2
I am writing so near to the times which I am trying to describe that I must occasionally invoke the judgement of posterity. I may be told that my facts are wrong, that I have distorted them by unintended omissions, above all that I worked in a false perspective. My only answer must be that I have written the truth as I saw it, that I have no thesis to maintain and that my conclusions have been reached without bias. At the armistice I believed that we had done with war; when peace was signed, I believed that another war was being made inevitable; and, when the peace-coalition fell, I believe that the sense and conscience of the country rose in revolt against a system that threatened it with another war. From this standpoint, the general election of 1922 closed the chapter that began in 1918 and the book that opened in 1914. If it did not answer my question whether the old governing classes could make peace, it gave an unmistakable answer to those who demonstrated that they could not. So far as the people of England are concerned, I feel that the diplomatic moves and counter-moves of this period, the division and regrouping of political parties, the influence of the party and press managers and the historical significance of the Irish settlement or the unemployment problem were all leading to the upheaval of 1922. If history admit of beginnings and ends, a system ended with the end of the 1918 parliament. In using the word “revolt”, which Louis XVI favoured, I wonder whether I should not use the word “revolution”, which de Liancourt substituted.
According to my uncle, the first responsible attack on the peace-treaty was delivered by President Harding; a counter-attack was opened by the French, when they stultified the Washington Conference; and an attack, in reply to the counter-attack, was launched by the Balfour Note on inter-allied indebtedness.
On the day after it was published, Clifford van Oss called in Fetter Lane to enquire whether the note was an overture to repudiation.
“I should rather call it our reply to the French non possumus at Washington,” said Bertrand. “If we pay our debts to you, the French must pay their debts to us instead of building submarines against us.”
“From what I know of the French,” said Clifford, with the detachment that some of us found irritating in a country which had so disconcertingly washed its hands of European problems, “they won’t take it lying down.”
The assertion was so intrinsically probable that I did not contest it; but, if I spent little time wondering what the French reply would be, that was chiefly because I was watching the fulfilment of another prophecy. The controversy that raged for six months over O’Rane’s articles in the Democratic Review is now public, if not ancient, history; and my chief memory is of his victory by silence. If one of his million critics had troubled to study his argument, he would have seen that the flamboyant gifts of embarrassed millionaires were attacked for their demoralizing effect on the recipients. Those who wrote to the papers or passed unanimous resolutions of protest laid emphasis on the crying needs of hospitals and the like; they assumed an almost impertinent right to tell other people how they should spend their money; but they did not meet O’Rane’s contention that every university could be endowed, every laboratory subsidized and every great work of art purchased for the nation from the money that was spent on luxuries.
I paid less attention to those who lectured O’Rane from expensive addresses than to those who heard, on the authority of a millionaire, that a great many people had a great deal too much money.
“Any windows broken?,” I asked him on one of the rare occasions when we met in these months.
“Not yet,” he laughed.
I did not dare to enquire whether any wives had been running away lately. Sonia’s threatened repudiation had not yet been published; but this, Barbara told me, was only because he had not yet stated in public that he would renounce his inheritance. The controversy imparted a transient heat to the chilly summer of 1922; and no doubt I should still be printing letters of protest if O’Rane’s theories of property had not been drowned in the thunder of a more urgent conflict. In August I took Barbara to stay with the Knightriders; and I had only reached Northumberland when my uncle recalled me to London with a telegram that revived for many days the agonizing fears and uncertainties of 1914.
I returned alone to find Bertrand breakfasting in bed.
“You’ve asked me more than once what we’ve done to prevent another war,” he began. “Here’s your answer: nothing.”
In the last week I had seen but a few provincial papers; I had almost forgotten the diplomatic moves that led to this check. With all the suddenness of those August days eight years before, however, I stepped out of the train at King’s Cross to learn that Great Britain was being left to fight, single-handed, for the freedom of the Straits, against a restored and rejuvenated Turkey.
“This is the French reply to the Balfour note,” I said; “their revenge for our refusing to accompany them into the Ruhr.”
“If you’ll be good enough to tell me what it’s all about . . .” Bertrand thundered; then he lay back, spent and very old, until I suggested calling in Fetter Lane to see the latest telegrams.
There was nothing to be learned there; almost nothing to be learned when I invited myself to dine with the Crawleighs, though I remember this night with pleasure as the only one on which my father-in-law and I looked on any political problem with the same eyes. Halfway through dinner, Neave entered in service-uniform. His battalion had received its orders for Chanak; he did not know why he was going; we could not tell him.
“Harington’s a cool-headed fellow,” said Crawleigh to keep his own courage up. “If he can avoid a conflict . . .”
I remembered the days eight years before when Jim Loring and I kept our courage up by telling each other that Sir Edward Grey would prevent war if war could be prevented.
“I still don’t understand,” muttered Lady Crawleigh, as though we were conspiring to keep some discreditable secret for her.
“No one does, ma,” Neave snapped and then left his father to reach the same conclusion in less few words.
War was again at our gates; and we had not willed it, we did not want it. Stalking across Europe from that country which had been most completely vanquished, it hammered at our gates within four years of the war that was to have ended war. Whenever in the last three years I had urged that the incorrigible and blighting Turk should be forced into the hinterland of Asia Minor, Crawleigh had annotated my articles with the red-ink comment that we should pay for a peaceful Europe with a hostile India. Now, though he knew better than most men that Mohammedan India was not bound to us by ties of love, we awoke to find that, while the victorious allies were quarrelling at a distance, Turkey had set herself quietly to recover all that she had lost in the war. When British troops went unsupported to uphold the Treaty of Sèvres, they were to find their old enemies equipped with the arms which we had shipped to Russia and restored to fighting form by officers of the French army.
“But . . . but why . . .?,” Lady Crawleigh kept repeating with pathetic helplessness.
Parliament, as represented by Crawleigh, the services, as represented by his son, the press, as represented by me, were not allowed to know all that was involved in this apparently aimless squabble about distant waterways.
“Nobody knows and nobody cares,” Neave cried in ungovernable exasperation.
And this was all that I could report in answer to Bertrand’s request for news.
“The first shot fires the magazine,” he predicted; “and we know from the Balkan wars that people can fight when they’ve no food and no money. Russia and Hungary will come in search of pickings. One will bring in another.” . . .
For once, however, my uncle was at fault. The political instinct of a somnolent people was again expressed by my butler in his favourite formula that another European war would be beyond a joke.
“If they can’t do better than that,” he decided, of the coalition ministers, “they’d better let some one else have a try.”
I handed on this opinion to Bertrand next day, with the rider that he looked like winning an old bet on the life of the coalition. Before I went north again to bring Barbara back to London, the Lloyd-George government was under sentence; and, had Bertrand been at hand in October to claim his wager, I should have had to entertain him at dinner.