Very soon after the Armistice there was ample evidence available as to the effect of the blockade, both in Russia and in Central Europe. Officers of our Army of Occupation reported that their men ‘could not stand’ the spectacle of the suffering around them. Organisations like the ‘Save the Children Fund’ devoted huge advertisements to familiarising the public with the facts. Considerable sums for relief were raised—but the blockade was maintained. There was no connection between the two things—our foreign policy and the famine in Europe—in the public mind. It developed a sort of moral shock absorber. Facts did not reach it or disturb its serenity.
This was revealed in a curious way at the time of the signature of the Treaty. At the gathering of the representatives, the German delegate spoke sitting down. It turned out afterwards that he was so ill and distraught, that he dared not trust himself to stand up. Every paper was full of the incident, as also of the fact that the paper-cutter in front of him on the table was found afterwards to be broken; that he placed his gloves upon his copy of the Treaty; and that he had thrown away his cigarette on entering the room. These were the offences which prompted the Daily Mail to say: ‘After this no one will treat the Huns as civilised or repentant.’ Almost the entire Press rang with the story of ‘Rantzau’s insult.’ But not one paper, so far as I could discover, paid any attention to what Rantzau had said. He said:—
‘I do not want to answer by reproaches to reproaches.... Crimes in war may not be excusable, but they are committed in the struggle for victory and in the defence of national existence, and passions are aroused which make the conscience of peoples blunt. The hundreds of thousands of non-combatants who have perished since November 11 by reason of the blockade, were killed with cold deliberation, after our adversaries had conquered and victory had been assured them. Think of that when you speak of guilt and punishment.’
No one seems to have noticed this trifle in presence of the heinousness of the cigarette, the gloves, and the other crimes. Yet this was an insult indeed. If true, it shamefully disgraces England—if England is responsible. The public presumably simply did not care whether it was true or not.
A few months after the Armistice I wrote as follows:—
‘When the Germans sank the Lusitania and slew several hundred women and children, we knew—at least we thought we knew—that that was the kind of thing which Englishmen could not do. In all the hates and stupidities, the dirt and heartbreaks of the war, there was just this light on the horizon: that there were certain things to which we at least could never fall, in the name of victory or patriotism, or any other of the deadly masked words that are “the unjust stewards of men’s ideas.”
‘And then we did it. We, too, sank Lusitanias. We, too, for some cold political end, plunged the unarmed, the weak, the helpless, the children, the suffering women, to agonising death and torture. Without a tremor. Not alone in the bombing of cities, which we did so much better than the enemy. For this we had the usual excuse. It was war.
‘But after the War, when the fighting was finished, the enemy was disarmed, his submarines surrendered, his aeroplanes destroyed, his soldiers dispersed; months afterwards, we kept a weapon which was for use first and mainly against the children, the weak, the sick, the old, the women, the mothers, the decrepit: starvation and disease. Our papers told us—our patriotic papers—how well it was succeeding. Correspondents wrote complacently, sometimes exultingly, of how thin and pinched were all the children, even those well into teens; how stunted, how defective, the next generation would be; and how the younger children, those of seven and eight, looked like children of three and four; and how those beneath this age simply did not live. Either they were born dead, or if they were born alive—what was there to give them? Milk? An unheard-of luxury. And nothing to wrap them in; even in hospitals the new-born children were wrapped in newspapers, the lucky ones in bits of sacking. The mothers were most fortunate when the children were born dead. In an insane asylum a mother wails: “If only I did not hear the cry of the children for food all day long, all day long!” To “bring Germany to reason” we had, you see, to drive mothers out of their reason.
’“It would have been more merciful,” said Bob Smillie, “to turn the machine-guns on those children.” Put this question to yourself, patriot Englishmen: “Was the sinking of the Lusitania as cruel, as prolonged, as mean, as merciless a death as this?” And we—you and I—do it every day, every night.
‘Here is the Times of May 21, half a year after the cessation of war, telling the Germans that they do not know how much more severe we can still make the “domestic results” of starvation, if we really put our mind to it. To the blockade we shall add the “horrors of invasion.” The invasion of a country already disarmed is to be marked—when we do it—by horror.