And thus, indeed, it was that, to one at least of many thousands, was brought fully and bitterly the significance of that post-war period, of those treacherous, deceiving years that had glittered so bravely on the horizon, that had looked so warm and hospitable, that had promised so much and had brought so little.
1919 was the year of disillusion, not merely of a political disillusion, of disgust at broken faith and forgotten promises and personal treacheries, but of a profounder, subtler disenchantment, of an awakened sense of life’s deception.
We came back from the trenches, the prison camp, the parade ground, radiantly, unspeakably confident. We had looked forward for so long to peace. There had been times when we hardly thought that it would come, certainly not to us. It was like the city of Heaven—a dazzling, remote prospect. We had come to look on it as a tavern where we should rest after our journey; a huge fire would be blazing in the grate, barons of beef would be set before us, mine host would bring from his cellar his richest chambertin. But we had hardly defined the circumstance of our dream. We saw it with the heightened vision of strained and tired nerves as a land of limitless enchantment. And, when peace came, we settled down and waited for the good things to be set before us. And, of course, they were not set before us. And we had not the vitality to fetch them for ourselves; we were tired, not with the exhaustion that follows a day’s hard work, from which after sleep we awake the fitter, but with the exhaustion of dissipation, of a sleepless night. For too long we had been geared too high. The pressure had been maintained by the intoxication of war conditions. We were like tops that are models of poise and balance only as long as they retain their intensity of speed. The stimulation, the incentive had been removed suddenly. We were weak as a drug fiend who has been deprived of morphia; we became listless, lifeless, indifferent.
We have been described as a generation that has flung up the sponge; and the old men grumble about us in their clubs. “No social sense,” they say. “A generation that thinks of nothing except tennis and dancing. Poor stuff!” Perhaps: it may be we are the seed that has been flung on stony ground, that has sprung up quickly, without root in itself or sustenance. It may be that the hot sun has scorched and withered us. It may be. But the Victorians indulged in such an orgy of self-righteousness. They proclaimed so loudly that they were leaving the world better than they found it: and we know what manner of inheritance they handed down to us. It may be pardoned in us, I think, our indifference to politics, and the rights and wrongs of little nations.
And yet we all of us, four years ago, came back to life with some sort of an ideal of citizenship; we were conscious of our responsibility to the future. “We would make it,” we said, “impossible for there to be ever war again.” We were frightfully anxious to do something, but there did not seem anything in particular for us to do. Those of us who wrote, would not have found it difficult perhaps to sell our pens in the arena of party politics. There were plenty of people ready enough to exploit us. But that was not what we wanted.
During the war many of us had come to look on the Labour party as a sort of fairy godmother. Labour was the only party that had included in its programme a ruthless avoidance of war. And, as the man who is hungry can think only of food, so in 1917 it had seemed to us that the avoidance of war was the one thing that mattered. We expected great things of the Daily Herald. But long before the end of 1919 we had realised that no more bellicose production had been ever presented in large quantities to the public. It had substituted one form of war for another. Nations were not to fight each other, but classes were. The proletariat of the world, with the possible exception of the French, was to ride triumphantly over the mangled remains of the idle and blood-sucking rich. It was to be war to the death. Prizes were offered for the best slogan. The people who had clamoured in 1916 for arbitration and compromise between the demands of Germany and those of the Allies, would not listen to arbitration and compromise when the Tynesider demanded another shilling a day from his employer. The Herald became the champion of every trade dispute, and some of us began to wonder. Was this international peace, we asked ourselves, worth the purchase at such a price? If it came to a fight, would we rather fight beside English navvies and English ploughmen against the navvies and ploughmen of Germany and Russia; or would we rather fight beside English, Russian, French, Belgian, German, and Swedish ploughmen against Russian, English, French, German and Swedish aristocrats, or vice versa? Of two wars, which was the less pernicious? And we began to think that class is a habit that can be changed in half a generation; a man who is a newsboy at seventeen may be a baronet at fifty and a viscount at seventy; but race is a tree planted deeply in firm soil. We can change our class as easily as we can change our clothes; but English blood is English blood in the pit, in Mayfair, in the shires; and we should have no sympathy with that party that strove to divide a people against itself.
Indeed, we were sick of party politics: we were in search of some league of international co-operation of the young people of Europe, which should have the right to direct our destinies. “It had been our war,” we said, “it was going to be our peace.” It sounds foolish now, no doubt, at this distant date, but we believed in it then; we were sincere in our desire for it. They offered us “The League of Youth.”
It was a magnificent affair that inaugural banquet at the Connaught Rooms. Viscount Bryce and Sir Oliver Lodge were the chief speakers, as far as I remember. And a number of other very venerable persons described themselves, like the old gentleman in the story, as being no older than they felt. I don’t think that there were at the high table three people under thirty. And the aims and objects of the League were outlined subsequently in the daily press in an article headed with commendable accuracy, but with a singular absence of self-criticism, “The Age of Youth.” But still we had hopes of it. I found myself vice-president of the Education Committee. One Committee meeting I attended. It was my last.
We assembled to discuss the reformation of the Public Schools. There were eight of us. Four of these were girls, of the Girton-Newnham-1917 Club variety. The other half was composed of a secondary schoolmaster, a journalist, an imponderable young Scot, and myself. The schoolmaster was the president. He knew a good deal about the practical side of the business, and he was, therefore, somewhat sceptical. He opened proceedings with a bland, highly noncommittal speech about “harnessing the activities of youth,” which was very jolly but got us little “forra’der.” The journalist, who was, in a sense, secretary of the affair, then read some letters from people who had been sufficiently far-seeing to decline the honour to co-operate. Then the Scotsman began his innings: it was a good, breezy innings, of the Walter Brearley-Tom Wass variety; vigorous, but with the bat infrequently connected with the ball. His idea was to draft manifestoes, circularise headmasters, and open a press campaign on such as declined co-operation. I suggested that headmasters were busy men, that they had secretaries and waste-paper baskets, and that a press campaign on what would be consequently the entire educational world would be a gallant, but unprofitable, undertaking. This perturbed the Scot.