Three weeks before this war began I was in one of those East End London parishes whose inhabitants exist from hand to mouth on casual employment and sweated labour; where the women, poor, thin, overworked souls, have neither time nor strength nor inclination for cleanliness and comeliness in person or house; where the men are undersized and underfed, with the faces of those without a future; where pale and stunted children playing in the gutters have a monopoly of any mirthless gaiety there is.
In one household of two rooms they were “free of debt, thank Gawd!” having just come back from fruit-picking, and were preparing to take up family existence again on the wife’s making of matchboxes at a maximum of six shillings a week, the husband not having found a job as yet. In another household, of one room swarming with flies and foul with a sickly acrid odour, a baby was half-asleep on the few rags of a bed bereft of bedclothes, its lips pressed to something rubbery, and flies about its eyes; dirty bowls of messes stood about; an offal heap lay in the empty grate; and at a table in the little window a pallid woman of forty with a running cold was desperately sewing the soles on to tiny babies’ shoes. Beside her was a small dirty boy, who had just been lost and brought home by a policeman, because he had remembered the name of the street he lived in. The woman looked up at us wistfully, and said: “I thought I’d lost ’im too, I did; like the one that fell in the canal.” Though she still had seven, though her husband was out of work, though she only made five to six shillings a week, she could not spare any of the children she had borne.
Prices have gone up. What is happening to such as these? They exist in all countries. You military bureaucrats, who safeguard and pursue “national aspirations,” who open the gates of the kennel and let loose these mad dogs of war; who rive husbands from their wives, sons from their mothers, and send them out by the hundred thousand to become lumps of bloody clay—spare a fraction of time to see the peoples for “whose good” you launch this glorious murder; come and sniff for one moment that sickly, acrid smell in the homes of the poor! And then talk of national aspirations and necessities!
There is only one national aspiration worth the name, only one national necessity—to have from roof to basement a clean, healthy, happy national house. “War the cleanser! Without war—no sacrifice, no nobility!” I refer you to that mother, slaving without hope and without glory, starved and ill, and slaving in a war with death that lasts all her life, for the children she has borne.
§ 6.
The Russian people is not Russia, unless it should become so in this war. There has hitherto been an almost absolute divorce between the essentially democratic nature of the Russian and the despotic methods by which Russia is governed. We English and French, fighting not only for our lives, but for democracy, for the decent preservation of treaty rights, and a humanity that we believe can only flourish under democratic rule, find it somewhat ironical that we have with us a despotism. And there is a profound reason why it has been and will be difficult for Russia to change its form of government. The emotional, uncalculating Russian has little sense of money, space, or time; he falls an easy prey to those sterner, more matter-of-fact than himself. Bureaucracy attracts the hard and practical elements of a population; there are, or were, many of Teutonic origin manning Russian officialdom. And Russia is so huge; democratic rule will find it difficult to be swift enough; in decentralization there is danger of disruption. Nevertheless, we welcome the help of Russia, for, if France and we were beaten, it would not only be our own deaths, but the death of democracy and humanism in Europe—perhaps in the world. The tide of democracy sets from the West. It must permeate Germany before it reaches Russia. Out of this war many things may come. If Fate grant that military despotisms fall in any country, they may well fall in all, and our ally, Russia, gain at last a Constitution and some real measure of democratic freedom, some real coherence between the Russian people and Russian policy.
§ 7.
When the conscript souls disembodied by this war meet, if they meet at all, how will they talk of this last madness? Perhaps one in each hundred will be able to say from his heart: “I was happy with a rifle or sword and some of you to be killed in front of me!” The remaining ninety-nine will say: “Like you I loved the sun, and a woman, and the good things of life; like you I meant well by others; I had no wish to kill any man; no wish to die. But I was told that it was necessary. I was told that, unless I killed as many of you as I could, my country would suffer. I don’t know whether in my heart I believed what I was told, but I did know that I should feel disgraced if I did not take rifle and sword and try to kill some of you; I knew, too, that unless I did, they would shoot me for a deserter. So I went. Nearly all the time that I was marching, or resting dead-tired, or lying in the trenches, I thought; ‘Shall I ever see home again? Let me see home again!’ But I knew that my first duty was to kill you, so that you should never see home again. I did not want to kill you, but I knew I had to. When I was under fire or tired or hungry, it is true I hated you so that I had only a savage wish to kill you. But when it was over I had an ache in my heart. We used to sing while marching, make jokes, enjoy the feel of our comrades’ shoulders touching our own, say to ourselves: ‘We’re fine fellows, serving our country, doing our duty!’ But still the ache went on underneath, very deep, as if one were asleep and could not come to the end of a bad dream. We seldom knew what our bullets were doing, but sometimes we came to fighting hand to hand. The first time, I remember, we had advanced through a wood under shell-fire, and were lying down at the edge. I had that ache all the time I was coming through the wood; it was fine weather, and the larches smelled sweet. But when I saw you charging down on us with the sun gleaming on your bayonets, it left me; I felt weak and queer down the backs of my legs, wondering which of you, yelling and running towards me, would plunge his steel into my stomach. Then my officer shouted; I fired once, twice, three times, and began to run forward. If I had not, I should have turned and fled. I did not feel savage, but I knew I must move every bit of me as quick as I could, and defend myself and stab. Then our supports came through the wood, and you were beaten. My bayonet was bloody. One or more of you I must have killed; I had been brave, we had won; I felt excited and yet sick. In the evening when I lay down my ache was worse than ever. All my life I had been taught that to kill a fellow-man was the worst thing man can do; it did not come natural to me to kill. It was having to risk my life so dear to me, in order that I might kill, that gave me that ache. If I had been risking it trying to save you, it would have been more natural; I should not have ached then!”
§ 8.
“The glories of war!”