Thus wrote the New Witness after the Treaty of Bukarest:
We should like to ask the Pacifists and Semi-Pacifists, who are fond of official documents, if they have read the White Paper dealing with the plain facts about the peace with Roumania. If they have a single word to say on the subject, we should be much interested to hear what it is. It makes absolutely plain two facts, both of which have a sort of frightful humour after all the humanitarian talk about no annexations and no indemnities. The first is that the conquerors have annexed in a direct and personal sense beyond what is commonly meant by annexation; the second is that they have indemnified themselves by an immediate coercion and extortion, which is generally veiled by the forms of a recognised indemnity. In annexing some nine thousand square miles, they have been particular to attach whole forests to the hunting-grounds of Hungarian nobles and the timber of Hungarian wood merchants; not merely annexing as a conqueror annexes, but rather stealing as an individual steals. Further, the fun growing fast and furious, they have taken country containing a hundred and thirty thousand Roumanians, merely because it is uninhabited land. For the second point, we often speak figuratively of tyrants enslaving a country; but Teutons do literally enslave. All the males of the occupied land, which happens to be two-thirds of Roumania, are driven to work on pain of death or prison. All this is clear and satisfactory enough; but the White Paper keeps the best to the last. It is this sentence we would commend to our peaceful friends: "The German delegates informed the Roumanian delegates, who were appalled at being required to accept such conditions, that they would appreciate their moderation when they knew those which would be imposed on the Western Powers after the victory of the Central Empires."
The reminder was needed. Far less than most people was Chesterton subject to that weakness of the human spirit that brings weariness in sustained effort and premature relaxation. Prussia had not, he said, shown any evidence of repentance—merely of regret for lack of success. The Kaiser said he had not wanted this war. No, said Chesterton, he wanted a very different war. Chesterton might and did say later that he himself had wanted a very different peace—the destruction of Prussia, the reconstruction of the old German states—but at present he wanted only to fight on until this became possible.
I do not think he ever hated anybody—but he did hate Prussianism as the "wickedness that hindered loving," and he had no liking for "the patronizing pacifism of the gentleman [it was Romain Rolland] who took a holiday in the Alps and said he was above the struggle; as if there were any Alp from which the soul can look down on Calvary. There is, indeed, one mountain among them that might be very appropriate to so detached an observer—the mountain named after Pilate, the man who washed his hands."*
[* Uses of Diversity, p. 40 (Fountain Library)]
His keen imagination could visualize the sufferings caused by war. Vicariously he knew something of the life of the trenches, for Cecil like many another C. Man* had managed to get to France. A delightful article on Comradeship shows, what letters from soldiers confirm, how perfectly at home was Private Chesterton among his fellows and how much loved by them.
[* English soldiers are classed A, B, or C, according to their degree of physical fitness, and Cecil was in Class C.]
I can understand a pagan, but not a Christian, who simply dismisses the suffering of our soldiers as useless. He is like Dr. Hyde scorning Father Damien or like those who cried at the foot of the Cross: He saved others, Himself He cannot save. They saved others these men, their suffering was that of the human race whose head is Christ. With Him they bore, even if they knew it not, that mysterious burden of humanity that makes some men question God's existence but draws others into conscious membership of His mystical body. Many were so drawn in those days and there seemed a new lifting up of the Cross. The New Witness does, I think, lack one note a little. They were too busy hating Prussianism to give thought to the Christian command to love Prussians, whose sufferings too were those of humanity.
Into the opposite error there was no risk that they would fall. Never for them would heroism be belittled in the name of the very horrors it was encountering. In one article Belloc touched on this strange perversion and reminded his readers that the power to ravage and destroy was not really a new result of modern machinery. Attila and his Huns had inflicted even greater devastation and had left a desert behind them. Barbarism in its nature was destructive and we were encountering barbarism. In so doing we were acting the part of Christian men.
But the old fights still had to be waged on the home front: against the money power and against what the New Witness called Prussianism at home. Unceasingly they battled for fair treatment for soldiers' wives and children, for freedom from unmeaning and unnecessary regulations, against the profiteering by big firms and the consequent crushing of small. About two thousand small butchers' shops for instance had to close at the very beginning of the war owing to a cornering of supplies by the large firms. Against this and all the ramifications of the meat "scandal" the New Witness struggled, publishing, they claimed, facts unpublished elsewhere and inspiring questions in the House of Commons. Belloc's irony, Chesterton's wit, point these articles and make them worth reading as literature; and there is some of the old fooling. A further series on the Servile State is attacked by Shaw who thinks that Belloc, since he is not a Socialist, must be a follower of Herbert Spencer! G.K. accounts for this by saying that Shaw had not read Belloc. "How do you know," retorts Shaw, "it is not Herbert Spencer I have not read? Suppose you had your choice of not reading a book by Belloc and not reading one by Spencer which would you choose? Hang it all, be reasonable."