A Woman and the War

by Countess of Frances Evelyn Maynard Greville Warwick

There is not on all the earth a more democratic army than that of France, and to-day it is a perfect union, a veritable brotherhood. From the highest General to the humblest "piou-piou" there is but one aim, one ideal, prince and peasant pursue it to the end. One and all know that if success is to be achieved against heavy odds, it is by the help of the real brotherhood, the feeling that the accidents of birth and fortune do not count any longer, that "a man's a man for a' that." Other countries have caught a glimpse of the truth, our own among the number, but it needed French clarity of vision to recognise the truth and crystallise it in a word—a simple word with the mystic number of letters and so powerful that, when it becomes the rallying cry in times of peace for all civilised nations, the evils under which men and women labour will be swept away like chaff before wind.

For many years past I have been convinced that the enemies of mankind are not men. Ignorance, poverty, greed, vice, disease, these are the foes that prey upon all communities, and while those who foster them are of no brotherhood, those who would combat them need no more than brotherhood in order to overcome. War, in which a man makes the supreme surrender, in which he discounts the terror of death and makes purposes splendid by his devotion, reveals the truth even to those who have never thought before. Will brotherhood survive war, or does it need the exaltation born of the greatest of world tragedies to open a nation's eyes—and keep them open?

The history of our civilisation depends upon the answer to this question. Nothing less than brotherhood will enable the nation to face the widespread poverty that already exists, but will not be recognised until peace is restored. There will be very little money left in the countries of combatant nations, and there will be very many needs. The care of the wounded, the maimed and the helpless, provision for the widows and the children of war will come first. Then there are the schools; nothing is more vital to the future generation than education, and few great claims are more in danger of a grudging treatment.

There are two ways of handling a nation's affairs, one is to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor, the other is to make the poor less poor at the expense of the rich. The peaceful solution of the whole problem is found in the battle call of our gallant Allies. If we are "camarades, bons camarades!" we can endure our national privations and scarcely feel them, for we shall all be in the same boat, and it is not poverty that galls but the contrast between poverty and wealth. Down to the time when war began this contrast was ever present, it was becoming one of the great dangers of our time; it has not disappeared to-day, but it is far less noticeable, and as we continue to spend between thirty and forty million pounds a week on war, the cases of contrast will tend to grow less and less. I look for the time when men and women will find it as distressing to flaunt riches as the poor find it to display the outward and indisputable signs of poverty. One does not envy even now the state of mind that enables a man to say that he is "doing very well out of this war."

Among "comrades" such a thing would be impossible, the only excuse for making money out of national misfortune is to be found in its wise distribution to alleviate the suffering that war renders inevitable. To amass wealth from the country's needs, to spend it on purely personal ends, to allow an orgie more terrible than the Black Death to fill private coffers, this surely is the negation of brotherhood, and those who do it are the outcasts of civilisation, even though they purchase palaces and peerages and every honour that unscrupulous Governments vend in semi-privacy. How will the men who have thrown their lives into the scale tolerate the men who trafficked in the necessities of life, or the implements of death, and demand the high places as a reward for successful huckstering? They will not lightly reckon them in the ranks of the "comrades"; in a world founded on brotherhood there will be no place for them. If there be a place in the near future perhaps it will be the nearest lamp-post. Stranger things have happened.

Sometimes I think we could afford to lose this war, or, at least, not to win it, if the Frenchman's battle call could become the rallying cry of all parties and all grades in this country. Much as I loathe war and all it stands for, I feel that an instant victory would have been very bad for us, while a success won by waiting must at least purge our national life of the grosser elements. The mingling of high and low, of rich and poor, the price of strife demanded of each and all, the community wrought by suffering and by heavy loss, all these things are salutary for a nation grown plethoric by prosperity. It will not greatly matter if we lose half the world and gain our own souls, for the simple reason that an England wide-eyed, clean-limbed, and efficient could yet achieve and retrieve, while an England besotted by sloth and bemused by riches can only endure until the advent of a stronger and more determined race.

Whatever our destiny, whatever the future holds in store, we shall be happy indeed if we can face difficulties, dangers, privation, or supreme victory with the cry of "Comrades!" When war came, this country was fast sinking towards civil strife, drifting for lack of the spirit of good fellowship. A few masters, innumerable men, industry organised into limited liability companies that the human touch, the community between employer and employed, might cease, the wealth of the country divided on lines that gave 90 per cent. to a tenth of the population and divided the remaining one-tenth of the wealth between 90 per cent. of the people who create it,—these conditions were making for a social upheaval of bloodiest kind. Education starved, an infant mortality greater than the present waste of war, discontent, ill-feeling, class hatred, all these things were, all these things may be again, but not if the cry of "Comrades!" is taken up.

Whether we win or lose, I see civil unrest inevitable, for this war has sounded the death-knell of the old industrial, social, and political conditions. Nothing within the range of possibility can leave us just where we are, and worse than the struggle with an enemy is the struggle with a friend. Though I hold all war to be fratricidal, yet civil war must ever remain the worst form of it. As soon as the old problems force their way again to the fore the danger of civil strife becomes imminent, and let us remember that the working classes that come back from war will have forgotten what fear means. It seems to me that salvation lies in the Frenchman's fighting cry, that in giving his brothers a lead he has offered a lead to civilisation. He has shown us how to make the inevitable changes peacefully.