"Every person in authority met them with rack and sword, cursed their religious leaders as emissaries of the Devil, and punished them for all the things which they considered holy. The earth was the Lord's, and the Pope and Emperor were the vicegerents of God upon the earth. So they were told; and in time they accepted the statement. That was the division of the world. On the one side God, Pope and Emperor, and the army of persecutors; on the other themselves, downtrodden and poor...."
How easy to understand! In crude works of non-imagination the wicked, repente turpissimus, suddenly says, some fine morning, "Evil, be thou my good." In life the conversion is slower. It is a gradual process of coming to feel that what has passed officially as true, right, and worshipful is so implicated in work manifestly dirty, and so easily made to serve the ends of the greedy, lazy, and cruel, that faith in its authenticity has to be given up as not to be squared with the facts of the world. From feeling this it is not a long step to the further surmise that the grand traditional foe of that old moral order of the world, now so severely discredited, may be less black than so lying an artist has painted him. Does he not, anyhow, stand at the opposite pole to that which has just proved itself base? He, too, perhaps, is some helpless butt of the slings and arrows of an enthroned barbarity tormenting the world. The legend about his condign fall from heaven may only be some propagandist lie—all we are suffered to hear about some early crime in the long, beastly annals of governmental misdoing. So thought trips, fairly lightly, along till your worthy Bohemian peasant, literal, serious, and straight, like the plain working-man of all countrysides, turns, with a desperate logical integrity and courage, right away from a world order which has called itself divine and shown itself diabolic. He will embrace, in its stead, the only other world order supposed to be extant: the one which the former order called diabolic; at any rate, he has not wittingly suffered any such wrong at its hand as the scourges of Popes and of Emperors. So the plain man emerges a Satanist.
II
To-day the convert does not insist upon bearing the new name. He does not, except in the case of a few doctrinaire bigots, repeat any Satanist creed. But in several portions of Europe the war made conversions abound. Imagine the state of mind that it must have induced in many a plain Russian peasant, literal, serious, and straight, like the Bohemian. First the Tsar, in the name of God and of Holy Russia, sent him, perhaps without so much as a rifle, to starve and be shelled in a trench. If he escaped, the Soviet chiefs, in the name of Justice, sent him to fight against those for whom the Tsar had made him fight before, while his wife and babies were starved by those whom he fought both for and against. When his fighting was done he was made, in the name of social right, an industrial conscript or wage-slave. If alive, to-day, he is probably overworked and starved, perhaps far from home, his family life broken up, his instinct or right of self-direction ignored or punished as treason by rulers whom he did not choose, his whole country in danger of lapsing into the abject miseries of an uncared-for fowl-run—all brought about in the name of human freedom.
Consider, again, the case of some German or Austrian widow with many young children. The Kaiser's Government, breathing the most Christian sentiments, gave the Fatherland war in her time; her husband was killed, her country is ruined, her children are growing up stunted and marred by all the years of semi-starvation; the Paris Press is crying out, in the name of moral order throughout the world, that they ought to be starved more drastically; part of the English Press complains, in the tone of an outraged spiritual director, that she has shown no adequate signs of repentance of the Kaiser's sins, and that she and hers are living like fighting cocks; the German Agrarian Party, in the name of Patriotism, manoeuvres to keep her from getting her weekly ounce or two of butcher's meat from abroad more cheaply than they would like to sell it to her at home.
What could you say to such people if they should break out at last in despair and defiance: "Anyhow, all these people, here and abroad, who take upon themselves to speak for God and duty and patriotism and liberty and loyalty are evil people, and do evil things. Shall not all these trees that they swear by be judged by their fruits? Away with them into the fire, God and country and social duty and justice and every old phrase that used to seem more than a phrase till the war came to show it up for what it was worth as a means to right conduct in men?" Of course you could say a great deal. But at every third word they could incommode you with some stumping case of the foulest thing done in the holiest name till you would be shamed into silence at the sight of all the crowns of thorns brought to market by keepers of what you still believe to be vineyards. So, throughout much of Europe, Satan's most promising innings for many long years has begun.
III
In their vices as well as their virtues the English preserve a distinguished moderation. They do not utterly shrink from jobbery, for example; they do from a job that is flagrant or gross. They give judgeships as prizes for party support, but not to the utterly briefless, the dullard who knows no more law than necessity. Building contractors, when in the course of their rise they become town councillors, do not give bribes right and left: their businesses thrive without that. An Irishman running a Tammany in the States cannot thus hold himself in: the humorous side of corruption charms him too much: he wants to let the grand farce of roguery rip for all it is worth. But the English private's pet dictum, "There's reason in everything," rules the jobber, the profiteer, the shirker and placeman of Albion as firmly as it controls the imagination of her Wordsworths and the political idealism of her Cromwells and Pitts. Like her native cockroaches and bugs, whose moderate stature excites the admiration and envy of human dwellers among the corresponding fauna of the tropics, the caterpillars of her commonwealth preserve the golden mean; few, indeed, are flamboyants or megalomaniacs.
So, when the war with its great opportunities came we were but temperately robbed by our own birds of prey. Makers of munitions made mighty fortunes out of our peril. Still, every British soldier did have a rifle, at any rate when he went to the front. I have watched a twelve-inch gun fire, in action, fifteen of its great bales or barrels of high explosives, fifteen running, and only three of the fifteen costly packages failed to explode duly on its arrival beyond. Vendors of soldiers' clothes and boots acquired from us the wealth which dazzles us all in these days of our own poverty. They knew how to charge: they made hay with a will while the blessed suns of 1914-18 were high in the heavens. Still, nearly all the tunics made in that day of temptation did hold together; none of the boots, so far as I knew or heard tell, was made of brown paper. "He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent." Still, there is reason in everything. "Meden agan," as the Greeks said—temperance in all things, even in robbery, even in patriotism and personal honour. Our profiteers did not bid Satan get him behind them; but they did ask him to stand a little to one side.
So, too, in the army. Some old Regular sergeant-majors would sell every stripe that they could, but they would not sell a map to the enemy. Some of our higher commanders would use their A.D.C. rooms as funk-holes to shelter the healthy young nephew or son of their good friend the earl, or their distant cousin the marquis. But there were others. Sometimes a part of our Staff would almost seem to forget the war, and give its undivided mind to major struggles—its own intestine "strafes" and the more bitter war against uncomplaisant politicians at home. But presently it would remember, and work with a will. There was, again, an undeniable impulse abroad, among the "best people" of the old Army, to fall back towards G.H.Q. and its safety as soon as the first few months made it clear that this was to be none of our old gymkhana wars, but almost certainly lethal to regimental officers who stayed it out with their units. But this centripetal instinct, this "safety first" movement, though real, was moderate. Lists of headquarter formations might show an appreciable excess of names of some social distinction. But not an outrageous excess. Some peers and old baronets and their sons were still getting killed, by their own choice, along with the plebs to the very end of the war. Again, all through the war one could not deny that those who had chosen the safer part, or had it imposed upon them, absorbed a stout and peckish lion's share of the rewards for martial valour. And yet they did not absolutely withhold these meeds from officers and men who fought. The king of beasts being duly served, these hard-bitten jackals got some share, though not perhaps, for their numbers, a copious one. Some well-placed shirkers were filled with good things, but the brave were not sent utterly empty away. Guardsmen and cavalrymen, the least richly brained soldiers we had, kept to themselves the bulk of the distinguished jobs for which brain-work was needed; and yet the poor foot-soldier was not expressly taboo; quite a good billet would fall to him sometimes—Plumer commanded an army.