it would have been better not to undertake it; and, before any have time to forget, all should take steps to make other wars impossible.

Yet not even this boon has been secured. Since 1914 mankind has gained the creed of the league of nations, which is reverently mumbled with as much conviction as would be exhibited by a well-bred agnostic who found himself shepherded to church and discovered his neighbours mumbling the apostles' creed. The league of nations has been accepted with the blithe vagueness of a man who proclaims that he "believes in progress and all that sort of thing." M. Clemenceau accepted it, with the reservation that it must not remove the foot of France from the neck of her adversary; President Wilson accepted it, with the reservation that he could not bring pressure to bear on Congress if Congress refused to take a hand in policing the world; Mr. Lloyd George accepted it, with the reservation that the work of the league was to be entrusted indefinitely to the supreme council of the allies.

It would be foolish to disparage a machine which is being deliberately kept from functioning by a number of men too suspicious or too lustful of power to give the fly-wheel its preliminary spin: if that international duelling which men call war is to be stamped out as, a hundred years ago, duelling between individuals was stamped out in England, every nation must make a vast preliminary sacrifice by surrendering the right of private vengeance and aggression, as the individual perforce surrendered his private right to punish an enemy or to protect his own honour at the sword-point; there must no more be reservations in arbitration between states than there are reservations to the English law under which aggressor and aggrieved submit their case, even where it involve their fortune and honour, to the judgement of an impartial court. Want of courage or of honesty has kept most champions of the league[23] from admitting, still more from insisting on, this repugnant idea of sacrifice; the league remains an abstraction; and already there is talk of an "inevitable" war between the United States and Japan, "inevitable" rivalry in ship-building between Great Britain and the United States.

Much is to be hoped from sane historical education; but, whatever contribution the League of Nations may make to the peace of the world, the first preparatory lesson, which no one as yet should have had time to forget, is that every modern war is a complex which includes "men disembowelled by guns five miles away" and that a war between several of the great powers, conducted with modern methods of destruction, is one in which no one, probably, gains anything. The second lesson is that, as the late war struck at combatants and noncombatants, neutrals and belligerents impartially if not with the same force, involving German women and children in the starving grip of the allied blockade and spattering the walls of English coast-towns with the brains and blood of British women and children slaughtered in some naval bombardment or air-raid, so any future war, with its call for the last resources of the nation, will convert into belligerents and potential victims the old men who are left to till the fields and the boys who stand at a lathe, the girls who fill a shell-case and the mothers who suckle future soldiers: all are providing the sinews of war; and the sinews of war have to be cut without too nice concern for age or sex. The third lesson is that there is no inherent, life-and-death antagonism between a Stettin dock-hand and a Bristol dock-hand, between a London physician and a Berlin physician, between Professor Gilbert Murray and Professor von Willamowitz-Moellendorff. So, at least, one school would be inclined to assert; and, if the assertion hold truth, it was no less true in 1914. Why, then, was this unnecessary war, which has impoverished the world in everything but bravery and suffering, considered necessary?

There was much ill intention, it may be submitted; more ignorance; and bad faith most of all. Russia and Germany stood, like every autocracy, to gain by a successful blood-bath; the triumph of a "spirited foreign policy" deflected attention from domestic politics and strengthened the bonds of discipline. France nurtured a spirit of hatred and revenge against the power which had after many years curtailed her privilege of exploiting and disturbing the German states for her own profit; she hankered, also, to recover two provinces which had been torn from her side as ruthlessly as she had torn them from the side of another. So much for ill intention.

There was ignorance in the epidemic of international fear which arose and spread from the day in 1892 when Germany made overtures of friendship to Great Britain. Before the government of the day had time to promulgate its historic doctrine of insularity, France was overtaken by panic at the possibility of being encircled; to counter an Anglo-German alliance which never came to birth, she purchased the alliance of Russia by financing the trans-Siberian railway and acquired at second-hand an interest in the thieves' kitchen of south-east Europe and a responsibility for its periodical conflagration. It was now Germany's turn to suspect an encircling movement directed at her immense double frontier; the uneasy suspicion turned to active alarm when the pacific geniality of King Edward and the cautious diplomacy of Lord Lansdowne added the resources of the world's greatest naval power to those of the world's most numerous and of Europe's most scientific armies.

