I

To give the cure a chance we must have a long quiet time. And we must secure it now.

For the moment, no doubt, war has gone out of fashion; it pines in the shade, like the old horsehair covers for sofas, or antimacassars of lace. Hardly a day can pass, even now, but someone finds out, with a start and a look of displeasure, that war has been given its chance and has not done quite so well as it ought to have done. One man will write to the Press, in dismay, that the meals in the Simplon express are not what they were in 1910. Another, outward bound by Calais to Cannes, has found that the hot-water plant in his sleeping-compartment struck work—and that in a specially cold sector down by the Alps. Thus does war in the end, knock at the doors of us all: like the roll of the earth upon its axis, it brings us, if not death or destitution or some ashy taste in the mouth, at any rate a sense of a fallen temperature in our bunks. However non-porous our minds, there does slowly filter into us the thought that when a million of a country's men of working age have just been killed there may be a plaguey dearth of the man-power needed to keep in pleasant order the lavatories of its trains de luxe. Sad to think how many tender minds, formed in those Elysian years—Elysian for anyone who was not poor—before the war, will have to suffer, probably for many years, these little shocks of realization.

Surely there never was any time in the life of the world when it was so good, in the way of obvious material comfort, to be alive and fairly well-to-do as it was before the war. Think of the speed and comfort and relative cheapness of the Orient Express; of the way you could wander, unruined, through long Æsthetic holidays in Italy and semi-Æsthetic, semi-athletic holidays in the Alps; of the week-end accessibility of London from Northern England; of the accessibility of public schools for the sons of the average parson or doctor; of the penny post, crown of our civilization—torn from us while the abhorred half-penny post for circulars was yet left; of the Income Tax just large enough to give us a pleasant sense of grievance patriotically borne, but not to prostrate us, winter and summer, with two "elbow jolts" or "Mary Ann punches" like those of the perfected modern prize-fighter.

Many sanguine well-to-do people dreamt, in the August of 1914, that the war, besides attaining its primary purpose of beating the enemy, would disarrange none of these blessings; that it would even have as a by-product a kind of "old-time Merrie England," with the working classes cured of the thirst for wages and deeply convinced that everyone who was not one of themselves was a natural ruler over them. For any little expense to which the war might put us the Germans would pay, and our troops would return home to dismiss all trade-union officials and to regard the upper and middle classes thenceforth as a race of heaven-sent colonels—men to be followed, feared, and loved. Ah, happy vision, beautiful dream!—like Thackeray's reverie about having a very old and rich aunt. The dreamer awakes among the snows of the Mont Cenis with a horrid smell in the corridor and the hot-water pipes out of order. And so war has gone out of fashion, even among cheery well-to-do-people.

II

But may it not come into fashion again? Do not all the great fashions move in cycles, like stars? When our wars with Napoleon were just over, and all the bills still to be paid, and the number of visibly one-legged men at its provisional maximum, must not many simple minds have thought that surely man would never idealize any business so beastly and costly again? And then see what happened. We were all tranquilly feeding, good as gold, in the deep and pleasant meadows of the long Victorian peace when from some of the frailest animals in the pasture there rose a plaintive bleat for war. It was the very lambs that began it. "Shall we never have carnage?" Stevenson, the consumptive, sighed to a friend. Henley, the cripple, wrote a longing "Song of the Sword." Out of the weak came forth violence. Bookish men began to hug the belief that they had lost their way in life; they felt that they were Neys or Nelsons manquÉs, or cavalry leaders lost to the world. "If I had been born a corsair or a pirate," thought Mr. Tappertit, musing among the ninepins, "I should have been all right." Fragile dons became connoisseurs. faute de mieux, of prize-fighting; they talked, nineteen to the dozen, about the still, strong man and "straight-flung words and few," adored "naked force," averred they were not cotton-spinners all, and deplored the cankers of a quiet world and a long peace. Some of them entered quite hotly, if not always expertly, into the joys and sorrows of what they called "Tommies," and chafed at the many rumoured refusals Of British innkeepers to serve them, little knowing that only by these great acts of renunciation on the part of licensees has many a gallant private been saved from falling into that morgue an "officer house," and having his beer congealed in the glass by the refrigerative company of colonels.

The father and mother of this virilistic movement among the well-read were Mr. Andrew Lang, the most donnish of wits, and one of the wittiest. Lang would review a new book in a great many places at once. So, when he blessed, his blessing would carry as far as the more wholly literal myrrh and frankincense wafted abroad by the hundred hands of Messrs. Boot. The fame of Mr. Rider Haggard was one of Lang's major products. Mr. Haggard was really a man of some mettle. By persons fitted to judge he was believed to have at his fingers' ends all the best of what is known and thought by mankind about turnips and other crops with which they may honourably and usefully rotate. But it was for turning his back upon these humdrum sustainers of life and writing, in a rich Corinthian style, accounts of fancy "slaughters grim and great," that his flame lived and spread aloft, as Milton says, in the pure eyes and perfect witness of Lang. Another nursling of Lang's was the wittier Kipling, then a studious youth exuding Border ballads and Bret Harte from every pore, but certified to carry about him, on paper, the proper smell of blood and tobacco.

