patience…'
But he did not mean a passivepatience. He meant that the method
of social reconstruction was still a riddle, that no effectual
rearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tangled
aspects was solved. 'I tried to talk to those discontented men,'
he wrote, 'but it was hard for them to see things as I saw them.
When I talked of patience and the larger scheme, they answered,
"But then we shall all be dead"-and I could not make them see,
what is so simple to my own mind, that that did not affect the
question. Men who think in lifetimes are of no use to
statesmanship.'
He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those
wanderings, and a chance sight of the transparency of a kiosk in
the market-place at Bishop's Stortford announcing a 'Grave
International Situation' did not excite him very much. There had
been so many grave international situations in recent years.
This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly
attacking the Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to
the help of the Slavs.
But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the
vagrants in the casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master
that all serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the
morrow to their mobilisation centres. The country was on the eve
of war. He was to go back through London to Surrey. His first
feeling, he records, was one of extreme relief that his days of
'hopeless battering at the underside of civilisation' were at an
end. Here was something definite to do, something definitely
provided for. But his relief was greatly modified when he found
that the mobilisation arrangements had been made so hastily and
carelessly that for nearly thirty-six hours at the improvised
depot at Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink but a cup
of cold water. The depot was absolutely unprovisioned, and no one
was free to leave it.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE LAST WAR
Section I
Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order,
it is difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow,
the motives that plunged mankind into the war that fills the
histories of the middle decades of the twentieth century.
It must always be remembered that the political structure of the
world at that time was everywhere extraordinarily behind the
collective intelligence. That is the central fact of that
history. For two hundred years there had been no great changes in
political or legal methods and pretensions, the utmost change had
been a certain shifting of boundaries and slight readjustment of
procedure, while in nearly every other aspect of life there had
been fundamental revolutions, gigantic releases, and an enormous
enlargement of scope and outlook. The absurdities of courts and
the indignities of representative parliamentary government,
coupled with the opening of vast fields of opportunity in other
directions, had withdrawn the best intelligences more and more
from public affairs. The ostensible governments of the world in
the twentieth century were following in the wake of the
ostensible religions. They were ceasing to command the services
of any but second-rate men. After the middle of the eighteenth
century there are no more great ecclesiastics upon the world's
memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen.
Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted,
common-place type in the seats of authority, blind to the new
possibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the
past.
Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the
boundaries of the various 'sovereign states,' and the conception
of a general predominance in human affairs on the part of some
one particular state. The memory of the empires of Rome and
Alexander squatted, an unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human
imagination-it bored into the human brain like some grisly
parasite and filled it with disordered thoughts and violent
impulses. For more than a century the French system exhausted
its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and then the infection
passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the heart and
centre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later ages
were to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this
obsession, the intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the
infinite knowingness of the political writer, the cunning
refusals to accept plain facts, the strategic devices, the
tactical manoeuvres, the records of mobilisations and
counter-mobilisations. It ceased to be credible almost as soon as
it ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of the new age their
state craftsmen sat with their historical candles burning, and,
in spite of strange, new reflections and unfamiliar lights and
shadows, still wrangling and planning to rearrange the maps of
Europe and the world.
It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry how far the millions
of men and women outside the world of these specialists
sympathised and agreed with their portentous activities. One
school of psychologists inclined to minimise this participation,
but the balance of evidence goes to show that there were massive
responses to these suggestions of the belligerent schemer.
Primitive man had been a fiercely combative animal; innumerable
generations had passed their lives in tribal warfare, and the