In such an atmosphere of suspicion, the "race of armaments" progressed apace and was fostered by an economic hallucination that, if Great Britain or Germany could destroy the other's trade, the survivor would be roughly twice as rich—with the embarrassing richness of a seller who brings his goods to a market where no one has anything to offer him in exchange. In brief sun-bursts of sanity, the manipulators of British foreign policy sickened of the suspicion-disease which themselves had spread; there were "peace talks" and peace missions: Mr. Churchill proposed a naval holiday; Lord Haldane visited Germany, flitting between Potsdam and Windsor, from one soveran to another, with a pregnant gravity and consequence that would have turned the head of a man less prone to personal vanity. By this time, unfortunately, the suspicion was too deep-seated to be charmed away by the bilingual fluency of a philosophic chancellor; the offer of a naval holiday, by a power which was already predominant at sea, suggested some kind of confidence trick; and the German government not only believed that an attack was impending, but knew well that, if the parts had been reversed, a boat-load of German Churchills and Haldanes would have been sent with messages of good-will to England. And no one outside the ranks of labour had proclaimed the simple doctrine that the NÜrnberg toy-maker had no inherent, life-and-death quarrel with the toy-maker of Birmingham. So much for ignorance.

II

In England at least there was also bad faith.

A new chapter in British foreign policy began with the Anglo-French entente: designed originally to end a long period of friction in North Africa, it effectually ended the longer period of British isolation from continental politics. So successful was its work as an instrument of peace that a similar entente was established with Russia; and, as soon as London and Paris had disposed of North Africa, London and Petersburg turned their attention to unsettled problems in Persia. It was speciously claimed that the entente principle reduced the menace of war: henceforth all international differences could be accommodated by friendly chats between the foreign ministers of entente powers; if Germany would join the happy family, the menace of war would vanish.

Those who sincerely hoped to see growing from the first ententean informal United States of Europe revealed one blind spot in their imagination. The object of war, seen from one angle, is to upset the existing order in the interests of one belligerent; the object of the entente was to preserve the existing order; but, though this brought substantial advantage to Great Britain, France and Russia by putting North Africa and Persia out of bounds for diplomatic skirmishing, it brought no corresponding advantage to a country which joined the entente after the spoils had been divided. "You have helped yourselves," the German imperialist might fairly say; "you not only refuse to let me participate, but you wish me to guarantee you in permanent possession." The German government refused to recognise the right of three nations to distribute among themselves the unallocated territories of the world; it presumed, further, to doubt their power; and the Agadir episode was an experiment to test the strength of the entente. A mailed fist and shining armour had prevailed against Russia when Bosnia and Herzegovina were annexed; they were worth trying again.

The international crisis of 1911 proved that, on this occasion and on this subject, Great Britain and France were not to be intimidated; here, at least, the entente was impregnable. Would it always be as solid? Throughout Europe, after 1911, the dominating question in foreign politics was whether the diplomacy of Great Britain and of France could always count on the armed backing of the other. Was there an offensive and defensive alliance? In the absence of an alliance, was there a binding obligation on either power to come to the assistance of the other?

The question was asked in the House of Commons:

"There is a very general belief," said Lord Hugh Cecil, on March 10th, 1913, "that this country is under an obligation, not a treaty obligation, but an obligation arising owing to an assurance given by the Ministry, in the course of diplomatic negotiations, to send a very large armed force out of this country to operate in Europe. That is the general belief."

To this Mr. Asquith replied:

"I ought to say that is not true."

A fortnight later he amplified his assurance by stating that this country was not under any obligation, not public and known to parliament, which compelled it to take part in any war. In other words, if war arose between European powers, there were no unpublished agreements, which would restrict or hamper the freedom of the government, or of parliament, to decide whether or not Great Britain should participate in a war. The use that would be made of the naval and military forces, if the government and parliament decided to take part in any war was, for obvious reasons, not a matter about which public statements could be made.

If the House of Commons had received any assurance less unequivocal, it is more than possible that the ministerial party would have split and that the government would have fallen. Though heavily reduced in numbers, the liberal majority was identical in spirit with that which had been returned to support Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman; it was strongly radical, straitly nonconformist and essentially pacific, knowing little of history and nothing of foreign policy, neither understanding nor liking continental adventures and occasionally resisting vehemently a quarter-comprehended drifting which demonstrably absorbed in armaments a revenue which might have been devoted to social reform. It disliked Mr. Churchill's activities at the Admiralty, it distrusted the liberal-imperialist elements which had risen to the top of the cabinet in the persons of Mr. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey and Lord Haldane; it had no quarrel with any one and, if its fears had not been lulled by the prime minister's explicit assurances, it would have taken steps to dissipate that danger of a European war in which Great Britain began to be involved on the day when she involved herself in continental politics. If the "obligation of honour," disclosed in 1914, had been made public any time in the three years preceding, if the government had fallen, if the commons of Great Britain had shewn themselves to the pacific minorities and majorities in every country of Europe as backing their peace-talk with deeds, there would have been reality in the professions of the foreign secretary; the naval holiday and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's hopes for proportional disarmament might have had a hearing.