Deep answered unto deep. In Germany, too, the pibrochs of the professors were rending the skies, and poets of C4 medical grade were tearing the mask from the hideous face of peace. The din throughout the bookish parts of Central and Western Europe suggested to an irreverent mind a stage with a quaint figure of some short-sighted pedagogue of tradition coming upon it, round-shouldered, curly-toed, print-fed, physically inept, to play the part of the war-horse in Job, swallowing the ground with fierceness and rage, and "saying among the trumpets 'Ha, ha!'" You may see it all as a joke. Or as something rather more than a joke, in its effects. Mr. Yeats suggested that an all-seeing eye might perceive the Trojan War to have come because of a tune that a boy had once piped in Thessaly. What if all our millions of men had to be killed because some academic Struwwelpeter, fifty years since, took on himself to pipe up "Take the nasty peace away!" and kick the shins of Concord, his most kindly nurse?

If he did, it was natural. All Struwwelpeters are natural. All heirs-apparent are said to take the opposite side to their fathers still on the throne. And those learned men were heirs to the age of the Crystal Palace, the age of the first "Locksley Hall," with its "parliament of man" and "federation of the world," the age that laid a railway line along the city moat of Amiens and opened capacious HÔtels de la Paix throughout Latin Europe, the age when passports withered and Baedeker was more and more, the age that in one of its supreme moments of ecstasy founded the London International College, an English public school (now naturally dead) in which the boys were to pass some of their terms among the heathen in Germany or France.

The cause of peace, like all triumphant causes, good as they may be, had made many second-rate friends. It had become safe, and even sound, for the worldly to follow. The dullards, the people who live by phrases alone, the scribes who write by rote and not with authority—most of these had drifted into its service. It had become a provocation, a challenge, vexing those "discoursing wits" who "count it," Bacon says, "a bondage to fix a belief." A rebound had to come. And those arch-rebounders were men of the teaching and writing trades, wherein the newest fashions in thought are most eagerly canvassed, and any inveterate acquiescence in mere common sense afflicts many bosoms with the fear of lagging yards and yards behind the foremost files of time; perhaps—that keenest agony—of having nothing piquant or startling to say, no little bombs handy for conversational purposes. "I sat down," the deserving young author says in The Vicar of Wakefield, "and, finding that the best things remained to be said on the wrong side, I resolved to write a book that should be wholly new. I therefore dressed up three paradoxes with some ingenuity. They were false, indeed, but they were new. The jewels of truth have been so often imported by others that nothing was left for me to import but some splendid things that, at a distance, looked every bit as well." "Peace on earth, good-will towards men," "Blessed are the peacemakers"—these and the like might be jewels; but they were demoded; they were old tags; they were clichÉs of bourgeois morality; they were vieux jeu, like the garnets with which, in She Stoops to Conquer, the young woman of fashion declined to be pacified when her heart cried out for the diamonds.

Then the Church itself must needs take a hand—or that part of the Church which ever cocks an eye at the latest fashions in public opinion, the "blessed fellows," like Poins, that "think as every man thinks" and help to swell every passing shout into a roar. I find among old papers a letter written in Queen Victoria's reign by an unfashionable curmudgeon whose thought would not keep to the roadway like theirs. "I see," this rude ironist writes, "that 'the Church's duty in regard to war' is to be discussed at the Church Congress. That is right. For a year the heads of our Church have been telling us what war is and does—that it is a school of character, that it sobers men, cleans them, strengthens them, knits their hearts, makes them brave, patient, humble, tender, prone to self-sacrifice. Watered by 'war's red rain,' one bishop tells us, virtue grows; a cannonade, he points out, is an 'oratorio'—almost a form of worship. True; and to the Church men look for help to save their souls from starving for lack of this good school, this kindly rain, this sacred music. Congresses are apt to lose themselves in wastes of words. This one must not—surely cannot—so straight is the way to the goal. It has simply to draft and submit a new Collect for 'war in our time,' and to call for the reverent but firm emendation, in the spirit of the best modern thought, of those passages in Bible and Prayer-book by which even the truest of Christians and the best of men have at times been blinded to the duty of seeking war and ensuing it.

