And there were Finland and the Border States. If Russia had remained in the War, ‘loyal to the cause of democracy and the rights of small nations,’ there would have been no independent Poland, or Finland, or Esthonia, or Georgia; and the refusal of our Ally to recognise their independence would not have disturbed us in the least.
Again, there was Serbia, on behalf of whose ‘redemption’ in a sense, the War began. An integral part of that ‘redemption’ was the inclusion of the Dalmatian coast in Serbia—the means of access of the new Southern Slav State to the sea. Italy, for naval reasons, desired possession of that coast, and, without informing Serbia, we undertook to see that Italy should get it. (Italy, by the way, also entered the War on behalf of the principle of Nationality.)[60]
It is not to be supposed, however, that the small State itself, however it may declaim about ‘liberty or death,’ has, when the opportunity to assert power presents itself, any greater regard for the rights of nationality—in other people. Take Poland. For a hundred and fifty years Poland has called upon Heaven to witness the monstrous wickedness of denying to a people its right to self-determination; of forcing a people under alien rule. After a hundred and fifty years of the martyrdom of alien rule, Poland acquires its freedom. That freedom is not a year old before Poland itself becomes in temper as imperialistic as any State in Europe. It may be bankrupt, racked with typhus and famine, split by bitter factional quarrels, but the one thing upon which all Poles will unite is in the demand for dominion over some fifteen millions of people, not merely non-Polish, but bitterly anti-Polish. Although Poland is perhaps the worst case, all the new small States show a similar disposition: Czecho-Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Finland, Greece, have all now their own imperialism, limited only, apparently, by the extent of their power. All these people have fought for the right to national independence; there is not one that is not denying the right to national independence. If every Britain has its Ireland, every Ireland has its Ulster.
But is this belief in Nationality at all? What should we have thought of a Southerner of the old Slave States fulminating against the crime of slavery? Should we have thought his position any more logical if he had explained that he was opposed to slavery because he did not want to become a slave? The test of his sincerity would have been, not the conduct he exacted of others, but the conduct he proposed to follow towards others. ‘One is a Nationalist,’ says Professor Corradini, one of the prophets of Italian sacro egoismo, ‘while waiting to be able to become an Imperialist.’ He prophesies that in twenty years ‘all Italy will be Imperialist.’[61]
The last thing intended here is any excuse of German violence by a futile tu quoque. But what it is important to know, if we are to understand the real motives of our conduct—and unless we do, we cannot really know where our conduct is leading us, where we are going—is whether we really cared about the ‘moral aims of war,’ the things for which we thought we were willing to die. Were we not as a matter of fact fighting—and dying—for something else?
Test the nature of our feelings by what was after all perhaps the most dramatised situation in the whole drama: the fact that in the Western world a single man, or a little junta of military chiefs, could by a word send nations into war, millions to their death; and—worse still in a sense—that those millions would accept the fact of thus being made helpless pawns, and with appalling docility, without question, kill and be killed for reasons they did not even know. It must be made impossible ever again for half a dozen Generals or Cabinet Ministers thus to play with nations and men and women as with pawns.
The War is at last over. And in Eastern Europe, the most corrupt, as it was one of the potentially most powerful of all the military autocracies—that of the Czar—has either gone to pieces from its own rottenness, or been destroyed by the spontaneous uprising of the people. Bold experiments, in entirely new social and economic methods, are attempted in this great community which may have so much to teach the Western world, experiments which challenge not only old political institutions, but old economic ones as well. But the men who were the Czar’s Ministers are still in Paris and London, in close but secret confabulation with Allied Governments.
And one morning we find that we are at war with the first Workers’ Republic of the world, the first really to try a great social experiment. There had been no declaration, no explanation. President Wilson had, indeed, said that nothing would induce the Allies to intervene. Their behaviour on that point would be the ‘acid test’ of sincerity. But in Archangel, Murmansk, Vladivostock, the Crimea, on the Polish border, on the shores of the Caspian, our soldiers were killing Russians, or organising their killing; our ships sank Russian ships and bombarded Russian cities. We found that we were supporting the Royalist parties—military leaders who did not hide in the least their intention to restore the monarchy. But again, there is no explanation. But somewhere, for some purpose undefined, killing has been proclaimed. And we kill—and blockade and starve.
The killing and blockading are not the important facts. Whatever may be behind the Russian business, the most disturbing portent is the fact which no one challenges and which indeed is most generally offered as a sort of defence. It is this: Nobody knows what the policy of the Government in Russia is, or was. It is commonly said they had no policy. Certainly it was changeable. That means that the Government does not need to give an explanation in order to start upon a war which may affect the whole future form of Western society. They did not have to explain because nobody particularly cared. Commands for youths to die in wars of unknown purpose do not strike us as monstrous when the commands are given by our own Governments—Governments which notoriously we do not trouble to control. Public opinion as a whole did not have any intense feeling about the Russian war, and not the slightest as to whether we used poison gas, or bombarded Russian cathedrals, or killed Russian civilians. We did not want it to be expensive, and Mr Churchill promised that if it cost too much he would drop it. He admitted finally that it was unnecessary by dropping it. But it was not important enough for him to resign over. And as for bringing anybody to trial for it, or upsetting the monarchy....[62]
There is another aspect of our feeling about the Prussian tendencies and temper, to rid the world of which we waged the War.