Perhaps there would have been no war.

When there was no obligation to participate, there was no cause for uneasiness. It was not until August Bank Holiday, 1914, that the House of Commons and the country discovered that "no obligation" was the same as "an obligation of honour." Sir Edward Grey, in guiding the House to war, used the words:

"For many years we have had a long-standing friendship with France ... how far that friendship entails
... an obligation, let every man look into his own heart,
and his own feelings, and construe the extent of the obligation for himself."

There was no "obligation," as stated by Mr. Asquith; there was "a debt of honour," as implied by Sir Edward Grey. "I ought to say that is not true," Mr. Asquith had replied in reference to an alleged "assurance given by the Ministry, in the course of diplomatic negotiations, to send a very large armed force out of this country to operate in Europe"; yet, to judge from another passage in Sir Edward Grey's same speech, there was so much telepathic harmony between the naval staffs of Great Britain and France that the French fleet had already withdrawn to protect their joint trade routes in the Mediterranean and was leaving the northern and western coast of France to the hypothetical protection of the British navy. An Irishman, unversed in the niceties of parliamentary good faith, has to pause for thought. Bishop Thirlwall, when challenged to say whether he did not prefer compulsory religion to no religion at all, is reported to have confessed that the difference was too subtile for his comprehension; any one of sensitive conscience must confess that his comprehension is not subtile enough to detect any other difference between an "obligation" and a "debt of honour" than that the debt of honour, unbacked by such sanction as is purchasable by a sixpenny contract-stamp, is the more strongly binding. Because there had been no exchange of signed notes, it is arguable that Mr. Asquith was justified by legal training and usage in denying that an obligation existed; Sir Edward Grey appealed to the chivalry of the House of Commons and defied it to say that there existed no obligation of honour.

Chivalry was stronger than resentment; the pacific majority, which, in its innocence of legalism, had kept the government in power on the assurance that no continental commitments existed, voted the country into war on the assurance that its honour was involved. It only remains to put on record the impression left by this hazy obligation on the mind of one party to it:

"We had a compact with France," said Mr. Lloyd George in August, 1918, "that, if she were wantonly attacked, the United Kingdom would go to her support."

In reply to an objection he added:

"There was no compact as to what force we should bring into the arena. In any discussion that ever took place, either in this country or outside, there was no idea that we should ever be able to supply a greater force than six divisions."

Later still he borrowed the qualifying language of predecessors who had tried to keep faith with France and Great Britain at the same time:

"I think," he said, "the word 'compact' was too strong for use in that connection. In my judgement it was an obligation of honour...."

So much for bad faith. The people of England, apart from occasional panics and blood-lusts, are justified in claiming that they did not want war; misled—and it is hard to refrain from adding "wilfully misled"—by their rulers, they were given no chance of preserving peace.

The public, which was left to pay the bill, is unlikely to know for many years how many members of the government shared with the prime minister and the foreign secretary the responsibility of misleading the House of Commons and the country. It is fair to assume that the terms of this compact, which was not an obligation, but only a debt of honour, were divulged to Lord Haldane before he carried out his peace mission to Potsdam; and to so consistent a champion of peace, of retrenchment on armaments and of social reform as Mr. Lloyd George, before he lectured Germany in his Mansion House speech during the Agadir crisis of 1911; and to Mr. Churchill, before he changed in a night from a "little-navy" man to a "big-navy" man; and to any one else who, like Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Churchill, forced the cabinet door to see what manner of skeleton lay behind. It is equally fair to assume that the smaller fry of the ministry were not admitted to the guilty secret; nothing but ignorance could justify so egregious a speech as that in which one member informed the public that "he could conceive no circumstance in which continental operations would not be a crime against the people of this country."

