A Woman and the War

by Countess of Frances Evelyn Maynard Greville Warwick

XXIII HOW I WOULD WORK FOR PEACE

For a long time past, ever since it was realised that the countless campaigns to which we are committed would be long in following their appointed course, costly in progress and revolting in detail, all manner of people have come forward to explain that they have mastered the causes and the cure of war. Belligerent and neutral countries alike have put forward their panaceas, and Great Britain has held some particularly active groups, perhaps because, while strife fills her horizon, only Zeppelins have succeeded in bringing the actualities home to those who are not serving. Then, too, we have always had in the country a number of men and women who believe honestly that war is a madness and crime, that their contention can be proved by argument, and that because they imagine war does not really benefit anybody, nobody really wants war.

There are others who do not go quite so far as this, being content to saddle policies or individuals with the responsibility. Secret diplomacy is, we are assured, a fruitful source of wars, and we are invited to place our cards on the table, and instruct our diplomats to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Out of these theories are born societies like the Union of Democratic Control, and many unnecessary speeches by people who are apt to confuse martyrdom and unpopularity.

War gives rise to optimists, like Mr. Henry Ford, who, quite oblivious to gibes and sneers, charters a steamer and proceeds to Europe, that he may call upon belligerents to cease their quarrels, because even from the distant city of Detroit, he can see how foolishly they are behaving.

It may be easy to laugh or to sneer at these manifestations. I find it impossible to do either. In every one of these efforts, great or small, notable or ludicrous, something of the spirit that is helping the world to progress is made manifest. If men and women who have little in life except the respect of their circle, deliberately sacrifice that precious asset for the sake of saying what they believe to be the truth, they are worthy of regard, and let us remember that most of us are amongst those who would rather be stoned than laughed at.

If I have criticism for panaceas that are to rid the nation of war as patent medicine-vendors offer to rid the individual of disease, if I look a little askance at all schemes of international betterment by will of the people, it is because all equality of reasoning power, all movement towards higher things, is conditioned by education.

We are very much like our fruit-trees. If you plant one hundred trees of equally good appearance and quality on a good soil, and you attend to fifty, and leave the other fifty to look after themselves, what is going to happen? The trees that have clean soil round the roots, that are pruned and washed and shaped in the way they should go will yield abundantly, look well, and live long; the others will be uncertain in their growth, unattractive in aspect, and liable to fail or become diseased.

In England we pay scant heed to the prosperity of the race, we are far more concerned with the prosperity of the race-course. We have been taught to care less for the well-being of the public than of the publican.

I do not write in any bitterness of spirit, but I remember how long, and successfully the race-course struggled against the war, how definitely Mr. Lloyd George's attempt to end the drink traffic was defeated by the "trade," and how, on the other hand, certain alleged economies in our schools, designed to save a few pounds at the cost of efficiency, have been accepted with hardly a protest.

If we wish to raise another generation that may benefit by the lessons we have learned and paid so dearly for, we must educate it, and education must be recognised as a necessity, something as necessary to us as the bread we eat, and more important than professional politicians, public-houses, race-courses, theatres, and motor-cars; more vital to our welfare than all the amusements of the rich and the poor put together.

Without education, the best ideas, the highest ideals must be lost and, as things are here, so they are elsewhere. In Europe the only belligerent countries that have developed education all over their territory are France and Germany. In some of the other countries, the schoolmaster does not cover a tithe of the domain, and rulers do not wish to see the area of activity enlarged, partly because they understand it is easier to deceive, divide, and rule the ignorant, and partly because they know that the rank and file will not be able to keep pace with the enlightened intelligences to which the most restless elements in the State will be attracted. Autocratic rule cannot endure indefinitely in countries where the proletariat has been to school, even military domination might in time be questioned.

But what bearing has this upon world war? you may ask, and I reply that it has a considerable bearing upon the whole question, because the great majority of those who ensue peace are preaching just now to the converted.

Those who make the next war may be despotic or unconstitutional rulers, if Europe is of a mind to endure such people after this, but they will depend largely upon the uneducated classes, or upon an iron discipline that makes every man a slave of him who represents the State. Education is the one reliable antidote to absolute monarchy, and despite its complete failure in July and August, 1914, I am still inclined to have faith in the International. It failed then, for each belligerent country called out that it was in danger, and in that hour when the social democracy might have saved Europe from the loss of millions of promising lives, the savings of one generation and the progress of two, it failed. But nobody will recognise more completely than the social democrat the price of failure; he will see that democracy must be in future as independent of boundaries as is art or science.

