Militarism has reduced it to its present plight, and to save itself from a similar disaster in future it has become more militarist than ever. Every little state bristles with guns to scare off invaders. Meanwhile no country in Europe pays its way, except Britain, with her reduced army and navy. But by means of loans and inflated currencies they all, even the smallest of them, contrive to maintain larger armies than Frederick the Great or the Grand Monarque ever commanded in their most triumphant years. And the cost of armaments to-day has grown vastly out of proportion to the numbers of the units that compose them. France—in many ways the richest country in Europe—displays a gaping and a growing rent in her national finance which has to be patched up by paper. The deficit grows in spite of the fact that a large part of her army is quartered on Germany to the detriment of reparations, and that the German contribution conceals much of the cost of that large army.
A good deal of the borrowing is attributable to the cost of repairing her devastated area, but the burden of maintaining so huge an army is responsible for a considerable share of the deficiency. The economic recovery of Europe is seriously retarded by the cost of the new militarism. The old continent is throwing to the dogs of war with both hands the bread that should feed her children. One day those dogs will, in their arrogant savagery, turn upon the children and rend them.
Algeciras, December 26th, 1922.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] 1,152 refers to when this chapter was written, i. e., January 6th, 1923. The figure has increased since then.
III THE ERUPTION IN THE MEDITERRANEAN
The shores of the Mediterranean have from time immemorial been the scene of eruptions and earthquakes. They generally break out without warning. Sometimes they are devastating in their effects, destroying life and property over wide areas and on a vast scale. Sometimes they provide a brilliant spectacular display, terrifying in appearance, but not causing much destruction. To which of these two categories does the last eruption of Mussolini belong? To drop hot cinders in the Balkans is a dangerous experiment. The soil is everywhere soaked with naphtha and it floats about in uncharted pools and runlets which easily catch fire. A cinder flung from Vienna started a conflagration which spread over continents. That was only nine years ago. The ground is still hot—the smoke blinds and stifles. You cannot see clearly or breathe freely. Now and again there is a suspicious ruddiness in the banks of smoke which proves that the fire is not yet out. And yet there are statesmen flinging burning faggots about with reckless swagger.
The temper of Europe may be gauged from the reception accorded to these heedless pyrotechnics on the part of national leaders by their own countrymen. Every time it occurs, whether in France, Italy or Turkey, and whether it be Poincaré, Mussolini, or Mustapha Kemal who directs the show, applause greets the exhibition. I remember the first days of the Great War. There was not a belligerent capital where great and enthusiastic crowds did not parade the streets to cheer for war. In those days men did not know what war meant. Their conception of it was formed from the pictures of heroic—and always victorious—feats, hung in national galleries and reproduced in the form of the cheap chromos, engravings, and prints, which adorn the walls in every cottage throughout most lands. The triumphant warriors on horseback with the gleaming eye and the flourishing sabre are their own countrymen; the poor vanquished under the crashing hoofs are the foe. Hurrah for more pictures! The Crown Prince denies that he ever used the phrase "This jolly war." His denial ought to be accepted in the absence of better proof than is yet forthcoming as to the statement ever having been made. But the phrase represented the temper of millions in those fateful days. It used to be said that in wars one lot cheered and the other fought. But the cheering mobs who filled the streets in August were filling the trenches in September, and multitudes were filling graves ere the year was out. But when they cheered they had no realisation of the actualities of war. They idealised it. They only saw it in pictures.