"Still, man's moral nature cannot, I admit, live by war alone. Nor do I say, with some, that peace is wholly bad. Even amid the horrors of peace you will find little shoots of character fed by the gentle and timely rains of plague and famine, tempest and fire; simple lessons of patience and courage conned in the schools of typhus, gout, and stone; not oratorios, perhaps, but homely anthems and rude hymns played on knife and gun, in the long winter nights. Far from me to 'sin our mercies' or to call mere twilight dark. Yet dark it may become. For remember that even these poor makeshift schools of character, these second-bests, these halting substitutes for war—remember that the efficiency of every one of them, be it hunger, accident, ignorance, sickness or pain, is menaced by the intolerable strain of its struggle with secular doctors, plumbers, inventors, school-masters, and policemen. Every year thousands who would in nobler days have been braced and steeled by manly tussles with smallpox or diphtheria are robbed of that blessing by the great changes made in our drains. Every year thousands of women and children must go their way bereft of the rich spiritual experience of the widow and the orphan. I try not to despond, but when I think of all that Latimer owed to the fire, Regulus to a spiked barrel, Socrates to prison, and Job to destitution and disease—when I think of these things and then think of how many of my poor fellow creatures in our modern world are robbed daily of the priceless discipline of danger, want, and torture, then I ask myself—I cannot help asking myself—whether we are not walking into a very slough of moral and spiritual squalor.

"Once more, I am no alarmist. As long as we have wars to stay our souls upon, the moral evil will not be grave; and, to do the Ministry justice, I see no risk of their drifting into any long or serious peace. But weak or vicious men may come after them, and it is now, in the time of our strength, of quickened insight and deepened devotion, that we must take thought for the leaner years when there may be no killing of multitudes of Englishmen, no breaking up of English homes, no chastening blows to English trade, no making, by thousands, of English widows, orphans, and cripples—when the school may be shut and the rain a drought and the oratorio dumb."

But what did a few unfashionable curmudgeons count for, against so many gifted divines?

V

And yet all mortal things are subject to decay, even reactions, even decay itself, and there comes a time when the dead Ophelia may justly be said to be not decomposing, but recomposing successfully as violets and so forth. Heirs-apparent grow up into kings and have little heirs of their own who, hearkening to nature's benevolent law, become stout counter-reactionists in their turn. So now the pre-war virilists, the literary braves who felt that they had supped too full of peace, have died in their beds, or lost voice, like the cuckoos in June, and a different breed find voice and pipe up. These are the kind, the numerous kind, whose youth has supped quite full enough of war. For them Bellona has not the mystical charm, as of grapes out of reach, that she had for the Henleys and Stevensons. All the veiled-mistress business is off. Battles have no aureoles now in the sight of young men as they had for the British prelate who wrote that old poem about the "red rain." The men of the counter-reaction have gone to the school and sat the oratorio out and taken a course of the waters, after the worthy prelate's prescription. They have seen trenches full of gassed men, and the queue of their friends at the brothel-door in Bethune. At the heart of the magical rose was seated an earwig.

Presently all the complaisant part of our Press may jump to the fact that the game of idealizing war is now, in its turn, a back number. Then we may hear such a thudding or patter of feet as Carlyle describes when Louis XV was seen to be dead and the Court bolted off, ventre À terre, along the corridors of Versailles, to kiss the hand of Louis XVI. And then will come the season of danger. Woe unto Peace, or anyone else, when all men speak well of her, even the base. When Lord Robert Cecil and Mr. Clynes and Sir Hubert Gough stand up for the peace which ex-soldiers desire, it is all right. But what if Tadpoe and Taper stood up for it? What if all the vendors of supposedly popular stuff, all the timid gregarious repeaters of current banalities, all the largest circulations in the solar system were on the side of peace, as well as her old bodyguard of game disregarders of fashion and whimsical stickers-up for Christianity, chivalry, or sportsmanship?

We must remember that, in the course of nature, the proportion of former combatants among us must steadily decline. And war hath no fury like a non-combatant. Can you not already forehear, in the far distance, beyond the peace period now likely to come, the still, small voice of some Henley or Lang of later days beginning to pipe up again with Ancient Pistol's ancient suggestion: "What? Shall we have incision? Shall we imbrue?" And then a sudden furore, a war-dance, a beating of tom-toms. And so the whole cycle revolving again. "Seest thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is? How giddily a' turns about all the hot bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty? Sometimes fashioning them like Pharaoh's soldiers in the reechy painting, sometimes like god Bel's priests in the old church window; sometimes like the shaven Hercules in the smirched worm-eaten tapestry?" Anything to be in the fashion.

There is only one thing for it. There must still be five or six million ex-soldiers. They are the most determined peace party that ever existed in Britain. Let them clap the only darbies they have—the Covenant of the League of Nations—on to the wrists of all future poets, romancers, and sages. The future is said to be only the past entered by another door. We must beware in good time of those boys, and fiery elderly men, piping in Thessaly.