How, then, is any emancipation to come? I know not, unless we take to looking on Education as the hub of the wheel—the Schools, the Arts, the Press; and concentrate our thoughts on the best means of manning these agencies with men and women of real honesty and vision, and giving them real power to effect in the rising generation the evolution of ethics and taste, in accordance with the rules of dignity, beauty, and simplicity.
VII
TALKING AT LARGE
It is of the main new factors which have come into the life of the civilised world that I would speak.
The division deep and subtle between those who have fought and those who have not—concerns us in Europe far more than you in America; for in proportion to your population the number of your soldiers who actually fought has been small, compared with the number in any belligerent European country. And I think that so far as you are concerned the division will soon disappear, for the iron had not time to enter into the souls of your soldiers. For us in Europe, however, this factor is very tremendous, and will take a long time to wear away. In my country the, as it were, professional English dislike to the expression of feeling, which strikes every American so forcibly, covers very deep hearts and highly sensitive nerves. The average Briton is now not at all stolid underneath; I think he has changed a great deal in this last century, owing to the town life which seven-tenths of our population lead. Perhaps only of the Briton may one still invent the picture which appeared in Punch in the autumn of 1914—of the steward on a battleship asking the naval lieutenant: “Will you take your bath before or after the engagement, sir?” and only among Britons overhear one stoker say to another in the heat of a sea-fight: “Well, wot I say is—’E ought to ’ave married ’er.” For all that, the Briton feels deeply; and on those who have fought the experiences of the battlefield have had an effect which almost amounts to metamorphosis. There are now two breeds of British people—such as have been long in the danger zones, and such as have not; shading, of course, into each other through the many who have just smelled powder and peril, and the very few whose imaginations are vibrant enough to have lived the two lives, while only living one.
In a certain cool paper called: “The Balance-sheet of the Soldier Workman” I tried to come at the effect of the war; but purposely pitched it in a low and sober key; and there is a much more poignant tale of change to tell of each individual human being.
Take a man who, when the war broke out (or had been raging perhaps a year), was living the ordinary Briton’s life, in factory, shop, and home. Suppose that he went through that deep, sharp struggle between the pull of home love and interests, and the pull of country (for I hope it will never be forgotten that five million Britons were volunteers) and came out committed to his country. That then he had to submit to being rattled at great speed into the soldier-shape which we Britons and you Americans have been brought up to regard as but the half of a free man; that then he was plunged into such a hideous hell of horrible danger and discomfort as this planet has never seen; came out of it time and again, went back into it time and again; and finally emerged, shattered or unscathed, with a spirit at once uplifted and enlarged, yet bruised and ungeared for the old life of peace. Imagine such a man set back among those who have not been driven and grilled and crucified. What would he feel, and how bear himself? On the surface he would no doubt disguise the fact that he felt different from his neighbours—he would conform; but something within him would ever be stirring, a sort of superiority, an impatient sense that he had been through it and they had not; the feeling, too, that he had seen the bottom of things, that nothing he could ever experience again would give him the sensations he had had out there; that he had lived, and there could be nothing more to it. I don’t think that we others quite realise what it must mean to those men, most of them under thirty, to have been stretched to the uttermost, to have no illusions left, and yet have, perhaps, forty years still to live. There is something gained in them, but there’s something gone from them. The old sanctions, the old values won’t hold; are there any sanctions and values which can be made to hold? A kind of unreality must needs cling about their lives henceforth. This is a finespun way of putting it, but I think, at bottom, true.
The old professional soldier lived for his soldiering. At the end of a war (however terrible) there was left to him a vista of more wars, more of what had become to him the ultimate reality—his business in life. For these temporary soldiers of what has been not so much a war as a prolonged piece of very horrible carnage, there succeeds something so mild in sensation that it simply will not fill the void. When the dish of life has lost its savour, by reason of violent and uttermost experience, wherewith shall it be salted?
The American Civil War was very long and very dreadful, but it was a human and humane business compared to what Europe has just come through. There is no analogy in history for the present moment. An old soldier of that Civil War, after hearing these words, wrote me an account of his after-career which shows that in exceptional cases a life so stirring, full, and even dangerful may be lived that no void is felt. But one swallow does not make a summer, nor will a few hundreds or even thousands of such lives leaven to any extent the vast lump of human material used in this war. The spiritual point is this: In front of a man in ordinary civilised existence there hovers ever that moment in the future when he expects to prove himself more of a man than he has yet proved himself. For these soldiers of the Great Carnage the moment of probation is already in the past. They have proved themselves as they will never have the chance to do again, and secretly they know it. One talks of their powers of heroism and sacrifice being wanted just as much in time of Peace; but that cannot really be so, because Peace times do not demand men’s lives—which is the ultimate test—with every minute that passes. No, the great moment of their existence lies behind them, young though so many of them are. This makes them at once greater than us, yet in a way smaller, because they have lost the power and hope of expansion. They have lived their masterpiece already. Human nature is elastic, and hope springs eternal; but a climax of experience and sensation cannot be repeated; I think these have reached and passed the uttermost climax; and in Europe they number millions.
This is a veritable portent, and I am glad that in America you will not have it to any great extent.