CAUSES OF WEAKNESS AND STRENGTH
Why we are fighting at all is one of our problems; why we are finding it so hard to win is another. In what does the main strength of our enemies consist? And in what does our own chief weakness consist?
To say that our weakness is to be sought in our own vices, and the strength of our enemies in their virtues, is of course a commonplace. But one has only to open the average newspaper to realise the need for restating the obvious. For there the contrary doctrine is set forth daily and weekly with a lachrymose insistency—that our hands are weakened because we are so good; that the Germans fight at an enormous advantage because they are so wicked and unscrupulous.
But the things which we are finding hardest to overcome in our foes are not the immoral gibberings of professors, or the blundering cynicism of the German Foreign Office, or the methodical savagery of the General Staff, whether in Belgium or on the High Seas. These are sources of weakness and not of strength; and even at the present stage it is clear that, although they have inflicted immeasurable suffering, they have done the German cause much more harm than good.
Our real obstacles are the loyalty, the self-sacrifice, and the endurance of the German people.
The causes of British weakness are equally plain. Our indolence and factiousness; our foolish confidence in cleverness, manoeuvres, and debate for overcoming obstacles which lie altogether outside that region of human endeavour; our absorption as thrilled spectators in the technical game of British politics[[3]]—these vices and others of a similar character, which, since the beginning of the war we have been struggling—like a man awakening from a nightmare—to shake off, are still our chief difficulties. It is a hard job to get rid of them, and we are not yet anything like halfway through with it.
It must be clear to every detached observer, that the moral strength of England in the present struggle—like that of France—does not lie in Government or Opposition, but in the spirit of the people; that this spirit has drawn but little support, in the case of either country, from the leadership and example of the politicians; and that there is little cause in either case to bless or praise them for the fidelity of their previous stewardship. In the case of France this national spirit was assured at the beginning; in our own case the process of awakening has proceeded much more slowly.
ILLUSIONS OF SUCCESS
It is essential to put certain notions out of our heads and certain other notions into them. From the beginning of the war, a large part of the press—acting, we are entitled to suppose, in patriotic obedience to the directions of the Press Bureau—has fostered ideas which do not correspond with the facts. Information has been doled out and presented in such a way as to destroy all sense of proportion in the public mind.
It is not an uncommon belief,[[4]] for example, that we with our Allies—ever since the first onset, when, being virtuously unprepared, we were pushed back some little distance—have been doing much better than the Germans; that for months past our adversaries have been in a desperate plight—lacking ammunition, on the verge of bankruptcy and starvation, and thoroughly discouraged.