‘Strong Allied aerodromes on the Rhine and in Poland, well equipped with the best machines and pilots, could quickly persuade the inhabitants of the large German cities of the folly of having refused to sign the peace.
‘Those considerations are elementary. For that reason they may be overlooked. They are “milk for babes.”‘[65]
Now the prevailing thesis of the British, and particularly the Northcliffe Press, in reference to Bolshevism, was that it is a form of tyranny imposed by a cruel minority upon a helpless people. The proposal amounts, therefore, either to killing civilians for a form of Government which they cannot possibly help, or to an admission that Bolshevism has the support of the populace, and that as the outcome of our war for democracy we should refuse them the right to choose the government they prefer.
When the Germans bombarded Scarborough and dropped bombs on London, the Northcliffe Press called Heaven to witness (a) that only fiends in human form could make war on helpless civilian populations, women, and children; (b) that not only were the Huns dastardly baby-killers for making war in that fashion, but were bad psychologists as well, because our anger at such unheard-of devilries would only render our resistance more unconquerable than ever; and (c) that no consideration whatever would induce English soldiers to blow women and children to pulp—unless it were as a reprisal. Well, Lord Northcliffe proposed to commence a war against Hungarians (as it had already been commenced against the Russians) by such a wholesale massacre of the civil population that a Government, which he tells us is imposed upon them against their will, may ‘lose its attractions.’ This would be, of course, the second edition of the war waged to destroy militarist modes of thought, to establish the reign of righteousness and the protection of the defenceless and the weak.
The Evening News is the paper, by the way, whose wrath became violent when it learned that some Quakers and others were attempting to make some provision for the children of interned Austrians and Germans. Those guilty of such ‘un-English’ conduct as a little mercy and pity extended to helpless children, were hounded in headlines day after day as ‘Hun-coddlers,’ traitors ‘attempting to placate the Hun tiger by bits of cake to its cubs’; and when the War is all over—a year after all the fighting is stopped—a vicar of the English Church opposes, with indignation, the suggestion that his parish should be contaminated by ‘enemy’ children brought from the famine area to save them from death.[66]
On March 3, 1919, Mr Winston Churchill stated in the House of Commons, speaking of the blockade:—
’ ... This weapon of starvation falls mainly upon the women and children, upon the old and the weak and the poor, after all the fighting has stopped.’
One might take this as a prelude to a change of policy. Not at all: he added that we were ‘enforcing the blockade with rigour’ and would continue to do so.
Mr Churchill’s indication as to how the blockade acts is important. We spoke of it as ‘punishment’ for Germany’s crimes, or Bolshevist infamies, as the case may be. But it did not punish ‘Germany’ or the Bolshevists.[67] Its penalties are in a peculiar degree unevenly distributed. The country districts escape almost entirely, the peasants can feed themselves. It falls on the cities. But even in the cities the very wealthy and the official classes can as a rule escape. Virtually its whole weight—as Mr Churchill implies—falls upon the urban poor, and particularly the urban child population, the old, the invalids, the sick. Whoever may be the parties responsible for the War, these are guiltless. But it is these we punish.