The Fruits of Victory / A Sequel to The Great Illusion

by Norman Angell

Now no one can pretend that this sacred union has really survived the War. The extraordinary contrast between the disunity with which we finish war and the unity with which we begin it, is a disturbing thought when we recollect that the country cannot always be at war, if only because peace is necessary as a preparation for war, for the creation of things for war to destroy. It becomes still more disturbing when we add to this post-war change another even more remarkable, which will be dealt with presently: the objects for which at the beginning of a war we are ready to die—ideals like democracy, freedom from military regimentation and the suppression of military terrorism, the rights of small nations—are things about which at the end of the War we are utterly indifferent. It would seem either that these are not the things that really stirred us—that our feelings had some other unsuspected origin—or that war has destroyed our feeling for them.

Note this juxtaposition of events. We have had in Europe millions of men in every belligerent country showing unfathomable capacity for disinterested service. Millions of youngsters—just ordinary folk—gave the final and greatest sacrifice without hesitation and without question. They faced agony, hardship, death, with no hope or promise of reward save that of duty discharged. And, very rightly, we acclaim them as heroes. They have shown without any sort of doubt that they are ready to die for their country’s cause or for some even greater cause—human freedom, the rights of a small nation, democracy, or the principle of nationality, or to resist a barbarous morality which can tolerate the making of unprovoked war for a monarchy’s ambition or the greed of an autocratic clique.

And, indeed, whatever our final conclusion, the spectacle of vast sacrifices so readily made is, in its ultimate meaning one of infinite inspiration and hope. But the War’s immediate sequel puts certain questions to us that we cannot shirk. For note what follows.

After some years the men who could thus sacrifice themselves, return home—to Italy, or France, or Britain—and exchange khaki for the miner’s overall or the railway worker’s uniform. And it would then seem that at that moment their attitude to their country and their country’s attitude to them undergo a wonderful change. They are ready—so at least we are told by a Press which for five years had spoken of them daily as heroes, saints, and gentlemen—through their miners’ or railway Unions to make war upon, instead of for, that community which yesterday they served so devotedly. Within a few months of the close of this War which was to unify the nation as it had never been unified before (the story is the same whichever belligerent you may choose) there appear divisions and fissures, disruptions and revolutions, more disturbing than have been revealed for generations.

Our extreme nervousness about the danger of Bolshevist propaganda shows that we believe that these men, yesterday ready to die for their country, are now capable of exposing it to every sort of horror.

Or take another aspect of it. During the War fashionable ladies by thousands willingly got up at six in the morning to scrub canteen floors or serve coffee, in order to add to the comfort of their working-class countrymen—in khaki. They did this, one assumes, from the love of countrymen who risked their lives and suffered hardship in the execution of duty. It sounds satisfactory until the same countryman ceases fighting and turns to extremely hard and hazardous duties like mining, or fishing in winter-time in the North Sea. The ladies will no longer scrub floors or knit socks for him. They lose all real interest in him. But if it was done originally from ‘love of fellow-countrymen,’ why this cessation of interest? He is the same man. Into the psychology of that we shall inquire a little more fully later. The phenomenon is explained here in the conviction that its cause throws light upon the other phenomenon equally remarkable, namely, that victory reveals a most astonishing post-war indifference to those moral and ideal ends for which we believed we were fighting. Is it that they never were our real aims at all, or that war has wrought a change in our nature with reference to them?

The importance of knowing what really moves us is obvious enough. If our potential power is to stand for the protection of any principle—nationality or democracy—that object must represent a real purpose, not a convenient clothing for a quite different purpose. The determination to defend nationality can only be permanent if our feeling for it is sufficiently deep and sincere to survive in the competition of other moral ‘wishes.’ Where has the War, and the complex of desires it developed, left our moral values? And, if there has been a re-valuation, why?

The Allied world saw clearly that the German doctrine—the right of a powerful State to deny national independence to a smaller State, merely because its own self-preservation demanded it—was something which menaced nationality and right. The whole system by which, as in Prussia, the right of the people to challenge the political doctrines of the Government was denied (as by a rigorous control of press and education), was seen to be incompatible with the principles upon which free government in the West has been established. All this had to be destroyed in order that the world might be made ‘safe for democracy.’ The trenches in Flanders became ‘the frontiers of freedom.’ To uphold the rights of small nations, freedom of speech and press, to punish military terror, to establish an international order based on right as against might—these were things for which free men everywhere should gladly die. They did die, in millions. Nowhere so much, perhaps, as in America were these ideals the inspiration which brought that country into the War. She had nothing to gain territorially or materially. If ever the motive to war was an ideal motive, America’s was.

Then comes the Peace. And the America which had discarded her tradition of isolation to send two million soldiers on the European continent, ‘at the call of the small nation,’ was asked to co-operate with others in assuring the future security of Belgium, in protecting the small States by the creation of some international order (the only way in which they ever can be effectively protected); to do it in another form for a small nation that has suffered even more tragically than Belgium, Armenia; definitely to organise in peace that cause for which she went to war. And then a curious discovery is made. A cause which can excite immense passion when it is associated with war, is simply a subject for boredom when it becomes a problem of peace-time organisation. America will give lavishly of the blood of her sons to fight for the small nations; she will not be bothered with mandates or treaties in order to make it unnecessary to fight for them. It is not a question whether the particular League of Nations established at Paris was a good one. The post-war temper of America is that she does not want to be bothered with Europe at all: talk about its security makes the American public of 1920 irritable and angry. Yet millions were ready to die for freedom in Europe two years ago! A thing to die for in 1918 is a thing to yawn over, or to be irritable about, when the war is done.

Is America alone in this change of feeling about the small State? Recall all that we wrote and talked about the sacredness of the rights of small nations—and still in certain cases talk and write. There is Poland. It is one of the nations whose rights are sacred—to-day. But in 1915 we acquiesced in an arrangement by which Poland was to be delivered, bound hand and foot, at the end of the war, to its worst and bitterest enemy, Czarist Russia. The Alliance (through France, to-day the ‘protector of Poland’) undertook not to raise any objection to any policy that the Czar’s Government might inaugurate in Poland. It was to have a free hand. A secret treaty, it will be urged, about which the public knew nothing? We were fighting to liberate the world from diplomatic autocracies using their peoples for unknown and unavowed purposes. But the fact that we were delivering over Poland to the mercies of a Czarist Government was not secret. Every educated man knew what Russian policy under the Czarist Government would be, must be, in Poland. Was the Russian record with reference to Poland such that the unhampered discretion of the Czarist Government was deemed sufficient guarantee of Polish independence? Did we honestly think that Russia had proved herself more liberal in the treatment of the Poles than Austria, whose Government we were destroying? The implication, of course, flew in the face of known facts: Austrian rule over the Poles, which we proposed to destroy, had proved itself immeasurably more tolerant than the Russian rule which we proposed to re-enforce and render more secure.