It is worth while to note how utterly fallacious are certain almost universal assumptions concerning the relation of war psychology to the problem of alliance solidarity. An English visitor to the United States (or an American visitor to England) during the years 1917-1918 was apt to be deluged by a flood of rhetoric to this effect: The blood shed on the same battle-fields, the suffering shared in common in the same common cause, would unite and cement as nothing had ever yet united the two great branches of the English-speaking race, destined by Providence....
But the same visitor moving in the same circle less than two years later found that this eternal cement of friendship had already lost its potency. Never, perhaps, for generations were Anglo-American relations so bad as they had become within a score or so of months of the time that Englishmen and Americans were dying side by side on the battle-field. At the beginning of 1921, in the United States, it was easier, on a public platform, to defend Germany than to present a defence of English policy in Ireland or in India. And at that period one might hear commonly enough in England, in trams and railway carriages, a repetition of the catch phrase, ‘America next.’ If certain popular assumptions as to war psychology were right, these things would be impossible.
Yet, as a matter of fact, the psychological phenomenon is true to type. It was not an accident that the internationalist America of 1915, of ‘Peace without Victory,’ should by 1918 have become more fiercely insistent upon absolute victory and unconditional surrender than any other of the belligerents, whose emotions had found some outlet during three years of war before America had begun. The complete reversal of the ‘Peace without Victory’ attitude was demanded—cultivated, deliberately produced—as a necessary part of war morale. But these emotions of coercion and domination cannot be intensively cultivated and then turned off as by a tap. They made America fiercely nationalist, with necessarily a temperamental distaste for the internationalism of Mr Wilson. And when a mere year of war left the emotional hungers unsatisfied, they turned unconsciously to other satisfactions. Twenty million Americans of Irish descent or association, among others, utilised the opportunity.
One feature—perhaps the very largest feature of all—of war morale, had been the exploitation of the German atrocities. The burning of Louvain, and other reprisals upon the Belgian civilian population, meant necessarily a special wickedness on the part of a definite entity, known as ‘Germany,’ that had to be crushed, punished, beaten, wiped out. There were no distinctions. The plea that all were not equally guilty excited the fierce anger reserved for all such ‘pacifist’ and pro-German pleas. A German woman had laughed at a wounded American: all German women were monsters. ‘No good German but a dead German.’ It was in the German blood and grey matter. The elaborate stories—illustrated—of Germans sticking bayonets into Belgian children produced a thesis which was beyond and above reason or explanation: for that atrocity, ‘Germany’—seventy million people, ignorant peasants, driven workmen, the babies, the invalids, the old women gathering sticks in the forest, the children trooping to school—all were guilty. To state the thing in black and white sounds like a monstrous travesty. But it is not a travesty. It is the thesis we, too, maintained; but in America it had, in the American way, an over simplification and an extra emphasis.
And then after the War an historical enemy of America’s does precisely the same thing. In the story of Amritsar and the Irish reprisals it is the Indian and Sinn Fein version only which is told; just as during the War we got nothing but the anti-German version of the burning of Louvain, or reprisals upon civilians. Why should we expect that the result should be greatly different upon American opinion? Four hundred unarmed and hopeless people, women and children as well as men, are mown down by machine-guns. Or, in the Irish reprisals, a farmer is shot in the presence of his wife and children. The Government defends the soldiers. ‘Britain’ has done this thing: forty-five millions of people, of infinitely varying degrees of responsibility, many opposing it, many ignorant of it, almost all entirely helpless. To represent them as inhuman monsters because of these atrocities is an infinitely mischievous falsehood. But it is made possible by a theory, which in the case of Germany we maintained for years as essentially true. And now it is doing as between Britain and America what a similar falsehood did as between Germany and England, and will go on doing so long as Nationalism includes conceptions of collective responsibility which fly in the face of common sense and truth. If the resultant hostilities can operate as between two national groups like the British and the American, what groups can be free of them?
It is a little difficult now, two years after the end of the War, with the world in its present turmoil, to realise that we really did expect the defeat of Germany to inaugurate an era of peace and security, of reduction of armaments, the virtual end of war; and believed that it was German militarism, ‘that trampling, drilling foolery in the heart of Europe, that has arrested civilisation and darkened the hopes of mankind for forty years,’[43] as Mr Wells wrote in The War that will End War, which accounted for nearly all the other militarisms, and that after its destruction we could anticipate ‘the end of the armament phase of European history.’ For, explained Mr Wells, ‘France, Italy, England, and all the smaller Powers of Europe are now pacific countries; Russia, after this huge War, will be too exhausted for further adventure.’[44]
‘When will peace come?’ asked Professor Headlam, and answered that
‘It will come when Germany has learnt the lesson of the War, when it has learnt, as every other nation has had to learn, that the voice of Europe cannot be defied with impunity.... Men talk about the terms of peace. They matter little. With a Germany victorious no terms could secure the future of Europe, with a Germany defeated, no artificial securities will be wanted, for there will be a stronger security in the consciousness of defeat.’[45]
There were to be no limits to the political or economic rearrangements which victory would enable us to effect. Very authoritative military critics like Mr Hilaire Belloc became quite angry and contemptuous at the suggestion that the defeat of the enemy would not enable us to rearrange Europe at our will. The doctrine that unlimited power was inherent in victory was thus stated by Mr Belloc:—