From Agadir to Armageddon, those who believed in the word of the government believed also that nothing in the international position of those days could involve Great Britain in a continental war. Sir Edward Grey's adroitness and love of peace had steered Europe through a Moroccan crisis and two Balkan wars; when Austria hurled her bullying ultimatum at Servia, it was hoped that his intervention would again be successful and that, whatever the foreign ministers might achieve, the world would not commit suicide in revenge for the assassination of an Austrian archduke.

No one troubled; no one, surely, had reason to trouble. London in 1914 was an exaggerated caricature of London in 1913 or 1912. The carnival moved with the inconsequent speed and false recklessness of a revue. Of the thousands who besieged every railway-station on the last Friday of July, bound for all parts of England and for every kind of holiday, few can have fancied that it was their last holiday in a world at peace.

III

An average group, assembling at Paddington, found the train service disorganised by a minor strike and whiled away its time of idleness enforced by exchanging news of the Buckingham Palace conference and of the menace to peace in south-eastern Europe. One of the party had been lunching with the Pilgrims and retailed a rumour that there had been a slight run on the Bank of England that morning; this was in the early days of rumours, and all listened respectfully, though it was difficult to see why English depositors should be alarmed at the Balkan imbroglio. Another of the party enlivened the journey by exhibiting new maps of Servia and south-east Austria, but, once away from the neurosis of London, no one was interested in anything but the threatened civil war in Ireland.

Any one who asked perfunctorily for news of Servia was assured that she would yield to superior force at the last moment. Though a journalist might whisper confidentially that the fleet had sailed from Portsmouth with coal stacked on deck, this was very far from making war unavoidable: if Servia refused to comply with the terms of the ultimatum, Russia would indeed come to her protection against Austria; but then Germany would come to the aid of Austria against Russia, while France would hasten to help Russia against Germany. The same automatic widening of the conflict had been threatened when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina; but, as it was then recognised that one great power would bring in another, so it would be recognised now and prevented; as Great Britain could not face a European war for Bosnia, so she could not now face it for Servia.

Similar conversations were taking place at that hour in thousands of similar houses. Few of all who took part in these last meetings imagined that within a few days they would be training for commissions; no one dreamed that, before a year had passed, almost every man at all these tables would have entered the army, that some would be wounded, others already killed. To most, a general war only became conceivable two days later, when the Sunday newspapers reported that German troops had crossed the frontiers of France and Luxemburg.

Thereafter, more quickly than dazed minds could take in, the impossible became the actual. On Monday, though Kuhlmann's efforts to localise the conflict brought a moment's hope, letters and telegrams, flying from one part of the country to another, convinced even the most sanguine that war—in which Great Britain would be involved—was inevitable; and, before nightfall, every town and village was ringing with Sir Edward Grey's speech.

"How far that friendship entails ... an obligation, let every man look into his own heart, and his own feelings, and construe the extent of the obligation for himself...."

The thousands who had scattered four days earlier to every part of England poured back, on a common impulse, to London. There, all felt, they would gain readier news, perhaps better news, when the silence and isolation of the country had become unbearable. They assembled at hundreds of country stations, debating to the last whether the peace-trained navy would stand the test of war; and, as they read the morning papers, they found that the full text of the foreign secretary's speech made war a certainty, unless Germany submitted to a diplomatic rebuff more disastrously humiliating than the worst defeat in the field.

London that afternoon lay at the mercy of the first war-expositors. Those who had most vehemently attacked the 1909 ship-building programme now most loudly thanked God that England was an island protected by a strong fleet; a few railed against the earlier course of a foreign policy which had embroiled Great Britain in continental rivalries; no one at that time or in that place suggested that war could be averted. When the major issues had been discussed, confidences were exchanged about the ministers who had resigned and wobbled and withdrawn their resignations. Lord Morley and Mr. John Burns had left the cabinet, followed by a small number of minor office-holders; Lord Beauchamp and others, who had refused to support a war for which the sanction of the country had been neither obtained nor sought, renewed their allegiance to the government when the neutrality of Belgium, which Great Britain was bound by treaty to defend, was violated; but the champions of peace, who had vowed that British troops should only leave England over their dead bodies, and the opponents of intervention, who had explained to wavering colleagues that Great Britain was under no international obligation to take part, remained snugly if silently in office. The fleet, it was now heard, had been ordered to take up war-stations and to seal the German forces in port before the ultimatum was issued; the expeditionary force, it was also heard, had received at least preliminary mobilization-orders while war hung yet in the balance; and so quickly do moral standards decline when personal security is threatened that those who had attacked Germany for her too timely massing of troops congratulated themselves that in England also there were men of laudable vigilance and decision.

