4
If I did not know then, I had a strength of conviction that amounted almost to knowledge. There was going to be public excitement; there was going to be loose speaking; there was going to be bad blood. And, after that, there might well be rioting.
I have replayed the game a hundred times since that day and asked myself what I could have done to change the issue. Before the war I should have talked to Bertrand; and, if he had shared my apprehensions, he would have spoken a word to the responsible ministers. With this new government of men unknown to me, with this new House no longer even in session, there was no one I could approach. During the war, when we broke down most of the interdepartmental walls, a telephone message from the Admiralty would have stirred sympathetic chords in Scotland Yard or the Home Office. Now I had long severed my connection with the public service; Philip Hornbeck was my one remaining link; and, if I bothered him again, I ran the risk of being told that Griffiths was become a bee in my bonnet.
This notwithstanding, I did ask Barbara to arrange a dinner; and I am only sorry that I did not make the invitation more urgent.
“Is anything the matter?,” she asked in some surprise, for Hornbeck had dined with us only two or three nights before.
“Not at the moment; but there may be trouble if some one doesn’t spike that fellow Griffiths’ guns. In his way, the man’s right: as the government has no remedy, you can’t find an answer to people who say they’ll take the remedy into their own hands. But the common sense of the world won’t allow that. Griffiths will be refused a hearing; the mob may break a few windows; and then the police will clear the streets. It’s not worth marching an army three hundred miles to learn that old lesson.”
“Until they’ve learnt it, they’ll go on believing in men like Griffiths,” said Barbara.
“But it will be a more costly lesson than they realize. With the best intentions in the world, he’s marching them into a trap. I want Hornbeck to stop the march and break up the units before they can collect in force.”
We telephoned to the Admiralty; but Hornbeck had left. When I got in touch with him next day, he was engaged for several nights ahead. Rather shamefacedly, I told him my fears; and he promised to enquire what steps were being taken, though I felt I had wholly failed to communicate my dread of the wasted little fanatic Griffiths. In the middle of the following week I read that the great “hunger-march” had begun; and, when Hornbeck dined with us, he explained that Griffiths was being given enough rope to hang himself, but no more. One army had reached Nottingham, a second was on the outskirts of Coventry and a third was halting on the east side of Newbury; but they would not be allowed to reach London. Since my interview with him, the leader and spokesman had abandoned his former caution; and Hornbeck told me that the police were waiting to prosecute him for inciting to crime.
“It’s a pity to wait,” I said.
“What else can one do?,” asked Hornbeck.
Perhaps my memory is biased by the events of the following week, perhaps my instinct was right in warning me that Griffiths was one of the most dangerous firebrands that I had ever met. He haunted me, as the shadow of Marat must have haunted the well-to-do citizens of Paris; and I felt an equal, unreasoning impatience with the departments that ignored him and with the papers that advertised him. For two or three days the great march was reported mile by mile, with a list of the victories won by “Griffiths’ armies” over the powerless custodians of such county halls, municipal libraries and public baths as they occupied on their way. For the same period the government maintained a calm and dignified silence. Then new interests demanded attention and space.
By the time that the various units joined forces in the open country beyond Neasden, hunger-marching commanded no price in the ever-changing tariff of news-items. London was shopping for Christmas; the Lausanne conference was becoming every day more firm and ineffectual; Signor Mussolini was in England; Germany had defaulted again; and the prime ministers of the late allies were discussing with their financial experts new and final methods of settling the problem of reparations.
I only learned that the army was at hand when I read that the government policy for combating unemployment had been fully explained and that, in the opinion of one private secretary, “no useful purpose would be served by a meeting between the Minister and the leaders of the unemployed now collected in Wembley Park.”
“This is the moment I’ve been dreading,” I told Barbara. “Griffiths has made fools of these people; and he can only recover his authority by fighting the government.”
I read next day that the leaders of the unemployed insisted upon sending a deputation to the minister of labour. A public demonstration was announced later; and from an evening paper I learned that, while the police would not interfere with an orderly march through the streets, it must not be conducted in the neighbourhood of Westminster. As I walked home that night, I was given a handbill in which I read, over the signature of Griffiths, that the hunger-march would be resumed next morning and would be directed first to Buckingham Palace, then—as a concession to constitutionalism—to the Home Office and finally—for a reason I could not guess, since parliament was no longer sitting—to the House of Commons. It was not for Scotland Yard to say who might or might not have access to the king or his responsible ministers; and the problem that chiefly vexed the spirit of Griffiths was to discover who in fact was responsible.
“Now,” I told my colleagues when I reached Fetter Lane through a double line of police, “there’s going to be trouble. The only thing that can stop it will be a downpour of rain.”
“And there is in fact a hard frost,” yawned Triskett.
“This fog may do as well,” said Jefferson Wright.
“It’s pretty serious,” we all agreed.
Did any of us believe in the warnings and predictions which we uttered? I cannot say. Everything that happened in these days is coloured by the memory of what happened afterwards. I may conceivably take credit for explaining before other people that these demonstrations were on a different plane from the coal strikes and railway strikes that aroused our uneasiness after the war; on the other hand, I may only have been suffering from disordered nerves. It was the end of the year; I wanted a holiday; and the self-control which I had to exercise at home sometimes deserted me when I was at my office. Accordingly I claim no praise and feel no shame in saying that I was nervous. The long lines of police-pickets had not been stationed about the streets without some purpose; and the news that trickled in throughout the morning was not of a kind to allay anxiety.
Philip Hornbeck did indeed repeat by telephone his customary assurance that Griffiths could be discounted. When the marchers entered Regent’s Park, they were warned that they would not be allowed to approach Downing Street; and, as Hornbeck walked to the Admiralty, he passed half-a-dozen columns of dejected, leaderless men who were standing easy or trudging slowly under banners of ineffectual protest. Even the bands, he said, were dispirited. After one glance, the passers-by paid no heed to a sight that was now wearisomely familiar; and, in Hornbeck’s eyes, the gaunt, ragged army found its best friends among the constables who tramped in a protective and restraining cordon.
“Did these fellows seem disappointed?,” I asked.
“I think they were too tired, poor devils, to feel anything. If it hadn’t been for the bobbies, you might have thought it was another retreat from Moscow. I believe there was some plain speaking when they found their Napoleon had left them, but I hear he’s only gone to see about billets. The police are helping him all they can. That’s the way we stop revolutions in England,” he chuckled.
I was reminded again of the day now long distant when O’Rane and I had stood in a crowd of many thousands to watch the body of Terence McSwiney drawing through the respectfully silent streets of London. The English, I felt, behaved sometimes like characters in a comic opera: consistent only in their inconsistency, they could not rise to a revolution. With a longer leap into the past, my memory fastened on a moment in O’Rane’s first year at Melton, when he watched a half-hearted attempt at a May Day demonstration and, in disgust at the apathy of the demonstrators, instructed them in the Marseillaise. I wondered if he recalled that day, which was also nearly his last as a scholar of Melton. I wondered if he and Hornbeck were right in discounting this threat of revolution.
Then I thought of the weary crowds that were pouring into London.
“If you’d put a spoke in his wheel at the beginning . . .,” I began.
“You can’t stop peaceful pedestrians from walking along the king’s highway,” Hornbeck rejoined, “and Griffiths arranged that the armies should only become armies when they were too big to turn back.”