I believe that scores of men and women have the right peace methods, that there are many plans by which peace might be assured to the world, but no one of these can possibly become effective unless it can appeal to the men who constitute the rank and file of the world's armies, and to their wives and sweethearts.

The only other way out of the tangle is for victory to fall upon the side of those who are really concerned to keep the peace, and there is more than a little danger in this, for those who are concerned only with peace are apt to forget war altogether—to neglect necessary precautions, cut down reasonable expenditure, and in short, to give the war-loving, but weaker races, a chance of challenging peace afresh. A union of the world's democracies is the cure for war, and this union is not possible until a certain standard of education has been reached by one and all. Only then will the man to whom fighting is the breath of life understand that he must control his murderous instincts or perish by them.

This war cost many years of preparation, part of it secret, and it is hard to see that peace can be more than a state of neutrality enforced by poverty and exhaustion. To make it abiding will need something more than the skill and cunning of diplomats, it will require the consent of the people themselves, and this they will give when they have knowledge, and not before.

Educate! Use all the modern developments of our civilisation to that end. Let every child in Europe be taught to read and be supplied with books; let every new railway line be hailed as an ambassador of peace. Let interchange of visits be arranged between the workers of all countries, so that they may learn that antagonisms belong to their rulers and not to them.[2] It would be a fine thing to have a panacea that acted as quickly as quack medicines claim to act, but we all know that such cures do not exist. You cannot accomplish in a few months the work that thousands of years have left unfinished. After all that has been said, let us remember that war has been allowed to be the rule of life for countless generations. We in England have hardly suffered, the United States have kept free from actual invasion, but nearly all the other great Powers have known its horrors within the comparatively brief period of our lifetime.

On the Continent, war is one of the incidents of normal life. Men are trained to take part in it as a completion of their education, women are encouraged to applaud it as the source of all honours and distinction. England and America, the two least threatened countries, would hardly appear in a good light as peace propagandists on the Continent, for war is received in a certain false perspective there. Thousands glory in the thoughts of a campaign, proud to have taken part in one as our grandfathers were to empty two or three bottles at a sitting. This false perspective is the greatest danger we have to face in educating the people: it must be destroyed before war will be seen as the thing it is.

Human nature being hard to move, the work must progress slowly, but it is not the less worth undertaking on that account. Sane peace propaganda, accompanied by encouragement of physical fitness and explanation of the significance of life, need offend none, and will benefit all.

The real facts of war must be within reach of everybody, the camera should preserve the records of trench, battlefield, and sacked town. Every city should engrave its list of dead where all may read, and in the cities that have suffered from invasion the full details of the horror should be preserved. The taxation that will grip Europe for many a year to come should always be associated with its prime cause, and every device should be sought to impress upon the children who will now be growing up into an impoverished world, the folly and helplessness of their parents who were unable to keep what they had inherited, whether of freedom or worldly wealth.

We who are middle-aged will be hardly called upon to see war again, the generation captured in its prime between the summers of 1914 and 1916, will have been ruined, the rule of the world will wait upon those who are just leaving school.

Here the propagandists must work, and as there is hardly a big family in belligerent Europe that has not contributed life or fortune in some degree, the foundation for the work will stand prepared.

If I were asked how to develop sane peace propaganda, I would call upon those who have gone through the war to tell the full story to those who have remained behind. All should unite to this end when war is over. Not only should the Englishman tell of frozen trenches and waterless deserts, but Germans and Austrians should tell of the retreat in Galicia and the advance to the marshes of Poland and Russia. The Servian retreat to Albania and the nameless horrors of Armenia should be recorded by survivors, women for choice, and men of all belligerent countries should speak of the horrors of the man-of-war that sinks blazing into the depths.

The camera has a tale to tell of devastated country-side and ruined city, of all the havoc and waste of war. Let that tale be told.

Let the maimed, the crippled, the blind, the physically useless, come forward—our eyes will learn their lesson.

Let the Churches speak, not at the bidding of authority, but in response to the plea of humanity.

Let War, divorced from the physical training incumbent upon men and women alike, take its place by the side of cancer, cholera, and plague.

Let the authorities tell us the loss of all communities in material wealth, and the eugenist speak of the blow to civilisation.

Let all the accumulated facts be on record in every public library in the world, and let them be available even to the illiterate.

Here, then, when the greatest of world-tragedies draws to its appointed close, is the means I would choose to render its repetition impossible, believing as I do that ignorance is the root from which all evil springs.