And, like punctuation-marks at the end of every sentence, came interruptions from men torn out of familiar surroundings and flung into a world whose very language they did not understand:

"They say there will be a run on the banks for gold ...," murmured one.

"They say the Government will have to declare a moratorium ...," murmured another.

"They say there will very likely be bread riots...."

"They say that special constables are to be enrolled...."

"They say you ought to lay in a certain amount of food...."

At eleven o'clock at night a state of war began between Great Britain and Germany.

IV

From the moment when the ultimatum took effect until the day when the first reports of military activity reached England, political speculation and prophecy raged unconfined. In the betting-book of one club stands recorded a wager that, in the event of war, there will within ten years be not one crowned head in Europe. Now that war had come, every one was calculating how long it could go on: for all her preparation, it was said, Germany would soon run short of certain essentials; but a decision must be reached quickly, as banking experts were already predicting a general collapse of credit in November. Memories of the Franco-German war suggested that, with the precision of modern weapons and with the size of modern armies, no nation in the world could support the strain for more than a few weeks.

Nevertheless, whether peace were signed within three months or six, the old national and international conditions under which the men of military age had grown up were destroyed for ever: most of them, though even now they did not realise it, would be killed or maimed; a long war would bleed the world slowly to death, a short war would be followed by such frenzied re-arming and re-equipment as would exhaust every country not less surely. The days of general luxury, perhaps even of common comfort, were over; taxation would close the great houses and disperse the old retinues. Ethically, politically, intellectually, economically and socially every war marked a transition from one epoch to another; and, before the first unit of the expeditionary force had landed in France, every one felt dimly that an era had closed. As yet there had been no call for more men, as yet none knew whether there was time to train them, as yet it seemed likely that the casualties would be confined to the professional soldiers of the regular army and to the volunteers of the territorial forces; but, though imagination refused to contemplate such an upheaval as took place within even one month, the men between twenty and thirty felt that their world had passed away. Before five years had run their course, the best of them had passed away, too; and of one generation the finest work in the most fruitful period of construction was lost for ever.

This was a time of meditation and heart-searching. So staggering was the shock of war that men's minds refused to conceive of it as the human punishment of human malevolence or folly: Fleet Street dragged in Armageddon and laid the responsibility on God, while finding an excuse for Him in the depravity of man. The moral laxities of France and the perversions of Germany were to be punished by a retribution not less overwhelming than that which had fallen upon Sodom and Gomorrah; as Belgium, Russia and England were included in the general destruction, it was explained that they were being punished, respectively, for the Congo atrocities, the Jewish massacres and the attempted disestablishment of the Welsh church; only Servia, which suffered first and longest, and Japan, which was far enough away to be forgotten, were overlooked by those who set themselves to justify the ways of God to man. It would take too long to trace the workings of providence in so many countries, but of England at least it may be claimed that there was a disproportion between her offence and her punishment: at the worst her people were indolent, vulgar, selfish and lacking in an imaginative conscience, but a nation would not seem ripe for destruction when four or five million of its members voluntarily offer themselves for mutilation and death.

Meditation passed away with the first bewilderment and was discouraged with every forward step of a nation arming itself for defence. From time to time spirits dwelling in isolation struggled to preserve detachment, the young poets who lay out under the stars in momentary expectation of death raised their voices in challenge to incomprehensibility; but the first were arrested as sedition-mongers and the second were dismissed as poets. Meditation was not allowed to become articulate until the armistice. It were fruitless and ungracious to dwell on the epidemic delusions and organised fury of those first days: they are common to every country in every war;[24] though they broke out periodically, their grotesque violence abated as new work called for undivided attention.

Not for long did it seem that the casualties would be confined to the regular army and the expeditionary force. Officers of the special reserve received their mobilisation-orders and reported for duty on the south coast; after long and anxious silence, during which it could only be assumed that they had crossed the channel and were being hurried into Belgium, some of the survivors at length wrote that they had been in the great advance and the great retreat, that they had lost almost every part of their kit, but were enjoying a moment's breathing-time. After the Marne, they moved up again, "dodging death and danger, without rest or food or drink ... till death seemed relaxation and a wound a luxury." Although for more than four years hardly a day passed without bringing news of the death, disablement or loss of some relation or friend, for the men under thirty the casualties crowded thickest in the early weeks; their generation was the most plenteously represented in the first months; and, after four years, of their generation fewest remained.